Icelandic developer Solid Clouds announced something this week for Starborne that most MMO betas never see: an expansion. It’s called Dissidence, and it’s promising quite a bit for the indie MMORTS, including a new handcrafted map, new map effects, new lore, improved UI, a new game mode, new rank categories, and the “one path to victory” through which “every player has a clear goal, and the lines are drawn in the sand as to who is friend or foe through means of sector-based warfare.”
The devs have put out several lore dev blogs this week in the lead-up to the announcement; the most notable among them explains how the team is tweaking the game’s fictional timeline and factions and introducing what it’s calling historical servers.
“We are introducing historical servers! Historical servers have the additional effect that their specific outcome not only claims a region in space but a lore piece will be specifically written about it. The very first Dissidence server is a historical server, where the players are actually defining the outcome of the first major conflict between all three blocs at Tau Scorpii. […] What this means is that the outcome, maybe some major battles (or their locations) and perhaps some high level political shifts will be taken into account as we write a lore piece about it. That lore piece will be the centerpiece of a release, forever becoming a part of the Starborne universe. While you won’t literally see yourself in it, it is my hope that you guys will see reflections of your efforts there and understand that what you did on a historical server mattered. Those reflections will become better and better defined as we improve our in-game history features, like biggest battles and such.
Starborne has been in open beta for the last half year and has pulled in over 200,000 players over 27 servers. MOP’s Fight or Kite columnist Sam has written several pieces on Starborne, being particularly impressed with the MMORTS implementation and campaign arcs.
