Lands Unknown - An Open World Historical MMORPG

Community Showcase Game Development
1

NOW ON KICKSTARTER!
Link to the Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1443416684/lands-unknown

Hi everyone,

We are announcing our new game, Lands Unknown.

Lands Unknown is a cinematic historical RPG set in the early 1800s, the end of the Age Of Sail. The world is vast and detailed, everything is historically accurate, and cities are realistically scaled.
The game mainly focuses on exploration and sailing, but there are many ways to play.

Get a fast, sturdy ship and sail to India for silk and spices. Explore the American West with nothing but your horse. Become a pirate, capturing merchant ships. Lead camel caravans across the desert, fighting
sandstorms and other dangers along the way. You could even lead an expedition to the South Pole!

The game will feature 50 or more ship types to choose from, 50 or more cities to visit, and a massive, part procedural, part handmade Earth to explore.
All of this and more will be brought to life with beautiful, film like visuals and audio.

Next gen graphics - powered by Unreal Engine 4

Seamless docking - approach a city and dock wherever you want, without any loading screens

A massive, detailed world - nearly 40 million square miles in size (Large game worlds are around 30-50 square miles)

Detailed ship models - complete with interiors that you can walk through and customize

Persistence - When you log out your ship will continue moving and will still be visible to other players (though they can’t do anything to you when you are offline)

Multiplayer cooperative sailing - one player steers the ship, another operates the sails, and several more could operate the cannons

Believable locations - the world is historically accurate and cities are created based on old paintings and photos

Overland travel - walk or ride an animal through deserts, mountains, jungles, rivers and fields to reach your destination

Physical cargo - instead of loading up your ship on a menu, you actually carry barrels, bags and boxes of whatever you bought and drop them anywhere on the ship

Survival features - your character will need to eat, so you will have to either pack enough food or eat whatever you find along the way

Name landmarks - If you are the first player to discover a landmark, such as a cave, you can name it whatever you want(landmarks are procedurally placed and there will be so many that all discovering all of them will take years, no matter how many players look for them)

Bounty records - If you attack and board other players’ ships you will be listed as a pirate and other players will be rewarded for sinking you

Ship customization - Ships are completely customizable, all components can be swapped out

Realistic navigation - You will find your way at sea using instruments on your ship, as there is no game map

Everything was done in Unreal, Blender, Sketchup and Gimp over the last year and a half.

Thanks for reading, please check out our Kickstarter page!

2

WOW!!! is there a beta you can download, because it looks awesome already. what are the minimum specs needed to run??? or recommended?

3

Thanks! There is a downloadable tech demo on the updates tab of our Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1443416684/lands-unknown There isn’t much to do in the demo, it’s really just to prove that all the gameplay is real.
In June or July there will be a new version with mechanics closer to the final game.

The current minimum specs for max settings(these will change before the final release) are:
GPU: GTX 750 or better
CPU: Any quad core CPU
HDD: 30 GB free space required
RAM: 8GB or more

4

Nice, using some of the same mechanics I’ve been wanting to use. I.E. physical cargo as opposed to being able to carry a house in your inventory. For a sandbox, that creates a lot of natural possibilities and opportunities for emergent gameplay.

7

Kickstarter is no more a good platform for funding, it has past it’s ‘heydays’ already.
Many developers are using alternative funding sites for games now, a lot of kickstarter’s “consumers” do not trust game developers anymore.

8

I don’t know all that much about networking myself, I’m looking to hire a programmer for the networking, but I have experimented with it in the past and I really think it’s possible.

Probably LU will use Photon or some other third party networking system. If it doesn’t work out we’ll just have to stick with player-hosted servers for small areas and single player.

9

Agreed, trust was definitely the biggest issue I had running the campaign. The plan now is to release something with more complete mechanics and use funding from that to continue development.