Click here to visit something fairly amazing in Second Life: A massive roleplay game world inspired by Mass Effect. It’s the creation of BluShock, a fan community that’s been creating entire worlds and experiences in Second Life based on the videogame franchise for over a decade. I recently made a small visit to the asteroid base, just a small part of the larger experience, and was duly impressed.
“It's our largest and most ambitious/compact base of operations yet,” BluShock leader Fazzy Constantine (above) tells me. “We have over 25 rooms and multiple elevators with 8 levels each, a huge arboretum dome, which is inspired to look like the Presidium Commons, on the Citadel, from the Mass Effect games, which our roleplay group has been inspired by, since 2010.”
But the base is only the beginning:
“The asteroid will be our base of operations in our fictional star system. Vanaheim, which is set in the Milky Way galaxy, in what would be known as the Beta Quadrant, if you were into Star Trek. We have three more main worlds we'll be creating, over the course of 6 to 9 months.” Here's further details on the group's in-game news site.
Anyone can visit their worlds, but the group is serious about maintaining their roleplay narrative, even in their Discord server: People can join, he tells me, "Through application, and then we hold an induction. If they have roleplay experience, great. If not then it's pretty easy to pick up. If they want to just observe and become explorers of the asteroid and worlds then they can choose to do that and still get invited to the Discord server."
More from Fuzzy below, and some pics from BlueShock’s Flickr group:
Gaming and Roleplaying with BluShock
Roleplaying-wise, we do weekly episodic missions, some which are crucial part of the storyline, like on Idun, we did 8 episodes from early February till end of March.
Missions [include] investigating ancient monoliths, encountering ancient races, mysterious crash landings, resource gathering by orbiting a planet or two and firing probes, with our main ship, the Mjölnir SR-4, a 60 odd meter war and stealth ship (Guardian class, created by Skyward heavy industries and Thynome Vector Foundation). Dealing with a local demi-God, in the form of an ancient Dragon, realizing the Monolith's were more than what they appeared to be, a library or archive that stored every race's collective memory inside them.
Future Updates
We're planning on planetary scans and surveys, resource collection, in ground vehicles such as a mobile command unit, and the odd enemy battle on the surface, which will be a part of our non settled planets that will change every couple of weeks or so. Each with a different setting, mostly barren, different EEP effects, and so on.
Crew specific loyalty quests are also in development. These missions are crew specific problem solving. For example, getting to know the crew and what can be done to help them forget about their past, do we need to go to their homeworld to sort it out, do we need to deal with bad guys on our way there, is there a reward waiting for them at the end? That sort of thing.
If the loyalty is complete then the squad mate, like in Mass Effect 2, levels up and unlocks a new ability… and doesn't die in the endgame. Heh.
Update, April 16: Added info on joining the group.
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