Roma Victor

» see romavictor.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In the spring of 2006 a player called Cynewulf was hung on a cross in the middle of a Roman town and left there for seven days, where anyone walking past could see him and throw things. His offense was sitting near the respawn point and killing people as they came back from the dead. The punishment was not one moderator's improvisation. It was the ban system, written into the game on purpose, because that is roughly how the province being simulated had handled the problem.

Roma Victor was a sandbox MMO set in Britannia in 180 AD, the year Commodus inherited the empire from Marcus Aurelius. The world was a thirty by thirty kilometer strip along Hadrian's Wall at one-to-one scale, cut into square-kilometer boards, and most of those boards were empty wilderness that became buildable once a guild put a hall on them. Romans started as slaves in Corstopitum, under what is now Corbridge, and worked toward citizenship by mastering skills. Barbarians started north of the wall in a village called Erring, where the law did not reach and nothing stopped anyone from doing anything.

There were no levels. If you wanted to be good at cutting wood you cut wood, and the sticks became handles, and the handles went to a smith who was only a smith because he had spent weeks being a bad one. Every object carried a current quality and a maximum quality, and each repair lowered the ceiling a little, so everything in the world was on a slow schedule toward breaking. RedBedlam released it on 14 July 2006, with anyone who had pre-ordered let in a fortnight early.

~ the case file ~

~ the cross ~

Crucifixion got Roma Victor more coverage than anything it ever shipped. The story ran worldwide in March and April 2006, months before the game was on sale at all. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League called the use of it obnoxious. Kerry Fraser-Robinson, who ran RedBedlam, said the company had taken care not to offend Christians and that the point was deterrence: "They can see what he's done and what that got him. It's very effective."

Cynewulf was a 27-year-old electrical engineer in Michigan and he served the full week. What gets lost in the retelling is that the mechanic was doing real work. A temporary ban the rest of the server can walk past and look at carries a signal that an account quietly failing to log in does not.

I was not on this one. In 2006 I was finishing a computer engineering degree in Ankara, and the online worlds within reach of a Turkish connection were the ones with Turkish servers or Turkish forums behind them, which in practice meant Ultima Online private shards and Counter-Strike. A single-shard British sandbox sold through an English-language site and paid for in a currency called sesterces had no route to me and was not looking for one.

~ what was advertised and never built ~

The list of things Roma Victor announced and then did not deliver runs long. Player-built roads and territorial conquest were both promised for commercial launch and neither one arrived, and mounts never turned up either. The afterlife was supposed to be a set of landscapes and puzzles you navigated according to the reputations your character had earned in life. What death actually did was drop you in a small holding pen called Elysium, where you walked over to an NPC and asked to be sent back.

Whole branches of the skill tree stayed unimplemented. Most advanced buildings were never made craftable by players, and a majority of armor types were never made craftable at all. The starter towns lagged because of the NPC servants every player was allowed to hire, and they lagged for the entire commercial life of the game. RedBedlam blamed the budget and the size of the team, and said several people on it were working voluntarily or part-time. That was not an excuse so much as a description.

~ the ending it announced and the one it took ~

On 10 February 2010 RedBedlam posted a schedule with a year of runway in it. New accounts stopped being sold on 5 May 2010 and the sesterce shop closed on 5 November, with the servers due to come off on 5 May 2011. The company admitted the game had not been profitable for some time and said it would carry the hosting bill itself until that date.

The same post insisted Roma Victor 2 was still coming, on a more realistic timeline, some time in 2011, and promised that character and household data from the original would be imported into it. The game went dark in January 2011, roughly six months early, with nothing announced. RV2 never shipped. More than a decade later RedBedlam's own site had stopped mentioning it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »