The New World - New Website

Iron Tower Studio created a new website for The New World:

In the Year of Our Lord 2754…

You will never feel the sun’s warmth under a blue sky, never hear the wind in the branches of a tree, and never swim in the ocean, because you had the misfortune to be born on the Ship. You have never seen Earth, and you’ll never see Proxima Centauri either, your past and future both sacrificed by some dim and nameless ancestor to the greater good of the Mission.

Starfarer, they called her, a pretty name for a retrofitted interplanetary freighter. She had already been twenty years in service when she was rechristened, and showing every minute of it. No one is certain the Ship will actually reach its destination, and nobody much cares, since no one alive now will live to see it. Might as well get on with your life and try to make the best of it.


The New World is an isometric, party-based RPG inspired by Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky. Your character's world is a “generation ship,” a massive spacecraft on a centuries long voyage to colonize a distant planet. The Ship's original government has been disbanded following a violent mutiny and you must negotiate a treacherous path among your fellow passengers and the contentious factions striving to dominate the Ship. Your choices alone will determine who your friends and enemies are.

• Skill-based character system, with feats and biological implants.
• Tactical turn-based combat, featuring standard as well as targeted attacks and weapon-specific special attacks such as Fanning and Long Burst.
• Multiple quest solutions, mutually exclusive questlines, and a branching main storyline.
• 12 recruitable party members with different personalities, agendas, and beliefs.
• 3 main factions and a score of lesser factions and groups.
• A large arsenal including melee weapons, firearms, energy pistols, grenades, and fancy electronic gadgets like the Reality Distortion Field.
• 16 environments to explore, from the Engine Room and Hydroponics Lab to the dystopian cities of the Habitat and the Wasteland, the now uncharted corridors and decks that bore the brunt of the fighting during the Mutiny.

The Ship was launched by a neo-Christian conglomerate dedicated to establishing a religious colony on a distant world. The original fifty thousand passengers, the so-called First Generation, were true believers in the Mission. They sacrificed whatever lives they had on Earth and demanded strict obedience to the laws of God and the Ship from their children.

Unfortunately, the generations that followed lacked their forebears’ fervent will to sacrifice. Dissatisfaction led to open revolt against the authorities, called the Mutiny, and the mutiny metastasized into a civil war. While the mutineers dealt a decisive blow to the old order, they did not eradicate it completely. When the fires died and the smoke finally dissipated, three factions emerged from the wreckage of the old order: the Protectors of the Mission, The Brotherhood of Liberty, and the Church of the Elect, each of them promising their own version of the future.

[…]

More information.

Turnbased combat, you got me there.
Looks interesting, different and more original then the average game.

It's an interesting setting, true, but I have to wonder if there is an ultimate point to this game. Will your actions have some impact on the ship's mission, or is it just a battle to survive? It sounds like the latter.

Big impact.

So it's not another Oblivion with guns.

Originally Posted by joxer
So it's not another Oblivion with guns.

Since the game is " (…)isometric, party-based RPG(…)" then we can safely assume it isn't. But that's a good thing, right?

The Ship was launched by a neo-Christian conglomerate dedicated to establishing a religious colony on a distant world.

Cool premise. Could have went with a more original name for the ship than "Starfarer" though.

Turn based tactical, the rest of text blabla-blabla who cares.. I'M IN!!!!!

Originally Posted by rjshae
It's an interesting setting, true, but I have to wonder if there is an ultimate point to this game. Will your actions have some impact on the ship's mission, or is it just a battle to survive? It sounds like the latter.

The first option would be nice indeed. Good chance it is indeed the latter.

Originally Posted by ikbenrichard
The first option would be nice indeed. Good chance it is indeed the latter.

As I mentioned your actions will have a big impact.

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum…ic,7181.0.html
^ update on the main quest design

Before we talk about the CSG’s main quest design, let’s talk about the AoD’s main quest to illustrate some points without spoiling anything.

The main quest started vague – "go I know not where, bring back I know not what", and then the faction quests took over as the meat of the game. Essentially, the game wasn’t about finding the temple but instead working for the factions and slowly uncovering what happened in the past. By the time you’ve visited all 3 cities and learned what you can about the factions, the war, and the gods, you know where the temple is and you're ready to make your choice. That fairly important choice affects the ending slides, but not gameplay because the game is almost over at this point.

Naturally, we want to do better. So in the CSG we’ll get rid of the vagueness, move the main quest to the center stage, push the factions’ quests back, and allow you to make key choices earlier and thus enjoy the consequences earlier.

It will start simple – while scavenging you stumble upon something clearly valuable, a long-forgotten device that wasn’t meant to be used until the ship lands (but can be used in-flight). Not being an expert on such things, you need to know exactly what this thing is to figure out what one of the factions will pay for it, which is a good way to introduce you to the three main factions in Act 1, whereas in AoD the Noble Houses were introduced one Act at a time for storytelling reasons (escalating events).

Once you know what that device is (at about 30% of the game), you’ll offer it to the faction of your choice, at which point your relationship with the other factions will go down, introducing an aspect we didn’t really touch in AoD – factions acting against you, attacking your base of operations, and turning locations under their influence against you, which will boost replayability.

At about 70% of the game, you might realize (via learning more about the ship if you’re smart enough) that what you’re doing might not necessary be what’s best for the ship (or you personally) and get an option to do things in a very different, "fuck all factions" way. The remaining 30% of the game will be dedicated to each path within this fork, presenting different challenges and choices. So far, that’s 3 'working for a faction' paths, 3 'fuck 'em' paths, and 7 different endings without counting permutations.

This way you’ll get to play through your key decisions, instead of being told about what happened next in the slides. Obviously, the slides will still be there but gameplay-to-slides ratio will be different.

Originally Posted by VDweller
[you] get an option to do things in a very different, "fuck all factions" way.

Now you got me interested. Not saying it's always the best possibility, but if something now gets ruined at least the blame is on me and not on some CEO.

I personally loved age of decadence and can't wait to play this game.

I hope it surpasses age of decadence in almost everything.

I also like the more "original" settings that are worked here although the themes are familiar.

It's a shame we have to wait four more years or so


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Not to be confused with New World Computing.

Originally Posted by Drithius
Not to be confused with New World Computing.

LOL nice.

Originally Posted by VDweller
The main quest started vague – "go I know not where, bring back I know not what", and then the faction quests took over as the meat of the game. Essentially, the game wasn’t about finding the temple but instead working for the factions and slowly uncovering what happened in the past.

I actually really liked that approach, slowly uncovering the lore and exploring the world. I would have preferred an AoD2 rather than a new game in a different setting (which while this premise is also cool it doesn't sound quite as cool as the whole post-apoc Roman society of AoD for me), but regardless this is pretty much an insta-buy for me.