The developers behind “Bitcraft: Age of Automata” want you to build the world from the ground up. Villages, towns, cities, nations and empires are all in players hands. That’s how Clockwork Labs envisions for its ambitious sandbox massively multiplayer online game.
Players start with primitive tools. Like other survival games, they’ll have to tame the wilderness as they venture through the world with one eye on their health and stamina bars while the other is on the lookout for dangerous beasts.
Players start out building tents and other simple structures, but the goal is to ultimately build a camp and then a village by banding together with other players. By doing that, they can create walls, a bazaar with automated shopping stands where they can sell goods or materials. They can even create structures that the group can rent out to members.
“We’re putting thousands in a single world,” said Tyler Cloutier, founder of Clockwork Labs. “They’ll have to rebuild civilization.”
MAGIC AND ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
But the world of “Bitcraft” has a few twists. Although players will advance technology up to the medieval era as of now, the world itself is based on fantasy. Players will find ruins of an ancient civilization and nonplayable characters picking through the remains. Cloutier said these beings are integral to the story and leftovers from that long-ago era. Players can trade with the beings and they have plenty of notable items.
Ideally, the developers hope players band together and form cities and use the resources to rebuild civilization. From a small walled village, players can improve the technology to build roads to resources. They can terraform the world if they want creating hills or streams. It’s important to know megaprojects like this take time and resources.
From what I’ve seen, “Bitcraft” reminds me of “Sid Meier’s Civilization” series, but the perspective is more granular and at a field-level view. Players aren’t a grand leader directing a nation, but one of the foot soldiers working with others to build something grand. Those villages could turn into cities and those cities could expand into nations.
Of course, that brings politics and complications to the game. Players have to figure out how they want to run these complex systems. Cloutier said that the systems they’re building for “Bitcraft” supports all sorts of ways to run a society.
Players will run across NPCs that play an integral role in the lore of “Bitcraft: Age of Automata.” They are also merchants. (Clockwork Labs)
PROFESSIONS AND SPECIALIZATIONS
When it comes to the role-playing aspect of the project, the developers said currently 13 professions are in the game. They include forestry, foraging, fishing and leatherworking. The way they set up the systems it’s better for players to specialize in one craft rather than be a jack of all trades. By specializing, players make themselves more valuable to others, so they become a vital cog of the group. If you’re one of the few players on the server with the ability to craft high-level items, players or maybe even other guilds will be at your doorstep.
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One of the challenges Clockwork faces is trying to balance “Bitcraft” so that veteran players and new comers can coexist. One of the solutions is by giving newcomers the ability to craft or gather materials that are too low for high-level players. This encourages veterans to work with newcomers so that they can acquire the ingredients needed for a recipe or a project.
Figuring out those guard rails is important in a player-driven economy, in which the environment is hugely important. Certain parts of a world that has 10 biomes have their own minerals and other resources. Players will either have to travel and gather the materials themselves or they can trade with another group that may have started a village nearby the resource.
One of the notable elements to this system is that towns have sphere of influence and they can take ownership of certain areas, including the valuable resource they contain. Unfortunately, players won’t be fighting over it. “Bitcraft” is mainly focused on players vs environment. In the far future, beyond cities, the team has plans for nations and even empires. One of the ways a bigger nation can perhaps bully a city is through upkeep because players need to pour in resources to maintain their land, the developers said.
Still, that’s far off. What Clockwork Labs envisions is a grand experiment, and it will be up to the players to shape it. A few will have a chance to teset it out when “Bitcraft: Age of Automata” holds a closed Alpha starting April 2 on PC.