01/27/2021
Fase 2 !!!!!
What to expect of Earth 2
A new world - and of course imaginations are running wild. A new year - and it's our job to define at least a few guidelines, to give a little orientation what you can expect in the next months and - yes - years. Because Earth 2 will not - like Earth 1 - be built in seven days. We're only human.
We currently define Earth 2 internally as "The haven we all would have needed LAST year". We probably should not try making a living of naming genres… Not included in this definition are terms like "sandbox" and "trade" and “simulation” and some more just for space reasons. But they too will become part of the overall experience.
This is a rather broad terrain, admittedly, but it allows us the flexibility we need. After all, it's very hard - and here decades of game design experience teach us - to not allow ourselves to kill options at such an early stage and at the same time set expectations too high. So we prefer to remain too cautious at this point in time, rather than going too far ahead.
Phase 2 will allow you to mine resources and optimize this process through successive tiers of research and production, always depending on the land you own, the things you do with it and the buildings you decide to build. No land on Earth 2 is unusable, every tile will produce something. However, it is possible that its special usefulness will only be revealed in a later tier. If you’re sitting on a literal goldmine, yes, that surely will come in handy soon. But some people may be sitting on a metaphorical one without even realizing it for years, until suddenly a formerly undiscovered raw material under their soil becomes the most important element for an exciting new technology, demanded by basically everyone. Yet basic raw materials will be produced by every bit of land anyway.
This is where we will begin - and we aim to start rolling out parts of Phase 2 in a few weeks from now: You will find that your land starts producing Essence. Essence is the basis of everything. It reflects the place you own, knows what’s in the ground and - in later upgrades - will be able to reproduce it. We also plan for a teleportation system on Earth 2 around this time. The teleportation system will allow other users to teleport to your property, larger properties will be able to register a more premium teleportation name. After users have fair warning to take advantage of this incredibly important teleportation system, we will also add the ability for users to then subdivide their properties - if they should still feel the wish to do so.
A little further down the road we will also improve the tile class system to make it fit the new game experience. And there will be the option for PvP at some point in Phase 2, a PvP system beneficial to most if not all of those who opt-in. Phase 2 will largely be about adding more purpose and ability to your land, customising it, adding things to it, using it and more. We will release further details of these features as they become confirmed from within.
But all of this serves one single purpose: That you will be able to hit the ground running on that very special day sometime in the future. The day when Earth 2 goes surface, becomes an open 3D world, and - over time - offers more buildings and materials and research and possibilities to develop your properties. We know this is important to you. It is important to us, too! But we prefer to make promises that are not easily broken, therefore we cannot say exactly when this exciting day will come. All of this will last a while - as all MMOs do. But to give you a glimpse of how it will look we will release a video of the Earth 2 terrain system very soon, which will show you how far we have already come.
At some point you will surely have your own avatar. And it will be highly customizable. We want individuals roaming Earth 2. We want you to have your own house. We want you to meet each other, communicate, to build communities, to experience this new world together.
And little by little, over the years, Earth 2 intends to expand into a complex simulation. We dream of players being able to work together and design joint strategies in order to give each other access to higher technologies and access higher levels of the Earth 2 experience: We dream of all kinds of entertainment and business and chances to build communities of all sorts, raising the values of your lands.
Bit by bit we are currently planning to add various games (without going into any details now), the elements of which you can produce inside the economic simulation, use for your own benefit on Earth 2, trade them or use in competitive games you yourself might invent. There will be a common resource market, which will also depend on the technologies developed on Earth 2. There will be PvE and PvP challenges. In our vision all the structures of Earth 2 will connect into one big social experience.
And this is about as far as we can see with reasonable certainty: it is something like this that we intend to create. Of course we plan to build a big team for all of this with the most skilled developers from the industry. In fact we have already begun to build that team! And we know that we will make mistakes on the way, learn from them and then (after failing better a few times) will eventually do it right. There will be emerging opportunities for the players of Earth 2 that we wouldn't think of now, Phase 1 has shown us this. And then a time may dawn on Earth 2 when you, the players, can use this place as a platform for your own businesses, your own developments in a time when you can basically sign your own Declaration of Independence.
That is the dream. Or at least a big part of it. We still have some even wilder things up our sleeves. To make this dream come true, we need you, too: your patience, constructive criticism, devotion and forgiveness whenever we make a mistake. Nobody ever built a second Earth. It’s an un-trodden path. At least for humans.
We are excited to meet you on Earth 2.
