Revival is a new massively multiplayer online game in development at IllFonic, and the studio is hoping that elements such as a live, player-driven story will help "revive the MMORPG," said studio creative director Kedhrin Gonzalez in an interview with Massively.
According to Gonzalez, the decisions that each player makes will have an impact on Revival's open-world sandbox and on the story within.
"The live storytelling aspect is like playing Skyrim, but imagine someone is playing as the dungeon master, opening and closing things all over the place," said Gonzalez.
Revival's extensive karma system is a major part of that. Individual players will be rated on a blue-gray-red (positive to negative) scale, but everything else in the game — non-player characters, guilds, cities, gods, animals and more — also has its own karma rating for the player. A city's karma is essentially a measure of its health, which is tied into the types of players who can call it home.
"When the economy goes down, the count of the guards goes down," said Gonzalez. "You'll visually see the city start to decay. When this happens, red players can move in and start killing NPCs/players, looting, stealing... eventually, if the city is unable to heal itself, the karma of the city will turn red. That means it's a city that welcomes red players."
Gonzalez stressed that Revival is currently in the prototype stage at IllFonic, which previously made the online shooter Nexuiz. The game is being made in Crytek's CryEngine 3, and is in development on Windows PC.