Customization extended so far as to allow players to build their own skills out of “bricks” through the Modular Action System.
There was an incredibly deep harvesting and crafting system, a heavy emphasis on roleplay, deep lore, player housing, GM events, dynamic invasions, and a world that could be shaped and changed based on character actions. The game certainly checked off a lot of boxes on the sandbox wish list. As either a member of the Matis, Tryker, Zoraïs, or Fyros race, players would explore this large and dangerous planet (which was really a giant tree in space) and carve out their own destiny. The concept is that players start out the game as refugees on the planet Atys in the year 2525. Ryzom’s beautiful art style is only the first step into what makes this game fascinating. That might seem weird, considering how small a niche it’s occupied, but the feature set doesn’t lie. If you can scrounge up a Ryzom fan - and they do exist, I assure you - you’ll soon be assailed by passionate evangelism about what makes this game great. Yet like many plans, these were to be dashed on the rocks of reality. With a name change to Ryzom and plans to eventually branch out into multiple worlds across an alien galaxy, this MMO looked as though it had a clear path to its future. The only true limitations will be their own imaginations.” “ The Ryzom Ring will empower individuals to create their own adventures and lands and to share them. “Our hope for The Ryzom Ring is that it will bring back the power to the players,” said Corval in 2006. In effect, this turned players into classic tabletop dungeon masters. Undeterred by low numbers, Nevrax went ahead with work on the game’s first expansion, The Ryzom Ring, for October 2006. The expansion’s selling feature was a set of tools that allowed players to create and run their own in-game scenarios. The North American and European launch of Saga of Ryzom went forward in September 2004 - and was largely ignored by most of the gaming community apart from a dedicated player core. Over the summer, 70,000 players would dip into Ryzom to see what it held. However, Nevrax decided to slightly delay the launch until the fall due to tester feedback.
Player testing in this strange new world commenced in May 2004 with plans to launch the game the following month. On the contrary, Ryzom is an invitation to those who want to plunge themselves deeper into heroicĪdventures, and take an active part in a saga designed to be larger than life.” Players are therefore not expected to remain a passive audience (with no grip on the world or the ongoing story). The players will be the orchestra who give life to the symphony. “We (the team that is Nevrax) are the composers (since we imagined, designed and built the game), and we will also share the conductor’s responsibility with the publishers (who will operate the game). “ Ryzom is like a symphony with its three major forces: the composer, the conductor and the orchestra,” said Nevrax CEO David Cohen Corval in 2004. This MMO, which would initially be called The Saga of Ryzom, had lofty goals that included the community at every step. The engine itself was made to be open source, although the game that the studio had in mind was not. The team of 50 employees continued its work by making its own game engine, NeL (Nevrax Libraries), by 2002. A pilot game called Snowballs was created that year to show off ideas and tech to investors for the funding that Nevrax desperately needed. The studio and team came together with an ambitious vision to create a different type of MMORPG from scratch. To truly start at the beginning of Ryzom’s story, you have to go back to the founding of French independent game studio Nevrax in 2000. What is Ryzom, how did it come to be, and can you really own and run a copy of it yourself? We’ll answer these questions and more today! In September, the game will have been operating in one form or another for 12 years, which makes it a candidate for investigation. The first is that it was a beloved title by one of our former Massively colleagues, and the second is that this game had struggled to survive over the years as it switched hands, business models, and presumably alternate dimensions. Ryzom is an incredibly odd sandbox that’s been on my radar for two reasons. One title’s popped up enough in the request space that I knew I had to tackle it before too long, and that game is Saga of Ryzom (or just Ryzom if you’re being informal, and we are). These are often incredibly obscure titles, even to me, and when I get them they go into a queue along with my other wish list topics. Every so often I get requests to cover such-and-such game in this column.
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