Sometimes you come across an idea that wasn’t used in any game you encountered, it may be pretty obvious, so there must be some good reasons no one used it before. Usually, it’s because the concept is really hard to implement, or it appears to be not that interesting in reality as it was in theory. But on rare occasions you do find something viable, that just waited for its time.
We consider the concept of infowars one of the main features of our MMO.

The idea behind it is, again, pretty simple. The game knows a great deal about each player – their level, wealth, skills and perks, it knows when they acquired each item, whom they sold it to and for how much, it can draw a map of all their movements from the start of the game, recite all their dialogs with NPCs (with the dialogue choices he made). So what if we take all this information and build it into the gameplay, make it available not only to the engine and the player themselves, but to all the players?

Not immediately and not without effort, of course. Information, huge chunks of it, is stored in databases, that can be raided and captured or hacked remotely, players can also buy access to them. It’s not very far from hunt for customer information by our contemporary tech companies. The more you know, the more you can predict. If you know the merchant caravan routes and schedule, you can plunder it. If you know the location, where pirates prefer to attack, you can make a detour if you transport valuable goods.

Information in the world of Cybernation means everything. In principle, players will go to great lengths to find a planet no one seen before and build a secret base there. Bases can be protected with the cloaking devices, turrets and traps, but their main protection is that no one knows of their very existence. Except the owner who poses the greatest threat to its secrecy. If the player is careless and blabs something telling about the base in conversation, or if he takes the same route there every time – the scanners will pick it up, or someday a pirate will just attach a tracking device to his ship and follow the poor guy to his most treasured possessions. The more you visit your base, the more you endanger it.

Most importantly, you can sell any info you possess, and buy data you need. But it’s not a wild gamble like paying a guy for the coordinates of the enemy base, that can not even be true or up-to-date. We hope, that it would be possible to share info through special interface – you can highlight any part of your logs like «spaceship X entered Y star system through gate Z» and sell it as an object. Buyer will see, that the info is verified by the game, you can’t lie and fabricate it. You can redact some parts and keep some information from the infoblock – omit the name of the system for example and ask for additional payments for details – but you can’t edit anything in.

We hope that hacking, buying info, accumulating your database and trying to stay off the grid, covering your tracks will become essential parts of the gameplay.

Dude that sounds super dope.

Thanx, it will be really hard to do right, but its one of the priorities.

I see the quote, but whats the reaction?)