This post was just a long way of saying, what’s the point? :-) What is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, where is the Princess, who is playing the role of Ganon (Ganondorf fans go home :-P), and how do you approach infinite progression with finite items? Do you eventually save the world?
There's no way to "win" in this game, to be sure. It never ends, period. However, there are many conflicts in the world, of varying scopes. Using Zelda as a good example since we're all familiar with that, there are indeed "overlords" in AVWW that are on par with Gannon in a lot of ways. They threaten Hyrule-or-larger tracts of land, and oppress everybody there. To take them out, you'll have to go through a large chunk of gametime before you're ready. And once you do defeat such an overlord, then that Hyrule-or-larger tract of land is suddenly liberated -- hooray, you're the hero! People remember, things change, and no new overlord just moves in to take back over.
If you want to call that "winning" and "done," then go for it. It has a similar arc to an adventure game story, or that's our goal. But thing is, that's not all that's going on in the world. You've also got improvements and such you can make at settlements, you've got more interesting items and such to craft, and there are more overlords threatening other parts of this infinite world. Knock off one Gannon and you save one part of the world, one kingdom if you like, but there's plenty of other Gannons out there.
how do you approach infinite progression with finite items?
As far as I understand it, that's an incorrect assumption. There may be a finite number of named items/materials, but after you run out of those and level up further, you can still make yourself an Unobtanium +37 longsword that casts Fireball LXXXIV every time you swing it when you're 8000 hours into the game.
Yep, that's precisely it. There are two things going on, though, I should mention: there are new types of weapons and items and spells that are level gated, and then there are new levels of existing weapons and items and spells. So let's say you can build rapiers from the start of the game. You can still be building higher-level rapiers at the end of the game, too, if you want. By then they will have changed to have more slots in them so that you can further customize them, but otherwise they are just a higher-stat version of the rapier you first saw.
That allows for an infinite progression, but obviously a repetitive one if that's all that's going on. And that's where two things at play that make it not repetitive until hundreds of hours in: new items, and slots. Slots alone are fascinating, because it lets you take a rapier and change it in fundamental ways -- power, speed, spell effects, etc. And then new items are something that you find over time, too. At level 1 there isn't an option for you to build a weak version of all the best spells. Those spells don't even show up until later in the game, at higher levels. So as you're exploring and leveling up and such, all sorts of new things keep cropping up that you can do.
Are those infinite? Of course not. Past a certain point, the game will get repetitive like any other. Our goal is not to prevent that -- which is impossible -- but instead is to make that ridiculously far out compared to other adventure games. This game
is unique in that you can literally play for what would be infinite time in a human timespan, and there's always more goals. You can strive for the Unobtanium +38 longsword, you can go for that Fireball LXXXV spell if you want to. There's a level 40000 Gannon somewhere out there if you want to face him. But those would require thousands of hours of gameplay to get to, and by that time you'd have seen so much of the game that there wouldn't be anything much new or surprising.
My goal is that a hundred or two hundred hours in, you're still finding at least bits of stuff that is new and surprising, and that you can play for thousands of hours if you like the tactics and mechanics of it. There's plenty of FPS and adventure games that I play just for the joy of playing, even though there's no surprises. Here you can keep doing that in one single world if you want to "replay" the game, rather than having to start a new world. Or you can start a new world, the choice is up to you.
Another thing which we have going in our favor, which folks familiar with AI War already know, is that our games tend to evolve. Let's say you have been playing for 8000 hours, and you get utterly bored because there is nothing new. Well, presuming that there's still interest in the game and we're still building on it at that time, you could take a few months off and when you come back there's some new content to discover. Free DLC and paid expansions are definitely in our plans here, unless it unexpectedly flops out of the gate or something. So that's an advantage that we have over most of the games like Diablo and Torchlight, which don't see that sort of ongoing thing post-release to my knowledge.
Do you eventually save the world?
Definitely not; but you can save huge pieces of the world, as per above. There are always more adventures to be had, though, and new villains to fight.
