[April Fools] The Next Logical Step - World of War for the Overworld Online!
War for the Overworld · published
Darkest Greetings Underlords,
Emerging from our dormancy, we blink, raising our arthritic hands to block out the invading light carried by the gnarled imp that appears at our door.
“Master”, it gurgles from its awful, malformed gullet, “the Underlords, they summons us!” The goblin-thing holds out a scabby hand. Clutched within a rotting roll of parchment, marked with an incomprehensible repeating message of “+1”, repeated again and again by different voices, overlapping in cacophonic disorder – perhaps in some sinister, evil ritual that causes a monkey paw to curl somewhere.
Well, your demands have been heeded Underlords; after a brief foray into SPACE, our next game in the War for the Overworld franchise is just around the proverbial dungeon corner – and in a form you might not expect.
We’re proud to finally introduce WORLD OF THE WAR FOR THE OVERWORLD: ONLINE! That’s right Underlord, we’re making the next logical leap for a real-time strategy game, the inevitable, inexorable march towards the MMORPG genre!
Adventure Out, Return to your Dungeon with Riches
Grab your Wizard robe and hat, open your wallet, sign up for our game time subscription, and create your Underavatar.
Select from your favourite evil races; Gnarlings, Augres, Chunders, Imp, Humans and, of course, Bards, who – let’s be honest – are more monster than man. Pick from a range of classes and strike out into the depths of the Underworld!
Some of the available race/class combinations in our upcoming Alpha Test
Team up with your fellow Underlords in a massively multiplayer role playing experience. Loot and pillage the vast caves of forgotten ruins, face deadly foes and answer the quests of dungeon delvers and denizens.
Stumpy the Imp has aged in the intervening years, and now serves as an important character in the story
Should you survive your perilous journeys beyond your walls, you can return to your own personal home realm, and use your newfound treasures to build up your dungeon in familiar dungeon-building gameplay. Build vaults to store your loot, lairs to house your guardian minions, and workshops to build deadly traps for any who may dare wander in – for indeed no dungeon is truly safe from external threats, both PVE and PVP based!
When you're done outside in the Wolrd of the War for the Overworld you can return to your dungeon and shape it with your winnings in a totally new, original game
This unique, two-tier gameplay of RPG and Strategy is how we’re bringing everything you know and love and hammering it into an unrecognisable shape until all the charm is gone, and what remains is an indistinguishable mush of flesh and bone that all gamers are sure to enjoy! At least, that’s what our marketing analytics say.
HARD Mode - A New Way to Play
We’ve been watching developments in the MMO space closely these last few years – and especially the rise of “Hardcore” experiences. We want to take the tension, the pressure, and the immersion even further!
So we’re introducing Hardcore Absolutely Real Death Mode or HARD Mode. For the low price of £2,100 a month (and a signed waiver by you) our in-house specialist, Geoff, will come to live with you with the explicit goal of linking your fate to your characters.
If you eat in the game, Geoff force feeds you coffee biscuits. Get stabbed by a goblin? Geoff cuts you with an actual knife. Fall off a cliff? Geoff breaks your legs. Die in the game? Geoff snaps your neck like a carrot!
Better yet, while playing HARD Mode, your character never truly logs out, so the peril never stops! Find a safe space for your character, eat when they do, sleep when they do. Geoff is always there, all seeing, all knowing. Geoff is there for your immersion. Trust Geoff.
One artist’s (Henry Fuseli) impression of Geoff just doing his job
This new commitment to the hardcore experience is sure to provide hours of entertainment to the five viewers of your twitch stream!
We’ve Got What You Need!
*Producer’s Note: FOR INTERNAL REVIEW ONLY DO NOT INCLUDE IN PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT!!!*
There’s a bunch of awesome ways we can monetise this shit on top of the subscription and make some EZ DOSH. People will buy anything these days y’know? Suckers. Anyway if you figure out a way to make this fit into the announcement in a way that gets people hyped it’s here for you. JUST MAKE SURE IT’S NEVER SEEN!
- Mounts! - You seen those suckers paying £50 for a goddamn horse these days? That’s more than the whole game! Get in! While you’re at it, throw some VFX on it in an afternoon, and we can probably make a premium version cost a bit more. Cha-ching baby!
- Convenience! - Everyone’s getting older and busier plus, we’ve harnessed the power of dark design to make it so everything just feels a bit more like a slog, but you can never put your finger on why. That’s great because it means we can sell people stuff like character boosts, reputation boosters or other useful consumables so they don’t have to play the game or talk to anyone. Win-win I’d say!
- Seasons, Seasons, Seasons! - You gotta keep people playing man! No matter what the cost, have an arbitrary system that hands out piecemeal rewards which we’d have previously given out in bigger batches. We can get more playtime out of the same work on our part, and more playtime means more sunk cost! Keep them in the net like the minnows they are!
- In-Game Money - Goldsellers are a plague – getting all that fake money in our game, and making real money by selling it to people. But I’ve got a great idea – instead of banning these suckers and their customers as the cheats they are, we can just become gold sellers ourselves. Just abstract it out to give the option to get game time for in-game money and vice versa, then bob’s your uncle – we’ll outcompete the gold sellers AND make a tidy profit. What’s that? Concerned about the integrity of the game economy? Truly don’t give a toss.
- Geoff Customisations - Geoff has insisted, as part of his contract, he gets all sorts of “swish human cloth” sent to him. Listen, I don’t want to fuck with this guy – he scares me, and if we don’t do it he might eat my appendix. Let’s just add a bunch of micro transactions and call them customisation for the player’s personal Geoff. As long as it keeps him busy, we’re good. Just get it done, for Christ's sakes.
- The Billionaire Special! - Why stop at letting people buy gold and levels? For our biggest whales, let’s offer a service where some cheap labour plays the game for them, getting them the best gear while they sleep; all so our most venerable whales can feel a sense of true accomplishment and “earn” the admiration and respect that their joyless, empty, money golem heart truly desires. Just make sure it’s not too obvious. We don’t want people upsetting our biggest cash cows by rightfully claiming they’re frauds, or something.
That’s just a few of the things, I’ve got more of these than I can shake a stick at. Let’s book a powwow on Thursday to go over it! Thanks! - CFO
Growing The World of The War for the Overworld for The Overall Good of The World
The fun doesn’t stop there, Underlord; we already have a comprehensive roadmap for what comes after release.
Of course, this’ll take the form of seasons, which we’re sure so many of you are familiar with now. It’s a great system that can’t ever be shaped into something that makes something actively less enjoyable for you! Gone are the days of exploring at a pace that suits you – now we’re going to roll out semi-content so quickly that you’ll always have something to keep you in the game, and earning amazing, unique rewards!
You'll need to team up with the Underavatars of other Underlords if you want to take on the hardest challenges
We also know what you’re thinking; “do we actually get to war in the overworld in The World of The War for the Overworld Online?” Well, we’re pleased to say that our Season 4 update is already penned to add The Overworld as a playable Overworld to The World of The War for the Overworld: Online, in a season we’ll be calling The World of War for the Overworld: Online Season 4 – The War Over the Underworld in the Overworld.
In the meantime keep a keen eye out our future dev diaries in coming weeks as invitations to our first public alpha start as early as TOMORROW!
See you warring in The World of The War for The Overworld Online Underlord,
- Brightrock Games