Pathfinder Online is looking to take the MMORPG world by short sword in just a few years. One of the promised features is an open-world “sandbox” style of game-play, which means you pretty much get to do what you want to do, and it will impact the overall world that other players experience. Rich Baker illuminates us further on the Goblinworks Developer’s Blog:
“Pathfinder Online is a sandbox, not a theme park. What that means is that our game isn’t going to present a tightly scripted set of storylines or a large number of iconic locations or dungeons to explore. Instead, we’re designing a game that generates opportunities for you to engage in activities or tell stories that interest you, based on the narrative you decide you want to tell with your character. That doesn’t mean that we won’t have PvE content—it just means that our world isn’t going to have the sort of career-long quest chains or custom-built raiding dungeons that you might be familiar with from other MMOs. Instead, our primary vehicle for PvE content comes from events, not locations. We call these content-generating events escalation cycles.
An escalation is a dynamic story event such as a Bonedancer goblin invasion, an outbreak of widespread banditry from the League of the Wood, or a raid of dark elf slavers. Each escalation begins in the deep wilderness in one of the hexes player settlements can’t quite tame, and slowly builds up strength. At first you see some goblin scouts and wolf-riders, then bands of goblin marauders venture out to trouble travelers and harvesters in nearby hexes, and then vicious war-parties begin an all-out effort to pillage “civilized” hexes and wreck any structures PCs have built there. Dealing with the rampaging goblin hordes provokes various forms of retaliation and generates quests; PCs may find that as the story of the Bonedancer goblin invasion unfolds they’ll be called upon to rescue captives taken by the goblins, interfere with the dark rites of goblin shamans, or challenge important goblin chiefs. Left unchecked, an escalation soon spreads into neighboring hexes, and may continue to infect new areas until someone deals with the problem. At any given time, there will be a number of different escalations running in various parts of the Crusader Road area, each threatening a different corner of the game world”.
For more information about how Escalation Mechanics will work, head over to the Dev Blog and read up on everything that is coming our way. Pathfinder Online is on track to realease in early 2016!