Newbie Here

daanish

Hi I’m contemplating rather or not I should jump in and make a character here with you all! Im thinking rather over not, but I have some questions! I played Achaea a few years back for a few years probably mostly from 07’-11’. I definitely collectively spent several hundred hours in game, but with no real goal and across many characters. I predominantly like Achaea for the role playing aspect but definitely enjoyed hunting and leveling etc. So I guess my main question is... Where do you start in this game? I’ll probably pick a race that looks cool, and a class that sounds neat. After that what should I do? Are there cities and factions etc?? Clans? Is this all redundant because the tutorial is solid? What should I expect? At this time is it worth it? Are people actually role playing thus far or is it mostly just people exploring the various systems from a gameplay standpoint? And advice, feedback, jokes, insults are welcome! Let me hear it 

Nykara

Hey - so I play in Scatterhome, and run a mercenary company (of my own making!) of some renown. I can't talk to the experience of other factions but roleplaying for me can be found in absolute spades and with no effort at all from me, at most any time of the day. There's a lot of bashing to be done, too. The biggest thing is that you have to be ready, able, and willing to make your own goals. You should pick up a race that looks cool, that fits your character concept... because races have absolutely no mechanical benefit here. You should also pick the class that looks most interesting to you, because other than fury, none of them have a drastic advantage over one another. 

There are three factions: Scatterhome, Song Dominion, and Celestine Ascendancy. Each has its own lore, but it's basically...

* Scatterhome is the space cowboys, unwilling to submit to any higher power. Think Firefly, if the Browncoats had broken off and took over their own asteroid belt instead of getting crushed.

* Song Dominion is the imperial militaristic overlords (like the Alliance from that same show)...

* Then there's Celestine, which is kinda like [every cyberpunk property] while we're drawing comparisons: hypercorporate entities in the future and the rebels fighting against them. 

Pink_Candyfloss

Think of this as Achaea in space. A lot of the commands will feel instantly familiar to you and should help to ease you into playing the game. It uses the same help system, which can be accessed and searched through with the HELP syntax, such as HELP CLASSES.

People do roleplay, the vast majority of people are here for the roleplaying aspects that the game offers. Pretty much anyone who is vocal and speaks over the various channels in game is roleplaying their character. There's an awful lot of information regarding the factions, classes and other interesting tidbits on the main website: www.starmourn.com You should take a peek at this before making your character as it may spark your creativity and lead you into making a character you wouldn't normally think of. That said, you can just jump straight in using IRE's Nexus client off their main website, just hit the Play Now button and on creating a new character, you'll see descriptions and artwork of the various factions, classes and races to help you choose.

In game, there's a NEWBIE channel for any questions you may have, plus you can ask your faction at any time and they'll be happy to assist.

The game has been released to the general public for 6 months and it has plenty of content for you to sink your teeth into. You'll find many improvements compared to Achaea such as a revamped questing system and a different type of curing that doesn't require thousands of lines of code. It really is newbie friendly, even I can work it out. We have a large economy run by players and helped by the game at points, the traditional hunting of thousands of beasts and denizens, space exploration, resource gathering, production chains, ship combat. We do not have a guild based system, nor families. These have instead been combined into a new dynasty system, where anyone can join a dynasty from any faction and work towards a goal. The dynasty, for example, could be a group of mercenaries, or a large corporation. It could just be a family too.

The game is free so there's no harm in jumping in to check things out. The worst that could happen is you'll become hopelessly addicted and you'll never play games with graphics again.

Indi

It's a lot easier to get into aspects of the game that are a lot more daunting in Achaea (such as pvp). You don't need a 'system' to cure or attack for you, or track stuff. Some clever echoing of information is helpful but not necessary. Skill/Ability requirements are a lot lower. 

So if you're considering Starmourn for roleplay, consider the idea that roleplay can be richer when you're able to participate in ALL aspects of the game, hacking, economy, ship warfare, pve, pvp etc without there being a massive time or monetary investment making you question "is that aspect of the game important enough for me to go to that effort?"

I personally think that is a major draw to this game. Some of my most memorable RP moments have been linked to pvp in some way, whether RPed fueding or the consequences of random mistakes like riding my camel into the Enorian public bath-house after fighting in a war.

Regarding class choice
Fury: stance driven, attack until they die
Beast: attack until they die, with some AoE (this class needs a bit of work tbh)
Scoundrel: faster, shooting, ability to control the environment to a degree
Engineer: not a pet class, despite BOTS. Bots simply enable active attacks. But turrets can be used for room/environment control. Slower, with plenty of group-desireable utility
Nanoseer: bit of everything. 

Slander

I'll mainly comment on the RP scene here - it very much exists. In every other IRE game I've played I've mostly stuck to myself and only RPd sporatically because I'd get nervous randomly approaching people, where here I don't have to make much effort at all to get involved in RP. In fact, at this point, it takes effort for me to do anything else - I realized a couple days ago that for a week the entirety of my time logged in was spent engaging with other players' characters.

In all other regards, I may be a bit biased, but generally I just absolutely love this game. I started out focused solely on grinding levels and once I reached the current max switched my focus to hacking and space stuff. It's super fun and, one of my favourite parts, things are so accessible. It's not like other games where having a ship/aethership/housing is prohibitively expensive and out of reach.