Thanks for checking us out! Welcome to the Kickstarter home of Divergence: Online; A hardcore sandbox mmorpg that brings back the glory years of truly massive online games where player freedom wasn't just a tag-line, it was the whole experience. Divergence is a project I started in 2006 with the idea of bringing back what I considered to be "real MMORPGs" to the ailing genre, bloated with disposable throwaway installments. In the midst of a recession, the project suffered from an almost total lack of reliable funding until a successful startup crowdsourcing campaign a few months ago. With enough support we were able to fulfill our promises and get a playable demo ahead of schedule, and now we're back to show the community "where their money went" and do our best to drum up enough new support to get this project closer to a fully-realized and much more polished state.

This campaign proves possible what many said couldn't be done on an indie budget:

To provide a massive sandbox world where the player is free to strike out in any direction, settle a plot of land or traverse the vast oceans of our planet "Rook" for plunder. Divergence's Battle Strategy is simple:

Maximum. Player. Freedom.

The way it aims to accomplish this is:

A virtually limitless-sized gaming world. The ocean is in itself, unending. There is no border and no edge. When a player reaches the edge of the known game world additional terrain is raised from the seafloor to create additional islands and continents with. This provides a virtually limitless supply of new world to explore, colonize, defend and dominate.

A non-linear world spreading out in all directions. Pick a direction and GO. Streamed to your client, the player can cross dozens of kilometers without seeing a single load screen.

A Skill-Based progression system. No levels, just you and what you choose to do and get better at. Master a profession or round out your character with skills from several at once.

Advance in ways other than combat. Be a career architect, a tailor, a dancer, a bio engineer or any number of non-combative professions in pursuit of the almighty-credit.

Completely modifiable terrain. Dig chasms, raise mountains, even plan foliage such as trees and watch them grow in real-time. Harvest them early or let them grow to enormous heights for maximum yield of resources.





The Pursuit of Gaming Truth

Divergence does not placate the user. You won't be rewarded with thousands of meaningless achievements or exploitable special attacks. Our aim is to give the end-user REAL features, not just clever tricks of scenery, particles and way... way too much bloom. Divergence will never treat you like a child or lead you down a cleverly disguised pipe of an existence towards the same tired meaningless endgame.

In Divergence, right now, you can truly fly around and blast other players out of the sky. No "cleverly disguised roller-coaster ride or rail-shooter". We wouldn't disrespect our players that way...

True Combat. True Physics.

Keeping with it's mission goal of truth in gaming, Divergence's core gameplay is based on a real-world model.

Under typical circumstances, there is no "TAB targetting and attacking". Where you point your weapon is where you fire it, swing it, or focus your righteous indignation. You aren't "faked out" with a pretty particle system made to fool you into thinking you're actually firing, you ARE firing, shooting, or otherwise dispensing murder or justice as you see fit.

Projectiles have mass and momentum. You have mass. All objects have mass and almost all objects can be destructible. What does this mean? Use you imagination.

Real physics means real movement. There is no "jump on a flying mount and move from place to place in 3D." In Divergence (as you can already see in our Part 2 video) all movement, and subsequently flight, is REAL and at times hard to control. How's your piloting skill?

Actually Create Your World

Divergence's technology is based on "gridspace" whereas you can place almost any object inside the game world such as wall modules, cloning tubes, dance floors, or even pre-fab buildings. You can also, however construct these structures and objects completely within the game's tools out of blocks and primitives that combine into their own meshs. Unless you wish it to be by choosing a pre-fab home, no two player houses or cities can possibly be identical.

Use our tools to lay a foundation and build yourself a single log-cabin hermitage in the words. Or strike our with your friends and build a bustling metropolis complete with skyscrapers, retail outlets or anything else you can imagine. In Divergence, the only limit on how much you can build and call your own is how confident you are in your ability to defend it...

Divergence Means HARD-CORE

Open-PVP everywhere. No exceptions. If you don't like the way that alien is checking out your girl, put a bullet in his face. Just be prepared to lose faction with the establishments bouncers who with enough ruckus may elect to toss your ass out.

If you don't like the way that alien is checking out your girl, put a bullet in his face. Just be prepared to lose faction with the establishments bouncers who with enough ruckus may elect to toss your ass out. Lootable Corpses. You won't have an inventory full of thousands of ridiculous objects. All objects have a mass equivalent and slow you down based on your physical ability to carry loads. Don't carry your valuables on you!

Limited Permanent-Death. The most controversial of the controversial. Cloning in Divergence is common but not guaranteed. You'll need clone insurance, a few clones in storage, to be within the sphere of a cloning beacon and a race which can actually clone in order to avoid starting over on your character after death. Death means something, and thus life means something. Dancers, don't despair. Most NPC and player towns have their own cloning spheres.





A Modifiable World

Working in hand with our crafting system, there are a multitude of ways the player can affect the actual game world itself. Explosives blow chasms in the terrain, sometimes exposing veigns of precious minerals beneath. Use a personal drill or drop a mining rig to drill down in your absence, or build up the terrain to a flat section perfect for putting that house on top of. If I were you, I wouldn't leave that equipment lying around too long though, privateers are always about! Better safe than sorry, put a turret near your rig! Bandits won't dare mess with your stuff if they could die and lose their own gear in the process. Unless of course, they have courage. No guts, no glory!

Privateering

A return to the old days when a pirate was free to make his own way in the world. Or free to be hunted down and exterminated like the vermin they are! You can choose one of the existing factions available to you, Omicron, Darius Conrad or Viconye Ritek and attach yourself to the protections and pitfalls of association with each. Or you can form your own organizations, legit or otherwise criminal and stick it to the man.

Truly Unique Races

In Divergence, the playable races and breeds aren't confined to being purely graphical changes from one to the next. Some races, such as humans, have several breeds, each with differences among them. Some races such as AI or D-Tanix have no body of their own and must dominate other entites, assuming their abilities, strengths and shortcoming. Still even more extreme are the Vindicator, who being members of a dying species cannot normally clone at all and when killed never return.

Available Human Breeds

Homo-Sapien Constituting the majority of humans in the galaxy, Sapien Humans have the largest amount of customization available to them.

Constituting the majority of humans in the galaxy, Sapien Humans have the largest amount of customization available to them. Homo-Solitus The first breed of humans born to share the Earth with Sapiens since the demise of Homo-Neanderthalas. These humans were found to have a naturally developed spatial intelligence as well as numerous other neurological differences.

The first breed of humans born to share the Earth with Sapiens since the demise of Homo-Neanderthalas. These humans were found to have a naturally developed spatial intelligence as well as numerous other neurological differences. Homo-Auxilium The first genetically created breed of humans, these sturdy individuals were bred to be the perfect soldiers until the arrival of Homo-Invitrus.

The first genetically created breed of humans, these sturdy individuals were bred to be the perfect soldiers until the arrival of Homo-Invitrus. Homo-Invitrus These humans were born entirely in a lab and grown as such until adulthood in essentially a testtube. They are smaller than Auxilium humans but have a fused ribcage and heightened regenerative capabilities with the traedoff of an extremely short lifespan.

These humans were born entirely in a lab and grown as such until adulthood in essentially a testtube. They are smaller than Auxilium humans but have a fused ribcage and heightened regenerative capabilities with the traedoff of an extremely short lifespan. Homo-Callidus An illegally-engineered breed of humans, these grey-skinned and lithe humans possessed an almost entirely cartilaginous skeleton and reflex speeds many times that of traditional human breeds.

Funding Requirements and Milestones

Stained Glass LLama is an independent game studio. As such, we have the agility to tune our goals to the available budget. This is a fancy way of saying "the more money we get, the cooler stuff we can pull off" and thus there are no hard-set funding goals that determine milestones.

The focus of this campaign is to allow us to hire on the additional staff required to take this game from an alpha prototype to a fully-launched title. Eggheads don't work for free (although I wish they did) and right now we are a team of less than 6. However, please keep in mind that a team of 6 did everything you see already so take a moment and imagine what might be accomplished if that team size were to increase to at least 12. I'd like to think we're be rocking it our pretty severe!

Click an image below for a readout of each Military Synthetic Chassis!

Extremely Limited-Quantity Upgrade

Your choice of a Vindicator of Verrator playable character gives you a one-time opportunity to be the baddest sumbitch' in the valley. The 7-foot tall alien cyborg ninjas have a strength and agility that no other humanoid can withstand. A single blow from their Theta/Metal Blades can rend a typical player in half, then disappear in the blink of an eye, "teleporting" to another location. With proper effort they can even swat ballistic rounds out of the air. The tradeoff? These two opposed breeds of the same species are nearly extinct and once they're gone they're gone. Seeing one of these on the battlefield is the closest thing to divine intervention any player of Divergence will ever witness.

Thank you!

Again, thanks so much for checking up on Divergence and if you have any inquiries please don't hesitate to bring it up on our forums!