People on the street are always asking me, “What’s going on with the Career Story Arc? What’s it about? When will we get to play it? Do you use a product to get your hair like that?” Instead of answering people one at a time, I figured I’d just write a devlog and address everyone’s concerns all at once.

First of all, the name’s changed. We’re now calling it the “Role-Playing Story Arc” so as not to get it confused with the career specific mission chains (Navy, Freetrader, Privateer, etc). The content has been submitted and exists in the main build (not the beta build, so don’t even try). It consists of over 70 missions, 30 custom encounters, and 100 characters. Now I’m in the process of fleshing out the details and fixing bugs. Naturally, you’ll want to know, “What do you get to do, anyway? MMORPG’s aren’t known for having compelling storylines. What makes yours so special?”

That’s an excellent question! Now, I don’t want to deliver any spoilers, but here are a few things you will get to do in the Role-Playing Story Arc:

1. Alter the course of European politics
2. Have a forbidden romance with a Corsair princess/prince
3. Recover the lost treasure of the Knights Templar
4. Discover the remains of an ancient Atlantean civilization
5. Sow the seeds of democratic revolution in the Americas
6. Initiate the Apocalypse, and possibly end the world

Does that do anything for you?

Now, since I can’t resist waxing philosophical in print, I’d like to discuss where I’m going with this. Though it contains many disparate elements, there is a central theme that holds it together.

The guiding light behind the Role-Playing story arc is finding magic in the mundane. By this, I mean finding extraordinary answers to seemingly ordinary questions, and obvious answers to impossible ones. I’ve always enjoyed discovering something that I have taken for granted as being ordinary actually has very unusual circumstances surrounding its origin. Conversely, I love the “Oh, duh” moment when I discover something that I thought was mysterious or unknowable was right in front of my face the whole time.

There are four of these types of questions in the RP story arc:

1. Why is there an island in the Caribbean called Grand Turk?
2. Why do we have ‘Algiers’ xebecs in our game?
3. What is the most obvious location for a lost Atlantean civilization?
4. What was ‘in the water’ that produced the Americas’ founding fathers?

So just what are the answers to these questions and what connects them all together? You’ll have to play and find out.

The current plan is to hold back the RP story arc until initial release. That way the beta players have something new and interesting to look forward to after ship and I have time to work out all the kinks and give our fans what they deserve. I’ve been stretching our tools to the limit from the onset of this process and that means working hand in hand with every other department to make sure it works the way we want it to. Luckily, I’ve gotten continuous support from our devs and artists in my efforts to press the boundaries of what we can do with our mission system, and I’m going to take full advantage of that right up to ship.

And just for the sake of completeness, let me address the final question with full disclosure. I use a styling wax.