Shores of Hazeron

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asphere8
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Shores of Hazeron

#1 Post by asphere8 »

Short description: Shores of Hazeron is an MMO in which you join or build an interstellar (and in some cases intergalactic) empire. You build cities and spacecraft for your empire, and captain or crew these craft for the purposes of cargo/passenger transport, exploration, resource extraction, space combat, planetary invasion, etc. Empire diplomacy can lead to alliances and wars.

Wall of text description:
Spoiler!
Shores of Hazeron is an amazing though not well-known MMO which one very friendly man, Haxus, has been working on alone since before TwoKinds began. He made the game free to play up until early this year, paying all hosting costs out-of-pocket with money from selling his previous company. It's not great on the graphical department, but the gameplay is great fun. You begin by designing your species similarly to Spore. The game then plops you down on one of millions of uninhabited planets. Each planet can be seamlessly travelled around on foot or by ground, sea, air, or space travel. Once you are ingame, you are given a short tutorial and tasked with creating a flag. (Most commonly accomplished by murdering the tutorial agent, Targoss, and taking his hide.)

Upon creation of your flag, you get the chance to create a city, allowing you to name your city, planet, solar system, and if you're lucky, sector. You then build your city a-la Simcity, placing roads and buildings. All buildings can be seamlessly entered and exited. You can later even design your own buildings somewhat similarly to The Sims. Once this is done, you can have your city build vehicles and spaceships which you design and captain like Star Trek Bridge Commander. You can even operate the consoles yourself if you so wish.

Of course, entering and exiting spaceships is seamless, as is interplanetary flight, and entering and exiting the atmosphere. The only loading screens ingame are for interstellar travel. Once you have all this, you can explore the galaxy, colonize other worlds, and interact with other player empires. There are ringworlds similar to Halos in the Halo series which are somewhat rare and often fought over. All plants and animals in the game have unique DNA which can be collected, and previously undiscovered species can be named by players. All stars in the sky can be visited.

And, of course, I would never have found TwoKinds without Hazeron. A wartime ally on Hazeron became a friend, who linked me to the comic Freefall, which led me here.
Have some screenshots of mine:
A low-tech space station of my design backlit by my home star.
Two of my slightly higher tech warships with my capital city partially visible on the ground below, through the clouds.

Some nice planet screenshots from other players:
A planet with its moon.
A planet viewed from its moon.
Sunset in a city.
A city viewed at night from a sailboat.
Amazing how a game with such lowres graphics can create such sights.
Since the graphics aren't great and the game originally released in 1999, this game will run on almost anything. It was built originally for Win98! As long as your system supports CG shaders (unfortunately Macs don't, sorry!) you can run this game. CG shaders are slowly being replaced with OpenGL ones, so soon Macs can play too.

Other relevant links:
http://hazeron.com/thegame.html
http://hazeron.com/welcome.html

Hilariously, due to an old joke, clothing manufactured from the hides of dead players is known as YiffWeave by the playerbase. Some was even given to the developer, Haxus, as a gift with the statement "made of the finest furry," as the player whose skin was used happened to be a furry. Ironically, so was the giver of the gift.

I think I've preemptively answered many questions about why I love this game.
Does anyone else play this game (or have any questions about it that I may be able to answer)?

Side note, unfortunately the game is no longer free to play, as it was for ~15 years. You can download the launcher and play with the offline design studio or test the game on your computer with the limited singleplayer before buying it. (2wks for $5 USD.)

This turned from an "anyone heard of this" to a glowing recommendation really quickly. Thanks, brain.
Sometimes, I wish I could art.

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