Trace/ALTER is a collaborative roleplaying game with hundreds of other players where you'll inhabit a persistent long-term character and live out your own storyline.
In this world, magic is real and magic is terrifying. It has given rise to horrifying entities known as ALTERs, which thrive off the feasting of souls. It is only the ancient Tracer Order that has given fierce opposition through the use of TRACE Magick. You will find yourself in the center of this age old conflict, in a city centre known as Cascade Valley, in Japan.
Please note that it is an RP mandatory setting where players must act as the characters they are playing.
For more info and instructions on how to play, please join our Discord.
Strength: This determines the raw physical effectiveness of your attacks. This scales with the damage of weapons such as the Claymore, Warhammer and unarmed attacks.
Intelligence: This determines the effectiveness of your magical abilities. In-universe, this increases the density of your TRACE energy, which in turn increases the power of all your magical skills.
Agility: This determines your turn order in battle, with the player with the highest agility going last. It additionally scales with the damage of weapons such as the Katana, Claws, and Dagger.
Speed: This increases the distance your character can move. Every 10 points invested equates to one more move tile.
Vitality: This increases your total health pool and overall damage reduction from both physical and magical attacks.
Once you have 10 total RPP you will unlock automated mission assignments. These missions can be found at mission terminals in all three starting districts.
Each mission ranges in difficulty from E -> S grade, and their subsequent rewards are scaled based on this difficulty slider. Every mission in trace/ALTER is generated from a variety of pseudo random templates both in map, monsters faced, and your objectives to provide a different experience each time you depart.
Once you've been assigned a mission, you can assemble your squad, and depart by heading to the train station in your respective district.
You'll have to take the train! You can find the train station for the heart line in the southern reaches of every district. You'll need to purchase a 'FAST Pass' from the metro terminal inside the train station before you'll be able to board the train, so make sure you come with some money in hand. Once you have this card, simply click the train and you'll swipe your card and enter.
RPP (Roleplay Points) is a tracked value that allows us to keep track of how many points (skill/statpoints) you've earned through roleplay rewards. These rewards are distributed to all players every 24 hours automatically. Additionally, these rewards are scaled based on your activity in the last 24 hour period, which determines the size of the chest you receive!
At certain RPP thresholds, features may unlock for you such as:
3 RPP: Choose your character's backstory, join squads, able to drop items/money, etc.
10 RPP: Gain your first reputation point if you do not already have one, enabling mission content.
Skillpoints are points that you can spend to purchase active and passive abilities from skill trees found in your skill book.
Statpoints are spent to increase stats such as intellect, strength, agility, vitality and speed. This determines your character's power.
Reputation is your in-universe renown. It determines what difficulties of missions are available to you from the mission board. As your reputation increases, you'll be trusted more by clients and be able to take progressively more difficult missions for you and your squad. You can check your reputation anytime in the top left corner of your screen, or check others by viewing their profile.
Progression is through one of two ways.
a) RPP and reward chests every 24 hours. Stay active, roleplay and take part in the community for this!
b) Involving yourself in missions, and defeating enemies. You'll earn reputation, money, and XP each time you run one of these.
Energy is your character's overall pool to perform activities. This is drained each time you perform an overworld action such as a healing skill. It is also drained depending on the difficulty of mission you're contracted to undertake. You can regain this energy by actively roleplaying in game, or by eating food. Note, that there is a long cooldown each time you eat food, so do so sparingly.
Certain skill trees require specific criteria to be met to unlock them. These could be one of the following categories:
a) Bloodline. These skill trees require members to possess a unique backstory passive to be able to progress in this tree.
b) Unique. These skill trees require members to have purchased this skill tree with Generational Points during the reincarnation process.
c) Faction. These skill trees require members to be a member of one of the overarching factions (Tracer. vs ALTER), or a specific faction to progress.
In trace/ALTER, battles take place in a tactical representation of the players' surroundings. This closely resembles games of the strategy genre, such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, XCOM, etc.
These battles are broken up into three distinct phases and further broken up by round. The phases are as followed:
Movement Phase: Players take turns moving simultaneously on the board and selecting the locations they'd like to perform their next action from.
Offensive Phase: Players take sequential turns choosing their attacks. These attacks are hidden until every player in the battle has chosen an action to perform, at which point they are all revealed at the same time. If a player chooses to skip this phase, they are allowed to perform actions in the...
Bonus Phase: In this phase, players who did not choose an action in the offensive phase are able to react to incoming attacks. These actions may be deflections, emergency movement abilities, or defensive formations such as shields.
In PvE (player vs. environment), a battle is deemed to be over when all AI combatants have been defeated.
In PvP (player vs. player), a battle is deemed to be over at the players' choosing. Noting this is an RP game, we leave this to the players to determine when a battle is over based on the IC situations they're involved in.
i.e.,
Roleplay Commands
Credits can be purchased starting from $5 for 5 credits. They enable players to purchase items such as:
Game provides an environment for some great RP, fun gameplay, and has active development.
Only problem I've had is its players tend to get assmad and start a shitshow if something doesn't go their way.
The game has a lot of promise, but it's held back pretty hard by the staff team. There's the creator of the game Crazah, and then one single administrator that hardly has time to fulfill every help ticket that comes into the game, creates event characters that are hardly interacted with which makes it hard for certain key plot points to advance, and probably one of the worse offenses of all which would be constantly arguing and belittling the playerbase leaving for a difficult player experience that feels akin to trudging through a field of mud. The players themselves are pretty nice to interact with. But I have a hard time recommending this game in its current state, even if it is in beta.