The opening account
About
A fully synced Skyrim, under the stars of Mundus.
About I
A Shared Province
A persistent multiplayer world.
Aurbis will soon begin Open Beta with a text-only canon heavy roleplay server with invite-only access codes. When the gamemode nears release, we will begin a whitelist process. A premium voice chat server will follow soon after.
We have successfully synced the entire province of Skyrim on a shared world clock starting at Morndas, the 17th of Last Seed, in the year 4E 201. By syncing nearly all vanilla gameplay and adding some of our features and algorithms where necessary, we are close to making combat, skills, survival, professions, economy, leadership, factions, families, NPCs, animals, mounts, enemies, and quests fully available to all players.
While work on the gamemode continues, the daunting questions have to be asked: What can we achieve if we truly work together to build a world? What is necessary to make this work at scale? These are monumental questions when you begin to consider what the Elder Scrolls and Skyrim have to offer.
The current goal is to design the gamemode for everyone's character to find a role in a living province with real functioning survival, economy, politics, and warfare. While the gamemode is nearly complete on that front, the community is not. Skyrim is an ancient province of a grand Empire and we want to simulate that properly.
We hope to integrate qualified groups and individuals as existing "Lore Artifacts" in Skyrim on Aurbis. You'll have to post a public application and we'll let the community decide on seeding the major factions and holdings. The public whitelist server will have the same vision but operate with more strict and organized administration.
We will not dictate the world to you. We hope the players will set the standard and build the world piece by piece. This server will be an experiment in chaos and order and Aurbis is the perfect title for it: "The Gray Maybe" for nobody knows if it will stand the test of time.
About II
The World Itself
The challenge ahead.
The technology has not been lacking for a server like this to exist. The problem lies in the world itself. This is a more complex, more dynamic world than anything any modern roleplay game has to offer, and not because of features we built, but because of the richness of the Elder Scrolls world and the legendary games that influenced us all.
Think of the systems and governance in a modern roleplay game, there are potentially 6 avenues of gameplay and authority: a cop, a gangster, a doctor, a lawyer, an admin, or a citizen. In the Elder Scrolls universe there exist thousands of potential roles and experiences. Hundreds for every race, combat, and skill class, hundreds for factions and holdings, hundreds for resources and crafting, hundreds for every supernatural aspect and beyond.
Who can claim to conceptualize or maintain a mortal plane like Mundus? Who can claim to have the knowledge and authority to govern an Empire consisting of 10 proud and ancient races, Jarls and High Kings, witches and wizards, zealous religions and cults, dragons, werewolves, vampires, and nearly every other fantasy you can conceive of? Anyone who has scrambled and attempted this hastily will almost certainly only lead to disappointment and frustration, if not complete implosion. The only real option is to build something together that gives everyone the chance to achieve their dreams.
You can make Skyrim an arcade, a fun theme for your own gamemode, but people can play any game for that experience. What players truly want is immersion and significance. A thousand MMOs and roleplay servers have come and gone but your best gaming memory comes from a foggy morning in 2012 embodying your favourite Skyrim character and thinking "I wish this was multiplayer."
A living, breathing world where they have the opportunity to find the role that suits them and not be shuffled through weak and broken systems. A place in a world for everyone with every interest and every skill set under the stars: The Warrior, The Mage, The Lord, The Lady, The Lover, The Thief, The Serpent, The Shadow, The Steed, The Tower, The Atronach, The Apprentice.
About III
The Standard
Players set the standard and build the world piece by piece.
To make this possible there must be some Principles we agree upon and that we have decided to establish as our guiding light. No matter what the rules end up looking like, we must abide by our founding principles. With that being said, we have made a series of hard decisions in terms of gameplay and governance that we hope will form the foundation for a versatile gamemode that serves all types of players.
We currently don't know what the community will look like or how the game will play at scale. The main things we are trying to avoid are crafting unrealistic rulesets, hastily choosing leadership, and attempting to establish lore beyond our knowledge or station, these should all be up to the players. Ultimately we are attempting to build the gamemode from the ground up with scale and balancing in mind. It is complex work but rewarding when real heroes begin to emerge and genuine markets begin to form.
We have opened up every single state available to a Skyrim vanilla character to the public including supernatural states such as vampirism and lycanthropy. Your racial aspect spell will persist as will your Standing Stone buff. All magic will eventually become available but we are starting with the main combat spells for damage dealing, healing, resistances, and buffs/debuffs. All skills, combat, magic and potions are available but will be altered in rarity as balancing is required and gated when necessary. We have a stable job faction and mounts persist as active world NPCs, can be bought, sold, claimed or stolen.
The main goal will be to completely sync the vanilla world and attempt to fill it to capacity. When that happens we'll be ready to integrate mods and scripts to immediately expand all the existing holdings. Whiterun, Solitude, Windhelm, Markarth, all these look like grand cities but Bethesda took great pains to make the large scale fit on 2011 hardware. Fortunately they built everything broadly modular. This means we have the ability to expand these cities to the scale they actually appear and deserve. Other mod integrations will start in the form of quality-of-life RPG mods that add massive roleplay value or cleanly enrich the existing vanilla features.
Together we can raise up something primordial that stands like another Adamantine Tower that anchors our world. That struggle will be the Aurbis.