VR1 Crossroads - In Memoriam

Back in 1999/2000 I discovered this text-based massively multiplayer RPG game called Crossroads. It was made by a company known as VR1 and was still in beta. By the time I had discovered it though, most of the beta testers had left and it was obvious that even though its developers might have wanted to keep working on it, their parent company was having none of it.

What was up was still quite fairly detailed though. The background for the game was quite unique, players began in a place known only as 'The City' in their chosen faction HQ. In the HQ, you are given a book/journal/message board that informs you of the history of your faction, why it is in the city and some background info on the world. Most factions will tell you that they all used to belong to a larger faction known as The Division. An uber secret organisation with multiple sub-organisations under it that were kept secret from each other and from the existence of the Division.

The Division was run by mysterious beings known as Archons who one day, just as mysteriously, disappeared, causing the break of the division, and the cutting loose of the factions under it.

From there, depending on which faction you join, you are given goals. Most factions want to control places of power which were sources of a substance known as Odyle, others wanted to control the city via its politicians, mobsters and other influential people. Some wanted to do both. And then some wanted to also gain influence over the dreamworld.

Dreamworld? Yes, this game had it all.
When I first downloaded the client for the game I was asked to create a character. The character creation screen was also quite interesting to me. I had never played Ultima or other text based MUDs before this one, so the use of a personality quiz to determine what kind of character you would be was a novelty for me. After answering some questions, I was then asked whether I preferred fantasy or sci-fi. I chose sci fi out of curiosity and was then given attributes that I had to choose from. Each positive attribute added points to a pool and the total positive points had to be balanced out by a negative points. Different attributes had different points associated with them.

I then got thrown into a faction of alien psychics, unfortunately I don't remember the majority of the faction names, and proceeded to explore the headquarters. It was such a fascinating experience. I realised I was the only person in the faction and so was the de facto leader. Assuming this meant I was the bees knees, I stepped out into the world to explore.

As I said earlier, the game was mostly bereft of players by this point so no one bothered me for my first thirty or so minutes while I got familiar with the command and the interface. I guess I should mention the fact that this was the first text-based game I had ever played with sound. The music was simple from what I remember, but it really set the mood of the various areas I went through and was enough of an addition that it immediately catapulted it to the top of text-based games I had played.

After some roaming about I found a place of power. I had been instructed to use the 'sense' command at these places to confirm the presence of odyle. After doing that, all I had to do to collect power from it was to sleep there for a long enough period. To be honest I can't remember whether all of this was int he faction diary or on the noticeboard, but I knew what I had to do when I found one. I then proceeded to sleep and what faced me was another character creation sequence. This time I had to 'mold' my character from dream stuff and it followed a more conventional character creation set up. After completing this I ascended through light and ended up in a central hub in the dream world. It was so cool! The interface changed slightly and the ambient sounds changed to suit the mood. While the city was mostly realistic and had normal locations like book stores, bars, night clubs and offices, the dreamworld had temples and dungeons and castles with fiends in them. I also traded my trenchcoat for a suit of leather armour and a sword.

I fought a few creatures and explored a bit before suddenly I was wrenched out of the dream world and back into the waking one. I think there was a notice in the dream world hub warning dreamers not to stay out too long as you could only sleep for a fixed amount of time (the exact amount was randomised slightly and was also based on the amount of odyle one had accumulated) and if you weren't in a special zone like the hub, you would lose all the items you had gained in the dream world. The experience taught me to pay more attention to the rules of the world. I dusted off and left to explore the world more before logging off for the first time.

I was hooked.

I proceeded to play the game solid for about 4 - 5 months religiously every day. It also didn't help that I was having a bit of a depressing time in real life and took the first chance I could to excape from it, but the game was really that good. I got attacked a couple of times by rival factions, re-created my character a couple of times and settled on a faction called the Jactara. I became faction head there too since there was no one else and started mapping the city's underground. Hunting down places of power and making sure that one was safe there (as other players could wake you up if they found you) was quite exciting and addictive in its own right, but finding out about the world and what happened to the archons was even more interesting. The writing was quite good from what I remember and all the players in the game were very reluctant to reveal which faction they belonged to although we sometimes shared information about pieces of the story we were able to figure out from our faction's information and our own investigations.

There was also the tussle for influence over the city as you could bribe NPCs to spy for you or just to gain power over them, thereby increasing your influence. This was easier to do, but for a more permanent solution, the best thing was to find a bit of blackmail material on the NPC in question. I was never sure whether they used to spawn in random places or just occurred in one place, but the idea was that blackmail items were unique and so only one player could have them giving them complete control over that NPC until someone else could get that item from them, and there were loads of hiding places.

The dream world also had its own rules as well and items to find, creatures to slay and so on. I became quite adept at sleeping and even learnt some spells that helped keep me asleep for much longer than normal so that I could explore.

There really was so much to do in the game and it was nowhere near finished. There were mystical factions, a faction made of dreamworld inhabitants, psychic factions, alien factions, a super hero faction, and a Men In Black-style faction called D12 (Division 12), which was the only faction to my knowledge that possessed a dossier on all the other factions and the most information about the archons. They were also one of the few factions that could actually kill a player for good.

Normally if you lost in combat your character would be knocked out and you would end up in the dream world. You could then be looted. There were no experience points in the game per se and so you might lose some odyle points, but your influence would remain intact so long as you had your blackmail items and so on. But, if D12 or one of the other factions that had kill requisitions (like a psychic faction called the panopticon) gave one to one of their players, they could kill your character. This did not mean game over however. Your character would instead get stuck in the dream world, never waking up. I don't know what would happen if you then died in the dream world however. It was possible to make it back to the city though if you could break into the dream inhabitants faction HQ and steal a body from there which gave you other abilities.

The game was really awesome and the developers had not yet implemented all the other factions or a lot of the skills or quests or finished areas. A lot of mobs were absent or present in an unfinished form, but it was already very engrossing. The few people who remained were a diehard bunch who still explored the world and had fun griefing one another from time-to-time. Unfortunately, VR1 then announced that it would not be continuing development on Crossroads (I think they couldn't find a publisher or their publisher told them not to continue), deciding instead to focus on more traditional videogames like Nightcaster as well as an mmorpg that was cancelled as well called Lost Continents.

While the forums were still up, some of the players were asking if VR1 or their publisher would be willing to sell the IP to them along with the engine so that they could continue developing it. Even creating a thread on text-based MUD company Skotos' forum asking the company to approach VR1 about purchasing the game. After a while of following the ever dwindling community I gave up on ever seeing Crossroads again. Now, I am not sure whether they even exist any more as a company. I have tried googling them and checked wikipedia but there's no link to a website or anything else. And their former web address is up for sale so who knows?

For a very long time it was the only mmorpg I had seen that had such an interesting setting and backstory. I really hope that games like The Secret World can sate on my yearning for playing in a world inspired partly by HP Lovecraft, contemporary conspiracy theories and a healthy heaping of mystery.

For more information about VR1's Crossroads, you can check out this really nice article on the game here, a press release discussing its then pioneering use of direct music can be found here , and here's an interview with one of their leads discussing Lost Continents.

EDIT: Just found out that they merged with Jaleco USA to form Jaleco Entertainment. No offense to VR1 Entertainment or Jaleco at all, but really? From Crossroads to this? I wonder whether the original designers behind Crossroads and Lost Continent left or are the ones behind the games on the jaleco site as well...

EDIT 2: Also, a link to one of the original designers of the game over on IGN. He also apparently worked on Lost Continent too.