I have to admit going through their client/server update logs the game seems to be updated several times per month so that is a plus for a free game. I just wish I had more time to try most of the games I read about... someday.

Found this game through word of mouth advertisement. I vaguely recall reading this brief thread on it a few months back and at the time I shrugged the game off. I downloaded it yesterday and I have to say, I'm sorry it took me so long to get around to it. The graphics are not stellar by any means, but that shouldn't let it fool anyone. This game has a ton of potential for being very engrossing for an extended period of time in my opinion. Previous poster said it was a melding of "Wurm Online" and "Civilization" and that is accurate, however, I'd like to toss out the comparison of "Spore" meets "Minecraft."

The game can start in one of two ways: "Start a new Empire" or "Start a New Player." The difference between the two modes is that when starting a new empire the player is made "leader" of that empire where as starting as a new player allows one to join an existing empire. This can be great if people are wanting to play together and multiple people working together can potentially be quite advantageous. I went the route of "start a new empire" so I'll proceed to give a brief explanation of my experience so far.

After choosing start a new empire I was prompted to design and decide upon many aspects of my race's physical characteristics. The designer is not nearly as powerful as Spore's, however, there are still lots of options to choose from. Once all these physical characteristics are designed my avatar was placed upon a habitable planet within a solar system that no other player had ever visited before. My avatar was completely naked with nothing but a knife and a torch (technically not even the torch but you get it moments after starting). There is a tutorial (which is going to be improved over time) that told me the very bare basics about movement and manipulation and after that I was set on my way to go out onto my world and prosper. Once again drawing on Minecraft as a simile, a player is able to craft basic items "by hand" with no additional equipment. Basic equipment includes items such as a backpack (which provides more inventory space), basic non-armored clothing, a medical kit to heal oneself and most importantly a flag. I should note at this point that there are indigenous animals on one's planet as well which will NOT attack you until you place your flag and found your first city. This is important as they can be attacked, killed, and then harvested in order to provide some basic resources. These creatures are designed from different "DNA" strands so in theory the creatures on each planet one explores will be unique. On that note, I think a cool feature that the game has in this regard is that when you attacked these creatures it'll give output that says along the lines of: " hits carnivore for damage." However, once one kills the creature than can pick up the carcass and drop it onto a "DNA" icon which then gives the player the ability to name the species and forevermore the species will be referred to by that name in messaging. Additionally during this time, basic resources can also be gathered by hand from trees, planets, and other resource nodes.

I personally spent time hand crafting a bunch of items before planting my flag so that I could learn the basics of the game in relative safety. Once I planted my flag, the difficulty level did amp up just a bit. I won't say that creatures immediately swarmed my town square (which is what is placed when one plant's their flag) however attacks were somewhat common. The bane of my existence (still to this point) was an aerial creature that had the ability to use electricity and radiation as a weapon. As I only have a knife to this point, I have no recourse against this creature so far, though one can build rifles/pistols at a later point. I digress, however. After the flag is planted, one is able to begin constructing a large array of other building types. To name a few: Farms, mines, refineries, roads, workshops, and so on. At first, a player must go to each construction site and manually click to build these structures, however, eventually citizens will begin to immigrate to the city and take jobs at both the construction sites and the production facilities.

We are approaching the extent of how far I've managed to get in this game, however, I'd like to share my most recent accomplishment in the game as I found it something that was very motivating. As I mentioned earlier in this post a player is started with a knife and a torch. The torch is one's only light source and the planet I started on was not only extremely dark at night, but it also has an extremely long night cycle due to the way it rotates (day/night cycles are different on each planet as orbits and rotation are modeled). Most recently, I managed to build and bring online my race's first power plant. The power plant provides power for the entire city and not only makes things much brighter at night time, but also allows citizens to work at night which increases production dramatically.

On that note, the game eventually allows you to develop spaceships, colonize other planets/moons, explore other star systems, etc. For example, as it stands now, at night if I look up into the sky I can see several other planets (with moons) orbiting my own. It is my understanding that once I am able to build a rocket ship/space ship, I can lift off my planet and fly directly to one of those planets and start a new colony there.

Final note: The game is not always completely intuitive and can be frustrating to learn at first. However, I recommend sticking with it as there is already a great amount of depth and development is quite active on this game. If anyone ends up playing, and would like to be part of my empire and/or has any questions about play feel free to send me a private message and I'd be more than happy to help where I can.

My apologies for the double post, I didn't see an edit button for my previous post. I wanted to provide these two resources from the Hazeron website that I think are invaluable to a new player:

http://www.hazeron.com/software/Hazeron ... irIsth.pdf -- PDF file that acts as a tutorial for a starting player

and

http://www.hazeron.com/letsplay.html - YouTube videos that also help show a new player the ropes

i got a bit bored after a while the graphics do need some work. The interface is ok but even spaceship building sooner or later it gets a bit boring

The graphics in the videos and the pdf remind me too much of Starquest, But I'd like to see what this custom ship building/using is like. How long does it take to get a reply when you apply for an account?

Also, is the PVP forced or do both sides have to choose to do pvp to attack? I don't like forced pvp.

got very bored seems the project has been abandoend a bit

Its instant, make an account and your off.

Its rather open, as in you do what you want. My first empire ran afoul to the 'Join or Die' type of players. But that wasn't so bad, I joined their empire and bought every piece of their technology that was on the market and set out to form a new colony free from oppression 🙂

The graphics do suck but you get used to them, and we all know graphics aren't everything.

If anyone wants to have a quick go, your welcome to join my Republic 🙂

"The Alkari Republic" in case anyone is interested. I'll set you up with a ship and resources to found a colony on the ring world, or you could just design a ship yourself which is arguably the best feature of the game.

Not only that, you can also pick any star in the sky and head straight for it 🙂 It has an accurate sky box with stars in their correct positions.

Believe it or not but that knife is acutally one of the most powerful hand-held weapons you will get in the game... Be sure you don't lose it as you won't be able to replace it yourself until much later in the game, as it is made from Vulcium, a special rare metal much harder than any other metal.

You may be able to head off to any star which is cool, but... I thought I would dead head to the nearest system on the map, 4pc away and after I got under way, I found it would take 2 hours. and, to prevent automated exploring, when going to a system you haven't been to before, You have to not only be on board, but in the capt. chair, THE WHOLE WAY! 🙁 If you get up, the ship seems to turn around and head back.

Yeah it can take a while, but just so you know unless you have an extremely slow ship it generally takes about 10 minutes per parsec to travel that way. When I was deadheading I would just minimise it and do something else 🙂 I don't recall having to sit in the captain's chair and I didn't even have an officer on board....

Also there is a way around the ship stopping, you can just order all of the crew to stop manning their stations then they wont be able to stop the ship. 😉

If it's a system you have been to before, you can tell them to go and they go. Don't even have to be on board. But if you haven't been there...

I played this game for about a month - what a waste of time (even for a game 🙂 )

First the lag, every few minutes you are stuck in place for up to a minute or more. This is with 30 people online at the same time WITH 12 SERVERS. Feels like you're playing on some Win 95 box.

The bugs - this is pre-alpha code and as far as I can tell none of the updates (if you can call changes that introduce as many bugs as they claim to fix an update) are even tested. Expect a crash to desktop every few minutes. Expect the servers to crash after that.

Maintainers - haphazard at best. The whole development process appears unplanned - features appear that follow no logical pattern.

Perhaps in another ten years of development it might be beta level code, but I wouldn't plan on it

A month of this game is enough to be frustrated

Lag they would need funding for better servers

Bugs he wont make it open source so yeah its haphazardly maintained. Its unplanned however doesnt stop pioneer from working open source it and then it might work

You are missing the point, they have 12 servers and can only handle a dozen or so people on line and opensource (the server code is NOT opensourse) doesn't mean haphazard. You can have a million servers with crappy code and it will run slow as molasses, there is no way around that.

Many open source projects are meticulous on the what they are and where the want to be. Shores of Hazaron is haphazard though with no thoughts as to how to improve the game. Updates are random in nature and often have little bearing on the real bugs.

My suggestion, close down the game and actually test and optimize the code so that it will run for more than five minutes without segfaulting instead of having your users alphatest the code for you.

Maybe I can load this up this weekend and give it a spin and see how it is and do a little official write-up on it. I know from the webpage it looks like they put out fixes often, but like some of you said there needs to be plan for the fixes and just blindly fixing issues as they arise. I will look past the obvious graphics in this game and see how my experiences is with a few hours of game play. I know it seems to be an empire game so it might need more than that, but usually in that amount of time the game will have me wanting more or erasing it from the drive. I know Shores of Hazeron is trying to do some pretty big things and would like to see it all work. But nothing kills a game for me like lag or downtime. That's why I haven't gone back to Black Prophecy because of my issues with lag, how can you play a twitch shooter with lag? 🙂

Anyone else have any thoughts on SoH gameplay?

I love the game, but its player count is really low, and the galaxy really big.

Haxus just bought some new servers, so some of the lag is actually better. Ikkir even made an offline ship editor to help bypass the worst lag.

Looks like my kind of game, after reading the infomation on the website. If only it had single player capability, or an offline mode...

I have no problem holding off for a while, so many games so little time 🙂

Well I recently re-started a new empire with SOH so I'll give you the latest.

The main difference is a recent update to planet terrain and cities. Previously cities were built using a grid system where the suface of the planet was made of square tiles. Each of these tiles would be like a building or road location. The new worlds now have a more dynamic system. Roads can be placed in any direction and of varying length. Buildings can be placed anywhere on the terrain, the grid is completely gone. The planet surface itself is much better, with a far less angular and blocky appearance. Personally I think it creates a more unique and fluid looking city. The downsides are that cities tend to cover a much larger area and take longer to build. There are some issues but on the whole its a step forward.

Unfortunately the choppy movement is still there. As far as I know its something to do with everything being server side. Its speculated that this is to do with the hacker risk of it being client side, but I really don't know what I'm talking about! Either way, from what I gaher its not changing any time soon.

In the weeks that I've been playing I have not suffered the dreaded limbo, although it is still reported on the forums.

Despite its issues, I still find the whole game utterly compelling. I just wish that we could see where the development was going.

Alas, Hazeron is no more.

RIP.

Indeed, lol.

Now this reaction is more like I'd expect from Haxus.

Its a bit odd really. He fixes one of the biggest problems the game has had throughout its entire existence (laggy movement) and then with no warning ditches the whole project without even letting forum members bid farewell to the game and each other. Hazeron had a small but close community, and I'm sure many were left wondering "wtf" when they tried to log in to the game.

I feel quite sad that it went like it did. For such an ambitious game, its final demise deserved some recogniton. But no, not a word. Just a "Thanks for playing" message and a lot of "404 not found".

But I guess thats Haxus all over. Right to the end.

If you go back to the website for the game, there has been a change.  According to the author's posting on the 20th of August, the game may be back sooner than expected.  I am guessing he was contacted by someone who was willing to help with development. I did not get a chance to play this game, but I watched a Let's Play on youtube.  The game looks like it's would be amazing if it was completed.  Hopefully we will be hearing more from th creator soon.

 

August 20, 2014

Shores of Hazeron is morphing into a different game. It may be back sooner than you think, sort of. Ship designs and DNA may play a role. Lots of juicy code needs to be distilled; we'll see what remains.

Check here once in a while for updates.

Interesting but what sort of game will it be.

Interesting but what sort of game will it be.

Well if its going to be made using some of the orginal code then I can't even begin to imagine...

Maybe the same game but made into some sort of strategy game. First person could be done away with and ship flight simplified or even automated. Planets may be top-down view only (90% of the time you use top-down anyway). Could end up like Civilization with the Hazeron universe. Hmmm thats actually sounding pretty cool. Damn I wish I could make games