Saturn Valley Online

[Another World]

Saturn Valley Online
PC Homebrew

Saturn Valley Online is an MMORPG based on Earthbound (Mother). The current release has a real-time battle system and players can team up with 3 other users to explore the 100+ map game world.

• Completely redesigned game (NetGore engine)
• [Fix] Less to no movement lag

 Off-site Download

 Vids

 Version History

 Homepage

 

[Wabsta]

Looks pretty nice, but those 2d mmo's just don't work..

 

[dan80315]

They do if you're a fan of the series!

This looks like a great casual pick-up with friends.

 

[saxamo]

Thanks for the heads up, surely going to check this one out!

 

[Zetta_x]

This is epically awesome.

 

[quacko]

I think I'm going to give it a shot too. I loved Earthbound and enjoyed Mother 3 when the patch came out. Now I just need to find some people to go questing with me.

 

[signz]

For a moment I thought that's for DS.

 

[Ritsuki]

I'll definitively try this one.

EDIT :

Attention new users!

By Skye - Posted on 01 May 2010
The alpha is closed for new users. You can make a skyon account, however you will not be able to log into the game with it until the Q4 release. The next version, built with a new engine written in C# will contain the Earthbound battle system, PSI, equipment, items, shops and more! However, a preview version of the new game will be released soon.

I'll have to wait some more

 

[Skye07]

Yeah sorry about that. The current live version is the one written in Visual Basic 6 and is pretty laggy.

We're working on a C# version at the moment with a new engine called Netgore. Should have a teaser version ready in a week or two.

You can find some video footage of the old game(play) if you do a Youtube search for "Saturn Valley Online"
Here's a quicklink to the vids: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type...24,20&uni=3

EDIT:

I should also mention we're working on a Earthbound battle system clone to replace the realtime one so it feels more Earthboundy

 

[Ritsuki]

It looks very nice ! I hope there will be a lot of people and a good community

EDIT : I lol'd at the " Rick Astley's Rick Roll in Saturn Valley Online! " video

 

[Skye07]

The community is/was pretty awesome. Many people left when we stopped updating the outdated vb6-based game. However, there are still a handful of people around on the forum and those are the true dedicated fans. No doubt once we release the new version with the Earthbound battle system many of the old members will return.

Check some of the user-made youtube vids, you'll see plenty of people playing the game together.


Also, I'm looking into allowing new accounts to connect to the old gameserver so you can check out how SVO looked like back in the day. If you have a twitter account follow us http://twitter.com/TeamSkyon and you'll be the first to know when it's available again.

 

[Tux']

This looks amazing! I can't wait to try this out! I hope that my laptop will be able to run it without overheating and shutting down >.< anyways, this still looks really amazing and I can't wait to try it out!

 

[purplesludge]

This looks awesome.

 

[MarkDarkness]

Make sure to duck the Cease and Desist orders... Square-Enix is shtitty at those.

 

[Skye07]

SVO is really lightweight. Any laptop capable of running Windows XP will run SVO.

As for the C&D letters, have you seen Fangamer.net? They SELL Earthbound t-shirts and other merch, we offer a free to play game. If Nintendo starts suing people it would be them first

but then again it has been proven countless of times that NOA doesn't care about Earthbound.

 

[shakirmoledina]

beautiful to advertise this on gbatemp... great work guys with an mmorpg of this nature
ahh the hope to make one yourself, if u get too many ppl then server issues will occur so its better to get satisfied with fewer committed ppl

 

[Skye07]

I saw the other PC homebrew so I figured I'd contact another world to ask if SVO is worth frontpage news.

As for the server, it's currently running on a server machine in my garage but if I see there are too many people for it to handle, I can move it to a friend's dedicated server in a datacenter in Holland and it should be able to hold 200-300 people online simultaneously. But then again, I don't think we'll reach that number anytime soon. I'd be happy with 50 online at the same time.

Also maybe worth a mention:

If you're a pixelartist, we're still looking for someone to help us create some new Earthbound-looking graphics.
Also a PHP programmer and a C# programmer would be welcome to join. We got 2 C# programmers at the moment but they're very busy in real life so development could speed up with a third.

 

[Cobalt-]

This looks delicious. Going to follow this.

Also, yeah, Mark, Earthbound is Nintendo, not Square-Enix.

 

[referencer]

So the idea here is to take a game that was great for its charm and tone in spite of its poor gameplay mechanics and put it in a genre that focuses entirely on gameplay mechanics?

Okay then.

 

[Skye07]

We never said we'd be using the gameplay mechanics Earthbound uses. Most of the stats and battle stat-related mechanics will be adjusted and will be updated to be balanced if it's needed. That's the power of having the source

we'll be spending a lot of time to make the mechanics work out nicely.