Transcend

General Info

Released: 26th July 2005
Author: Ransom Arceihn
Missions: 44
Mods included:
Raa's Kelpie
Cobra's Plato reskin
Nico's Legion

SCP Required

Story

Only a few short months after the end of the Second Shivan Incursion, amongst the chaos of Capellan refugees and ever-heightening levels of piracy, mysterious things have begun happening on the edge of GTVA space. Unexplained disappearances, strange rumours...

You are Lieutenant Sunder Marcel, recently transferred to the 103rd Shadow Guardians. Your squadron has been charged with uncovering the cause of these disturbances, to venture out into the unknown and return with an answer.

But something's strange about this case. The clues have no meaning, and reality is beginning to slip...

Everyone has a limit...

Author's Notes

Transcend has been criticised by some for having a confusing or downright incomprehensible story. This was unavoidable. From the beginning of the project I wanted to make a campaign that showed rather than told the story to the player and force them to work things out for themselves, in contrast to Sync's - which had a few missions which were little more than one of the characters spouting exposition for the player's benefit. This meant that Transcend would definitely not be to everyone's taste, and to be honest it was received far better than I was expecting. It also meant there would be some ambiguity surrounding certain aspects of the plot, which was another motivation for me to attempt this kind of storytelling as some people presented their own theories on the story, which I found very interesting to read. (A couple of people got extremely close to my version of events, incidentally.)

Another thing it's been criticised for is repetitive missions. I don't really have anything to say about that other than it's completely true and I'm not sure what I was thinking with some of those missions, which is particularly embarassing as Sync suffered from the same problem.

One misconception I'd like to clear up is that Transcend is not a sequel to Sync. It does have connections to the story, but it was designed so people who hadn't played my earlier campaign could play it as well.

References

I included a few references to a bunch of pretty much random things throughout the campaign. There's actually probably a few more things I forgot to mention here as well. Most of them are ridiculously vague to the point where they might not even be considered references, but whatever.

GTD Voran - Agratis Voran is a demo character in the MMORPG Clan Lord. (All demo characters have the first name 'Agratis'.)
GTD Brax - Another demo character from the same game.
GTC Tanner - Tanner Mirabel is a character in Alastair Reynold's Chasm City.
GTT Incontrovertible - A friend of mine wrote a fanfiction for David Brin's Uplift series which involved a ship by this name. I don't know if he made it up or if it's actually in Uplift, I've never read it.
GTC Brice - Name of a character from the film Below.

Delays

Transcend was actually complete in late March. However due to a slew of problems, specifically Raa's Kelpie being unplayable (the game crashed when you shot at it) and SCP bugs, it was delayed for four more months until everything was fixed and the campaign was released.

Related Links

Project Site provided by Game Warden
Release Thread
ModDB Profile