Many years ago back in 2006, I had had a better way of explaining the idea to my group of college friends when I was still in college as an undergraduate student. I had made the character a few years prior, but it did not dawn on me that I probably should explain Zelazon a bit before getting into both the problem of the design and the content that surround the character.
Firstly, Zelazon is a part of an architecture that is supposed to be more than a standard MMO character, but also a character that helps to drive the plot of the story until an MMO could be developed around the character. I had this idea for a while, but wanted to run the character online because I need to see how the archetype would hold up online.
Zelazon is a bit weird to describe as it is not my internal description of myself, but more of a story character that I borrow from in order to be able to analyze and develop the character a bit so that any external ideas that come from stay with the character versus trying to identify as Zelazon. Zelazon has his only personality, operates in his internal world, but it strictly a storyline character for the story Souless.
Why this was important is because you are not allowed to forget that you are still borrowing a character from a story to have that as an online alias; this means you can't take the character from the story since the character does not exist online.
However, the other character I had used archetypes from my friend designed, but since I've lost touch with all of the friends that I had in the past, Zelazon essentially because a problem in itself since the design has become both unusable and unplayable if you are looking at it from a multiplayer perspective. I've often thought about how to mitigate this problem, but it's hard when the people are no longer available to work on the design or have conversations about the character for development. Additionally, because I finished the outline for the story, the character is closed design since there was no more room for growth and I need to start a new project, meaning Zelazon has to be abandoned.
Just going on the story for a bit, the main boss at the end is Lord Onthra, and some people online have seen the name, but it's been relatively need with AI assistance that I could show what Onthra looks like:
Essentially, it was cool to materialize the character, but one problem I faced is that if you need artist to develop the imagery around the each character, you would need a business to create the story and need a ton of money to get the idea realized. Onthra serves as the final boss that awaits the heroes and essentially has been around for the whole book before having the main character fight the entity. Zelazon is the main character that fights against Onthra, so to me, it's hard when that boss is a direct threat to Zelazon, but Zelazon cannot fight Onthra alone. Onthra has too much HP, to many abilities, and is overpowering to the point where fighting Onthra solo is a stupid idea.
Ultimately, how Onthra and Zelazon are tied together is that they are from the same paradigm, they have similar architectures, world is the same, but without the friends, both are unlikely to see each other due to the other characters being necessary in order for the development and the plot to lead Zelazon to Onthra. It's hard because the idea has to be disbanded since Zelazon has no way of getting to Onthra without the actual people to assist in the idea. While it can be good or bad, this means that utilizing Zelazon online is akin to trying to run a guild online in an MMO without any players either playing the game or not having enough friends to fill up the guild.
It's difficult, but the idea of Zelazon comes from the older architecture of the classic idea of the heroic design, which was armor, weapons, and the usual stuff you used to see in the media before 2000 hit. It's weird, but the design is no longer relevant, and I think I could put my efforts into a better character that has more substance of today versus a design that had died out in the late 90ies.
The way I see it today is that back then, many games were new versus the old that we currently look at many of the MMO that already came out. Ideas that were innovative are now stale and uninspiring, but I do like that the development of Zelazon did yield some success since I can still talk about the character today and keep him around long enough to have a nice farewell for him.
While not as popular as some other characters as we know, it's important to have an original design so people know that you had some big-scope idea to implement in the world. It's also important to ensure that project is close when needed to ensure that the idea isn't coming back anymore. The idea is old and needed to be closed.