KickStarter Shroud of the Avatar - Lord British's Not-Ultima Online 2

[GarfunkeL]

There is so much wrong in that picture, oh dear.

 

[Norfleet]

The graphics are a bit on the lightweight side, but then, who cares? I don't really like graphics anyway. Graphics, schmaphics. Forsooth!

 

[Cyberarmy]

That skeleton has punk hair?

Punk is really dead it seems.

Spoiler

BA DUM TSS

 

[Taxnomore]

Man, that #5 card.

 

[Caim]

Wasn't it clear to you yet that Lord British was a self-insert courtesy of Richard Garriot?

 

[Norfleet]

Lord British has been Garriott since before there ever was an Ultima. It's the reason why he still owns that name instead of EA. There is a proud and noble tradition of attempting to kill him in every game.

 

[SuicideBunny]

Lord British has been Garriott since before there ever was an Ultima. It's the reason why he still owns that name instead of EA. There is a proud and noble tradition of attempting to kill him in every game.

and getting the shaft when you actually succeed....

 

[Taxnomore]

I think it's a metaphor. However bad his games are, he comes back. Again. And again.

 

[Morblot]

What's with his eyes? They look very hollow and soulless. Did he see something in space that man wasn't meant to see?

The arms are somehow weird too.

 

[Whiran]

What's with his eyes? They look very hollow and soulless. Did he see something in space that man wasn't meant to see?

No, he helped create Ultima IX...

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...the-avatar-is-ultima-online-2-in-so-many-ways

Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar is Ultima Online 2 in so many ways
It has promise but the pre-alpha isn't recommended for all.

When Ultima Online came out 17 years ago it blew my teenage mind. My medieval fantasy world was alive, inhabited by actual other people. I didn't care that I didn't have any idea what to do because it was so exciting! But Ultima Online was obtuse - making progress was an initiation, not a right. It was a reward in and of itself. And knowing that someone could come and kill you in a dungeon and loot everything you carried? Part of the magic.

I slid all of the face customisation sliders to the left.

Now massively-multiplayer role-playing games are common, and they've changed (barring ye olde Eve Online). They're friendly, they don't kick you while you're down. They can't; if they let go of your hand and you stray too far off the entertaining path, you'll leave - and they can't afford you to. Attitudes changed and their design changed, but for the better?

Not according to Richard Garriott, creator of Ultima Online, but what does he know? He hasn't made a great game since Ultima Online. For us to listen, he'll have to prove it - prove he knows better by making the game we want him to: Ultima Online 2. I can tell that after playing Shroud of the Avatar for 15 hours, his new game, it is the sequel he's promised in so many ways.

But let me make this clear: if you don't know Ultima Online, don't play it - yet. Don't pay the £30 Steam Early Access asking price because you'll see a game with dodgy graphics, archaic combat and ugly menus. You'll grind wolves and skeletons like it's 1997, in a game that looks and feels like it's 1997. You won't have any idea where to go, how to craft or what to do, and you'll want your money back. Look again next year, when pre-alpha is long over.

However, if you've been waiting for a Richard Garriott Ultima Online follow-up, then with caution you may proceed, because there's real promise.


Shroud of the Avatar isn't as charming as Ultima Online yet, but it's going for the same look and the same feel. You sign for trades with NPCs, type keywords to prompt NPC reaction and cast (some) spells with reagents - and they can fail, Fizz. The music can be near identical in places and it's lovely, a real reason to listen, although the sound effects are placeholder bad. There's all the player housing surrounding the cities - grandiose abodes and even castles - and the classless skill system, the player-run economy and myriad crafting options and tables. At times you really could be in a 3D version of Ultima Online, only without the elegance of that isometric world.

Eww menus, even it is at a kobold shop.

Ultima Online had a whimsy, a feeling of a dusty old tome: parchment menus, leather bag interiors for backpacks, stony health bars. The interface in Shroud changed from something similar to something ugly and functional for Early Access, and I hope it doesn't stay that way. Characters are more cartoony than realistic, and the environments are mainly murky and dull. Cities and a day-night cycle sporadically elevate it, but the poor performance besmirches their efforts.

But Shroud of the Avatar also sets out to do things differently. It's not a pure MMO but a "selective multiplayer" game. You can play it offline, alone, ignoring everyone else forever, or you can play it online in a number of ways. You can play Single-Player Online, ignoring everyone else but making use of the shared economy and world; you can play Friends Online online, seeing only your friends; or you can play it in full multiplayer online and see everyone else.

Combat has changed for a deck building system and uses skill trees, neither of which were in Ultima Online. When you level up, you earn Skill Points, and can spend them in whichever tree you like. Doing so unlocks active glyphs (abilities or spells) that you can build a combat deck with. The glyphs you put in the deck appear at random, and temporarily, in your hotbar during combat. Some can be combined to make combos.

There's occasional beauty.

Slugs - unusable grey blocks - pop up in your hotbar during combat, uselessly occupying a slot for a while. How many Slugs are in your deck, your heft of armour declares. Then there's an entire skill tree designated to altering how your deck works: size of hotbar, speed of glyph draw, number of glyphs you can lock in place - even the ability to discard a hotbar for a fresh full compliment of glyphs immediately.

Mastering deck building and optimising your build - choosing which equipment, which skills - is an art. Fortunately you can reset and change it as often as you visit a Skill Trainer in town.

It's fortunate because like so much else in Shroud of the Avatar, it's not well explained. It's not even finished being made. If you want to know how to build your character, want to know where to go, it's trial and error and searching the internet for community videos and articles.

Oh dear!

There aren't any exclamation marks leading you around the world. There are quests but you'll have to talk to people to find them, and don't expect to be able to immediately complete them when you do. There's no world map blinking objectives at you, or even a town map marking points of interest - there are only scroll maps with the rough layout of the town, and a compass when you're on the top-down world map that links zones.

There's no clear progression path beyond heading to an area with monsters around your level and standing there and killing them - as was the norm in old MMOs. Finally when you've killed enough, you level up, and maybe you've got enough money for some sturdy equipment. Then you try and find a new area to fight in.

It's a boring cycle that MMOs improved upon long ago, and it's made all the more wearisome because combat lacks any heft or punch in Shroud. Certainly don't come from World of Warcraft expecting to be thrilled by the systems here.


So why do it, why play on? Because when I found a way, through perseverance, to level my way up to 25 (from five), by running around in circles so enemies couldn't hit me - I know - I felt like I had achieved something, become somebody. I could feel a newcomer's eyes on me as I walked past. "How did he do that?!" I felt like I'd achieved something precisely because I knew how hard it once seemed. I'd figured it out. It was the same joy I felt in figuring out Ultima Online.

Oh dear for them. Progress at long last.

I haven't figured crafting out beyond making a few ingots, though, and there's fathoms of depth there - even whole skill trees (not implemented) for it. Without money or the known location of places to harvest materials, and the power to survive there, you won't get anywhere. And getting anywhere will take time.

Some magic skill trees aren't implemented yet and there's no real incentive to try it, given the relative power of melee and, more importantly, heavy armour. Also, while I tried to find PVP in the Owl's Head arena and on the open PVP island, both were deserted. But I did see people flagged as PVP running around so it's happening somewhere. I still don't know how to turn my PVP flag on just like I don't know how to do so much else in the game.

Shroud of the Avatar, at the moment, is a house with foundations and stud walls but no plaster or decoration. There's a long way to go. But it's a house with a clear design, a cohesive vision behind it, from people who are particular about what they want to create. That house isn't designed for everyone but those who appreciate it will stay a long time, because it's built for them.

Does Shroud of the Avatar prove Richard Garriott knows best? Not yet. But he knowssomething, and it would be wrong to ignore him.

 

[Xenich]

There aren't any exclamation marks leading you around the world. There are quests but you'll have to talk to people to find them, and don't expect to be able to immediately complete them when you do. There's no world map blinking objectives at you, or even a town map marking points of interest - there are only scroll maps with the rough layout of the town, and a compass when you're on the top-down world map that links zones.

That is huge for me. If it has depth in character development and a large world to explore (and doesn't have a massive RMT outside of fluff crafting crap), honestly... I can excuse a lot of the game then. The hand holding in games has really killed gaming in general these days. Is it really exploring if you have a GPS that guides you directly to things?

 

[Brzęczyszczykiewicz]

Man, that #5 card.

Oracle looks like shodan.

 

[Slow James]

That is huge for me. If it has depth in character development and a large world to explore (and doesn't have a massive RMT outside of fluff crafting crap), honestly... I can excuse a lot of the game then. The hand holding in games has really killed gaming in general these days. Is it really exploring if you have a GPS that guides you directly to things?

Yes, but the thing to keep in mind is that there needs to be either a lot of fun in the exploring or a destination worth arriving to... preferably both.

Too many games had roads to nowhere that were slogs to get through and were demoralizing to finally get through only to realize it was all for nothing.

 

[Xenich]

That is huge for me. If it has depth in character development and a large world to explore (and doesn't have a massive RMT outside of fluff crafting crap), honestly... I can excuse a lot of the game then. The hand holding in games has really killed gaming in general these days. Is it really exploring if you have a GPS that guides you directly to things?

Yes, but the thing to keep in mind is that there needs to be either a lot of fun in the exploring or a destination worth arriving to... preferably both.

Too many games had roads to nowhere that were slogs to get through and were demoralizing to finally get through only to realize it was all for nothing.

I don't mind large empty areas as long as there are some locations in those remote areas that are interesting (which means you can search for a while an possibly miss it). I never subscribed to the idea that every 10 feet there had to be an interesting placement interaction or it was wasted space. That type of thinking resulted in games that became tight little corridors with every turn feeling like you were being led there. I know some didn't like it, but I really enjoyed EQs vast open world, even with the large amount of empty space. After all, how can you really have exploration with no vast area to explore and if that area is piled with one attraction after another, are you exploring to find or chance upon something? Or are you simply browsing rides at the theme park?

 

[GarfunkeL]

You could honestly get lost in the UO world.

 

[Slow James]

I don't mind large empty areas as long as there are some locations in those remote areas that are interesting (which means you can search for a while an possibly miss it). I never subscribed to the idea that every 10 feet there had to be an interesting placement interaction or it was wasted space. That type of thinking resulted in games that became tight little corridors with every turn feeling like you were being led there. I know some didn't like it, but I really enjoyed EQs vast open world, even with the large amount of empty space. After all, how can you really have exploration with no vast area to explore and if that area is piled with one attraction after another, are you exploring to find or chance upon something? Or are you simply browsing rides at the theme park?

I agree you don't need some thing every ten feet - if you do, it actually DECREASES the chance of finding something actually worthwhile.

But few things are worse than diving to the bottom of a dungeon to find... nothing. Or combing an entire section of a landmass to find... trees.

At some point, you've got to have a jackpot for the player to hit when they keep pulling at that exploration slot machine arm.

EDIT: I feel like UO did this pretty well, although the fact that killing Lord British still was one of the coolest thing that ever happened is also to its detriment.

 

[Xenich]

I agree you don't need some thing every ten feet - if you do, it actually DECREASES the chance of finding something actually worthwhile.

But few things are worse than diving to the bottom of a dungeon to find... nothing. Or combing an entire section of a landmass to find... trees.

At some point, you've got to have a jackpot for the player to hit when they keep pulling at that exploration slot machine arm.

EDIT: I feel like UO did this pretty well, although the fact that killing Lord British still was one of the coolest thing that ever happened is also to its detriment.

Agreed, having a large amount of space without anything there is... a waste. Though if I remember right, games like EQ (I use it because it is a perfect example of the argument over space/content) still had a couple of key relevant things in every zone. Now those things may not have been relevant at any given time (you find a location that looks like there should be something here, but nothing happens, etc..., but were so with the right knowledge, object, etc...)

An example of lots of space with a surprise was the entrance to Dalnir in the EQ Kunark expansion. You had this vast area of forest where there seemed to be nothing, but then... there was a small cave entrance which led into the hillside, which went deeper and deeper for multiple levels with an entire dungeon area of named mobs and theme. That large amount of space is what gave that find so much meaning. It was hidden, as if it was meant NOT to be found.

I liked UO's vast feeling as well. You explored in large areas, running into the occasional mob, but on occasion you would happen upon a crypt or cave that was into a dungeon. It was interesting, and made exploring exciting.

Watching some of the videos concerning this game, I am noticing a nice mechanic for hidden walls, traps, etc... for exploring. I just hope they go out of their way to hide dungeons, secret caves/crypts, etc...

 

[Infinitron]

http://ultimacodex.com/2015/02/shroud-of-the-avatar-nearly-6-million-raised-yearly-releases-planned/

Shroud of the Avatar: Nearly $6 Million Raised; Yearly Releases Planned
BY WTF DRAGON · FEBRUARY 9, 2015

There’s a lengthy article/interview with Richard Garriott over at Polygon, in which Lord British reflects on the current crowdfunding successes of Shroud of the Avatar. He also discusses how Portalarium’s plans have changed since the Kickstarter campaign, and what their new targets for deliverables are.

“Running a crowd-funded game is a very interesting life as you might imagine,” Garriott said. “It’s a constant internal introspection you have to do as to how much money you currently have in the bank, how much you should be willing to spend on speeding up or improving quality, versus what you predict for new players joining you in the future.”

What Garriott has come to find is that players quickly adjust to the idea of playing a game that is still blossoming, and that once they understand the growth, they come to enjoy it.

…

“Everyone who has been with us for more than a month is in that rhythm and go, ‘Wow, each month I’m excited to see what new stuff is going to come online.'”

It was almost an experiment, one made successful in part by how well the development team was at hitting their promised goals.

“One of the things that has helped is that we’ve had 14 months of precisely on time releases,” Garriott said. “We have pushed the live button literally to the minute, to the second at times, on time, 14 months in a row.”

The status of the game is also talked about:

Garriott says about 70 percent of the game’s systems are now present, though they still need a lot of polish, and about 20 percents of the maps, content, conversations and quests are present.

“So now that’s the big push for the rest of the year,” he said. “We’re no longer gated by features, we’re gated by content. Which is generally speaking pretty predictable, so we think we’re in a good position to release the first full version of the game by the end of the year.

“Now it’s a content race. We think we can get all of the maps completed by the end of the year. The thing we’re looking at now is the storyline and quests.”

Note that “end of the year” remark; does this mean that we won’t be seeing the finished version of Shroud of the Avatar’s first episode until November or December? Discuss.

Oh, and what about the single-player campaign?

“A lot of the main plot we’re leaving turned off,” Garriott said of the playable build. “We only turned on little pieces of it to test. We’re going to try and keep the story aspects of it as quiet as possible to as close to launch as possible.

HOW LORD BRITISH ESCAPED EA’S CLUTCHES

What might surprise some long-time fans of Richard Garriott’s games is that in Shroud of the Avatar, Garriott’s characters name is still Lord British.

Despite having sold off developer Origin and the Ultima series to Electronic Arts, Garriott said he made sure to keep ownership of that game’s main character.

“I own it,” he said. “It does not belong to EA or Ultima. Prior to Origin’s sale to EA, I owned Ultima personally, Origin did not own Ultima. When EA went to buy Origin and realized the company didn’t own Ultima, they said, ‘We won’t buy Origin unless it includes the word Ultima.'”

Garriott said he told them he agreed to sell it, but that they couldn’t have Lord British. Despite that, though, Lord British remained in Ultima Online by contract.

“In the final month, we’re going to have to do more robust testing of the whole plot, but for most people we let them play the sandbox game, which isn’t spoiled by time, I think it’s enhanced by time.”

He also has some ambitious goals for the follow-on episodes in the Shroud of the Avatar series:

“This map is effectively the center tile of a tic-tac-toe board that is the total world,” he said. “Every year we want to release a doubling of the previous amount of geography.

“We will fill out that tic-tac-toe board with four more episodes. So we have at least five, if you count this first one, planned out.”

The big test, he said, is if the team can really produce a full episode of new content and maps in one calendar year.

“If this ends up taking us 20, 30 percent longer this year, each episode will probably be the same,” he said.

Of course, I’m assuming that much of this depends both on the ongoing success of Shroud’s crowdfunding campaign, and on sufficient sales of Shroud of the Avatar when it finally ships.

 

[Zetor]

With all this EA hate, are the Cube Generator / Sphere Generator / Tetrahedron Generator making a comeback?

 

[Aildrik]

I remember at one point in the early days of UO, they had dynamic content in the form of towers and other structures that would randomly spawn full of mobs and also chests. It was awesome but then they took it out for some reason I want to see more dynamic content in MMOs though. It gets tiring running the same static dungeons over and over. I think static content, especially from a Lore perspective has a place, but there is also a place for randomized content. It adds a nice level of unexpectedness. It makes you want to log in and see what you might find this time.

 

[Norfleet]

EDIT: I feel like UO did this pretty well, although the fact that killing Lord British still was one of the coolest thing that ever happened is also to its detriment.

That large amount of space is what gave that find so much meaning. It was hidden, as if it was meant NOT to be found..

These two events both share a common thread: The satisfaction of doing something not meant to be done. Players love doing things that weren't meant to be done. The greatest community events I have ever participated in on an MMO were events where players gathered to do a thing that wasn't meant to be. Player vs. Dev is where it's at.

 

[Xenich]

These two events both share a common thread: The satisfaction of doing something not meant to be done. Players love doing things that weren't meant to be done. The greatest community events I have ever participated in on an MMO were events where players gathered to do a thing that wasn't meant to be. Player vs. Dev is where it's at.

Well, that is the art of it I think. To implement something in a way that makes it appear as if you didn't intend it so the player feels like they really "won" something in the game by its discovery. I never understood the mentality of developers today actually trying to cater to the player by making everything "easier", "more accessible". I always thought of the developers as the competition who tried to create content to best me, be it harder monsters, secret entrances, and quests that made me spend enormous amounts of time thinking, exploring, etc... That is what a game is, that is why games are entertaining to me. Everything these days feels less like a game and more like cheap entertainment. The developers aren't clever game masters, they are the minimum wage workers collecting tokens at the entrance to the kiddie carnival ride.

 

[Infinitron]

Amusing thread: http://www.othersideentertainment.com/forum/index.php?topic=192.0

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=48439

Single Player Offline Features

[A SotA Public Forum post by Starr Long]

Greetings Avatars!

This post is intended to be a quick update on some future plans for how we will handle Single Player Offline and how it will differ from the Online modes of play. None of this is set in stone but it is our current thinking so, as always, feedback is welcome!

As you review this remember that Offline Mode is completely separate from Online Modes. Characters cannot move between these modes.

As we have stated elsewhere, we have to build the sandbox first and then layer the narrative on top of that. It will totally fail if we try to do that in reverse. Please be patient and know we are as committed to the Single Player Offline mode of play as we are to online, we just have not implemented it yet.

1. Save Games: One of the benefits to our distributed server model is that even though we are a client-server game, we offload some of the server work to the local machines of our users. For offline mode, the server (including all data) will be entirely client side so we can relatively easily provide the ability for users to restore their game from backups; aka Save Games. For Episode 1 launch, we are planning to give players the ability to have multiple Save Games!
2. Companions: In Online modes, companions will appear to the players from time to time along the story, but they will not travel with the players. We did it this way for the Online modes because we did not want clones of these key NPCs in the same party of players. For offline mode, we don’t have to worry about this though! This is, by far, the most requested feature, and we intend to provide a small set of Ultima like companions that will journey with you. They will still periodically go off to do “their thing” as part of their virtual lives, but for the most part they will indeed be companions. We intend for them to each have robust conversation and AI so that they truly feel like individuals (as they did in the linear Ultimas). In combat, they will have commands similar to the pet commands we have now. For Episode 1, we have a long wishlist of features that are probably outside scope, but…
3. Spawn Rules: Some scenes will never respawn (creatures and resources) in offline mode (clearing a dungeon for example). The scenes that do respawn may do so on a very slow timer, or only if there is a game state change that requires them to respawn (ex. a Town Siege by the Undead). We will balance this to make sure the game feels like it is reacting to the player, but it is also providing enough resources for crafting.
4. Content: There are a few items that we are not going to sell in game in Online mode, including the Castle and Keep sized lots. However, we do plan to make those available in Offline mode along with a handful of other items yet to be finalized.

-Darkstarr