It says Orc, but it looks like a gigantic carnivorous koala to me.
Anything good about this game, for serious? Like a stand out quest or story beat? Anything?
Playing it will make you go spend more time with your loved ones. Perhaps you will go on a hike, or have a picnic, or maybe a board game. But those memories will last forever.
Story, no. It’s also a very clunky/janky game. I found the deck-based combat pretty cool once I got the hang of it, though. It’s an interesting idea that could be pretty nice in a better game.
Seriously, though, I actually enjoyed it despite its many many problems. And there are many. It’s janky, the performance is quite bad, the graphics aren’t very good, etc. I was still able to get some enjoyment out of it for a few weeks. It’s certainly not a game I would go out and recommend to people, but for an old Ultima and Ultima Online vet it had some value.
Was the mod community ever able to get Ultima IX working reasonably well?
I played it 10 or so years ago and hit a game-ending bug in the third shrine (I think). Which was apparently commonplace.
I know there is the other newer NFT blockchain thread around here, but perhaps this is the best place to put this. I know there is almost nobody playing this still, and the interest is close to nil, but the story may be interesting still. Plus, the timing ended up being the worst possible for me, ugh!
Shroud of the Avatar recently tried to roll out its monthly update R106 on Sept 29th. Unfortunately, they quickly realized they had some problems and it would require more downtime.
No problem, right? This happens… we will be up and running later in the day for sure! Well the weekend came and went and then we realized it was much more serious than some of us thought. They realized there was some corruption of some sort in the database? going back to R105, and were working through finding a stable build and set up a QA server to evaluate.
So, after all that we are finally back up for play on Oct 7th, so over a week of downtime. The worst part, though, is all progress appears to be lost going back to Aug 24th. It appears the experience gained during that period was restored to the experience pool, and there are a bunch of high end boost potions they gave out to try to help recover faster, but some of us lost a ton of progress and items.
The worst thing that happened for me is my wife and I came back after years during this month and made a lot of progress, and now all of it is gone. I have a bunch of experience points in a pool that they restored, but still have to train the individual skills back up (they do go up faster the more you have in the pool, I believe, but still it will take a long time). It isn’t only that as I didn’t record or remember what I did. I had a really cool build I was having a ton of fun with and I don’t even know how to get back there now, lol. I used to actually track my skills weekly on a spreadsheet years ago, but didn’t this time. Plus, all the crafting grinding and unlocking of zones so I can use the fast travel scrolls and it feels like I lost 50 hours. It ended up being the worse timing!
I wonder if this has ever happened this badly in an MMO before. I feel like I just got gut punched, but by putting more time investment into this game, maybe I deserved it, heh.
I am sorry you lost so much progress and time - a rollback of over a month for an MMO is pretty unprecedented.
Unfortunately, since Shroud is down to a few part time amateur devs, a major catastrophe like this is a higher probability. The owner/only professional dev, Chris Spears, largely left Shroud to go build Richard Garriott’s NFT MMO about six months ago, so who knows how many tech errors have cropped up.
The good news - Spears mentioned on the game’s discord that he is close to returning to Shroud. I assume that means Lord British’s NFT game is getting wound down; not a shock since he missed out on the NFT grift craze by about a year and trued this right as NFTs crashed.
The bad news - Spears isn’t any great shakes either and seems to grudgingly lead Shroud - he doesn’t seem to care much for it at all, aside from whatever income he is pulling in from it.
Expect any compensation for players for the most time, items, etc to heavily favor the big money spenders in the game versus non-cash or small cash players.
Ouch, that’s horrible, @Kelan. As DraiAC said, that’s unprecedented as far as I know.
He seemed to care when I was playing the game. He was the one always taking the time communicating with the players, even when he was working through weekends trying to launch 1.0. I don’t think he would have taken ownership of he didn’t care.
Maybe that’s it’s, though. Burnout from the work, very little financial payoff, and interacting with a game community would sour anyone after a time, IMO.
Thanks. What hurts the most is I think my wife is done now, and we were just getting to a good power level and to some areas of the game I had never seen. At least we have Grounded to play together in!
Dang, that’s too bad. I can’t say I blame her, though. Having months of progress wiped out in a game like this is like a punch to the gut, as you said. Just unfortunate all around.
I decided to log in and look through the rewards a little closer.
I did find 10 Obsidian Potions of Guidance they gave that I didn’t notice yesterday that give +450% skill learning for 7 days, so that is 70 days worth and will help train those skills up much faster. This is in addition to about 50 Obsidian Potion rewards that allow you to pick one of a few different 7 day buff potions ranging from increased encumbrance, fast gathering, longer sprint times, increased repair/salvage to help recover lost material gathering.
I may give it a shot for a day or two and see how much it helps. Just wanted to update with some things they are trying at least.
No. I can’t think of a time when any MMO rolled-back a whole month of progress, ever. It’s historically bad.