Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues

Yes, there was a tangent about EA. He basically says that they released Ultima 8 before it was ready because EA was driven by seasonally-released sports franchises and tried to apply the same methodology to his game (and that he made a similar mistake with NCSoft and Tabula Rasa).

The concept of “selective multiplayer” was also interesting, where “solo” vs. “multiplayer” is treated like a slider/checkbox. At one end, you’re always offline and never sync with the world. It will be interesting to see how that plays out because an RPG designed for solo play can be fundamentally different from an MMO. For example, if the game is designed to encourage player trading/etc., then playing solo will feel like a crippled version of the full game.

And apparently Richard Garriott is not immune to the Minecraft craze (cites Minecraft as an example of a good “general purpose” crafting system).

It’s not really a full 60 minute interview because the last 5 minute are spent talking about ale and reciting Tolkien poetry while wearing a pink hat :P

Loving this Matt Chat video… say what you will – he’s a douche, he’s an angry old man, he’s over the hill, etc. – Garriott remains a very sharp guy and I love hearing him talk about game design elements as well as fiction/lore/fantasy techniques, which shade over into each other pretty fluidly in his approach to game creation.

Finally had a chance to finish the Matt Chat video that Nithrakis linked above, I found it very interesting. For anyone who is on the fence about the Kickstarter or just wants to know where Garriott is coming from, I’d highly recommend giving it a look. I found him to be really spot on in a lot of his critiques of modern MMOs, they’re issues that I share with the genre as well. He’s also a lot less out of touch than I thought he was.

Anyway, I found their conversation to be very interesting. Thanks for linking it, Nithrakis!

5 days to go… and if this project gets another $500K then:

Tracy Hickman has agreed to write a serialized novel as a prequel to the SotA storyline if we reach our $1.8 million stretch goal! How cool is that! And to show our appreciation for our early backers, we’re including Tracy’s novel starting at the $25 First Responder tier (and above)!

Quote of one the comments:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0/posts/442979#comments

Come on guys!!

The Loubet thing is pretty great.

I love a lot of those potential features/extras - I realize these campaigns typically get a last minute push and this offers some temptation, but I think it would have been smarter to entice with these earlier.

That all said, after a medicore start, this kickstarter campaign did manage to provide a lot of information (and address single player concerns, etc.) about the intended game. Timing is tricky, and it might have benefited from being 6 months further along and more polished visuals (then again, that’s not really helping Larian’s Divinity campaign). But I’m legitimately excited about this game now, and not just fuinding it for nostaligia’s sake.

Still not enough to get QT3 excited judging from the length of this thread.

As a (presumably) male you should know better than judging by length alone.

They’re 30% over their (modest) goal, so the game will get made, but obviously few are excited about it. I’m up to the point where I regularly keep up on news and this forum thread, but I’m not pre-purchasing over a year in advance. When it comes out, if it looks good, I’ll pick it up. If not, not.

RG and Co. haven’t done a very good job of selling it. all the reveals have been generic mmo stuff so far.

only reason i’m still backing is to see what Tracy Hickman can come up with.

That’s still where I’m at with this also, instead I upped my Torment pledge as every new stretch goal there gets me more excited.

Yeah, I actually reduced the amount of my donation and gave additional money to Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin instead – that game actually looks like a decent successor to Ultima VII as well, and unlike Garriott’s game, we can reasonably anticipate that the product will deliver as advertised. But I’m still contributing and rooting for Garriott.

Hot damn Desslock, thanks for Divinity… I didn’t know about this Kickstarter and it looks AWESOME! I backed it without thinking twice after seeing some screenshots. Turn base combat! WOO HOO!

I’m very disturbed by the last two updates to push the campaign towards another stretch goals. All their updates are about ego stuff: new house, early access to skills, crystal swords, servants in house. And these are typically the higher pledges. Not so much gameplay updates like Torment’s. I have a feeling I’m really buying a MMO game despite being able to play single player. Most of the enhancement and play testing would be for the mp. I am doubting whether this game is for me. Maybe I should cancel this and up Torment pledge to the one where I can get Wasteland 2. Shroud is just so disappointing so far.

You obviously didn’t play Divinity2 on PC. It had a bug that caused all the doors in the world to disappear, corrupting your savegame. They refused to fix it and told me to buy the expansion pack, due to come out 6 months later. Fuck those assholes.

Huh? Here’s the stretch goals, with the MP-specific ones italicized:

$1.1M: Pet system
$1.2M: Weather
$1.3M: Interactive instruments
$1.4M: Taming
$1.5M: Covert art, musical compositions, double continent size, 20 additional scenes
$1.6M: Mystery Island content, ports with boats running on schedules, localization for additional languages
$1.7M: Dynamic resource nodes (online AND offline), minimap,
$1.8M: Novel, Underworld content, apprentice system, cloaks
$1.9M: City Theater, masks and costumes
$2.0M: Castles
$2.25M: Offline mod support, art creation skill, enhanced character creator
$2.5M: VR support

Sure, there’s definitely some stretch goals there for online stuff (as there should be), but the majority of those are for the game in general. If you’re talking about what perks they offer at higher reward tiers… what does it matter if you’re not contributing at that level anyway?

MMO is one example I highlighted. I also find that a lot of the stretch stuff are frivolous, not necessarily enriching the quest-based fantasy game. Don’t you see those stretch goals as more of stuff for a game called “The Sims” instead of RPG-fantasy game stuff? I am backing a RPG fantasy game, not The Sims Medieval. And minimap as a stretch goal? Come on! Their stretch goal pales in comparison to Torment’s. Now, that’s a gameplay updates I was referring to.

Not to me, no, they sound Ultima-ish. Having the world be as interactive and “alive” as possible has always seemed to be one of RG’s major design goals and these seem to fit along those lines.

Ultima’s attraction to me are the story, the quests, the world to explore, people to talk to. The items are good to have, being interactive is important, but I still think the overall story and world of Britannia what attracted and wow-ed me in the first place. I don’t remember Britannia for the cup or the hidden magic ring in the tree trunk. I remember the sinister of the Shadowlords, Guardian, the the murder scene in U7.

Ah, see, I remember the murder scene as well. But what sticks out to me was the fact that I could pick up the bucket of blood and dump it on Iolo’s head, at which point he would get rather outraged at what I’d done. That totally blew me away. I remember the shopkeepers locking their shops up and heading home for the night and discovering that I could bake bread by combining water and flour and putting it in the oven, or rob people blind. What hooked me on the Ultima series (U7 was my first experience with it) was how the world felt like it had depth. Instead of being generic terrain and NPCs that made up a flat backdrop for my Kill The Big Bad Guy quest, Britannia had a sense of place with how interactive everything was and how party members and NPCs would react to some of those interactions.

So yea, for me, those “Sims Medieval” things, as you put it, help flesh out the world. But in the stretch goals listed above, there’s still a lot of game content, whether they be new systems (pets, taming, ships) or additional areas to explore like islands and the underworld. Not that it’s particularly relevant anyway, given that the majority of those goals aren’t going to be hit.