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

Infinitron

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Meanwhile, on Facebook...

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:hero:
 

Minttunator

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Codex 2012 Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Wrath
So basically the SOTA community is like any other gaming community on the Intertubes (except the Codex, which is the reverse :P) where fanboys jump down your throat when you offer constructive criticism about a game?
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...rriott-the-power-of-crowd-sourced-development

Richard Garriott: The power of crowd-sourced development
By Matthew Handrahan

360x200

TUE 08 OCT 2013 11:13AM GMT / 7:13AM EDT / 4:13AM PDT
PUBLISHINGDEVELOPMENT

How Unity Technologies helped the creator of Ultima to regain his mojo

There was a time, not so long ago, when Unity Technologies struggled to find figureheads for its growing community of developers. The sort of august professionals whose long, storied careers could lend this upstart engine some much-needed credence.

The opening keynote of the annual Unite conference is reserved for just such a person, but this year's totemic veteran, Richard Garriott, believes that the tide has now irrevocably turned. Unity can now offer more to a distinguished developer than they could ever provide in return.

"My first game, I wrote in seven weeks of after-school time in high-school, so therefore my costs were close to zero," Garriott says when we meet after his keynote address. "I earned $150,000 in sales, and it's been downhill ever since.

"The total money has been bigger, but the return on investment has gotten smaller and smaller, and that's been true of the whole games industry: more expensive, more risky, smaller margins."

For anyone who started in the industry at the same time as Garriott - his breakthrough, Ultima I, was released in 1981 - staying anywhere near gaming's cutting-edge became a daunting prospect, heavy with peril and laden with chastening caveats. This is particularly true of the MMO, the genre in which Garriott has diligently worked since he helped to set its foundations with Ultima Online. At some point, he says, what could be achieved and what was required to get there fell hopelessly out of sync.

"You just look at that and you go, 'that's not sustainable.' At any level. It's not sustainable personally, because it's too much work for the emotional reward. It's not sustainable economically, as even a good investment."

For Garriott, Unity is a "watershed moment" not just for his own career, but for the industry at large. Despite existing for less than a decade, Unity Technologies has fashioned a workable solution to the spiralling cost - risk, time, money, you name it - of game development. "Unity has fundamentally changed that paradigm," he says. "The risk and the time and the cost have been going up and up and up, and with Unity that has been reset dramatically."

Ultima_Online.jpg.jpg

As evidence, he offers his latest project, the Kickstarter-funded RPG Shroud of the Avatar. Garriott has been working in development for long enough to remember a time when it was necessary to build each game by "brute force" - a small team, a pile of money and a lot of hours. Within 90 days of choosing Unity as the environment in which to build Shroud of the Avatar, Garriott and his team went from nothing to a rough version of the entire game that any of his team could log into and play. In that first few months, they accomplished what Garriott believes would once have taken, "literally years."

And that hasn't always been the case. Garriott was aware of Unity in its earliest, most rudimentary incarnations, and he admits he would have struggled to make the case for the engine over more established - if prohibitively expensive - alternatives as recently as two years ago. Today, however, Unity seems like the best available choice for all but a rarified, dwindling group of AAA studios.

"If I was trying to be objective to compare to, say, the Unreal Engine or my buddy John Carmack with id Tech, they have trade off 'who's the best renderer?' periodically," he says. "And two years ago I wouldn't have even tried to make the case that Unity was competitive with the number one render pipeline. That doesn'thave to be your goal, but you want to be as competitive at that leading edge as you can. It's a problem if you're three steps behind, and there are people who would have argued, two or three years ago, that Unity was two or three steps behind.

"But the stuff they're showing today, running on an iPad, there's nothing deficient about that - at all. It used to be that people would probably choose one of those other engines if their number one goal was rendering. Even before today, if your number one choice was data entry, art flow, asset access, community support, Unity was already the number one by far. I think now you can make the case that there's no longer a consequential difference even on render pipeline."

With the trend line for Unity's growth - both the company and its community - still pointing sharply up and to the right, Garriott can see trouble ahead for its competitors. It is a dominant force in every form of casual gaming, a darling of the indie scene, and a surprisingly prevalent feature in the discussions around what the next generation of consoles will offer.

"Unity has it pretty well covered," Garriott says. "If you're making a first-person shooter, there's reason to consider whether you want to adopt someone else's render pipeline. Your gameplay is so simple that you need to compete on the bells and the whistles. But if you're doing anything deeper, it's more reasonable to just compete on content.

"For the render pipeline only solutions, they're not going to be able to keep pace. They're going to have to make big investments at a time when it's hard to justify big investments."

This idea of "competing on content" rather than presentation is key, because Unity's capabilities in that area will likely always be behind Epic or Crytek. The most realistic and spectacular games on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will probably be made with a competing engine or proprietary tech, but the gap between the games with the highest production values and those without will not seem quite so wide to consumers in the next generation.

From the perspective of a developer, Unity makes an even more compelling case. For Garriott, any audio-visual deficit pales in comparison to the advantages offered by Unity's vast support-network of developers. This is exemplified by the Asset Store, which has grown from a fanciful concept to a thriving marketplace selling more than 8,000 packages of production tools and assets to more than 400,000 users. The Asset Store's top sellers now make up to $90,000 every month, with 10 per cent of sellers making more than $1,000. For Unity users, sharing content is now both a philosophy and a potentially lucrative revenue stream.

And Shroud of the Avatar will be made with no small amount of help from the Asset Store's sellers. The rocks, the trees, the grass, the animals, and many other details of the game's world will be modified versions of models and textures purchased from or freely given by Unity's users. And once Shroud of the Avatar has been released, Garriott will make the improved models available to their original creators.

"We twiddled our thumbs a bit at first," he admits, "but it just seemed inconceivable that people would, A, notice, and B, care. It's perfectly fine for every game to decide what handful of things it wants to do better than they've ever been done before, but there's no reason to start with sticks and stones."

Garriott's initial reticence was tied to decades of working in an industry obsessed with "special sauce," to the point where opportunities to innovate and develop genuinely unique features are lost to time-consuming, humdrum tasks like drawing and modelling yet another set of buildings, or implementing the physics on a character's cloak. With Shroud of the Avatar, the Asset Store shouldered much of that burden, affording Garriott's team more time to experiment with more novel features like its conversation system.

Shroud_of_the_Avatar.jpg.jpg

More than anything else, Garriott claims, this crowd-sourcing of effort and assets that will be a catalyst for Unity's evolution. The Asset Store is still only a few years old, but, as with so many phenomena powered by the crowd, it's growth could eventually become self-perpetuating, the curve thundering towards an exponential trajectory.

"If it had not been as broadly adopted by such a sharing community, Unity would not be nearly as powerful. Not nearly," he says. "Everyone is willing to give each other stuff for free, or for truly reasonable prices, then that again multiplies the power of everyone who's working within Unity. To me, that's a unique moment."

As a journalist, Garriott's evangelism of Unity raises certain alarms. After all, just hours ago he took the stage to deliver the opening address at the company's annual get-together. However, there's an unmistakable sincerity to Garriott that belies any suspicions I might have of corporate alliances. Just as with Peter Molyneux, Brian Fargo and a growing number of veteran developers, Unity has offered Garriott a compromise-free route back to the hands-on development on which his reputation was built.

"If you look at the middle Ultimas and Tabula Rasa and other games I've been a part of, the tools that we build internally are usually only finished to the point where they're as good as you need to be able to finish the product. They're not easy to use, by any means. They're sufficient," he says.

"And so I used very few of the tools myself, because unless you're the designer who's building in that world editor every day it's pretty hard to pick it up and use it casually. You're either the designer, or not a designer, and in all of my early work I was the designer. In my later work I was manager of the designers - one more step removed.

This spring, I was working with my designers on Shroud of the Avatar, giving them feedback. I'd watch them make these changes [in Unity] right in front of me, and we'd run it again instantaneously... After watching them a few times, I didn't even have to take any tutorials. I could then say, 'Get outta the way.' I could do it myself, and I suddenly realised that I'm not out of my design job any more. I can contribute again in the ways I want and need and believe I can add the most value to the process.

"It's a process I've felt very separate from in a very important way for a long time. God, I've missed it, and I think it's critical. Game design is a hard problem, and the management needs to get down there in the weeds to really understand it."
 

Grauken

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all that energy spent on a housing simulator, kind of sad

also Saint Fargo was there first with the catechism of the holiness of unity, Garriott is just a hanger-on
 

Hellraiser

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Meh, unity is cheap especially due to its licensing terms, 5k kwabucks (IIRC) and that's it. With Unreal Engine you end up paying a percentage of revenue to Epic above a certain threshold in addition to the basic hefty licensing fee (unless you're going noncommercial IIRC). The asset store is just icing on the cake really, unity doesn't have much competition for 3D games as far as cheap "indie's first commercial 3D game" engines are concerned as far as I know.
 

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http://sota.ultimacodex.com/game-guide/story/

cluster-left.png
What is the story of Shroud of the Avatar?
cluster-right.png


At present, the exact details of the story of the Shroud of the Avatar series remain a mystery. According to Richard Garriott, the story of the first episode of the series, Forsaken Virtues, deals with identifying the malevolent force that is plaguing the land of New Britannia:

…the first mystery of the first episode, the Forsaken Virtues piece of Shroud of the Avatar, is to see how and why this new malevolence has risen in the world. You arrive in the world and the first things you discover are that you’re in a medieval world and there’s a little bit of technology developing, that the Mechanical Age has begun, but only in the wealthier pockets. And there is a new evil that has risen. It’s not a mindless evil, it’s not just in the dark that monsters rise and cause trouble; there is a very specific plan that they are executing. Your first job is to figure out who they are, what their ultimate goal is, and what they’re trying to execute right now as they lay siege to one town after another…Once you’ve discovered the nature of this new evil and the goal of their plan, that’s when you move on to the second episode.​

Additionally, the world of New Britannia has suffered some manner of cataclysm in its not-quite-recent history. The nature of the cataclysm is not fully known, although one of its effects seems to have been the shattering of one of the world’s moons. Unsurprisingly, this has also had a negative impact on the Lunar Rifts that were once the mainstay of point-to-point travel in the world:

Long ago the Lunar Rifts were used to effortlessly travel through the world. As their names might imply, the Lunar Rifts were controlled by the two moons. They were considered to be almost holy ground and small villages and ornate temples frequently sprung up around them. Due to the powerful magic nature of these ancient rifts, the earth and stone around them for a hundred feet or more was more stable and protected through the eons. The result was that many of these Rifts are actually on plateaus left behind as the earth around them was eroded away.

At some point on the very edge of recorded history, something terrible happened and the Lunar Rifts changed. Instead of being an efficient and reliable travel method, many of them became erratic. Sometimes they worked fine, other times they were inert, and worse yet, other times they became portals that allowed the darkest of creatures to enter into the world. These creatures quickly destroyed the villages and temples that had sprung up around the rifts.​


cluster-left.png
How do player-controlled Avatars fit into the story?
cluster-right.png


Avatars from Earth, the player-controlled characters in the game, are typically viewed with suspicion and fear by the inhabitants of New Britannia.

“Few know the tales of the dark times, much less what happened before them. Since the great Cataclysm 400 years ago the world has slowly recovered but much was lost…”

– Arabella

Where do we start, when telling a tale? We would start at the beginning, but so much of those days have been lost to us. We can see the fragments of the world that came before all around us; under a hill near a quiet village there might be a ruined building, made of alabaster and marble, speaking quietly of days past and glories lost. Occasionally an inscription can be seen carved in a wall, a fragment in a language similar to ours, yet different enough to be unclear.

The ruins of the world past tell us little, so we turn to myth, prophecies and legends retold. They speak of a cataclysm long ago, when the sky burned and the ground tore itself apart, and the long years afterward, the cold, dark famine. The stones of the past tell little of who survived and how. The legends tell us only that so very few did.

We know a little more of their children, the men and women who rebuilt our world from the shattered past. They were a practical people, those who passed through far more than we can imagine. They left few grand monuments; you could say that their greatest monument was their own survival.

And of their children, we know more. The desire for power and control returned, as it always does, to consume the weak and the strong. Wars were fought then, amongst the ruined cities of their forefathers. New magic came to the world then, as warlords vying for power sought any advantage over each other. New, terrible monsters thought only whispered legends began to walk the earth in those days, serving their purpose in the endless conflict, even if that purpose was only chaos.

And their children understood it could not continue, and united to defend themselves against the warlords and the sorcerers. The city states arose in those days, and we learned that together we could defend ourselves. Yet still the darkness and the chaos pushed at us.

We are still a practical people, traveller. We do not think much about the why, only the how. We are young, after all, and it has not been very long in the shape of things that we have had the luxury to breathe. We are still building our world back to where we can shape our own monuments of alabaster and marble.

Legends and myths tell us little traveller, but they are very specific at times, and those are the times when legends can frighten you. I tell you this, because there is one legend in particular that should interest you. It tells that the world will begin its next cycle, led by a power horrible and great. It is very specific as to the year, traveller. And I think you can guess which year that is foretold.

And that, traveller, is why we fear you…
 

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ELVES confirmed: http://ultimacodex.com/2013/10/shro...e-of-the-continent-and-native-races-revealed/

Recall, if you will, that Richard Garriott stated that the entirety of the world of the Shroud of the Avatar series would be called “New Britannia”, but that he hadn’t yet given a name to the continent that would be the location for the first game in the series. Well…it would appear to have a name now:

The survivors of the Cataclysm four centuries past have settled in the land we call “Novia”, a large island which, while bearing the scars of that time, still harbors enough life to support our people.
Equally, at least one region of the land of Novia is populated by elves. Yes, elves:

The Vertas people that live in the Forsaken Vale, for example, a new race borne of the Cataclysm which we have grown to call “elves”; Lord British has told me this may be reference to a long-distant legend that the people of Novia have since forgotten. The Vertas elves for their part are like men, but different… different enough. They struggle to live alongside the rest of us, but where a man might burn with emotional fire, an elf will be cold, distant. They worship history, knowledge and truth, and those who wish to learn the wisdom they hold would do well to discover the ways of these people. It is certain you will encounter them on your way.
Veiled Ultima reference noted and greeted with approval.

Humans populate another region of the continent:

The lands of the southwest are rich and full of life, and that is rare in Novia. Men and mythical creatures mix throughout, and that brings conflict, as it always does. As our numbers recover from the Cataclysm, the settlements of various races meet, and begin to argue about land and water and right and wrong and truth and lies. Peace lies on a fine edge; it is an edge you may have to walk along.
And yet another race calls another part of the map home:

And always the Fomorians, remnants from the Dark Armies of wars past threaten; from their strongholds in Blackblade Pass they often strike looking for prey.
A few additional locations get mentioned, as well:

You will see many wonders on your path, traveler; the fauns of Midmaer and the barrens of Quel, the sailors who brave the Bay of Storms (whose name is well earned) seeking to take travellers to the legendary lands of Elysium, where lies the halls of Artifice. There, your destiny will take you, traveller, though it will challenge you in ways you do not yet expect.

More story here: http://ultimacodex.com/2013/10/shroud-of-the-avatar-two-story-sneak-peeks-for-the-price-of-one/
 

Minttunator

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Codex 2012 Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Wrath
Jesus Christ. Anyway, wasn't Spoony going to have an interview with LB to roast him over U8 and 9? Whatever happened to that?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Pretty good 3D modernization of Ultima VII's environmental interaction, I must admit. ForkTong, are you guys watching?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Release schedule: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/early-access-schedule.3875/

RELEASE 1: December 12 - December 14, 2013
  • Install / Patching system: Step one for you guys to play the game is for you to download the game and then patch the game. Since this is the first hands on impression of the product, it is critical.
  • Login / Registration: Players should be able to log in using their existing accounts and if they have not yet registered, they should be intuitively led to the steps to register.
  • Character Creation: Players should be able to create and customize their character. Creation / Customization options for Release 1 will include: name, gender, head shape, skin tone, hair style, hair color, and eye color.
  • Single Player Online: All public releases prior to commercial launch will be online only. For Release 1 and 2, it will be constrained to single player online only.
  • First Town: Our first town (perhaps Owl’s Head) will be open for business. This is important for testing purposes so we can better tune our performance metrics on real user machines. For Release 1, exiting the town will just funnel you back into the same town (anyone see Groundhog Day?)
  • Conversation: Important that players converse with the townsfolk so we can start expanding the dialog system. As you talk to NPCs, we will be tracking your conversations and using them to add more content based on your input.
  • Bag Inventory: This is a hot topic in the forums so we want to get it in your hands for feedback on preferences. Immersion vs. ease of use, let the battle begin!
  • Equipment: Players will be provided with several chests full of “ph@t lootz” (armor, clothes, weapons, etc.) for trying on for size.
  • House Claiming: Players will be able to select a house from the entire list of player houses (even Lord of the Manor!) for free so that we can test out the various size houses on the lots and allow players to test drive the various houses so they can have a better idea of which they ultimately want to own.
  • House Decorating: Chests full of furniture and decorative items will be provided so you can stress test the decoration system and try out various styles of interiors. Help us figure out all the ways you can break things! (Look forward to screenshot contests on this!)
  • Metrics: All the while you are playing, we will be stress testing our metrics system. This system is critical to maintaining a balanced economy, tracking exploits, and gathering data to improve the experience.
RELEASE 2: January 24 - January 26 2014
  • Crafting: We will be opening up crafting for testing with more than 100 recipes. Chests full of crafting resources will be provided. Crafting will initially focus on refining and production for smithing, tailoring, and carpentry.
  • Shopping: Shopkeepers will be open for business for selling and buying.
  • Town 2: An additional municipality (likely village sized) will be open for business! Exiting one municipality will take you immediately to the other municipality.
  • List Inventory: For those who prefer spreadsheets to immersion. The inventory battle royale continues!
  • Character Customization++: Characters will be wiped, but you will now have even more options when creating your character to make it look unique including: facial features, scaling, and more content (hairstyles, head shapes, skin tones, hair colors, etc.)
RELEASE 3: February 20 - 22, 2014
  • Open Multiplayer Online: FINALLY we will let you see what the other players look like BUT we’ll be taking away your house for the month as we prepare housing to have persistence in the multiplayer space for Release 4.
  • Chat: You know, so you can talk to your friends!
  • Emotes: More than 30 emotes online so you can look like a clown with your friends.
  • Town 3: A third municipality opens up (perhaps the lovely oceanside village of Kingsport).
RELEASE 4: March 20 - ?, 2014
  • Hidden Vale: A hidden island north north east of the mainland with numerous biomes to explore via the overworld map system
  • 10 Hidden Vale Scenes: With the opening of the overworld, we need something to do between the cities so we will be turning on the first 10 scenes including wilderness, caves, and dungeons.
  • Combat / Magic: Those first 10 scenes might have stuff in them, so we’ve decided we should give you a way to fight back! A wide array of combat and magic skills, along with the ability to assemble these skills into decks, will now become available.
  • Advancement and Skill Trees: Players will start earning experience points for fighting, crafting, and questing. This will lead to level increases and skill points which can be spent to learn new skills or improve existing skills.
  • Quests: Players will be able to participate in quests that will send them around the world and even change game state in the scenes based on quest flags. Testing this early is important because our quest system operates differently than the current standards (e.g. no exclamation points or convo trees).
  • Loot: Creatures and quests will generate loot including gold and resources.
  • Crafting: Resource Gathering will be added to crafting including resource nodes placed in the world. Item wear begins happening and in turn, Repair will now be available. Item enhancement will now also be possible, allowing upgrading of items to more powerful versions. On top of all that, more recipes will become available
  • Player Housing: The housing system will be relaunched with persistence in the online space. Housing choices will now be based on backer level, add on purchase, or what can be bought in the game. Waterfront housing will also come online.
  • Wearable Dyeing: Clothing and Armor will now be dyeable
  • Social Systems: The first social systems will come online including Friends and Parties. Safety in numbers!
 

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