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

Zep--

 

Typical. Was going to have a go at codex for not having much on this one anywhere and then I see we are already on page 68. Wow.

Any updates from Codexers that have this - would respect an opinion on its current state.

Only interested in it as a single player. A bit dubious as it is also tagged as MMO and have fear it will be 'turned off' at one point.

Constant online connection required?

Does it feel like an Ultima game or generic fantasy world? I thought EA killed Ultima?

 

Sorry... super late reply!

Haven't made up my mind yet about real money vs ingame money. I will say I remember, very fondly, trudging through dungeons in UO to save up enough for a 2 story house for myself and some friends. It was a huge feeling of accomplishment and I think having goals like that give more meaning and drive to adventuring. If you have people shortcutting that with RL cash I can't help but think it cheapens the experience. There is too much 'pay to play' shit going on in "free" games these days and it is downright scary how fast you can throw $$ at such games.

I would say, if the RL cash purchases amount to nothing much more than grandiose RP furnishings - and the only way to get magical items and armor is through crafting and adventuring, I might be OK with that. That would allow the game to make some extra money through crap like people buying big buildings or even cities for their guilds, etc. If it goes much beyond that, I would consider it a problem. I am curious to see how real estate pans out. I remember in UO it got so bad (especially after people abused item duping and cash became almost worthless) that it was a challenge to traverse the wilderness as their was a house built on every patch of available ground

 

There was one UO dungeon (cant remember which one now) just a short way in, there was a locked box that was very heavy. Myself and a guild mate carried it out and brought it to town. When whoever had the box on them afterwards and talked to a vendor, had an INSANE amount of money to that vendor.

The stamina penalty on heavy objects required the 2 man team-up to get it into town (walk, drop , pass to next). We never did get the damn thing to open after many tries after a world reset.

Zep--

 

I remember at one point, a few friends and I hid outside a known PK house and waited a couple hours, chatting in ICQ. Sure enough a red guy shows up; we gank him right at his doorstep and snag his key This was followed by like 5 minutes of frantic looting of their ill-gotten gains. Everything not nailed down was pretty much stuffed into boxes, sacks, etc. Think The Grinch cleaning out a Who house. Finally his buddies showed up but I remember being so encumbered I almost couldn't take a single step to walk through my own gate spell I've never experienced that kind of adrenaline rush in pretty much any game after that. UO was the Wild West of MMOs. Housing and crafting added a dimension to the game I haven't seen since. I am wondering if Garriott can recapture some of that magic this new title.

 

No way. Too many people complain about how houses were fucking everywhere and how expensive they got after shards ran out of real estate space. Not to mention that permanent red-flagging, losing all/most of your carried equipment and other fun things are way too hardcore for modern gamers.

 

Steam store page is up: http://store.steampowered.com/app/326160

Single player mode won't be available until right before launch next year, they say.

 

Well, in real life, usually when there are houses everywhere, a fire happens and most of them burn down, since that many buildings in one place is a fire hazard. You'd think that in a game where people fling fireballs like candy that a fire would almost certainly occur.

 

I don't leave my house without a bullet and stab-proof vest and weapons either. Never know when some fag and his friends might want to kill you out of boredom. Fucking carebears man.

 

That brings around a great idea!!! Take the game "Banished" (a strategy sim type game) and then combine it with these crafting/building MMOs and you just might get me on board with playing them. That way, I could stand outside of someones mega house they bought for RMT which was rolled by a tornado and laugh my ass off. These idiots always go on about "realism", well... how about dangerous and realistic environments? "That is a neat 200 dollar ship you bought there, too bad it was sunk by that hurricane. Better luck next time!"

 

It would serve them right for not understanding that, just like in real life, you want to situate your house JUST within range of a nearby trailer park, which will serve as a magnet for the tornado and thus attract it away from your house, but not so close that the flung trailers would hit you. There's an art to these things.

That, or you just build underground like a sensible person, and leave that weather shit to surface dwellers.

 

Strike the earth!

 

Because a "walk naked in a forest" simulator is so much better...

Really, why are houses bad?

Houses were one of the best things of UO.

Losing all your carried equipment is boring.

Good thing that item insurance happened.

 

I didn't attack housing, just repeating what was complained about on OSI boards back when I was an UO player - and it was fairly silly how some places were so crowded that you only had room for a single character standing between houses. The problem was that they had big most-empty zones meant for houses and then only few locations elsewhere. It would have been better to sprinkle housing lots all over the map and to break the big lots up slightly with trees, to avoid the suburbia madness that happened.

Ah sure. Remove the only actual danger in dying, that made playing an adrenalin-fueled excitement. You're the cancer that killed UO. Bet you moved to Trammel the second it became available.

 

No, the problem was that this blatant violation of fire safety code was allowed to go completely unchallenged. If the giant jam-packed housing blocks caught fire and burned to the ground as characters struggled to extinguish the rapidly spreading blaze because they could barely access the place to deliver buckets of water to, causing their entire village, them included, to all burn to the ground, this would never have been a problem, and we'd be speaking of the Great Britannian Fire to this day.

 

That is true Some people even kept their pet dragons around in such cramped conditions!

 

Yes, can you imagine if such carelessness had the natural consequences, and the result was an enormous fire which spread rapidly under the crowded conditions, with the impaired traffic and rapid spread making the blaze impossible to extinguish, so everything burned to the ground and all those who didn't flee got roasted alive?

There's a REASON why fire safety codes exist.

 

Is that it? Houses were a problem because some places had too much houses?



And I'm pretty sure that the minimum space required between houses was more than 1 block.

You still lose money (600 gold per piece, IIRC) with insurance and all your non-insured items drop. It's still punishing, but without being extreme.

I didn't played in the official shard. But I played in a variety of shards and the old-school ones were the worse. Just a bunch of naked people doing PvP.

Also, I don't like Trammel, it makes Felluca almost pointless.

 

You should've said that to begin with so I could've just ignored everything you say about UO. Playing on a private shard with few hundred people is an entirely different experience than on official Europa when there were twenty thousand people online. I can tell you, it was a lot more than just naked people doing PvP.

And 600 gold per piece of insured item? That's nothing bro, what the fuck. When the smallest house on Europa went for at least 100,000 gold (and prices were only going up because real estate was gone by then) and people sold rare items for 200+k gold and up. I could make more than that on a single dungeon run.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?p=46091

 

Now out on Steam Early Access: http://store.steampowered.com/app/326160/

The price is $38.24 with a launch discount.

 

There space travels are expensive, u know? €35 is not that much considering the fame and hope and other baits.

I swear it looks worse than Dung Lords...