“About half our player base is more interested in playing through the story than playing online!”

The info on the direction for single players is all over the place. They have a deep dive for Story & Single Player, for starters. You are not going to convince me that you don't think they have been providing the info on this stuff.

I know you are aware of what they are working on. Don't know why it gets parsed out because it's not in the current release.

 

@Rune that is your opinion. I think it is amazing to be able to do it and the creativity effort someone took to do it really warms my heart. I don't want this hindered only want to see it enhanced for the sandbox it is. This is going to happen in this game, hopefully the developers will never listen to stopping something like that.

 

Ok, this is baffling.

If someone, or even 100's of people, writes a book, drops it on vendor or displays it on their bookshelf. Your immersion is impacted? It's a random lot in a random town in a random location. Heck, I'd even go as far to say it's more immersive. There are wacko's out there all over the place that get the lore wrong. No other game has the ability to have miss information from the locals.

 

I think that immersion plays a huge part here. For me, playing a game is like reading a good book. I am immersed in the story and in the world. I fear for the heroes, I even imagine being one of them. Now imagine someone with a silly name jumping through a dungeon in the book, talking silly things or the heroes reaching a town and there are silly things written on the grass with fruit or chairs stacked to the sky etc... MMO-fans don't seem to care about such things. It seems that for them it is more important to stack chairs than to be immersed in a story or an event.

I just think that quests or events like the one with the thief could add so much to the game and the immersion. I can totally understand the problem such an event creates for a multiplayer environment.
Another example would be freeing some monster in a dungeon and having to flee from it (like in the Underworld Ascendant video). For a single player fan this would be a great quest/event but it wouldn't work in a multiplayer environment as others might attack the monster while you try to escape from it, effectively ruining the experience...
I hope you understand what I am trying to say. I fear that such exciting and interesting events and quests might be missing from the game experience of SotA and I think that this would be a pity as the single player aspect would benefit greatly from such things imho.

 

Here's what I don't understand about all of this...there's a single player mode where no other player or player action can impact anything. Just play there and all your problems are solved.

 

Most MMORPGs consider online content to be: Go to XXX and Collect 00 of this or that unless it is actually a MOBA. SWTOR, LOTRO, WoW and alot of heavily revered MMORPGs do this alot and this is why I no longer Play them. At least Everquest (The Original) was large and hard enough to make soloing or camping worth while but that to got old. SotA is an SPO first and an MMO with Fantasy RPG elements second. That said, adventuring/exploring, gathering, refining, crafting, repairing, leveling, decorating, player and community events, music playing, PVPing to me have purpose. Fun! If these things are fun to boot, bonus right? The din of repeatable quests, collecting or killing quests and meaningless other quests have never sustained my interest in any game. People will come for the Episodes as they are released and not engage much in the MMO game stuff. And thats fine. there will be alot of people who want to engage in what the MMO side of SotA has to offer. Engage with one another, craft, build a homestead, celebrate holidays and just evade real life for a while. Not sure why the OP considers this even...a thing.

 

I meant copying lord of the rings in game not making books.

Yep, it's my opinion that no physics rules creates issues with layouts....I'm sorry I don't see a lot of creativity in mile high ankhs with chessboard pirched in the sky....I like doing stuff like that in minecraft though but not a rpg world. EDIT: Note, what you just did was your opinion as well.

Actually I think Lum answered that better, you can make your quests etc and they absolutely matter to those involved but it is not official. It doesn't take anything away and doesn't stop you from having events.

 

I remember a statement used a few times. "both sides are going to be equally disappointed" We know one side is the full open PvP, non consensual PvP, types. This is the other side, the don't break my immersion with your online multiplayer types.

 

Right that's true, but you can play single player and avoid even seeing the stuff that isn't canon. So there's no problem for either of us.

 

What's wrong with that? It's not going to be in any books in the storylines, both the 40 hours and the constant updated content throughout the episode.

 

I don't think it's healthy to separate players from the canon completely, it's supposed to be the players game. Otherwise it's just a book and not a game. Or it's just a game and not a world. I don't think players should be able to ruin quests by killing off NPC's. Sorry Arabella is dead, no one else can enter Novia!

But I do think that players have to have a meaningful way to become part of the canon, or at least impact the canon collectively so that player choice matters. Otherwise the narrative of the game becomes, Episode I happened and would've happened without you stupid players. Now gives us more money so we can make Episode II, something else that we don't need players for. Gather round the campfire as we tell you the static story of how Episode I became Episode II.

 

Are you purposefully not getting what I am saying....I meant recreating a lotr village and acting like it is canon, I don't care about written books in game....those are fiction to the game.

Can still do that online thanks and enjoy the things that online brings.

 

This is just true for single player offline but not for single player online. In every online mode I see the player houses and how they are decorated etc.
What I loved about the whole concept of SotA when it was announced is that I could play alone and experience the story without being bothered by others. But when I see that one of my friends is online I can ask him to play together with me. Maybe another day there is some concert in a city so I go to open online mode and listen to it... But every time my experience is impacted by the stuff players create.
So basically I am forced to play offline. Then my experience is not impacted at all by other players but I cannot play with friends etc. anymore.
Now you could say that I can create two characters - one online and one offline. But I do not have the time to level up two heroes. So one would always suffer and this would mean that either I can't progress in online or offline mode.

Also this "just go to offline" for single player fans does not solve the problems of how the quests and story are presented. So will there be the quest from my thief-example in offline mode? I can't imagine the devs creating different content for the different modes.
Other things: What about the chat window? It doesn't make sense in offline mode but the whole conversation system is tied to it so I am stuck with it even in offline mode. What about the player houses in offline mode? Will the lots be empty? Will there be NPCs without personality living in the houses? What about the economy in the offline mode? For me a true single player experience is different to an MMO and just going offline to play alone will not solve all of those problems.

 

When you play online you're giving up some amount of control. It's not reasonable to play online and see the world through only your own eyes. That's just a reality of dealing with other players.

I feel like your expectations are to go into an online world with multiple players and for them to somehow take on the role of NPC's performing only actions that you approve of. That's simply not going to happen. I think you need to expand your expectations to allow for stuff that normally wouldn't exist in "your world" because now you're in "our world" and by that I mean us collectively as a community.

To do anything else is setting yourself up for disappointment. Your playing experience doesn't trump anyone elses, and vice versa. There are plenty of people out there that don't want to see or hear from roleplayers, or that don't care one bit about "your world". But the moment we're all in the game together, we don't have an option to take in players ala carte. Even in friends only mode or single player online mode there is still the reality that POT exist, and other player homes exist.

 

They might exist, but we have the option of including them in our game. We don't have to go to them. I hope that some are good enough to warrant my attention...if they add to my game experience Yay is me. However, the ones I like someone else might not like. That is one very good reason why they shouldn't be official lore/canon. Let the players decide where they go and what they do.

By doing this you keep a carrier signal to guide the game by...meaning that you see that beacon of light that is cannon and things rotate around that. This makes it easy for people to see what the world is and allows people creating PoT's etc to create a believable area if they want(or not I guess as well). This way we don't get a mish mash ultima 1 and 2 feel where the world doesn't feel very cohesive.

 

A good solution would have been to restrict player houses to POTs or special player towns only and give players the option to turn those off if they do not want to see them - but then they would not be able to enter them. So you would have to decide if you want to get the community feeling with all of its ups and downs or if you want to get immersed into the world.

 

We're talking about several things at once here that should be separate conversations, imo. But regarding what is and isn't canon, what I'm saying is that just because a player makes something shouldn't exclude it by default from becoming canon. I'm not saying that all player created work should become canon. I'm simply saying that if no player created work (or actions) can impact or become canon, then that segregation is not healthy and actually does damage to the gaming world.

 

I think it is way to late for that....I think we have to be more realistic in our expectations. Asking for staking rules etc would be more in line in my belief.

You remove housing from NPC towns and you have an empty town.

I think you will see some...like when players help to stop a ransacking dragon, it would get mentioned as the dragon was slain by heroes(very simple example) but it probably won't include names. I think that would be hard to do especially with the colorful amount of names in game.

 

Actually a good solution is to tell people that want a static world that they can find it in single player mode. If you want other players to influence your world in any way, you have to take the subjective good with the subjective bad. There's no other reasonable way.

What I hear you saying is that you want to play with your friends and have access to player made items, but you don't want to see the homes players live in or the towns they made? Is that correct? Isn't this like asking for a new game mode that is just for you?

 

I think we can do a lot better than that. I think other games have fallen very short in this area, and the few games that have tried to improve and expand meaningful player impact on the game have failed. I think this happens mainly because players are not really seen as individuals by the game (or the developers). Sometimes there are very good reasons for this, but sometimes there's not.

The example I'd use is the Ernest Cline novel, Ready Player One. The few people that accomplished an important task first were recognized for those accomplishments by essentially gaining more clues to achieve the next goal. Their names were put up in lights, and they became far more important than the original "quests". I think that's the kind of thing we should strive for in multiplayer. But to do that effectively, we have to have fairly sophisticated quests beyond whatever the main story is. Some of these quests might be very non-traditional and multiplayer would likely be a requirement as the reward would be a multiplayer recognition.

The idea that seeing "the dragon was slain by nameless heroes" is not something we should expect anyone to be excited about. Nor does it properly reward real accomplishment. But at the same time, I'm not sure that killing an NPC dragon in an MMO or in single player mode should be considered a real accomplishment anyway.