Markee Dragon's interview with Atos

SotA Life - Special Guest Dev Atos


Highlights from the interview:

1:03:11 - "The Ultima audience, all they care is story, the quests and the dialogue and hardly anything else. And then there is Ultima Online guys who could not care less about the story, dialogue and all that type of stuff. They are really there for the other players. We knew that going into it. Its just been a surprising how dramatic the difference is between the two audiences."

1:19:01 - "The people who are on the project now, have never liked our art style that much. Primarily, because there isn't much of an art style."

1:21:03 - "We toyed around, would we do a Kickstarter, not for Episode 2, but for Unreal switch? Again, I put a lot of thought onto this. I don't see us switching. I investigated a few option for it. But, roughly six million dollars is what I come out with. I put together a budget. It would be about 2 year process, which would also delay Episode 2 by two years."

 

Lots of good stuff in this video.

Procedural Dungeons spoiler.

The talk about how Port has handed Unity thumb drives with replicable Engine crashes that only Unity can fix, but Unity won't fix their own crash bugs without being paid to do so.

This is the biggest game ever created in Unity, and why.

 

Ship ep2 then work on unreal switch for ep 3 is my vote.

Thank you for posting this.

 

I would prefer the delay but I can agree on everything that gets us unreal.

 

Unreal's not happening, it would cost 6 million bucks.

Unity needs to fix those crash bugs that Chris and team have literally handed them the answer to on flash drive.

 

I wonder how feasible it would be to port it to Godot Engine....

 

So they identified that they needed to move to Unreal 6 months into the project, when they could afford to, and they have delayed the decision long enough to make it unfeasible.

 

Six months into the project = episode 2. Not episode 1 which your statement makes it sounds like. Just clarifying.

 

We should try and help push Unity a bit to work better/closer with Port and be a litlle more open with their code - from what I recall that is the biggest issue. How much better or noticeably even the game would look in Unreal vs Unity, or anything much like that, isn't really an issue

... but I do believe the multi-core support is probably much better in Unreal - Unity (and therefore SOTA) is still bound primarily to the single fastest core on your CPU - which is why the game runs better on my roomate's 4ghz CPU from 3 years ago than my newer one running @ 3.6ghz.

Speaking of Unity - saw this in NBNN this morning - seems cool and possibly might help SOTA, since I believe GC has been a source of hitching:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/11/26/feature-preview-incremental-garbage-collection/

 

Put it up as a stretch goal and lets see what the community thinks! I am all for the engine switch!

 

The "talked about" idea where we could switch to the unreal engine is a tantalizing notion.

I wonder if in this hypothetical talk would the devs choose to go to open lands instead of a overworld?

 

A neat idea

 

Ep2 will just be a repeat of Ep1 unless they fix the game's core issues. And if Unity is the root cause of some of those core issues (stability, visual quality, performance), especially for the type of game they have / want to make with SotA, then perhaps an engine switch is what they need to prioritize. It could be Unreal, or even Lumberyard. Both give them access to the engine source. If it's hard to switch now, it'll even be harder after Ep2 or 3 or ... and Unity will still hold them back the entire time.

 

They talk about selling dragon dung as a deco item.

Dragon dung with bits or armor mixed in would be funny.

 

Did they say POT lots will no longer expire for inactivity?

 

Budget for an engine switch: $6,000,000 dollars. Not happening.

 

It would take quite an item or group of items to make that kind of cash

 

Perhaps a continent?

 

perhaps yes. That might motivate people BUT on the single player side I would still want the overland to stay in step with the old Ultima games.