UO Postmortem

Well I agree that many of player requests weren't implemented for this game. Now for various reasons some financial, some technical, and many were fraught with the usual disagreeing of what this game actually did need has always been there. As someone who didn't get into UO before the trammel split I cannot speak for that pvp aspect for those who miss those days of UO. I did always speak up here for details to be added in like a treasure hunting and boating system full of interesting and in depth details giving deep exploration possibilities.

Truly imo such systems as I envisioned for the scope of this games mmo part were truly denied us with the choice of engine for one thing and the other thing was all our visions and agendas did not coincide with each others. Now for this game due to these factors some things will imo be impossible to forge into this game now which is saddening to me because there really is so much wonderful that has come out of all those years of battles and implementations.

Now When you look at a game that has so many possible pieces because of a good engine and lots of available finances like ESO but yet they didn't get it right either. One of the unique and interesting features of that game was the roguelike questlines but did these continue to be a feature after the questline completion well heck no. So to think a game can get it all right without being restrictive is most likely too much to ask for in the current situation of this game but how I wish it could be. Taking all those beloved features we all desire and putting them into one game now that would truly be a miracle and if that possibility did actually finally happen would it be enough?

Well imo for this game that won't happen but as always I'll still wish for all we can possibly get going forward. My one request has always been don't forget the in depth details. These matter the most. Now if the take away from this thread is what could have been or still could be then I'm there.

 

There are many levels of problems with this. Every item in a scene must be present in your computer's RAM for housekeeping and manipulation and also in your GPU's memory in order to be drawn. SotA already requires 8 gigabytes of RAM to even think about playing. Recall how your framereate drops when you enter a town with lots of decorations, now imagine entering a scene where someone has dumped potentially hundreds of thousands of objects. That's only one example of possible griefing.

 

But, take boating, mining and treasure hunting. All of these things were in UO and really done good. One gigabyte of memory was a pipe dream. Few even envisioned that being possible on home computers back then. For mining, the landscape was organized in hex pieces. Then on a random basis, ore hotspots were randomly plotted into the grid globally. Grabbing your pickaxe, you traveled around till you hit a hot spot. Then after several swings you got one of perhaps 8 types of ore. When you discovered a hotspot with a rare ore, the first thing you did is look over your shoulder to see if anyone was in the area. If so you pretended that you were just prospecting and had not found anything yet. Later you would come back and clean out the vein. The next day the vein would be renewed in the same place and you could mine it again. This went on until the next random placement. Then prospecting again. It was handy to mark a rune at your spot so you could get back there without using pen and coordinates. With the unity engine, and the size of the world chosen, Instances are generated locally. The global ore distribution became much more difficult because it had to be generated in so many landscapes, and even those landscapes are not durable for all players from instance to instance. What we do in an instance here is regenerate from scratch at each entry. Nothing carries over for the next new instance. Back then once you cleaned out a vein, it was empty till the next refill for EVERYONE.

With the low memory capability of our computers we were able to build a house anywhere in all the lands where you could find a space big enough between the trees. We could take our axe and swing at any tree, getting different types of wood randomly. Logging and mining were two professions resulting in very saleable raw product. These dreams of mining, logging, boating, and etc. existed decades ago on smaller systems, slower internet and arguably weaker software. The dreams are about things that have been solved decades ago and discarded along the way. I suggest this is due to conformance with the advanced engines we build our games on.

 

I don't know why I need to say this but SotA is not UO and 3D games are way more complex than 2D games. If SotA had been designed for a top down view (like UO, Baldur's Gate, Diablo, etc) then the memory and processing requirement would have been much less but SotA was not designed this way, if it had been then there would probably have been a lot of complaining.

 

Good video! IMHO: Open world pvp is a big part of what made UO great. I do remember always wishing there were more 'good guys' though. You know, groups of PK hunters. On the rare occasion that big world fights broke out, it was some of the most EPIC gaming that I've ever witnessed.

The interaction with objects was really cool, at first. But in the end caused too many problems. E.G. murderers who team with blues, and the blue would just swarm you with objects you had to pick up to move. Overall, a feature that is too easy to exploit and/or break the game with.

 

The only real reason to not have the ability to place items in the world is lack of dev hours to make it happen.
The rest is just excuse after excuse.

The tech to place decos is already there and if there's a performance issue, just limit the quantity and location of the items like for example only one item can be placed every square meter or so. Exceeded the max quantity? Oldest one decays.

Still on performance, last time I checked there was no LOD for trees for example... I suspect there is barely any instance of LOD being implemented in the game.

 

Failure to implement this has nothing to do with the engine limitations and everything to do with LB's ideas for what makes a good or enjoyable game largely being stuck in the 80s. Can you imagine how ridiculous the world would be if every adventuring scene was littered with the detritus of thousands of previous avatars? Maybe one or two scenes would be interesting, but beyond that it'd be giant makeshift dongs in the middle of the Oracle's chamber, classing it up for the climactic moment of episode one. Maybe a giant sign promoting Doge coin suspended in the air over the most popular grinding area.

You could make an engine that could handle it, Rust, Fallout 4, the dozens of "Minecraft but better" titles that show up in my feed each month. The question is, why would you want to?

 

My understanding was that the majority of the original backers were more upset they didn't get more LB ideas implemented than what it ended up being... I know some for sure didn't like the dated interface but I think the game was designed purposely for that old school feel which was more geared for UO nostalgia. not sure on the dongs you speak of, but if many previous did come back it would not be an issue as the instances only load so many than it starts a new one so it can handle the numbers. They also have party and private incase your spots are camped.

the why would you want to is because the people that are here still want the UO successor even if it takes a while to get there. UO was not built in 7 years its well over 20+ years so anything is possible

 

It was extremely immersion breaking when I found out I couldn't drop items on the ground in SotA. I realized the world wasn't persistant or connected, just instances of a non-interactive husk of single player experience.
If I want to get rid of an item, I left click and delete it... doesn't feel very immersive. Being able to drop items anywhere is a very common feature in 3D games for what, 20 years already?

But yeah sure, this discussion is way over due.

 

Original backers didn't like the game because the end product wasn't even in the same genre as what they backed. It's like if Port was marketing a point-and-click adventure game about a hard-boiled detective set in the 1920s and then shipped a hidden object game featuring Nancy Drew wearing a hat from the 1920s. As for the "Dongs-for-days" issue, if you can place items anywhere, you can use dropped/placed items to draw art and when gamers are given the option to draw art, crude representations of male genitalia is the art of choice the overwhelming majority of the time. If placements aren't permanent and shared, you've reinvented Fallout Online's placement system, which I seem to recall being one of 2020's most hated mechanics, iirc.

 

Man this part got me genuinely curious about your take on what was promised vs what was delivered.
Could you elaborate on that?

 

From my perspective, there were a few bullet points that they just couldn't deliver for various reasons but the game is largely what they said it would be. I guess you just can't please everyone, which is a shame because it's a pretty great game.

 

What was promised was single-player Ultima experience with a multi-player element. While that wasn't throughly explored in the Kickstarter, the thought was that it would be like Diablo or Divinity where there would be options to play co-op, maybe an arena, MP only challenges, that type of thing. The Kickstarter was very clear, Q: "Is this an MMORPG?" A:"No".

 

For what was promised verses what we did get imo is not something we can bridge like just that. Not for this game due to the choices in the way the game was created. Once it was discovered that housing and player owned towns brought in lots more revenue and with that path became the downfall to many of our ideas. This game became a whole different animal when those things happened imo. I don't criticize for that happening since I do love having a player owned town and nice homes to create as I please but these two things did absolutely change the dynamics of the game that many of us had originally wished for. It began to blossom into a different game. IMO the important thing to consider when discussing how to get this game to be more like the vision is not an easy road to travel. It all lies in what is possible given the choices made regarding engine type, navmesh etc. I did look up navmesh to make sure I was thinking correctly on this interpreted obstacle. Most may know of this but here is the description.

A NavMesh is a designated mesh in your Unity scene, which specifies navigable areas in your environment, including areas where characters can walk, as well as obstacles. This is useful for scenarios which incorporate pathfinding and AI-controlled navigation

I am not technical or educated on that subject at this time so I don't completely understand if it is easy to change or set new navmesh rules or not but I do find it an interesting subject.

 

From the kickstarter page on what the game was to be.. more of this is as they said. I do think it does fall short of Ultima in that most NPC's are very static and in Ultima many NPC's had daily routines etc which made the world always feel alive and moving. I think Player towns though are the worst as they are so Static and Its one of my bigger complaints. I been pushing for years that they need ability for players to be able to create waypoints with npc's / vendors so we can script them to do more than stand.. even pot guards should have npc routines to just walk around the scene... patrol should be more than walk 4 feet stop, turn.


Shroud of the Avatar is the “spiritual successor” to Richard’s previous work in the FRP genre. Our primary objectives are to tell a story even more compelling than Ultimas IV-VII, create a virtual world more interactive than Ultima VII, develop deep rich multi-player capabilities beyond combat akin to Ultima Online, and offer a bold new approach to integrate them with “Selective Multi-Player”.

• Shroud of the Avatar is infused with rich storylines, deeply integrated into game play, developed by Best Selling Author Tracy Hickman and RPG legend Richard Garriott.
• Players will adventure in an interactive world where their choices have consequences, ethical paradoxes give them pause, and they play a vital part in weaving their own story into the immersive world and lore surrounding them.
• Shroud of the Avatar is a Selective Multiplayer game, allowing players to choose how they want to play! Whether in Single-Player Offline mode or any of three online modes, the main quest line will provide greater than 40 hours of focused, story driven content.
• Shroud of the Avatar can be played as an offline DRM free solo experience or online, where our servers will enable player to player transactions, group finding, patching, streaming of dynamic content, and exploit prevention.
• Built using the Unity Game Engine, Shroud of the Avatar will support Win/Mac/Linux for official launch.
• Players can specialize in a wide range of combat and non-combat skills, provided by a robust, classless skill system, and full-featured crafting and housing mechanics. Play the way you want to play, molding your character into the hero, anti-hero, or artisan you want to be!
• Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtue is the first of a 5 game series of full-length, stand-alone games (each using the same game system), referred to as Episodes 1 through 5. Estimated availability of Episode 1, Forsaken Virtues, is October 2014, with Episodes 2 through 5 estimated for subsequent yearly releases.
• Shroud of the Avatar is a “buy-to-play” game that, once purchased, does not require a subscription to play!

They did do a 180 on the (episode2) which it was a vote on if it should be a new stand-alone game with characters starting at level 1 or if we all wanted to continue the progression which is what we have today.

All in all the rest was as they said...

 

The only bullet point that doesn't have a multiple asterisks next to it is the multi-platform release. I know this forum is a bit of a bubble, but folks do know that the wider gaming audience would double over in laughter if you seriously suggested SotA met those goals, right?

 

Which one was not met from the list above that would make people laugh lol. I'm serious if you read line by line as is with out throwing ones own perceptions into things ie cut and dry; its as is. short of one thing which was that each ep would be standalone.

Its only when people put their on perceptions into the words and expand on them does it not match. that would than imply that people are reading into things beyond what is said. I have argued this before which is why I think its funny when people tell me what should have been than I go look at the KS page that I backed and see if what they are stating is listed... its not.

Now if we take the stretch goals there was some short fall beyond the initial core points. ie duke heads and some items never made it which I would agree with those with Duke and higher that they did not get what they were promised but they were compensated still with some very nice stuff but still yeah not the same.

one could maybe take about the non bullet part of this below and make statements that the story was not as compelling, or that the interactive of the world is not the same as ultima series. that sure I could agree that well the main story of ep1 is not bad its could fall short, and maybe the interactive falls short as Ultima you could do alot more with items... but still the main core points were achieved.

Shroud of the Avatar is the “spiritual successor” to Richard’s previous work in the FRP genre. Our primary objectives are to tell a story even more compelling than Ultimas IV-VII, create a virtual world more interactive than Ultima VII, develop deep rich multi-player capabilities beyond combat akin to Ultima Online, and offer a bold new approach to integrate them with “Selective Multi-Player”.

I see it more like We are building the game and its Blue... and those that interrupt the news so you dont have too would say thats not blue its Cyan.... Blue should look like this...

We are all Ultima fans thats why we are here and well we all have our own views of what things should be... its not the view that was presented in the BW text. we all made up our own idea of what we think or thought it would be and only disappointed ourselves. If we wanted something different perhaps we should have be more clear in the beginning when things were hashed out.

 

This forum is pretty much the only place you could say that.

"Rich story"? Compared to what? I more or less 100% completed episode 1, with many parts more than once and I can't remember much of anything, it literally made no impact. There was one part where I had to get the 3 things to get the thing and 7 things to get the thing and a bunch of parts where I whistled yakety-sax as I ran round and round an obstacle plinking some generic fantasy monster with arrows and that more or less all I remember of the plot of the 1,000 some odd hours I have on the game. Oh, and I had to kill a bunch of kids, because it is a LB game.
"Tracy Hickman's involvement?" Yeah, sure, brother was long gone before the quest was written in episode 1.
"Choices matter, ethical paradoxes, etc", yeah, your biggest choice is whether you click all the keywords in conversations from the left or right. No choice matters beyond the bonuses your reward for completing episode 1 provides, and even then it is trivial to change them.

Need I go on? The game gets savaged any time someone from outside of this bubble reviews it. Good and bad is subjective, so I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, I'm just saying that outside of the few hundred folks that have sunk thousand or tens of thousands into this game, very few people would agree.

 

It's a matter of how you represent and store such things. I expect such a feature to be that each scene would have a list of "dropped" items, just like the death skeletons, and they would be visible in all parallel instances just like how housing works. The problem is the value of such a feature vs the effort to implement it, and its effect on performance. It sounds cool, but in reality will probably only be abused, either by dropping books with "indecent" text, or dropping hundreds of useless items, trash that only serves to increase load times. (yes I know you can have limits and decay) But the biggest problem is how would it improve the player experience other than checking off a bullet point from the kickstarter goals? "Oh look at what I can do, isn't that cool?" "Yep that's cool, now let's get back to playing the game."
tl;dr: they have the tech, but it's not worth the effort

There is, however, a related problem that would be useful to fix, and that was large gatherings with a VIP, specifically the Shooter Jennings appearances. A player can only be in one instance, yet the game design starts a new instance at 128 or so players in a town instance, for performance reasons. It would be useful if the VIP player could be set to a special mode that has all his actions mirrored through all instances o a scene, just like how housing works. For now the workaround has been for devs to yoink people into the first instance. Well, that and having very few really big events.

And I do wish Chris would go ahead and start working on the siege thing he's talked about already.

There definitely is, but the only time you notice it is when it breaks.

 

I don't know, do you? What do you expect will happen? At this point the game is what it is and it will not significantly change. you can either get over what was said in the kickstarter and play the game we have, which is actually pretty good, or don't play it.