I keep coming back to Shroud of the Avatar, not necessarily as an avid player, but as a fascinating case study of game design. This will likely be my last run here. I’d like to think I’ve been fair, at least, with my criticisms. By knowledge here may be a bit out of date, but it almost doesn’t matter. Buckle up. On July 28th, 2016, Shroud of the Avatar crossed the event horizon. 100 gold Why do nearly all the skills and spells cost 100 gold? Am I the only one who’s found that a bit odd? I can see 100g for the baseline skills, but each row down the trees is 100g… then 100g, and yep, more 100g. For the price of a sandwich - a week-old stale Italian Hero from Walmart, handed over to the supreme weapons master of the universe, in Ardoris, he’ll be like “Okay fine, I’ll teach you the ways of the coveted 7-dimensional stab skill passed down only by those of the stabby-stab royal bloodline” Why not 1 gold each? Why have them cost anything? Why bother visiting a trainer? They could just unlock automatically. It’s like they’re default numbers, and the devs just never got around to making them make sense later. Honestly, the 7-dimensional stab skill should cost more like a million gold… and maybe helps with gold inflation… maybe? Anyway, let’s not get distracted. Recipes No, not the in-game recipes. Not yet. I feel a lot like game design is a recipe. I often make allusions to a cook coming up with a new menu item for a restaurant. A game is a recipe, and it has numerous ingredients. Or, if it’s like the peanut butter I get, it has one - peanuts. Most recipes have multiple. No individual ingredient is good or bad. Aside from inducing food poisoning, there isn’t really a good or bad recipe either, just more or less popular. The usage of licorice is rare as an ingredient. What’s curious is that you can have multiple foods from the same ingredients, which are mixed in different proportions, and cooked differently. Even slight tweaks, such as whether there’s too little or too much salt, can make or break a recipe. It’s precarious. Ingredients can enhance or conflict with each other. Before you is a cauldron. Today, we’re going to make a stew. We’ve lit the fire, and we have an intimidatingly large spoon. First, let’s start with a base broth of Adventure Zones. It’s alright, but our stew needs more. Next, some chopped Player Crafting Economy. Whoops! Looks like we sabotaged a big point of going adventuring - the loot. The loot cannot be better than the player stuff. What this recipe needs is an Unlimited Classless System, and, oh why not? How about without any meaningful skill caps? Welp, we just turned the lowbie zones into ghost towns, because there’s little point to creating another character that’ll just end up being a clone of the first. Let’s try to undo that with Skill Specializations - just two. What? The patrons want to specialize in literally all skills? Do they even know what “specialization” means? Just no. *takes a sniff* Hm… smells like all the endless skills and farming is creating massive stockpiling of resources. Let’s balance that out with a heaping pile of RNG that destroys heaps of materials. What’s that you say, players are overly invested in their own gear, and don’t want any item degradation/breaking skills? Or PVP? What’s that you say? The economy has completely stalled? There’s no reward in going adventuring anymore? And everyone is sitting on a pile of wealth, able to solo all zones with their overpowered character? Any gold inflation has gone bonkers because, between everyone having tax free properties, commission free vendors, unbreakable tools, and endless high level farming, selling endlessly to infinite-gold NPC merchants, gold value has plummeted? Okay… let’s put this on the back burner. We’ll fix it in post. Maybe with artifacts or something. Now, In-game recipes Remember when nearly all the recipes could be picked up for cheap in Ardoris? Then one day most of that disappeared, and was scattered to the wind, almost literally. You kill an enemy. You have a percent chance to have a “supply bundle” drop. Then you have a percent chance to have that bundle drop something cool, of which you have a percent chance it’ll be a recipe, of which there’s a percent chance you’ll put it on a vendor for someone else to buy. Neato system right? There is, and was, an exception - obsidian recipes. Those, as it turns out, could be reliably picked up by exploring an adventure zone. They gave a compelling reason to go to a specific area - you know, a game where you go to adventure zones for hypothetically compelling reasons. Why wasn’t this done with the rest of the recipes? Time limits … ? Just empty that bulbous bag of RNG into the cauldron and move on. We’ll get back to it later. That was done before persistence, incidentally? So new players wouldn’t be permanently disadvantaged? Well, uh, So aside from randomly getting lucky enough to have a recipe drop that you didn’t already have, how do you get non-store ones? Go town-to-town, wait 2 minutes for each town’s vendor search to load, then see if anyone has anything you want - overpriced, of course. Back in the kitchen, the stew is starting to smell kind of funky. What could we do about that? I’m no economist, but I think we could focus on the question of demand. People usually demand something that they want or need. There’s several categories of ways to get there. 1 - Destroy stuff. You swing your sword and it breaks, and you gotta replace it. (Hint: Guess which sectors of the player economy are doing better than others) 1.5 - Destroy everything - Regular player wipes. 2 - Planned obsolescence. Do what WoW seems to do, and with each expansion, just render all prior equipment/resources obsolete. You get a spike of crafting activity until the new plateau is reached. 3 - Have players quit. Their money and stuff is then effectively removed from the economy. Make sure to have new players join, otherwise, this may backfire. They will then want stuff. 4 - Lateral progression. Create new kinds of things that are needed - usually in conjunction with new mechanics. Or, some combination of the above. None of these are particularly… good, or popular. #4 weighs down the game. They just spent the last 12 months optimizing the game, just to negate it, because we’ve ramped up the number of different items loading in a POT from 500 to 750. #1 is probably the most confusing. People don’t think anything of quaffing a health potion, and it goes away. Of course it does. You used it. But weapons? Oh no, that’s a forever thing. Why? Because you spent 80 hours, millions of gold, and several rounds of the pinnacle of game design annihilating warehouses full of materials, because you got a bad roll of the dice. Oh, they fixed that so it only locks down the item with lower durability? Oh, now the vendors are loaded with crap failed items causing the high leveled prolific crafters to down out and lower level competition? Man, that cauldron in the back… I sure do wish we could just, I dunno, start it over. People are weird. I’ll hand-wring over spending $10/mo on YouTube Premium, but will think nothing of buying a game on Steam for $15 and then never play it. We seem to be an assortment of randomly formed compartmentalizations. There’s a lot of player expectation, and audience-crafting, that goes into something like a game, or a YouTube channel, etc. It requires this particular realization, and for time/effort to put into it. You can’t just allow players to endlessly skill up ultra-high level crafting, creating ridiculously expensive equipment, then expect them to be willing to part ways with it. To allow that… sure seems like they didn’t think it through. For those complaining about the near non-existent player economy, we could ask, how should the devs fix it? “Not my job”, you say? I’d like you to step back, and reflect on whether you’ve handed them an impossible task, vetoing all possible avenues for repair. Maybe that’s why they’re ignoring you? I launch quite a bit of criticism, but I don’t think this one is particularly fair. Not in current-day 20XX. On July 28th, 2016, Shroud of the Avatar crossed the event horizon. On December 25th, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope launched. It was a little terrorizing, because 25 years of work hinged on 20-30 minutes of blasting into space. Sure, they could make minor corrections, but that small window is what makes or breaks the whole endeavor. Can we increase how much gold skills cost? Maybe, while also unfairly benefitting older players. Can we fix the player economy? That’d probably also kill the game, at this point. Can adventuring feel rewarding? Not without a fundamental reinvention of the game. Can the recipes be distributed into zones? Not without taking time away from the other thousand systems they’ve thrown against the wall, hoping something will stick. That stew we’re cooking - it needs to be emptied, and started over. You can’t just keep adding in ingredients. You must carefully measure the ingredients. You can’t just wing it. Almost everything you pour into the stew cannot be un-poured. It’s there permanently, forever. Except for heritage items, which was one the best possible reversible scenarios, and that went… awry. … and most importantly, the recipe, at least in its fundamentals, needs to be correct before players become invested (which is further complicated by crowdsource rewards). After a long time, I came to realize this. On that day in 2016, the fate of the game was sealed. Maybe they can steer… I dunno… around the singularity. I think I saw a movie about that. On that day, the opportunities to do fundamental course corrections and recalculations ended. They couldn’t empty the cauldron anymore. The current game developers (which I interpret as Chris offering some tech support, but otherwise having passed the reins to others)... are Wall-E, from the coincidentally named movie, Wall-E. They’ve spent the last 700 years dutifully collecting garbage, compacting it, and creating piles of compacted garbage. Why? Because that’s the last instructions they got. They are forever condemned by the decisions of their ancestors. Pssst… What are you doing? Do you think that completing episodes 2 through 5 will save the game? Is that time well spent? Quick quiz - do new players experience Episode 1 zones first, or Episode 5? To those who paid for those episodes (which they’re no longer legally obligated to fulfill), are you willing to sacrifice that, to let them spend time trying to grab the space steering wheel and drive around the singularity? Standing back, I’m constantly baffled by what I’m seeing. The one thing I’ve heard repeatedly about this game is that it “has potential”. I often wonder what Richard Garriot’s contributions to the game actually are. I can list aspects of the game that seemed interesting, that may even be his ideas. Recipe discovery - But instead of expanding on that, maybe making it so every character gets their own unique combinations of materials to make different variants of items, unique to that character… I think it was sabotaged and dialed back years ago? Virtues/Antivirtues - Which could have a lot of interesting implications for gameplay. Garriot even said the numbers would never be revealed (until they were). Yet, little has come of this. Sieges - The Cabalists could have been a great faction mechanic. But the sieges got in the way, and instead of fixing and pushing it to fulfill its potential, they were sabotaged and abandoned. Regional economies and control points - Now you can just walk through. Now you can magic your stuff around the world. Entire possible professions (such as “haulers” in Eve Online) are now little more than vapor. Anything that could have made the game interesting has been systematically removed in favor of endless purgatory of seeing how long you can “attenuate” to make your numbers marginally go up with ever-diminishing returns, and how many different variants of a birthday cake you can collect. So much of the success of the game depended on having a solid core, a clear vision, and a well calculated initial trajectory, instead of endlessly piling on layers of technical debt. This is what the industry veterans should have known. So what’s the biggest obstacle standing in the way of them pulling a FFXIV? It’s not actually money. It’s you. Maybe they can spend that money to fully refund everything you’d paid in, refund you your time, but that’s unlikely to happen. It’s nothing you did wrong, but you’re in the way, and you won’t get out of the way. That’s also understandable, given how much you’ve sunk into this game. And you can’t be replaced until they have a replacement game, and you’re of the people who are still willing to pay, which is needed to replace the game, which will end, once you, and the game, are replaced. You didn't do this on purpose. You were put in this position. The fate of the game was sealed in 2016.
It was a good read, there are a lot of things that the devs should look at tht you mentioned for sure. all in all though you are right there are many things that started off as a good plan but stopped short of complete and never got revisited. i hope that devs read this and take some of what your thoughts are and use that to help continue to improve things.
What happened in 2016 that I missed? I would say a lot of the criticism is valid. It's my hope that the development team will continue to make incremental improvements that will touch on some of the things you mentioned. That said, it is probably a waste of life's time to bemoan what could have been.
Hello @merlinfire. I would say so much happened since 2016. Yes and very true not to dwell on what could have or should have been. I guess the point being is there some things that were added to this game that players will find to enjoy for themselves? A lot of good things have been added imo but that will be up to players to decide for themselves. There are links and list out there someplace on what's been added I'm sure. We are still here and improvements and additions are still happening on a small scale. So halleluiah for that. *cheers*
It's also a bit late. The game was inexorably set on its current path the moment Starr Long joined during the Kickstarter. Up until that point the project was possible, after that they decided to attempt to win the World Series with a bag of dented bats and a little league team.
