Thoughts from the Anvil (R6 edition)

With R6 behind us its time for another of my Thoughts from the Anvil which I admit is more for my own catharsis, but I hope some of you find them entertaining at least.

While engaging with the pre-alpha this weekend I had what I thought was an interesting epiphany: If hypothetically I’d been able to see the game in this form before backing it….I wouldn't have backed it. I at least try to be honest with myself in this regard since there is a very real danger when pre-paying for something to see it with filtered glasses.

Now hang on, don’t everybody jump down my throat. I did come on board last year, they’ve got my money, I have enjoyed participating in the whole process, and I will continue to actively, and I hope constructively, participate here till the end. But if I am being honest with myself, I cant say with certainty at this juncture whether I’m actually going to play the final game to any meaningful extent. This is simply a reflection of the fact that the road RG and Portalarium are going down may not be my road.

There is a recent thread which has cropped up with some passionate and I think very sensible concerns about the hex construct of the game world. I mention it because for the most part, this is at the core of my misgivings. I want to go back to the now famous (or should I say infamous) debates about “the map” for just a sec (please bear with me).

While a few posters joined those debates thinking it was about art-style, they were in fact misguided as such (sorry if one of them was you). It was never really about paper, cloth, or 3D. Rather it was about the very foundation and construct of the game system: what we were shown in R4 was in fact nothing more than a travel map when, in the opinion of many, what the game desperately needed to “tie it together” was an entirely fleshed out, fully functional 2nd scale of game play. The fact that the only real way to do that is in 3D muddied the waters and confused a few people into thinking it was an art style debate. It should be pointed out that in actual fact what most proponents wanted was a single scale world, but knowing that Portalarium simply would never, ever cave on that, the functional 2nd scale was lobbied for as a “next best thing” in that IT at least would be a single scale world of sorts.

To be clear, what we have right now is a game which is, essentially, 100% instanced (making earlier arguments about instanced housing somewhat silly). Towns, POIs (points of interests…aka dungeons etc) and wilderness are all instanced with absolutely no relation between them. If you go to the west edge of a given hex, you will NOT appear on the east edge of the next one. And at this point its impossible for them to make that happen since not only is the world not single scale, there isn’t even a 1:1 relation between the hexes (some are big, some are small, none have edges which directly correspond to what is adjacent to them). The “world” of New Britannia I said, in good humor, was about as believable as a spread sheet: when we got our first look at the map I thought they should save themselves the trouble and just show us a pulldown menu with Town, Wilderness, POI, and Suburb headers to choose from.

Why is this such a big deal? Because no one will EVER visit “forest hex #235”. They just wont. Not unless there is a VERY specific and unique quest or game play item there they’ve been told about, in which case its no longer a forest hex and would instead be a POI hex. Likewise, people will NEVER visit a player housing hex…unless they live in it which really should have all those who were concerned that people wouldn’t “walk by” their shop up in arms right now. As it stands, all of the spaces between towns and POIs don’t even have to exist in a sense.

I've read/listened to all technical reasons for the instanced hex system, from plain old cost to ease of world editing to streamlined player grouping, but not once do I recall anyone saying “we are doing it this way because it will make for better gameplay”, rather it is all back-end logistics. Someone recently pointed out that Ultima evolved OUT of 2-scale gameplay. I simply cant help but regard a return to it as a gameplay compromise made for technical and fiduciary reasons, both of which are respectable considerations mind you, but that doesn’t make the pill go down any easier.

Something that many may not be aware of is RG’s emphasis on friends-only online and how the instanced hex system caters to that. His manifesto is that the odds of “running into” a friend in an MMO is infinitesimally small because of the server/shard motif. The concept of aggregating your contacts and social media to bring together people who have some link in RL is bold, and I believe he is right when he says its going to be “the next big thing” in gaming. This is for me the one and only virtuous justification for the existing construct, but I humbly submit that the instanced hex is the wrong way to go about it (that’s a whole separate topic unto itself though).

Everything, and I do mean everything, hinges on R7 now and what will hopefully be our first look at the reimagined "2nd scale" of game play. It was clear to me in Starr’s now famous post that they understood the fundamental change that folks were lobbying for. If we take him at face value, Portalarium is not simply switching the map art from 2D to 3D. Rather they are developing a genuine 2nd scale, where the content of hexes is represented in miniature, NPCs and fellow players will be milling around and so on. I honestly don’t know how they will pull this off since they decided early on NOT to have a 1:1 relation between the hexes but we'll have to see what they come up with. I remain hopeful.

Moving on to more R6 specific stuff, I’m slightly concerned about Starr’s mandate of it being a polish pass. Starr talked up a lot of cleanup work, but to my critical eye I saw precious little, and in many aspect some regression was evident. Maybe I didn't understand or know what to look for in this regard. I’ve said before, when it comes to characters, hair is everything. I know he said that they were waiting for Unity 5 to really dig into this, but I really believe they would have been well advised to give us two, just two (one male one female) finished, "final quality" hair options. The lego head is I believe, subliminally perhaps, at the core of many of the graphics quality discussion we see on the boards.

As for NPC character interaction, its interesting to me that there have been a lot of negative comments coming out of R6 and I’m not entirely sure why since, as bad as it is, its as good as its ever been (though still unusable). Personally I don’t understand why NPC interaction is put on par with player chat. As some of you know, on this front I have lobbied for a conversation system on par with Ultima 7 which I found simple, functional, elegant, and not entirely removed from what we saw in R6, save for the presentation. Clicking on an NPC, and then clicking in the player chat box (why not double click the NPC?!?), and the whole thing transpiring within makes no sense to me while the floaties over their heads is a disjointed mess. I know that the “system” is far from complete, but I’d have thought the that “format” would have been figured out by now.

Crafting is for me something of a contentious issue. I mean, I get that its fun to gather some stuff, go to a table and turn it into something cool. I have reservations when it takes more time to craft in a computer game than it does in real life. Ok, that’s a bit of sarcasm, but I’ve always felt there is a fine line in gaming: if kids spent as much time with a real guitar as they do playing Guitar Hero…they would be pretty darn good musicians (seriously) instead of possessing the undeniably useless skill of plastic button mashing. My point is, playing a computer game is a choice we all make, but when an aspect of a game becomes literal “work” I really need to evaluate what it is exactly that I’m spending my time on: having fun gaming, or wasting time making virtual crap?

I should wrap this up and in doing so I want to be eminently clear: I came for Ultima 10, I’m not getting it, and I’ve made peace with that a couple of releases ago. I'm going to ride it out but at this point I just don’t know if I will want to play this game. I remain hopefull.

See you in R7, if not around the forum in the mean time.

 

I think the above quote sums up most of what you were saying.

I agree, and posted something similar in the R6 forum feedback.

 

I have pretty much the same feeling about those bloody hexes.
My gf and me are postponing (maybe even indefinitely) upgrading our pledges to citizen or edelmann because frankly we don't see the point in shelling out so much money for a tax free plot of land, a vendor and a house deed if no one is even visiting our 'town' and vendor in the middle of nowhere.

 

Excellently written! As I've said before, this map idea might work in Single player, but in the online mode it'll make SOTA the most instanced of any MMO on the market by a longshot.

 

I had a similar train of thought and thread i asked here. This game seems very anti-mmo in some respects to technology.

 

I doubt that we will see miniature forms of the hexes on the 3D overland map. I believe that it will be similar to what is in the cloth map. So you will have a forest on the 3D map and when you enter it, one of the forest scenes will load. But the forest on the map will not look like the forest in the scene.

 

I have a feeling that there's a underlying tension in the SotA design: some people (like me, really, and I think the OP) want Ultima 10, and some people are looking for Ultima Online 2. I think Portalarium could have done one or the other and pulled it off pretty well, but trying to be *both* is a massive design and implementation hallenge. SotA is trying to do a lot of different things -- perhaps too many for a first pass. It's clear from RG's writings that he's been wanting to try to combine both types of game for a long time. It remains to be seen whether they'll fully pull it off.

 

Well not much to say to the OP about this, well maybe there is lol. No one can or should change this process for you. It is just as with life we do not know how it is going to turn out, but still we hang in there.

There may be some things one person loves that another person does not, but yet they will love something else. There is going to be more than the normal game here.
You do not just hack and slash or kill or be killed, or kill a zillion of this or that. There will be so much more, mysteries, secrets, surprises, interactivity, the NPCs will know your name. Hey you can lay on your bed ,or find a secret door, the NPCs will say something that surprises you, who knows all of what will happen, it is not just black or white to what this game will be.

To declare that your thoughts are this game will not be for you perhaps, well many could say that, but we do not know of what we speak at the moment, no one does exactly, we just get a glimpse of the dream of what the game can be.

So for me I am in there for the ride and long haul. Are you? Best wishes whatever that may be. I am very tired of the exciting 1-6 months of new game after new game. I am here to help in any way I can for this game to be the game I am wishing for.

I will support the best I can, even if that is by just giving my thoughts or by buying a christmas treee or whatever to continue to help fund the game. I will not threaten to quit even when it is not going as fast as I think it should, even if something doesn't look as I think it should. For me no matter what there is that I like or I don't like, there will be as much of something that I will like in another area. In the depth of this game it will still out-do any other game out there in so many ways that matter. So I will be here waiting.

 

Pretty sure I didnt call for, request, or otherwise solicit any change to any process. Rather I was simply sharing my perspective at this juncture.

On that point we are of like minds.

 

That'd be a shame, but who knows. Thats why I feel that right now, for me personally, R7 will truly be a critical release.

 

This seems a bit aggressive when the other post wasn't really questioning your motives.

 

er... MMO it's not... Shroud of the Avatar is a Selective Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game or a SMORPG... if you backed the game thinking it's a/an MMO then you'll be disappointed... T_T

 

True (but my current apprehension about the project has nothing to do with that).

 

oh I was replying to this... ^_^

 

Didnt realize you were responding to someone else's post. Sorry.

 

"Every release is critical because that is what we are here for, to be critical and as critical as we can be"

We are not playing a game here, we are testing many things out and sharing our true feelings on whatever we see or don't see as a fun and happy part of our game. The players we now have for testing are not the majority that will be coming, nor are they players we "must have", yet they are contributors by their comments that have allowed us to have their concerns voiced here which the game has profited by in many ways. Some people are innovators, while others are thought provokers and still others lay in the shadows until some great point brings out some grand idea from them to share with us.

I'm not just spreading sunshine around, "these are facts"!

This release (6) was said to be a polish and shine up of our world and the way it looks, with a secondary of having us test some things we can do in the world. Portalarium accomplish that as we can all see by our in game pics. In R5, we hardly had anything to do but explore and see what we could see in the ways of navigation and we finally got to hit something... not very hard, but we did it anyway... yet here in R6, we got to actually fight some things that had some punch to them and we to them. Those were the first times for SotA, so I can't see what any big deal there is in judging that as a final outcome, because it was the first... numero uno!

But I also want everyone to know that I too, just like "Sunsanvil" am less concerned about graphics now and want to see some real meat we can sink out teeth into... and I'm not taking about Cannibals, I'm looking for something "New" in our game mechanics that will be something we can enjoy and see a future of making better and deeper content. Have we seen any karmic questions arise in game? "NO"... but we know that those are coming, Have we seen a polished NPC interaction yet, "Some" but as yet to become what it will become.

Sunsanvil is right, we've seen the candy coating and it's time to see some content in our R7 that can continue to spread a New Britannia feeling we want to share with the rest of the gaming world.
Bring on some of the main course of this meal in R7 because we're gettin' hungry
~Time Lord~

 

Agreed, I suspect the new overworld map will be a stylized abstract, much like how the cloth map was, only in glorious 3D.

As you noted in another thread: Since most of the local maps are duplicated, if all the hexes matched their local maps, the repeating effect would be rather hideous.

 

This means it's a good idea not to start developing your game at all before a Kickstarter. Just make the Kickstarter all about promises, and you'll get the most money.

I am with you here.

I agree single scale world would be amazing, but that's really hard to do with 3D. I don't think anyone has done it successfully... even WoW has different servers, not everyone plays in the same world..
Certainly it's not possible to build the game the way we see it is intended as single scale. ESO couldn't do it with 200 million dollars, so who is thinking a kickstarter that raised 1.8 million would succeed?
Aparently, some people on here are thinking that.

I don't completely agree here. I think you could hide stuff in the world for explorer types and it would be a reason to dive deep into some hexes.... but I'm not sure if that is going to happen given the resources and direction of the game at this point. I think you're right that there is no reason to go to player housing.. I'm hoping player housing can start communities up that eventually provide their own reasons to go there - for example, meet up with friends, go to a well known crafter with certain types of unique items, etc. Other than that, if it's just walls and walls of knight houses in the woods, then yeah, it's a problem.

Well, yeah, but I mean... those are valid reasons... just because you want a game not bounded by any constraints in the real world doesn't mean it can happen. Too bad no Ultima fans are billionaires out there...

This isn't going to work out how you want. There simply isn't the time or money or staff to make, in a month or two of work, the game you are describing, which is a fully fleshed out 3d instance game and a kind of age of empires over world that is more than just travel from place to place. This should be obvious.
I don't agree with your assertion that "everything hinges on R7"... it doesn't. It just means more people are going to see the actual situation we're in than currently do, is all.
I'm thinking this game needs another full year of development to be what we want. and maybe another fundraising round even.

I couldn't even play this game this time around due to bugs. I played all the previous releases, but I upgraded my mac between R5 and R6 and it had problems, some of them not fixed from R5.
Most people didn't have this, but it made me realize that the game is really not working on fast mac hardware.

With you on this.

Don't agree with this, for same reasons as in wanting Runic not auto translated. If I want to play a game, it's my time, I want to be challenged and if I'm spending time learning how to overcome fake obstacles, make it a challenge for me. I don't want to be spoon-fed just because this is recreation. The kids playing a guitar thing is something my dad would say, and with about the same kind of insight, i.e., none.

We'll see. I reserve judgement until the end.

 

Thanks for the good feedback Trady!

Let me rephrase: for me personally, everything hinges on what the new 2nd scale of gameplay will be like.

You and me both pal!

 

Putting a different dress on ... Its stll a mmorpg imo.

I think it will be very similar to neverwinter except with housing and slightly less action.

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