Single Player Offline

I am curious about the Single Player Offline mode. Especially how the towns looks like. Without player housing, are the towns then ghost towns with empty lots?

 

I read that the devs plan to populate most lots in the offline mode with houses which are then owned by NPCs. Those won't be "important" NPCs who have much to say but they will go about their business, work in the gardens etc.

 

We don't know for sure, but I seem to remember a couple of ideas they were kicking around.

One was that the lots would be populated with random houses which you could remove or replace.

The other idea was that some percentage of a town would be NPC housing intermixed with player housing, so if all the player lots were empty, there would still be some occupied plots.

But, the only answer we really have is that they haven't gotten to it yet.

 

Its supposed to be filled with NPCs while allowing you to buy housing as you see fit. The economy is supposed to be another area which needs balancing because you have to be able to craft if you want to and sell to NPCs while being able to buy from NPC what you need too

 

Thank you, wow that sounds a lot of work. To mentioned the incredible number of villages, towns and cities.

 

I can't find it now, I think it's buried in 10K Kickstarter comments, but I recall seeing a post by RG that, to paraphrase, said:

"Single Player Offline" is only for people who insist on a DRM free offline experience. Most people will want to play Single Player Online because the world will be more "filled in" and dynamic.​

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WWKSF (What We Know So Far) (everyone feel free to add so we can keep track!)

From Kickstarter Page

• 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.

From Kickstarter Update #5

First, the game can be played offline, no connection required. The character used for the offline version of the game will not be useable in the online version of the game for obvious exploit/hacking reasons. We are going to investigate ways to export your online character to the single player version of the game but the offline character will not be importable into the online version.

Second, the offline single player version of the game for those who purchase it through KickStarter will not use any form of DRM. We had been holding off on committing to that because we don’t know what our final distribution system (Steam, GOG, etc) is going to be and some of them use DRM. We may have DRM of some sort on post-KS sales but we’ll commit to keeping KS versions DRM and “phone home” free for the single player version once launched.

Third, the offline single player of the game will not have any microtransactions. We know this is kind of a no-brainer since it is offline but we wanted to be perfectly clear on that since there was some vagueness in a few statements in one of our video chats.

From the Kickstarter FAQ

The game can be played offline, no connection required. The character used for the offline version of the game will not be useable in the online version of the game for obvious exploit/hacking reasons. We are going to investigate ways to export your online character to the single player version of the game but the offline character will not be importable into the online version.
Last updated: Mon, Mar 11 2013 7:28 PM CDT

From a Lord British post in this thread

First, know that I am listening and reading all of this important thread.
Second, me and the team agree with most of the concerns raised here, and feel we are mostly on top of these things... (though not entirely).
Third, while most of the team is building code, art and maps... it has been MY task to write the story (with Tracy) including the challenge / reward / and cost for playing "well" or straying from the path.

On this point, I feel we are on track, with the usual development cycle where the story concept comes 1st, then the systems get in second, and the story is refined to best take advantage of the systems as implemented.

From a Lum post in this thread

Just to back up what FireLotus said upthread; we're intentionally not introducing a lot of the single-player story experience yet.


From Deep Dive: Single Player Offline Click THIS LINK to jump directly to 19mins 26seconds where they talk about housing in offline mode.

 

Great post!

 

Yes, great summary! Based on your deep dive video link, i think RG gave the answer i was looking for:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=yV_ycMNgGQo#t=21m17s

 

A friend of mine asked me if it wouldn't be hilarious to send your avatar 'touring' online to your friends' single-player games, the way EA (hissssss) did it with the Sims 3- that way, offline towns could be populated by NPCs based on PCs.

And I thought about what would happen if Donna Elvira Ondarivas, my character, were able to start visiting other people's games as an NPC.

Dear heavens. And I was grateful that that would not be a possibility.

On the serious side, I liked seeing a compilation of all of the answers available in this thread. Good job, Baker.