Sold off and letting go.

SWTOR didn't feel like a single player game. Not with all of those windows, bars, texts and the WoW-stle combat system, the constant respawn of enemies... It played like an MMORPG where you didn't have to play with others.

 

Any story NPC you killed stayed dead in your storyline. If you spared and redeemed a Sith, you'd hear from them again. Many of the class storylines were truly fantastic.

You said it is impossible to have a good single player RPG built on an MMO base, and yet it exists.

Not all single player RPGs have great combat. Two of my favorite of all time (Ultima VII and Planescape Torment) had terrible combat. I'd greatly take SWTOR combat over those any day of the week.

Plenty of single player games have respawning mobs, etc.

Plenty of single player games have tons of interface windows. (And in SWTOR you actually have full control over the UI and can customize it a great deal to minimize it).

 

It's own economy.. how do you think that's going to work? Merchants have goods you can buy.. they'll buy from you.. ok.. How will bosses and mini-bosses work? Well let's see how they work when they're in properly. How do you expect them to be different? How do you expect shard zones to be different? Towns are already populated by NPCs and they've talked about having schedules.. how much more do you expect?

 

The issue here I believe is the areas of towns that are just stretches of player housing, and whether they'll just be empty.

 

They'll be empty lots, no houses or NPCs. So you'll just see the inner town with the NPC buildings and empty land around it.

 

Sure but all of those elements diminish the gaming experience. What do I need a chat window for in a single player game? Why do I have to suffer a MMO combat in the first place if there would have been other options? SP games with respawning mobs don't create a compelling world and don't simulate a world - and wouldn't this be what RG wants? A simulated world?
SotA wants to be a spiritual successor to Ultima and I don't expect a SWTOR or WoW from a spiritual successor to Ultima.
SotAs offline mode will be compared to Skyrim and The Witcher 3 - simply because the game was advertised as a single player offline RPG, too - and it will fall very short not because of production values, presentation or graphics but because it wants to be a single player game but uses MMO elements and thus it cannot be a single player game.
If you would add hundreds of player to The Witcher 3, would it be a MMORPG? No, it would need specific elememts and features to make it a MMORPG and this also applies to a single player game. Just removing other players from a MMO does not make it a single player RPG.

 

I don't post much here, but that statement is a little provocative to me. I think SWTOR is actually a good example of how MMO elements can impair the single player experience. I really wanted to experience all the class stories in SWTOR but never got around to it as there was just so much empty "MMO space" between one main plot area to the next. There were a lot of things I liked about that game and enjoyed, and I love Bioware's take on story telling and the involvement of companions in that story, but for me, the MMO aspects watered down the story telling to the extent I didn't want to finish the stories. So, I think this is a valid concern, even though it's not high up on my list.

Gotta say, though, I've been considering upgrading my pledge for some time now to get tax free housing, and R23 hasn't pushed me over the edge yet. Happy to be $25 pledger; looks like it will stay that way due to pledge expiration. Still too many uncertainties here for me and an uncomfortable amount real world economy mixing with in game economy.

 

So it will feel just like the MMO side, those towns always look like empty lifeless places.
We recently had a thread asking if people had stopped playing now, from players testing who never see another player and feeling like they are already in a badly made SP RPG.

 

They can bot all they want offline. That character will never be able to go online.

 

Didn't they say they could not create the single player until the multi is done or almost done ?

 

Empty lifeless places with out of place obsidian towers sticking out like sore thumbs and vendors on every doorstep. I think its exactly one of the things single-player fans are upset about.

 

I think SWTOR is a good example that a single player experience does not consist of content and story only. Story was great in SWTOR but the mechanics and features prevented it from feeling like a true single player experience.

 

You do realize that the economy for the single player game needs to be properly balanced for a single player experience? Which takes time? Right now I could see the reviews praising the SOTA MMORPG for its impressive player economy but critizing it's single player for its broken, simplistic economy.

Control points right now is built on players capturing them as a group to allow passage. A group needs to remain present to maintain control. It's fine because you might get lucky and be able to pass safely and you are playing with others. Having to capture control points when you are playing by yourself will get tiresome. Maybe not, but if we had single player offline we'd know if they needed to tweak control points for single player or not.

As for shard zones, right now they exist for optional PvP with additional resources. There won't be story reasons to go in there due to the optional PvP mandate. So are they just pointless scenery in single player offline? Or will they serve a different purpose giving people a reason to explore them?

I'm going to guess POTs aren't going to be in single player offline hence why they aren't cannon. But what about player towns like Redmill? It's not a POT but the only NPCS there are the town crier/bankers. No NPC buildings. Not even a red mill. It'll just be a vast empty map. Or if it doesn't exist, the world offline will feel way emptier and less populated than the online world. Which yay?

 

Offline and Single Player Online are very different.

Offline will have no player owned anything. The economy is not linked in any way.

SPO shares everything with FPO and OPO.

 

One point of major concern to me was the statement by the devs that we would NOT be testing single player offline until right around launch, if at all.

It seems to suggest that overall the mechanics between single player and multiplayer are the same, and therefore don't need testing.

Not a great sign.

But I'm still trying to have some hope.

Fingers crossed.

 

Well you can own homes in offline and they've talked of taking all the player created items in beta and putting them in offline mode at launch. But yes I know this. So I thus want to know how the world will be like in offline mode. Cause right now the offline world feels like it'll be an empty world.

 

This is what I fear, too. That we get an MMORPG in which we can remove the other players and play alone... But this would be far, far away from a true single player experience.

 

a simple feature list or description would be nice, of how single and multi player gaming will differ.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f.../single-player-offline-unique-features.21739/

 

yes, im aware of that thread. However, that only lists 4 items, one of them being able to save your game. If those are truly the only differences, then all hope is already lost.