Features you'd like to see in Shroud of the Avatar

I agree we should get more crafting skill slots/points than in UO, but still for any community to work we have to depend on each other. I would hate for that to be lost. If someone is like an island, relying completely on themselves there is no need for an economy you can do everything. It would be unrealistic.

However I like how some of the skills had combat bonuses as well. Such as poisoning skill make mages ability to cast a poison spell be a more deadly form of poison, or Lumberjacking added to the damage of a person who uses axes. Although too much of that might suck. So I hope tinkering skill doesn't make you a better thief or something silly like that, but a few of these skills may be cool to have benefits to combat.

 

However lumberjacking doesn't effect much, but if everybody was a fighter/GM-Smith then who would buy weapons and armor?

 

I'd like to see the "Search" capability in the game like in Ultima IV to find stones and things. Nothing like getting back to the spot near that darn skeleton and finding the stone while thinking to myself "How many times did I walk past this darn thing?!?!" Or the wall you could walk through in Paws. I think it was Paws village...

 

A RP-Server with rigorous RP rule enforcement.

One of the good things of the early UO times was the great community. For me this was because a great deal of people were role-players. This for example made it easy to start a guild with 7 or more people I never met before and who really were role-players! Something that is very difficult to achieve nowadays if you do not organize yourself outside the game before hand. And even if you get so far, on modern MMO's you are permanently surrounded by more non-RPlers than RPlers even on the so called RP-Servers!

 

I have no idea how the game is architected, or what it means to have a "server" but I suspect it can be very different from 10 years ago. Rather than have an RP server (or PvP server for that matter) I'd rather have it be more like a chat channel. I simply register my interest in RP in general and seeing more of it right now and those are the types of people I'm going to encounter. Whether people want to play as one big community or many logical different ones shouldn't be tied to how the physical hardware scales.

I understand the realm pride, server vs server pvp thing. But I think ever that should be done by player controlled factions and alliances, rather than some artificial restriction.

 

Clothing that can be dyed

Option to mutilate bodies (I'd like to keep the head of my enemies)

Interactive movements with furniture (sitting in chairs, laying in bed)

Option to insure Items (In case of full loot pvp - insured items can be retrieved)-

Option to "NAME" crafted items I.E. "Glass Sword Crafted by Markus"

Ability to implement/Create Personal or Guild Crests

Player Run Bounty System (Wanted posters at City entrances - Turn in the Bounties head to a Guard for the reward)

 

Very excited about cool dialogue. I loved Ultima V's dialogue system. No hint what words were keywords, and you could always ask a basic few things. That kind of feel made dialogue so cool, because you never knew for certain the NPC would react, so everytime you did get a reply, it was a boost to you as a player. I really hope that kind of typing dialogue system will be in, but I doubt it :/

 

Jumping on Isaiah's train....unique ways to personalize your crafting skills. Say you are a swordsman and a weapons maker, then maybe you get special recipes for better sword customization since you know so much about it. Same if you are an archer and a fletcher. Mage combined with glass blowing, maybe your products can have extra attributes like fairy lights or sparkles. Then say you add third skill, other attributes are added to the construction of whatever craft.

Crafters will then have pretty unique items to sell depending on the amount of skills and the levels of the skills you can combine.

 

Meant to add this sooner but accidentally posted it in the wrong thread.

A crafted item should weigh less then the sum of the materials used to craft it as materials are used up in the crafting process. They shouldn?t double and triple in mass simply by being assembled.

Also if you can sell/buy craftable items from NPC's their base value should be the purchase value of materials plus a few coins for selling and double that for buying. If you can sell the iron used to make a sword for more then you can sell the sword for something has gone wrong, even with a dynamic free market economy.

 

don't have time to read through everything.
i've posted a lot about housing in the stratics forums, particularly urbanization of the population, guidelines for renting and developing, etc.

I mentioned a "law & order" type of system so will embellish a bit on that.

In urban areas, the enforcement is strict. This would be similar to the "care bear" land of trammel in UO governed by an AI in the game with strict rules that if not followed, sorry, you get evicted (still keep your plot - or sell it and go fine a new one somewhere). Thieves don't even think to snoop, you may lose a hand! (maiming would be an interesting addition to a game now, wouldn't it?) Can set up a reputation system where upstanding citizens who pay their taxes on time get some perks, or a merchant who over charges is ignored. And of course, the players themselves vote on critical issues related to the city-state they live (this is also explored a bit in my stratics post)

The further away from the cities, the more justice should be doled out & managed by the players:
Villages have their guards (hired players or guild alliance, or flip it over to an organized crime family)
Townships have their knights, (smaller groups of militia or roaming vagabonds and mercs)
Smaller groups of homes (settlements?) would have the local strong man or two.. or maybe THEY are the criminals! (Give us a Buc's Den worthy of the reputation).

All the smaller towns/villages/suburban places own allegience to the closest city/kingdom and all will come together for wars or cooperative events (story arcs, dragon invasion, strange influx of rampant murderers from the world of shattered gems). All this bound by taxes, improvements, voting and .... CHOICE. The players choose if they want to participate in it. If they don't well, they loose some perks (and that leads to ask WHY play a social game? if don't wanna, then play off line!)

with offline mode, the world is static & synched only when the player wants to sync, the longer the player is non-synced tho could cause DL issues. oh, and what would they interact with? maybe have some base NPCs running around or something...


but i digress... back to my own topic...

Let the players form their own little neighborhoods (guilds/allied guilds, bands of farmers, merchant association - whatever you wanna call it) that outsiders could visit, interact with (non-instanced). This would help give a purpose to your socializing aspect fo the game, and yet leave it open enough for people to make new friends (or enemies) out of strangers.

That, there, is what really made early UO so enticing. We could role play with people from all over the world, have little wars, set up barricades and eventually make peace.

I read years ago in the old stratics forums of a PKer who realized grief-killing is really not what makes the game so much fun - it is developing a tight bond with your "enemy" so much so you become best of friends.

the best, and only mob is another player - do not forget that aspect of a real role playing game for even in table-top-dice-games, the DM was our ultimate foe!


Edit: There seems to be a problem with getting to page 10 of this thread using the numbers to the bottom right. The work around for this is to go directly to the page via this URL: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=features-youd-like-to-see-in-shroud-of-the-avatar-sticky&paged=10

-- cs2501x

 

I like how Luitpold is thinking.... is kinda how I've been thinking as well.

 

Chop your pk victims up so you can spread their pieces out on the ground and laugh at them, while they can only OOoOoOOooOOoO

Ahahaha, so much fun!

 

One of the best aspects from Ultima Online of yesteryear was the fact that player belongings dropped upon death, and that items broke in combat. When this was replaced by item insurance and then following that, powder of fortification, wealthy players gained omnipotent power because their items never broke. Additionally, there became no risk taking "prized" items out on the field. They could enter a dungeon fully equipped, then die and return. Rinse repeat. This became very boring.

Before though, the risk of a dangerous dungeon or pvp encounter was increased when one stood to lose his belongings (it was also fun to try and retrieve one's corpse after dying). Consequently, the satisfaction of surviving a feat was doubly positive.

A more subtle effect though was an important circulation of items between artisan, combatant and thief. The constant need for items lost kept them flowing back into the game, which made the economy better than any other game.

So I ask, please make (usable) items only transitory, creating a continuous need to craft; quest; or steal, limiting player advantage to the lifespan of such items.

 

@Zeal: No worries. That's a crackin' Avatar btw.

 

I would love to have a coliseum for gladiator fights and chariot race

 

VIRTUE BASED MAGIC:

Somebody just mentioned in chat an idea about virtue based magic.

Compassion = healing
Valor = Offensive

etc

Sounded like a cool idea to post.

 

@Isaiah

I like the virtue idea a lot and was thinking along those lines. Possibly that virtues determined your skill trees and sort of passive party buffs. e.g. if you went a ton in honor you were more or less a paladin and gave your party some defensive buff. These might ebb and flow a bit based on being true to the virtues or moons, etc.

I still think magic effect might be rune based (e.g. fire or w/e). But someone with the fire rune and high in where healing is might be doing a lot of healing as a part of their fire manipulation.

 

This is my ever growing wish list!

I really want to see big towns with lots of people in full open online mode to hopefully be like how it was on UO. Also optional mini-games for resource gathering would be cool we talked about that a bit in the chat. In the end I want UO style skill leveling, Pets, and as close to possible UO Style custom houses. I've always loved UO so I just really want a full blown UO feel while being able to experience something new and an amazing story line I'm a fan of co-op and single player when others aren't around. I would also love to see recall and moongate type spells brought back those were always awesome! Make as many items in the game craftable and as many animals/monsters in the game tamable. I would say horses are a must as well! Definitely would love Google+/Facebook integration to gather up my friends into the game! Maybe also a LAN offline multiplayer mod for those that want to mod the game but still have fun with their friends. Hopefully when it comes to houses and taxes it's in-game gold maybe a one time or yearly fee of real money of like $20 as opposed to monthly fees. I can't think of anything else right now I'll reply or edit this if I do. I would love to see Android (Phone, Tablet, Ouya!) and possibly Google Chrome Native Client (probably a demo) versions of the game. What are you guy's thoughts on this?

EDIT: Someone said it would be cool to have pet breeding and I thought that would be awesome to be able to breed horses and other pets.

EDIT 2: : I think it would be cool to have Players on the Evil Side and Players on the good side and have town sieges with Players, Monsters, and NPCs all against each other on either team

I'll be updating it here I encourage you guys to post your ideas in the community as well because we can more easily discuss individual ideas because we have a whole section for it!

https://plus.google.com/communities/105026079540261315944/stream/8f3657f0-6120-4d9d-aa42-a281b2ad3b6e

 

- Name Reservation. My feedback is that there should be no single use names. You can know lots of Johns. You could even know more than one John Smith. BUT, in order to tie in things like mail and messaging, you could use a different name than John or John Smith. You could, for instance, have a name that is your Account Name. A player could have a unique Account Name but also a visible Character Name. Account name JS1234 character name "John Smith" and a different player Account name JS5678 character name "John Smith". Messages could then reach a player whatever character they are on, and mail could go to a central mailbox for players to decide which character gets the mail. But then yes, KS gets first pick for their "Account Name".

Some have been said:
My WANTS:

-Legacies: Probably top on my list, but I don't know how feasible to implement:

<i>The ability to have offspring, to be able to play as the offspring of older or "retired" characters:</i>

More than just creating a new character and "saying" your new character is their offspring...actual relationships in game which, through work and attention and investment, can produce NPC offspring of one PC character, which a player could at some point take PC status of the child NPC. Before you shoot this down without thinking about it: What's to stop a player from creating tons of offspring to wander around aimlessly? Nothing...but at some point the children grow up and wander off. Where do you think the plethora of faceless guards and hordes of backwoods brigands and thieves come from?

<i>-NPC Companions:</i>

Like most Ultima games, specific NPCs throughout the world be available to join you in, and HELP in, your quests. For those that play alone, should they be turned away from taking part in all the world has to offer because they have no friends? And just as much, being able to romance a companion (see above).

<i>Guild Halls:</i>

More like Communal Havens. The group might be united by craft, or family, or guild, or clan, or fealty, but however the group was brought together, can be together...without one of them having to Sacrifice their own house to make for a communal haven.

<i>UNLOCKABLE House Growth features.</i>

E.g. Pay to build a mailbox, Contract gold per month to the Auctioneers guild to put in an AH Window, Go recruit and train an animal handler companion (assuming $1.4M is reached) to open up stables for you, Complete a quest chain to save an NPC to be your cook to open a special kitchen/food vendor in the house, Best a knight in Tournament to be the guard for your front door, gather ingredients and with your own crafting skill make a magical harp that will play music in your home...the point is many DIFFERENT ways to unlock MANY DIFFERENT features for a house.

 

Thought and reasoning.

I don't want everything to be easy. Some rewards should be more valuable than others but they should take more logic/thinking/reasoning to reach those better rewards.