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

<blockquote cite="Dufnall">I?d like the ability to buy and sell slaves. Different grades of slaves would be extra good. Slaves specialized in different crafts maybe? A medieval setting without slaves would feel weird. </blockquote>

Sounds cool. I've always wanted a slave

Maybe PK-ers should be enslaved and be made to work in quarries untill they have collected an amount of ore.

 

Features I would love to see:

Animal taming
Writeable books
Being able to share a house with a friend
Carpenting

 

Exploration: When exploring UO I always loved investigating mysterious places such as the hedge maze, the "dungeon" east of Yew that was just a series of buildings with underground halls, various shrines, secluded ruins. I never really got back to UO to find out what purpose any of those places served (relative to old school UO, not what was added much later), but one such place in U8 (the locked doors with the enchanted armor behind them) saw me replaying the game about a year ago simply to fulfill my desire to know what it was like on the other side of those doors. You can't spoon-feed that kind of wonderment, please employ plenty of this in SoTA - whether there is a great level of functionality or not.

 

I loved Ultima Online more then any other game i played, and i played just about all types of MMO, it was just the best game ever created.

I'm an oldschool Ultima player that enjoyed UO before the game was in my opinion destroyed with first trammel and then the real nail in the coffin, Age of Shadows february 2003.

I saw the 2 million dollar pledge was guildwars and what i would really like to see is hardcore consequences for the ones choosing that option. It's optional and would not interact with the players that is not interested in PvP. This would mean alot for all the players that have felt lost in the MMO world since Ultima Online introduced Trammel and Age of Shadows. Alot.

With hardcore i dont mean griefing but full loot from dead opponents. And why do i want consequences in PvP?

Consequences add thrill to a game, you get that tickle in your stomach that dying ingame actually means something.

I remember when UO was young, i went collecting ore north of Minoc in the caves and i always had recall button up if a PK would enter my harvesting spot. Later on i got my crafter to be Grand Master in swords and tactics and with a little poison on the sword i managed to actually kill some of the PK.s that wanted my loot.=)

So let it be a optional feature to go hardcore PvP for the ones that seek that thrill.

 

Twitch combat "NOT" tab (lock on) combat pleeeaaaassseeee , So you move freely and if you swing your sword with 3 monsters closely gatherd infront of you, You hit all 3.

With the Rune bag, Different types of Runes I.E Starters/Dotters/Basic hits/Reactive(ie to dodge or roll/evades)/Finishers and they proc during the fight depending on the stage of combat and a choice procs I.E. you have 5 of each type of rune then when the proc happens u get a choice come onscreen of 2 or 3 to choose one attack from. With a wide selection of runes ever growing in the world

Finaly the acquisition of the runes be from different sources, Quests/certain rare and non rare monsters/npc's in the world, special events, Other players defeated in pvp all to influence adventure.

For me Ultima games have always been about 3 things:

Adventure

Socialising

Crafting/trading

But the biggest fail of all recent games for me has been combat So heres hoping Sota gets it right

 

Equipment and Combat: Find a balance between weapons and armor so that in the proper context a dagger can be as useful as a sword without an over-dependence on special powers or power attacks. Different weapons should serve different purposes, not just do more or less damage. Different armor should do likewise, not just absorb more or less damage. There's nothing sillier than seeing everyone wearing the same thing because it's what's best. How about the equipment supports RP by having function?

Gear in UO was a dime a dozen which was kind of nice since armor and weapons were like part of the in-game economy. I believe in highly breakable equipment if it is agreeably not master-work or magical armor. My PK friend used to have chests full of armor that he would let me borrow from and I just loved the down and dirty feel of using scrounged armor from the dead. Him: "Oh that was from this pathetic Great Lord who I carved leg jerky from. Corp Por Corp Por! Vas Flam Vas Flam!" Me: "I swear I will not lose it." Then I would die 24 hours later and howl OOOooooOOOooo at the PK as I watched all of the platemail being looted from my corpse. And all of that gear would go to someone else's treasure hoard, completing the circle of life. There would be an in-game story behind the equipment, not just "oh I got that in this instance where the boss conveniently waited for me to show up and the other set piece in that instance... etc." This stuff cannot be understated.

How about this solution? Soulbound items can exist, but if you die wearing them (and you can't necessarily remove them in combat) then they cannot be re-equipped for 24 or more hours or you have to restore them to life with some sort of rare consumable. If you want to play with the big boys then there need to be consequences.

 

I think I will make it simple.

1. Councils for barons

2. Rountables for knights

3. Town halls for citizens, villagers and other Shroud of the Avatar residents.

 

What made Ultima Online pre AoS PvP so skilldemanding was the incredibly twitchbased spellsystem, it didnt matter the slightest that the game had a autotarget system. 64 spells to choose from was enough variables to make every PvP encounter interesting.

It could take 6 months to a year to become really good in PvP and the skilled players just about always won against the less skillful ones.

I never experienced such a balanced, interesting and fun combat system after Ultima Online pre AoS.

Make PvP autotarget just like old UO and add that incredible twitchbase system we saw in old UO.

 

A few more:

- Individual housing lots in out of the way places. Forest cottages, cave refuges, a lonely island somewhere out of the way, etc. Might cost more than village lots to justify some special magical protection that prevents the monsters from destroying or breaching it - in other words, those out of the way lots might require a town level, or even a city level, deed. They might also have different available house styles.

- Mob research. Players only get through the UI mob characteristics they either learned from a NPC or experienced themselves. For example, only seeing the health bar after killing a couple of them, only seeing vulnerabilities or immunities after either being told by an NPC or using an attack that triggers it, perhaps even only seeing the mob name (for rarer mobs) after being told about it by an NPC.

- Gear reforging / upgrade: add a way to get a piece of gear back to pristine condition, and even upgrade it to the performance of an already existing "better" piece of gear, by either taking it to a crafter capable of creating the gear in the first place and repairing it with the same resource cost as creating the gear from scratch, or else by taking the old gear and a new, unused one and "merging" them.


@Owain:

The downside to making all gear easily replaceable is that gear becomes as exciting as a lump of gold, because that is all that the gear's value to the player boils down, how much he will spend to replace it. Attachment to the gear, for me at least, makes for a far better game, since it allows the player to actually care about the gear (though I come from the "absolutely no player looting" camp, so of course my point of view is different from yours).

The WoW way, though, - in other words, gear that is never lost, but is constantly replaced by better gear - is even worse. Easily replaceable gear at least gives players a reason to treat their gear well, if only to avoid losing money on repairs and replacements, something that is lost on WoW and other games that treat gear in a similar way.

What I want is to be able to pick a piece of gear and care for it, keeping it always in perfect working order, and even upgrading it to top performance, by caring for it, even if it takes more time and resources than just throwing away the gear and replacing it.

 

1. Animal Taming for creatures that can be tamed like horses.
2. Animal Trapping for creatures that cannot be tamed like most of them or at least easier to trap then to tame. I mean it's not like people can go and tame an alligator and then have it following them around all the time. But people do catch them.
3. Throwing - what ever it is that you pick up off the ground (that is light enough) you should be able to throw it. Including body parts, rocks, snowballs, or whatever
4. Swing/Bash or whatever .... I think we should be able to use any item to swing, bash, hit others with. Yea it might be a stick or it might be a cat. If we can lift it, we should be able to fight with it. I'm good with having penalties if you hurt tame creatures.
5. Kicking - I might want to kick someone out of my place, or maybe my dog.
6. Booby trapping - yea spy vs spy style - trip wires, door traps, trapped chest, etc
7. Smuggler type - getting resources moved across pk land or something.
8. Diseases - agent U.S.A. style was fun
9. underground tunnels from my house to a friends house - if houses are close enough
10. free to drop any item on the ground - yea with some sort of decay rate
11. herding - find ways to make it more fun
12. animal fighting tournaments
13. poisoning - swords, apples, water, etc
14. ways to transport heavy items like ore, maybe the wagon
15. everyone should be open to PVP, pkers should go perma red at least, with maybe some sort of police system to help those that got pked.
16. carving skill
17. dragons should raid farms and take their sheep/chicken
18. must have food to live - no creating food with spells
19. trap doors - think Jabbas palace
20. masonry - make stone buildings - carpentry - make wood buildings
21. able to rotate items on all its ends - so if i want to stand a table up or turn it upside down, etc
22. maybe in part 2,3,4 - have natives that do not speak our language, have us try and trade with them. Like Seven Cities of Gold - you either earned their respect by trades or the whole tribe got slaughtered by you
23. swimming - someone can figure out a way to make this fun
24. let us play as some of the creatures/animals - only limited to their abilities.
25. stealing, be nice to steal rares from shops or npc's

 

One main thing I want to see is a wealth of persistent content that lasts in the online environment for those who are done with the storyline. My current main fear is that this isn't MMO enough to keep people invested for years after they're done with the quest. I make no secret that I want the second coming of UO, so I want a persistent world with lots of dungeons, explorable areas, and PVP content/freedom. I want to experience a world, not a series of instanced zones that get abandoned after they out "level" them or pass them in the storyline.

Make EVERY town useful for something (whether it's the mining hub like Minoc or trade hub like Brit, etc.). Do not let people get bored since there's no persistent world or constant progress/challenges.

I also want relevant wilderness housing and a reason to explore out in the forests, mountains, oceans, etc. Give us VALUABLE treasure to find just for EXPLORING as opposed to only combat and crafting roles.

 

My main plea: Keep PVP optional. I remember UO's PK raiding parties riding along the mountainline / picking on miners, and it was lame. I remember archery PKs (homing missiles, you couldn't outrun them) and it was lame. I remember precasting and front-loaded halberd-swings, and it was lame.

Please have a hard PVP opt-out; AND do not reintroduce by making it back-door mandatory by hiding crafting components in PVP areas. If you do the latter I'll consider the concept failed.

My honest 2 gold. Good luck guys.

 

-Full loot
-Open PvP
-Some sort of criminal system to counter the greed effect of losing your equipment (aka I need 500 full plates in my bank zomg)

 

I think it would be kind of cool if players can most their achievements on Facebook. For example, lets say I did pvp today and gained x amounts of levels and achievements. There should be something where we can list those things on on Facebook page so other players can see. It would say something like ThomasJ completed 3 levels of pvp today, 124345345 kills and obtained these rewards from his badassery!

 

JUMPING/CLIMBING SKILL! Imagine a rogue being able to clear an otherwise deadly gap in a dungeon to hit the switch for his party.

 

I would like an open world where the openness doesn't mean either long treks with nothing to do or what happens during long treks is the "random monster encounter" with no story advancement involved. Of course, there really should be monsters and bandits on the road that attack you, but I'd like to see at least the potential for new stories in these encounters.

I know that we didn't make it to the stretch goal, but I'd really like to see some ability for players to contribute content to the game, especially when playing privately. That could keep the game going well beyond the five planned chapters.

 

My main concern lies with the combat or more how to avoid it. MMO usually tend to have a really boring combat. Which is nothing bad, but usually I am murdering tons of dudes just to get to the interesting story bits that I am interested in. I often play stealth classes to get by all the encounter that are mostly uninteresting.

Having an interesting combat would of cause be a good solution, but there are games out there which deliver on that much better than most MMOs I have played.

Having professions like Warrior or Mage is fine, but the part I find more interesting are things like Artificer or Merchant. Actually I would love to play a Musician or anything along the line. So it is the question how to make these things rewarding. I thing Combatant usually will find combat rewarding and Merchant will probably make more money than other people.
I think SWG took a really interesting approach on this to make every class you pick rewarding. SotA probably won't have a class structure but it would be nice to see that there is enough to interesting stuff besides combat challenges.

 

@ Yandere, I like your thoughts on potential class-styles. Artificer, Merchant... I'm imagining some original style abilities related to those 'classes', and I'm sure there can be many more classes build along that lines.

Maybe we can even have one class from every city?

Perhaps a Smelter/miner class?

It would be actually pretty neat to see fighting abilities granted depending on all your other skills and attributes. New abilities come when you advance your class as a whole, even taking in crafting and athletic skills into account.

Of course you have the effect of specializing in one area makes them lose skill (and therefore ability) in another area.

 

1. TITLE - FIRST NAME - LAST NAME - LOCATION in-game naming
e.g. Knight Jeff Bond of Yew

2. KEY TITLE - FIRST NAME - LAST unique key
e.g. i live in Yew but move to Brittania and buy a plush upper west side castle, i should be able to automatically change my name to Knight Jeff Bond of Brittania

this seems to give early backers a chance to secure their in-game names with flexibility for more players ... basically if a name is taken then a variant like Knight Jeff Bond7 of Yew might be available

ty

 

Some humor like cow wipping or what you can find in old Sierra games(Greetings from Roger Wilco). It would be cool to have some surprising ideas like slay a butterfly to convulse a region.