Richard Garriott wants to do a Ultima-4-like-mobile game

Like Albion? ;-)

 

That's actually one of my joys in participating in the community here. While it may have its moments of inevitable frustrations, disappointments, and drama, at the same time there's also so many talented creative folks taking part that, no matter what happens with Shroud, I don't think any good idea will end up going to waste because someone else can always take it up and run with it if Port doesn't.

 

Non the less it would be nice if port picked up some of those ideas ^^

 

Just without any MMO-aspect

 

Definitely! I think I most agree with that. Otherwise we could just be quietly taking notes to put into our own projects rather than sharing here.

 

Even AWFUL alarm-clock-based mobile games can make a ridiculous amount of money with just a little bit of publicity. They can rarely/never be updated and bring in huge amounts of cash for basically zero effort. Garriott's name still has pull in the gaming community, anything he makes will get loads of free PR. Even if the game is a godless abomination, it'll make money.

 

Lord British could probably put his name on toast and call it "Avatar Fuel" and people would buy it.

 

About the Avatar protagonist... you guys have to remember that its rooted in legend and myth, there is a reason this has been a common theme all around.

"You" say Avatar in a derogatory way because its easy to spit on old Ahu, but the true focus is ASCENSION.

Ascension of the mind, but also the body, and I'm a living example that this method of teaching virtue and ethics is one of the best there will ever be.

 

Online/mobile would be fun. If they tied it into the live SotA world it could be fun AND productive.
I made a post about it a while back. Total pipedream...but I think it'd be fun and a potential way to connect Avatars in the real world.

RE: "Ingress of the Avatar"
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/ingress-of-the-avatar-a-pipedream.88913/

 

As an aside along those lines, I too am a huge devotee and advocate of the avatar concepts in gameplay but completely abhorred U9, feeling like it was a total cop-out for the avatar to solve the imbalance conflict by subtracting himself from the world rather than using his acquired talents and wisdom to close the gap in the opposite way by adding to the worlds' inhabitants in a more direct-to-individual way to strengthen them to better handle their own problems instead of just doing everything for them and then suddenly leaving when that was no longer working out.

It bothered me so much I played around with a project of my own for a while, codenamed "Revention" for 'revisiting ascension.' In the course of which, I quickly found that building a playstyle around dynamic, teachable, influenceable NPCs is a huge strain on programming logic, interface design, and data definition. The interface problems I was able to find a workable solution to by creating a visio-tactile rather than verbal interface for conversation to have an intuitive basis around attention paid to the objects in an NPCs environment to allow for more voluminous available dialog options without making the user have to guess scores of keywords or navigate through multiple layers of menus. This also gave a significant production-cost benefit in shifting a lot of definition labor to writers and environmental artists rather than programmers. But still even so, the non-automateable human ingenuity labor needed to populate an entire world with such dialog would be ... a lot. Definitely beyond my own personal capabilities, and I could see then why a commercial studio might not feel it an advantageous direction to go in.

So I think that, while I'd be exceptionally thrilled and supportive of further evolution of the avatar concept, I don't know that the logistical capability exists for the avatar to grow much more without increased capacity for the NPCs in the world to also grow alongside, which would probably be a huge magnum opus undertaking requiring even more budget and manpower than Shroud does. I'd love to see Port continue to grow as a company to be able to contemplate such an undertaking in the future, but for now I'd be content with much smaller goals to help them get to that point, like revamped versions of the classic U4-U6 style world environment and gameplay.

 

Oh Welcome milady, I have read a few of your posts and I must say I am impressed, we seem to be following very similar paths.

Hear those who have ears...

I felt the same about U9, to me (even if others say there was no story in UO) Ultima Online was much more in line with the integrity of the western cannon

Ascension indeed requires community, and I think you put your finger on the wound here. Cop-0ut indeed...

That is why since the first releases I have been lobbying for people within the community to have roles, of yes thats a huge undertaking at first, but then a player can interact live when he logs in, but leaves a personally programmed NPC when they leave, forcing people to deal with true variety because of unpredictability of consequences.

Maybe one player would not deal with negative virtue players, maybe next week that could change because one of them still did the right thing in the end.

Right now we have black and white checkerboard, not a true sandbox IMO.

The Avatar's only solution as it is, is to ascend along with the community, which is hard and heavy. Being shielded from conflict is only a temporary band-aid for a much bigger problem which I've extensively talked about and does not fit the subject of this thread.

I'm all for a reboot of Ultima 4, its one of my favorites, the one I played the most But I think that is not what will truly propel Portalarium forward.

As I always say, we live in the age of ethics, of knowledge and wisdom. To base your player funding mechanisms on NONE of those concepts is like shooting yourself in the foot.

 

GOG has Ultima 4 freely available for download. I can check the link if someone can't find it. I had it running on the PC just fine.

 

This CANNOT happen LD! If they did an HD revamp of Ultima VII it would directly lead to my wife divorcing me due to extreme neglect, lol.

 

I don't think that's true at all. At least, the entire population of Steam seems to disagree, myself included

 

The reason that I ignore that particular liability issue is because they're responding directly to us; isn't that the whole point of crowdfunding?

But that's got nothing to do with the games' age, though. I still find myself enjoying playing games from the era of those old Ultima games... the thing is that those games still play relatively well whereas the Ultima games always played like a brick on concrete. It's just that convoluted objectives and controls were things that the general audience accepted to deal with for some reason.

I played Ultima 4 for academic reasons only and, while I loved the concept and what you do as an Avatar within the fantasy, I hated the act of "playing" it.

Except that you do get movies that stand the test of time because they're not being held up by gimmicks.

Age only matters when you consider how fit someone is for certain tasks. Games and movies were systematically done to be the way they are and this is a matter of competence on the creator's part. If a particular game or movie doesn't hold up, then it wasn't good to begin with; just that this was what people had at the time. They don't get a passing grade because of age because they will play the same no matter when you play them (assuming the hardware doesn't get lost).

 

I would like to see parts of SOTA available in Mobile. All of it if possible. My only concern about this is that SOTA is not done yet and I worry another game may be a distraction.

 

The death of PC gaming gets declared every few years. Every new console starts another round, the iPad started one. We're still plugging along though despite predictions.
Development resources are surely more distributed now. Many PC games are console ports of various quality. Mobile nibbles at the simpler side of gaming. Not dead or even wounded but one among many vs the only game in town.

 

I think it would be a great idea for him to do. I saw more of this conversation in depth somewhere on the forums. He went over the span of gaming and mmo's and the generations that have come since UO launched and all the niceties they bring to the table. This would reach out to generations of people who may not even have a computer and the new updates to the old games being able to play on today's far more sophisticated smart phones & tablets (as opposed to the computers those games rolled out for), is a wonderful idea.

An easy way to refresh the old, reach new people, and generate additional revenue. Seems good all around. I would love to see more old D&D modules revamped in such a fashion as well.

 

You're right, they always do. PC will always have its place on top of the big games market. The mobile market may trump in small games, but those wanting not only in depth gaming, more visuals, better everything... then most gaming enthusiasts will still choose PC platforms or at least consoles. Consoles come close depending on your PC's specs or if you don't have one. I'm not gonna hate on consoles as they have come quite a ways. Still not the same as a good gaming rig.

 

Shouldn't his focuse be on SoTa and and the future episode releases of SoTa? At least untill it meets his publicized goals?