Shroud of the Avatar Manual

While I do understand your logic, I must respectfully disagree.

1) No matter what the quality and intent of the companion novel was/is, it is not a replacement for a true classic Ultima style game manual. They were conceived and billed as two separate entities. Of course, I realize that nowhere does it actually SAY Ultima-style manual (even though RG undoubtedly knows every Ultima fan who backed assumed it would be ultima style) it only says "printed and illustrated." So technically, Port is delivering what they said they would... which is part of the problem. It kind of feels like they are providing the minimum they can possibly deliver while still meeting the letter of the reward details.

2) The description of a very "basic" outline of world lore, with a large amount of lore being added on the fly and retroactively by level designers, seems to go against one of the very tenets of this project, that of a world and storyline as deep and detailed as U7.

Overall, this whole thread is a pretty serious bummer. Would you mind making sure RG is aware of this thread?

 

Oh @Lord British and @DarkStarr are well aware of this thread. lol

Thank you @Scottie for all of your feedback and explainatuon of what the manual is, and is not.

Unfortunately, I don't think continuing this thread is going to remain as cordial as it has been. Therefore, I'll ask @Berek to lock it before it devolves.

Thank you everyone for keeping the communication civil.

 

I think they did say Ultima-style manual, but that might have been on one of their early steams. The closest I could find is on the KS page:

Also, in case anyone was wondering what an "Ultima" style manual looks like, I provided a link to Replacement Docs that has all of them. But here are the direct links to just the manuals. I did not include links to other supplementary material, such as spell books, maps, quick reference cards, etc, but they are all hosted there too.

Ultima I - Manual
Ultima II - Manual
Ultima III - Manual
Ultima IV - Manual
Ultima V - Manual
Ultima VI - Manual
Ultima VII - Manual
Ultima VII Part Two - Manual
Ultima VIII - Manual
Ultima IX - Manual

Hallmarks of an "Ultima" manual:

- Introduction, addendum, afterword, or thank you, from Lord British
- Bits of lore which may include the world, setting, story, economy, politics, magic, geography, astronomy, language, beastiary, professions, towns, etc.
- Illustrations by Denis Loubet
- Partly or entirely written from an in-game character perspective
- And mostly true only for the First Trilogy: how to play the game

Can't wait to see the final manual!

 

It actually sais in update #6 (March 13th 2013) of the Kickstarter :

$125 Tier (EXPLORER) - Explorer level now contains:

• NEW: Special Collector's Box
• NEW: Recorded media game (format of recorded media TBD)
• NEW: Recorded media game soundtrack (format of recorded media TBD)
• NEW: Old-school style, illustrated, printed manual
• Full size cloth map of the new world
• Also includes Virtual Collector Level Rewards (including the NEW "Royal Archivist" title)

Link is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/project...of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0/posts/426644

Now maybe the "old school style" may just refer to the promise of "illustrated and printed" , but if it is 3 pages of Lore and then 15 pages of listing commands (and probably a load of disclaimers), then the "illustrated" part can never amount to much.
I am sure that sentence evoked something quit different in the minds of old Ultima fans, then what they are getting now.

Not purposefully, but still reeks a bit like a bait and switch to me. To be honest, RPG-kickstarters in those years kinda screwed the pooch by promising so many physical goodies for the higher tiers(Pathfinder did the same, though they delivered all of it very quickly. Quality was mediocre off course). In hindsight those are very costly tiers for the devs, since now they have to produce real goodies, for hardly any extra money, for only a few people. So I never really expected those goodies to be high quality anyway.
But the manual would have been cool if that lived up to specs.

 

Absolutely! That's totally our goal!

Scottie ^_^

 

For all the reasons I've mentioned in the various posts above, the "old school" style and content that our particular Episode One manual will be emulating is much closer to the Ultima II - Manual and Ultima III - Manual indicated in "smack's" post above... More "instruction" than "lore" though the "voice" of the presentation is often theatrical. My intention, however, is to make the visual design of those interior pages even more artful than those old plain pages, from a standpoint of page backgrounds with "artfully-aged-looking" parchment and borders... This is done by printing images of said parchment as a background to the words and art inserts. And of course the quality of Denis' pieces will remain excellent! The one exception is our decision not to include a bestiary, since we plan to continue to add a variety of creatures and other foes as we move forward... Unlike past Ultimas, there's no definitive "set" of creatures that we want to nail down on a "per-Episode basis", and there may be an entire host of new content (of all kinds) that players could get exposed to long before Episode 2 becomes a playable reality...

At the end of the day, as I said much earlier, there's no way that this manual can be all things to all people... Now that the extent (and detail) of your expectations have been exposed, I can assure you that Richard will look at all these opinions and discuss whether changes (if any) should be made. But also know that the directives Gina and I've been given for what needed to be included came from Richard himself, with input from Dallas and Starr... This is the manual that they wanted to create, for this, the first episode of a new "Lord British Game" for a new era... It is a spiritual successor,...but a successor of this day and age none-the-less...

And I will do my best to make it a beautiful one...

Scottie ^_^

 

As far as the bestiary, spell list, etc are concerned, I'm not sure that incompleteness should be the driving concern. Lorebooks are always incomplete, and the player can imagine further volumes and addenda. I believe some of the Ultima lorebooks left out some monsters that ended up in the final games. And Monster Manual had a volume 2.

I do hope you get around to developing these kinds of things in an official capacity, like you suggested you might, though, whether or not you feel as a development team this can or should show up in the initial printed manual. Besides as I mentioned earlier getting some books included in the game, when I download games today, I'll still often find lore sections on the game website, and I'll read them to get started (wikis are too dense to read).

 

Not to derail the thread (too much), but the SotA website (including store) is getting revamped for launch, so it would be interesting to see what sort of lore content they put up there. The "About SotA" page is pretty lacking. I guess a new thread on this would be an ideal place to discuss this.

 

Locking thread per request of OP and after review of the question and discussion being answered.