Dialogue system and quests are bad - sorry :(

We will see how match making does. I still think so long as enough people are playing and match making is working well it won't feel like everyone's getting separated. But it's still a mostly untested mode and it's hard to see it really work with the current active player base. We won't be able to see it's true potential until after final wipe.

As for the story elements.. well we haven't seen it all yet. I think Richard probably thinks of his games as more PG-13.. Sure it had that stuff in it but nothing was really explicit.. and it didn't need to be and getting a bit back on topic.. Ultima VII and Serpent Isle in particular were good examples of this. The graphics were so low rez and you never saw close ups that.. well I at least can hardly argue that they were a big deal.. and scenes like with Lucia or Frigidazzi or the prostitutes at the bathhouse were black screen / fast forward.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if SotA had something along those lines.. though it's hard to do a love interest in an online game. They could easily do that offline. It might even surprise me if it's all completely absent in offline play.

I have very vague recollections of probably 3 years back Richard saying it would be a M game.. or he may have said they were going for a T rating.. but as far as I'm concerned every online game should 'M' just because it has other real people in it.

 

But will we see some of those more complex quests during the beginning of the game, too so that this gets us excited to want to play more?
Don't know if you can tell us, but will some of those complex quests be included into the beginning of the game and right now we just don't see them yet or will those complex quests take place later in the game?

I don't know... On the official website, on Steam, on the Kickstarter website single player, offline and story are always mentioned first, giving the impression that this is the focus of the game. Yet right now SP, offline and story are bad... I hope that this will change until "release" of Episode 1. But I still think that 8 months are a very short time to accomplish this. Especially because I always have to think about what the developers of Gothic 3 said. They had six months to include the story and quests into the game and this was nowhere near enough time - in the end Gothic 3 was a catastrophic game...

 

This!

 

Many of them are supposed to come at official alpha release, but yes RG and TC will react to the enthusiasm of the players I guess and dive in progressively. At beta release you will see what I am talking about for the single player, multiplayer is helping find the bugs and what people find fun for now.

 

I agree somewhat, but am willing to wait to see what the dialogue is like after it is polished. It is a mammoth task and I'm glad I am not the person tasked with doing it.

What I really like about SotA is discovering notes lying about giving clues to what has happened. The opening tutorial scenes of Blood River and Highvale do a good job of this as well as the Tower of the Shuttered Eye. I hope all adventure scenes will eventually contain such clues (like the ones in Desolate Hills. (I found myself looking for poor Henriet).

 

Maybe it even is too much text? When comparing the amount of text in SotA to the amount of text in Ultima VII, Ultima VII had much fewer text but managed to capture me more and although the amount of text was smaller every NPC got a detailed background, history, secrets, personality and they offered quests... I get the impression that I got to know the NPCs in Ultima VII better than the NPCs in SotA, despite U7 having not so much text...

I am wondering what other single player fans think of the quests and texts we now have in the game and how the dialogue plays out...

 

Indeed, I do not find that being "flooded" by text is a good solution to feel some immersion.

Perhaps my point of view is biaised since I am not a english native spoker. However, I felt that it was more simple to understand the story/background of NPC in Ultima7 thanks to the dialogue system and "short answers".

As for immersion, what Ultima7 did and was great was to offer the Avatar/player small choices that helped you to put a leg in the story, from the begining. For exemple: when Klog asks you if you want to join the Fellowship of Trinsic and assist to their gathering at 7pm... There was a dialogue AND a point for it !

 

And I miss the descriptive texts from the older Ultimas about what the NPCs are doing. Like here:

 

erm.. you do realize that dialogue was added to the Lazarus remake. Granted they did a fantastic job.. but some of that stuff wasn't in the original.

 

Sure but it was in Ultima 6 and 7. And people liked it as it added so much to the atmosphere and the NPCs. So Lazarus added it to, too. And it lead to great and atomspheric dialogues.

 

Well unless one of the Lazarus team members comes in here and confirms that then it's pure speculation. Sorry to nitpick but if your point is Ultima VI and VII had it then you should use examples from VI and VII. Not a remake with added dialogue not in the original. It goes from comparing Richard's earlier work with his current work vs someone else's work with his current work.

 

Ok then here:

Ultima VI


Ultima VII

 

I'm not sure why you're disagreeing as your post pretty much confirms my own observations.

I never said anything about how much RG's word is weighted in the overall design, just that he's the one pushing for the "Medieval sims online" approach. That is... unless you've got a weird way to go about saying that RG isn't trying to make a "Medieval sims online"... which would be completely wrong.

Everything about the role-play, moral issues, houses, farming, weather, constellations, story, etc... it's all (mostly) RG while the rest of the team is actually trying to make a video game out of it.
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Wow, you really were trying to say that RG isn't trying to make a "Medieval sims online"...

Okay, now you REALLY need to provide examples as to what you consider "Medieval sims online" , what you consider "copying from other games" and what the "true RG formula" is.

You don't care about the opinions of the other group of players... that's nice. You know, if you weren't so busy separating yourself from them, you might realize that we have more things in common than you think.

 

Oh I care about everyone. I just got the impression that most people here are content with the type of quests we get and instead are training synchronous dancing or stacking ankhs into the sky

 

Well, what else are we supposed to do with the crap "content" we have now?

While I'm the kind of guy who will prioritize game-play over anything else, don't believe for a second that I'm content with anything currently in the game. If I'm supporting SotA, it's because I see potential, nothing more.

Some of the best video games in history are done in their entirety in less than 6 months. Even games that have more than 5-10 years to make can also succumb to shitty writing and bad design. Each dev team and project is different.

If there's one absolute in this is that no dev team ever starts implementing story and quests into the game until after their various game systems are in place. If they don't, then they're green (and most likely indie) and they learn pretty quickly why rushing to put it in the game is a terrible, terrible idea. Although, I'm pretty sure you know why, but if you want a more in-depth explanation, as a developer myself, I'd be more than happy to elaborate on the subject.

Take comfort that the story for SotA was planned out before and during the development of the game... which is more that can be said about a lot of video games. The 8 months will be dedicated to implementing that story by building scenes and scripting events and NPCs.

 

Sometimes it feels like 90% of the team is dedicated to housing and the remaning team gets scattered across everything else.

 

Ahh, I did that too! I keep hoping to find more notes like that, but so far in my travels that place has been the exception. How many places have you found notes in?

 

I haven't found many, but that may be because I don't venture too far into high level scenes by myself. If I see a settlement of high level Ebon Cultists, etc, I get mobbed and killed very easily

 

That's unfortunate. I was actually doing a video series exploring the lore of the world, but it is much more sparse than I was hoping for. Might have to put it off until further releases, where it will (hopefully) be more dense