Do you have questions for Lord British and the Dev Team? ? (Dev) Replied

Following on from the instalment plans discussed in last nights Dev Hangout (which I now know is 9pm UK time? doh!) regarding the possibility of allowing backers to upgrade to housing level.

You mentioned that this was a possibility once all the kickstarted backers have been migrated over to the SotA website.

My question is in two parts:

1. Can you tell us a little bit about how this will work?
2. Will you be implementing this for existing kickstarter backers with existing tiers before they move onto the post kickstarter tiers? ? so they can have the opportunity to get a house with all the goodies associated with that tier over a period of time? say the 6-12 months I suggested in previous post. e.g. I would be keen to upgrade to Citizen or Knight dependent on how the instalment plans work (as have limited disposable monthly income)

Thanks and looking forward to Dev hangout tonight.

 

Please oh PLEASE don't create "non-PvP areas." There can be areas exactly like the original UO where if you DO attack in PvP then the guards will proceed to whoop you. But the whole, "I can toggle a switch and suddenly I'm invulnerable" is EXACTLY what destroyed the original UO. That Felucca/Trammel crap destroyed the game instantly. If people don't want to play a game where you can be killed by other players, then they should go play WoW or something. Let us finally have this niche where we can be immersed in a realistic game. Don't bow to the children that don't want to have to worry about anything in the game.

In the original UO, before EA tried to make it appeal to 10 year olds, you didn't have "soulbound" items. You didn't have "safe" zones. (Even Lord British himself was ultimately ganked by a group that jumped out of the shadows.) But you also didn't have players that were ridiculously overpowered, or any way to tell if someone was a powerful warrior, or just a newbie. All of this is PRECISELY what made UO so amazing. PKs were dealt with (harshly) by the players themselves, and the game was all the more interesting for it. People were, as a general rule, polite - because they DID have to fear being ganked if they got stupid, or mouthy. "An armed society is a polite society."

Please, oh, please don't make this game appeal to the 10 year olds by giving them the ability to run and hide in "invulnerability" zones, which then turns the "PvP Zones" into nothing but killing fields. This is precisely what the Felucca/Trammel split of UO did, and I haven't played it since. In Trammel you were invulnerable, so that's where the children hung out and mouthed off, making it unbearable. But go to Felucca, where PvP was turned on, and it was now just a slaughter field. People waiting at the gates to kill anyone who came through. Anyone you saw would grab a gang of their buddies and murder you. And NOTHING you could do about it without a guild to follow you around everywhere you went. Again, if you don't have some "safe" place to run and hide while being invulnerable, you will simply be more polite. And when there's no safe place to hide, then vigilantes and bounty hunters will see to it that PKs learn a hard, hard lesson.

There was nothing wrong with the original rules of engagement for vanilla UO, so no need to change them. I cannot beg for this enough.

 

In the multiplayer game please hide all nameplates until the individuals interact. We should not know everyone's name until we are either introduced or otherwise interacted in a meaningful way. In this way we can tell who it is we don't know or aren't aquainted with and can go meet them, but if everyone's name is showing and my name is shown to everyone nobody will know anyone, and those wandering alone in the crowd will have trouble finding the few they do know.

 

If it is decided that people can upgrade their KS pledge to a Citizen or above, please remember the people who gave immediately those house limits and let us go before the upgraders after the KS campaign was over. I know that coming up with the money for Knight level was hard for me to do so suddenly.

I still like the UO earning of titles for those who did not receive one in the KS campaign. Including the ability to those titles to "decay" over time.

Thanks

LordG

 

Will the ones that want to be able to play SotA comparable to Ultima Online felucca during the time Richard owned the game? Can players set such a level of PvP?
I really hope SotA developers add such playstyle for the ones wanting it.

 

One of my favorite things about Ultima Online, which makes it my favorite online rpg ever, was the way that you could decorate your house with an amazing amount of attention to detail. Will we be able to set our tables with cutlery and dishes? Put our table and chairs where we want?

UO managed to keep the scale of items realistic. No giant forks or chairs the size of dump trucks. Everything was nicely human scaled, and you could interact with nearly everything. Will an attempt to steer clear of other games good looking houses that are totally useless except for storage, and go with unique and creative decorative possibilities?

That is what I most remember most fondly about UO, and am hoping it can be achieved in a similar fashion here, all these years later.