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

On a completely separate note. I loved the bath house and casino in buccaneers den. can we have a Las Vagas themed city? where we can gamble our gold! would be super cool also to play texas holdem poker with game currency with other players!

 

FAMILIARS FOR MAGES


I though it might be cool to have a find familiar spell so a mage can get a bonded non-combat-like pet that has special abilities.

 

Has anyone mentioned farming yet? Not the endless grind, but growing one's own crops, tending livestock, and so on.

 

Isaiah i loved my familiar in D&D, I had a little viper called fang and he was SOOOOOOO cute (at least in my head)

 

<b>I. Game World:</b>

Dynamic: Changing weather and winds. Day to night and back again. Climate. Rain! Make the desert look and 'feel' like a desert.
Full: Leaves and grass moves to wind. birds singing. Candy for our eyes and ears.
~When I played Everquest2 and went to Feerot (a swampy area) for the first time, I literally swat my own ear due to a buzzing sound of a fly and then realized it was the game and I forgot I was wearing my headphones!! LOL.

Customizable: Not everyone will have a top of the line system. Give players an option to scale down the resource requirements.

Makes different areas for different types of players. A low stress-low reward area for the role-players and casual players. Make difficult areas for groups of players to play together and share rewards (plug-in a fair looting system here). Make very difficult and epic areas like dragons and such for "raids".

Player Killing vs non player killing. 2 servers! one is player vs enviorment. 2nd. anything goes! You will need multiple servers anyway.

<b>II. NPCs:</b> Give them an agenda and movement. Have them open shops, go gardening in their yards, walk the streets for a stroll. put them to bed at night for goodness sakes!!! Their poor feet! A lot of gamers find it annoying and <i>think</i> DEVs lazy when we see the NPCs just stand in one spot in town 24 hours a day and all they do is say "hello" as you walk by. Personally, I would rather you skip the NPC altogether if that's the case and put up a statue with a plaque. That would be more believable.

If there are going to be guards at the gates then make them guards!!! I have played countless games where I am a level 0 nobody and I am trying to run back to the gates before I die to that grizzly squirrel! I make it to the gates right on top of the guard and I die while the guard just continues staring in the distance. Have the guards attack anything hostile near them please. To avoid any exploits, have anything that the guard kill (or even hit) not drop any reward/kill credit/item.

<b>II.Skills:</b>
the 700 skill system from UO! Fantastic. But make the different avenues of skill distribution as <strong>balanced</strong> as possible. I mean, if I have 100 points in magic and want to be a "druid" then give the player something to go with it. Player controlling local weather for 20 minutes with /drizzle or /fog.

Make 1 avenue of skill progression just as viable and powerful as another. I <i>believe animal handling in UO was THE skill to have while others were not as useful. I think I had a 100 in Underwater Basket Weaving; I was not a very good fighter.

Make the skills exponential. I mean if my character only has 700 to distribute among 20+ skills or so, I have the option of being a jack of all trades with 30 in all skills or being an <i>artisan</i> in a (one) craft. For example:

Armor Wearing:
0 points: clothing (everyone) -- 2 points: animal hides -- 3 points: a buckler --- 5 points: leather
20 chain/magic leather/heavy shield -- 40 magic chain/plate --- 60 magic plate 80 exotic/unique
100 - THE ARMOR

Magic:
1. I can make a spark 10. I can light a match 20. I can light a torch 40. campfire 60. bonfire 80. house fire
100. Erupt a Volcano

Farming (seems to be popular in the thread):
1. I know what a seed is. 10. I can grow grass. 20. Flowers (pretty, but pretty much useless) 30. potatoes and apples. 50. wheat and corn 80. Magical reagents such as the old Garlic or Ginseng 100. Mandrake and Nightshade.

if the skills are to be supplemental, then there would be no reason to get a skill to 100 at the expense of 1-2 other possible skills, make the 100 skill points be worthwhile please.

<b>III.Emotes:</b>
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=emotes

We gamers love our characters, we grow them, water them, and put our time into them, help us make em look good! Clothing! Dyes! Different armor styles. please don't use the same model for 86 different sets of armor! I am unique! I want my character to at least <i>look</i> unique.

Unique names vs non-unique names? for the friends' list etc. use the account name and not the character name

Virtues? Yes please!! Two scoops! Just no avatar in multi-player please. That in itself would probably lead to more problems than it solves. Throughout the history of the series there was only one Avatar (that's why its capitalized, duh.) Maybe Richard can come up with a name for the thousands of characters that achieved all the virtues <i>after</i> the Avatar broke the ice in Ultima IV. (role play and back story plug-in here.)

<b>IV. Items</b> Other than the most basic of items such as a shirt, pants and boots, every, <i>every</i>, item should be consumable and disappear from existence after a time. In a game called Tibia I once created a house made from the boxes that i'd from the in-game mail system that I mailed to myself over and over again.

Take for example, Jon the armorer. If Jon the armorer makes 100 chain-mails a day in-game and those chainmails just get sold and traded and resold over and over again while Jon continues his quota of 100 armors a day, what happens? chain-mail becomes cheapened greatly and eventually worthless <i>unless</i> after a period of time or through wear and tear it "breaks" and disappears. This also includes money itself.

I have experience countless MMOs that have broken economies because there will always be players that horde their money and sell a few items items for an exuberant amount of money and eventually flood the market with said money. In this case, its the exact opposite of Jon's armor problem, now his chain mail armor are going for 2 million pieces of gold, each! SO, now I am a newcomer to SotA and after 3 days I got my armor skill to meet the chain-mail requirement, but in only 3 days killing grizzy squirrels I have only made 100 gold. Now what?

This problem exists in a way here in the USA, our 1 cent pennies: each penny costs our government just under 3 cents to make. We are sentimental about our pennies. Don't touch them!

<b>top 7 things gamers hate in video games</b>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNBFbLWC2i0

Probably to be continued...

 

Vanity items.

Its been in more games already like Terarria and even WoW now (at least I thought I read something about it) that you can wear cloth items just for the looks. Like your first armor for example or just like some role playing costume. This will hide your real fighting gear (might be nasty in PvP, things don't look what they are) but you can look awesome.

I would love to see this feature in game.

 

*ANGEL AND DEMON GHOSTS*

I mentioned this on the thread about liking LB idea about the Dante's Inferno, but I feel it is better placed here.

IF GHOSTs ARE AN OPTION:

If the ghost can materialize from the ethereal plane or whatever maybe the ghost of a truly virtuous person could glow or have more of an appearance of an angel, whereas the other end of the extreme the truly evil character's ghost appears more like some kind of menacing poltergeist or spectre. And the people who are in between just have normal ghosts.

 

I like LB's suggestion to have an ingame notebook where you can cut and paste snippets of dialog. This will be better then just having a arrow pointsing your way to the next quest. Also Ill allways have the notes from what that random gypsy told me about looking behind the tree in Yew for the secret tunnel.

 

Short summary: Necessary exhaustible travel supplies, that you can restock at any town/inn. An obvious choice would be food.

I like the feeling that traveling long distances is an epic journey that requires some preparation (not a lot, just hitting a general store to grab some travel gear), that your resources get "run down" over time, and that you can be totally "refreshed" by hitting a town. Make it dangerous and difficult to go too long without hitting a town, so when we do go on those long journeys, there is meaning and difficulty to them.

An elaboration on my food idea is here: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=hunger

 

Robes like in UO Reason:they hide what armor you have on. Exampleker comes running up not knowing your in full plate armor does very little damage you have a hallie hits him hard. Would make it not as safe to just run up and hit someone!

 

Crafting of not only paintings but also murals multi-colored rugs tapestries stenciling and colors to paint the smooth areas of your house.

 

Some interesting ideas folks; I like the Tapestries suggestion, Robes, and Familiars--amongst others! Very cool suggestions.

 

Robes, but they shouldn't be able to hide full plate armour and helmets, this makes no sense.

*Content removed for violation of Forums Rules* ~ FireLotus, eating and drinking should be made necessary. You shouldn't die if you've starved for a long time, but sure should get temporary decreasy in stats and hp/mana/stamina regen.

 

False flag tactics are valid, so robes with hoods to obscure your armor makes perfect sense. An open face helm would work better with this, since otherwise you'd look like Doctor Doom from the Fantastic Four comics.

 

I would like to have one race like LB wants but very diverse options like half elf half orc half dwarf should be easy i hope to do since it can be set up in char generation example orc skin elf skin we have height any way so tall thin half elves short thick half dwarves That would add to the diversity

 

@Jothyn,

Tapestries showing your exploits could be a nice in-game reward for achievements. Say you get the "troll-slayer" achievement; you're rewarded with a tapestry telling your story of slaying a troll.

 

In regards to the robes. In UO the robes covers most of the body didn't cover hands and feet so if you were paying attention and looked you could see armor when you got close enough face was in shadow so you couldn't see what you were wearing on head.

 

I was watching a retrospective on youtube of the history of MMOs and they were talking about some stuff relating to Ultima Online, which got me thinking.

Are they planning to bring any features that were cut from that game into this one? UO originally had an actual ecosystem in place, where progressively bigger and more dangerous animals would feed on others and reproduce, so if you wiped out a species of animal, migration would happen as their predators looked elsewhere for food. The idea that this is an actual world; where the AI live lives of their own regardless of players and quests is a very interesting idea. Obviously the chance for abuse exists; the feature was cut in the first place due to players just enacting murder on everything, but surely there's a compromise to be found here?

 

@SpaceKing Other folks have suggested something similar as well: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?topic=emergent-scenarios . It'd be very interesting to see some of those suggestions realised.

 

****GUILD SPARING BE NON LETHAL****

Can you guys make it so that Guild Sparing is non-lethal?

Instead of dealing a killing blow let them stay at 1 hitpoint, and have some animation showing that they formally give up.