Offline Shroud Chronicles (your offline experiences)

I'll begin in saying "You do you and I'll do me, but maybe we can share offline plans"
(I don't mind that some players modify offline files or hack our offline program to get what they want from it, but that's just not me)

As many may know, I'm currently engaged with a game offline (sota). The last time I seriously tried this, I found that I couldn't overcome our highest content of that time. Our game has changed quite a bit since then. I think it was about 2 to 1+1/2 years ago I attempted that side of our game. I was trying to overcome the high content with mid level enhanced equipment of that time and I just couldn't do it. I didn't bother with the "companions" back then, which is another thing I'm hoping adds power to my play.

I don't have the computer I played that game with, so this is a new game offline I'm currently trying to make my way in, with the hopes that our newer enhancements will make the difference I need, but there's also been allot of higher content added since that time.

With that past game in mind, I've begun going strait into crafting using agriculture to help fuel all the exp needed to make the equipment.

My hands don't work as well as some players and I use Auto Swing quite a bit, so it may take me a while to initially gain as much as most, as it takes a tremendous amount of adventure exp to get a powerful enough Auto Swing character to take on higher content with. Eventually, a few attack buttons must be added, yet the Auto Swing must always come first in building such a character.

Thus far, I've been able to achieve my goals of buying up all the lots in Kingsport and planting crops on all of it. I don't pack the planters in, I spread them out to make for quick and easy planting/watering/harvesting. My agriculture set up takes me about 1+1/2 hours to plant and around 1 hour for each watering of just around 6000 cotton plants.



Daily shipping container turn-ins are how I've been getting most of my adventure exp. I'm hoping that daily quests will add to that.

Please feel free to share your own experiences with offline no matter how you wish to play it.

Just because I'm trying to play it from a normal play doesn't mean you have to. There's no morals involved in offline play to adhear to, it's whatever you find that's fun to you that matters.

Sometimes I think our discussions can seem way too serious instead of way too fun. I like the fun part and I hope you do too, whatever that is to you.

So far the cooking quest at Castle Atos... she won't accept the ingredients I provided from the list offline isn't perfect, so I expect some disapointments along the way.
~Time Lord~

 

one of the items the turn-in box asks for is the list itself.

 

Big thx Alley!
I made that same silly mistake online before too I was never much of a "quest player" throughout my time here in sota, but offline seems to have made me now very interested in it.

I think it's time for me to share Quincy's fate, tell a hunter about the wolfpack, meet Capt. Kinsey and tell Abignail about Charlotte ~TL~

 

Published on Youtube April 14 2022...

Made you look and makes other's look too?
I think that's an important function offline has~TL~

 

A big plus in offline mode is the armor variety. I really like the armors in offline mode. You can get some nice looking armor from even the basic salesman in Ardoris. Stuff like Royal Founder gear, Elven Archer gear. It looks really nice. The main drawback to offline mode is the lack of player housing makes towns look a bit silly and lonely (massive empty fields around a small town center). While online has a lot of variety in housing that fills up the cities with interesting and sometimes odd looking sites, one drawback is the armor has no variety (that I have found so far). Apart from the virtue armor, it is just Leather pants +1, or leather pants +5, or leather pants +15, etc., where they all just look the same.

 

He says that it would be more fun if he didn't have to read.

 

Yes, and he didn't get past the starter area, but it wasn't bad exposure.

I'm begining to believe we need a pre-built character that has a limited life span in order to host game reviewers, so they could get into our deeper content instantly. Something that has "Guest" written as their name or for their guld name and then enter our world in the most popular & great looking area. Maybe an invulnerable character that could kill nothing and get attacked by nothing (or somehow limit their involvement). I think such a character could even be useful and some fun for some of our normal players to just take a walk about with.

Maybe such a character would/could be automatically dropped into an open hunting party, who checked the "accepting guests" option (a new option like that).

The thing is, is that I just don't think our game reviewers are giving good reviews of our game because they don't or can't spend enough time to provide a good review, and thus make hit pieces because they can't easily understand our game. I mean we have a real tech heavy game here in sota that does require allot of reading and study in many ways.

Our monsters are our lures as well as our landscapes, while our combat can't be quickly understood and thus stands in the way of good reviews.

Our game dose not advertizement well when it is sought to be advertized, because our game doesn't make it easy for our game to be advertized well as a game. "It's thick" and not easily gotten through to give a good review of it.

Our fan-boys are not game reviewers, thus no one goes to their channels looking for a new game as much as dedicated reviewers are able to attract those potential players who are game shopping.
~Time Lord~

 

I actually made a newbie alt the other day just to see how things had changed from a "new player experience" point of view. I did it online, rather than offline, but still relevant for the purpose of what's being discussed here regarding reviewers. The standard expectation of log in, create character, customize appearance and now you're off was fine - but the "where do I go, what do I do" started almost immediately, and the solace bridge experience I actually found quite off-putting. I had random weapons in my inventory given to me (rather than finding them, which I liked) but regardless of what I choose, I have to learn an archery skill to open the gate? Why must I do this? Seems the least intuitive thing to begin with especially since game's stingy with arrows early on. And there is a LOT of dialogue off the bat, and I kept accidentally clicking Charlotte and opening dialogue when I didn't mean to, and well, I felt very "shoehorned along" in a way that I did not like.

My original experience of Sota was when you had 3 different starting scenarios based on your initial virtue questions (this was cool! I made characters to try them all!) and it started you with weapon/skills appropriate to your choices. And then there was a lot of wandering solace bridge killing random things, picking stuff up, and clicking on stuff before wandering to Soltown (there wasn't outskirts back then). Later this changed to start you in Highvale/Blood River/Solace bridge depending on choices, which separated new people starting together and I wasn't as big a fan, but I mean, it worked. I felt much more free to roam/explore instead of "go here, talk to this person, click this blue glowy thing, ok now go here, learn a skill you'll never use and put it on your bar, then walk down here and try to find this guy and click the boat". I found it very offputting. And then I got to the outskirts and it was more go here, talk to this person, talk to that person. I think we've over-egged it a bit with the "guide the new person" to the point where we are detracting from the very open world exploratory feel that made me fall in love with the game at the beginning. I wandered off on my way to Soltown and ended up in perennial trail, and then the swamps, and stumbled across things, only went to town once my inventory was overloaded and it was like "oh yea I'm meant to talk to this guy." I'd already spent loads of time fighting road skeletons and whatnot. I had a lot of fun "doing it wrong." I think the current new player experience is far too forced/linear and not at all indicative of future gameplay which is anything but. Just my 2p.

If I was playing this game as a reviewer, based on the first 30 minutes, I'd be like "boring, linear, lots of reading, clunky interface and systems aren't explained." Why do I have an xp pool? How does this work? I'm losing exp training skills? I know there's a manual, nobody's going to read the manual. Or all the books. They want to kill stuff and see numbers go up and figure it out from there, which is exactly what we did back in the day without all the handholding and when you learned the things it was like, discovery.

I had the unique experience a few weeks ago of trying to get one of my friends to play. She was over at our house, sat next to me using Scoffer's computer and I was watching where she was getting stuck. She was having a horrible time with it similar to how I've mentioned above. When she went to outskirts she's like "Where did Charlotte go?" She just poofed with no seeming explanation. She asked how do I get the boat back to where I was (you can't). In the outskirts itself, she ended up swimming in the river within the first 5 minutes having fallen in and unable to get back out without the long boring swim back to town due to the high ravines. The shape/layout of solace bridge outskirts was very difficult for her, lots of pointless running past nothing because you couldn't go straight where you wanted to go. She gave it a good four or five hours, then declared she was "bored" and "couldn't find where she was meant to go" and "I'm so weak". Deck system made absolutely no sense at this stage and a lot of the skills it started you with weren't useful and you didn't have much to click (she wanted to fling fireballs at things but didn't understand how to develop to that point to "be a mage" - in the old days, if you started path of truth, you had a bit of starting skills for this).

She was going to bail. I went with the nuclear option - dragged her out of there, went and got her some xp, and explained about skill training and pools (like a 2 hr lecture about how everything worked while we were just bashing through some Tier 3s together to get her some familiarity). We went to the trainer and learned some things. She hit the dummy for a while, then declared she was "bored" and well, she's not really been back on since.

There was a LOT of feedback during this session, and I caught myself several times having to apologize for things, or defend things, or explain that things would be later evident, but at the end of the day despite it all, I see this again and again. I can't get people into it. And I know if I could just get them past all the painful bits they'd probably stay, but most people I try to get in the game bail after the first day. And when I thought about it I realized, I didn't have to go through this when I started - I started with fire arrow and a few other skills already learned and didn't have to figure out pool and skills and trainers immediately, I ran around nuking stuff and having fun. I think that's what missing, is it isn't FUN in the first 30 minutes, its tedious.

 

^^

 

Yes!

Yes again That's a great thing that is missing "wondering free, uninhibited of any obligations".

I was a big fan of that too.

Yep

It does make me feel like an Army Drill Instructor wanted me brain dead following orders.

Hup 2,3,4 Hup 2,3,4, "Get down!... Get up! What is your name privet?"

Built for their tasks. I think it's the "soldier style intoduction" of it that's a put-off. I mean, I do feel like a recruit with an obligation to serve.

This touches a subject I've been thinking quite a bit about, as it touches so many other subjects.

Lord British the Garriott has always said that he wanted "you" to feel that you are the character on our PC screen. That worked with UO, because there was not much on the heads-up display or on the sceen until much later, long, long after character creation. Much of it in the begining was boxing, running away or auto swing/auto-attack, which freed a players mind to focus on the character's figure itself, to see how "you" were doing. I think SOTA leads our eyes away from our characters through placing the major importance for the player's eyes to be focused on either the buttons on the computer, the card/buttons below the character, the health bar in the upper left side of the screen with the character's name on it or the health bar of the thing you're fighting, "instead of on the character itself as UO did".

Melee was much of what any new character did no matter which skills they chose in UO, due to skills not being deadly enough to keep running-no-touch kills going, as bandages needed to be aplied and waited for their effect. The entire proccess in UO was very "look only or mostly at the character" intensive.

In real life I don't see allot of buttons with options for dictating my actions, so it's very difficult for me to look at our SOTA screen and all it has there, "and see me" as the character on the screen. The me here in SOTA seems like a robotic me, as opposed to the more closely connected me I saw myself as in UO. That robotic feel, in combination with our Military Drill Instructor Intro mentioned before, only increases that robotic feel.

There was a topic here in the forums where we had been discussing "New, Inate Skills" and possibilities of there even being an entire tree where nothing but additional innate skills could more define or specialize our character. (I can't remember which thread that was but...), I can't help but to think that such a tree of skills couldn't aide the new character experience, "without even seeing or needing to see the skill trees, the cards or even the exp pools".

I think we need an auto-swing option tree of innate skills, with a default that allows the player buttonless melee combat, while also including our card based skills yet hiding them and their selection, thereby allowing a hidden computer hand to choose which melee special attack the character would enact...
I remember back in our early releases where I had a 5 card popup deck I would play. It was only 5 cards to choose from and they changed or replaced quite fast back then. Sometimes I'd just allow the cards to do whatever they wanted while I just hit the #1 on my keyboard, not caring which attack card I was pressing the #1 for. I just simply didn't pay any attention to it all. I did find that, that was quite fun to be surprized by whatever my character would seemingly choose to do, virtually on his own, with me just tapping all the while on #1. If you take away the hitting the #1 part and just have that automatic, then you have what I'm thinking about, "how that hidden innate skill tree would opperate".

((In an RP way, why would we be choosing magical when we came from Earth to New Brit. In this light, magic should be discovered through a trainer to be able to perform on "this magical planet".))

Bluntly said and all of the above in a nut shell, I think we need to auto-attack in this way until "we coose" to become more refined. Certainly this would not involve magical skills or buff cards of any kind, yet those "hidden innate skills" could be balanced against card combat progression.

Then, once the player chose to become more refined, the player could option out of the auto-innate-tree, get a refund of whatever adventure skill exp points from whatever they secretly had, thus surprizing the player with a good bit of exp to use for their further progress in the card combat we have, instead of being a melee innate skill tree character. But all the while, this has brought the eyes of the player to have become more associating themselves as the character on the screen, having had their eyes fucused on the character, wondering which special move he would choose to do while in auto-innate, while transitioning the player into our game in a more better understanding comfortable way.

It's not a compete thought or idea, but you get the intent or jest of it.

This has happened to me more times than I care to mention, as I have touted SOTA in a few internet cafe' here in Thailand and met with terrible feedback.

As mentioned, that innate skill tree thingy could buffer or cushion some of that.

I totally agree. Whether in UO or our SOTA earlier releases, it was better than it currently feels.

I always enjoy reading your input!!!
~Time Lord~

 

Another game reviewer that couldn't get past the new player content...

 

Well first of all that person in the video apparently didn't read the actual description of the Rewards Program, and was stating all this completely incorrect information....

The last 2 times I sat and watched and observed a new streamer playing our game for the very first time, they got through the Battle of Solace Bridge just fine. Then headed off to Solace Bridge Outskirts and then they experimented and ran around and talked to npc's and did quests and experimented some more. In general, from their own comments while streaming, they were enjoying the game. But we also had people in the stream helping them and answering a few questions. The last one I watched was highly amusing, when the player was blown away by the fact you could chop down trees... (hehe!).

For whatever reason, some people keep pointing a finger to the 2 starter scenes and saying "That's the problem!". I just do not personally feel that IS the problem. It's probably a combination of many, many, and various other things.

The whole removal of the Isle of Storms I hate more than anything. It's like the entire heart of the game was ripped out (I get, at the time, why they did that though). But "supposedly" when they changed it, their metrics of a person staying longer improved when they changed that. But that also doesn't mean anything. This could be because of so many different reasons for that. I still do like my idea of this: New Player Selection Screen I *think* that would help channel people to the proper way the player wants to play the game. But I don't know...

The only way to get actual and meaningful feedback from new player is to actually watch them, and then speak to them, and help them. These are just my own personal opinions and observations.

 

a very important aspect indeed. a couple years ago i went to a gamer/streamer event and had a booth to show off the game we were working on. i had a playtest setup at the booth and was able to observe players and hear their feedback as they experienced it for the first time. was extremely enlightening and allowed us to better tailor certain aspects based on the information i gathered.

 

All I can do is offer these two recent examples,

• The first from April 14 2022
• The second from March 19 2022

You point to two you remember attending that were successful and all I can offer in retort are these 2 actual recent examples. Were they or were they not what we would want a review to look like?

I think you and Anpu touched on elements, some things important that made the difference, which point back to our Hospitaller program, which had it's hay days and then dwindled and the highly successful "Wired Magazine UO Story" of May 1998:
https://www.wired.com/1998/05/ultima/

Maybe we should revive our Hospitaller program and have an option for game reviewers (and newbies alike) to be (like the open party option mentioned) as a point of entry with prebuilt character for learning/teaching/reporting/reviewing purposes, using a temp chr as mentioned here below.

What's different, is that instead of the guest being limited to a game review based on our opening few instances, they would be coupled with one of our Hospitallers who is online who could lead them into more noteworthy and exciting content.

Another option comes back to the "Master Blaster" consept:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...master-blaster-streaming.169828/#post-1329461

Maybe there's a better way, through an option which allows the new player/reviewer/reporter/guest to visually wach a Hospitaller playing our game, with an alert to the Hospitaller that he is being watched. Then the Hospitaller would act as the demonstrator. Maybe the guest and the Hospitaller could then be chat linked through the chat box, which would thus accomidate their needs of either new character building for the newbie or tour guide into deeper content for the game reviewer or just chat about the game in general. Maybe an option like that would be "Speak with a Player".

For instance the Hospitaller could choose to run solo, hunting through some exciting content, or call up some friends and demonstrate a hunting party etcetera.

This sounds allot like what @kaeshiva pinted to and similar to how UO fashioned it's entry:

~Time Lord~

 

Every time I create a new character, I always wonder why not have the following -

1. the character starts out with their inventory open and won't close until they equip a weapon.
2. they have 1 of each main type of weapon - bow, sword, polearm, staff and wand.
3. there is a "helper text" window that says they need to pick a weapon type, with a description of what their basic properties and capabilities are and how to use them (that latter part for wands and staves)
   
4. they can not move into aggro range with that first zombie until they have equipped a weapon
5. They automatically get the basic skill in whatever weapon type they equip - for staff and wand they get bludgeon plus fire arrow - or perhaps all of the "arrow" skills. I would add "Gust" also for air but it does no damage. The deck would automatically be populated with those arrow skills.
   
6. Finally the learning a skill thing with the automaton could simply be changed to allow them to pick from their chosen skill tree.

Oh, and fix the Charlotte thing so that she actually follows you to the boat...

 

I’ll assume after you unlock the gate, you run straight to the boat, ignoring all the hostile creatures on the bridge?

In all the times I’ve made a new character just to test bugs, never seen her not follow you to the bridge.

 

Xee made this recent totally awsome vid of noteworthiness from Feb 20, 2022:


Blenda had this noteworthy vid from Jan 17, 2022:


James Groves a streamer gamer reviewer with only 8 subscribers offered this look Jan 22, 022:


What is found to be most common in all the reviews of our game is that they all are reviewing our begining instances, while our fan base promotional vids bring the viewer/visitor more into the heart of our game, which I think is far more compelling that our begining instances.

The gaming reviewer above has only has 104 subscribers.

This one above has only 62 subscribers.

I'm guessing our game isn't unique enough of splashing the water enough to have attracted any of the important reviewers with massive subscribers, so we don't yet have one of those in 2022 to offer here as an expample.

My entire offline journey has been to see if there's any way to better use our offline game to better lead players to our online game, or better monitize either mode of play. The other element of continued SOTA success being broadening it's player base. I consider it's player base having changed from when it was first funded, to it's player base of today, which is a core number of tech players.

It's difficult for SOTA to compete in the tech player niche, because it's a smaller niche that those gamers who play (for instance) Grand Theaft Auto, which can be played by the litterally brain dead. Our current player base is certainly smaller that the larger player who first founded and funded our game.

Our game is about to have added competition soon within our own market share (Ultima Fan Base). I'm extremely happy Chris is involved with that as it will mean great things for SOTA. BUT, it will also bring the major gaming reviewers back to either write another death blow review of our game (as it's being currently painted by game jounalists), or better seeing what we have built here and it's true worthiness of good game review... YET... our best gaming reviews have never been in our begining instances.

Our game is about to have a direct competitor in our own market share audience, but that also means our game will also be coming under the spotlight and microscopes of game reviewers, so we need our game to be ready for that very nice or very harsh advertizement asset.

We need to put on our best thinking hats on in every suggestion we make from here to there with only that thought in mind.

There's a good wave coming if we better prepare or a bad wave coming if we just allow things to remain the same.

Thank about it!
" Please "
~Time Lord~

 

I usually clean-up any hostile stragglers. I also clearly remember seeing Charlotte about 1/2 way up the short path to the main road.

 

Can you take a video of Charlotte not following you? I’ve just never seen that happen.

 

If I can reproduce it.