Owl's Head I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down (because I have to log out for the day)

Okay, I love R3 so far, and I wish it hadn't been released during the busiest work week I'm probably going to have all year so I could spend more time right now checking it out.

A couple of things:
-- Local chat seems a little too far? This is probably a matter of individual taste more than anything, but it's kind of spooky to hear people talking in my chat window from seemingly the entirely other side of town.
-- NPCs: it's now really really hard to talk to them or to say goodbye. I nurture a special hate for Thomas Strongbeard, who wouldn't comprehend that I wanted out of the conversation no matter how many times I told him "bye". It's also sort of tricky because of the player conversations happening everywhere: I'll get NPCs by mistake.

I wish I had more stuff to say, but I'm kind of blown away by how different it becomes when so many people are added to the mix! Just the creepy urgency of realizing that all the loot chests are already looted by the time you find them, the sense that "gee I'd better start buying stuff up quickly before IT'S ALL GONE," etc etc. If I'm writing about it at boring length it's because I REALLY WANT TO GO BACK AND PLAY MORE RIGHT NOW, but alas, job, adult responsibilities, ugh. Why can't I just live in New Britannia and yell at people in the bar as my job?

 

An idea i am considering is that people could go in and out of a "chat box" based on proximity. You walk in and automatically get into the local chat box (a few ingame meters). Chat area could be blocked by walls. Ill expand on this idea when i have time to test the current chat system xD

 

Glambourine, I was told today that if you log into the single player side, you can get stuff from the chests still (which you can, I tested that part) and when you then log out and into multi player, you will have all that stuff, (haven't tested that part yet, but seems a reliable source). So you can get some things to use, if you wanted to say, try the crafting.

 

Thanks for tips! I did end up getting to log in really, really late Friday night for an hour or so, and had a really wonderful time (although I felt sad that I was slightly less inclined to get into long gab-fests with befuddled NPCs, as more Turing-capable options were around. )

The performance stuff seemed A LOT better than R2 on my machine! Crafting seemed clearly better (I didn't really get to try it because I didn't log in on SPO), although I would have liked to see a merchant who sold some of the "gathered" resources so that there was a little more of a business loop (buy materials, manufacture, sell products) in the absence of gathering. (Maybe there was and I just didn't find him--the best merchant I found was Harry, the fence for Anton in Kingsport, who I made a point of visiting.)

Best moment though: after hanging out in a bar in Braemar talking to some players (with NPCs jumping in since I was playing the release before that was fixed, I think?) I heard from the One Honest Man in Braemar about the creepy "watcher" and went looking for it. Another player found it, we triangulated the thing, and then ran around chasing the creature back and forth like a creepy skittering soccer ball. It was kind of brilliant--this whole "let's go out and explore, let's go out and find something"--that's just what The Ultima Feeling Should Be, and although the game already felt like that to a large extent, something about that moment really sold the whole thing for me, made it feel for a second like the best of UO. Let's go out in the woods and have an adventure!

I'm almost sad combat is being added to the game in the next release--it feels like we've all been experiencing New Britannia in some strange Golden Age, before the fall, when you could walk from Owl's Head to Braemar without even carrying a weapon and just enjoy the journey. It's kind of sad to think that a bunch of skeletons are coming in to mess everything up

 

I just want to sheath my weapon with a simple key rather than having to open my toon and drag the weapon out of my hand..... So it doesn't look like I'm going around brandishing my sword all over the place....