R14 Postmortem rough transcript & minutes

0:01 FireLotus. Thanks to everyone for joining the hangout. They’re delving into Release 14, giving a preview into Release 15, discussing other topics, and also giving incentives for people to be in the chat room. People who are in chat should use their forum names so the chat names and forum names can be matched up. Turns it over to Lord British.

0:43 Lord British. Thanks to everyone for joining the hangout as well as supporting the developers as they build the world for everyone. He also wishes thanks to the development team for having a game that has gone live on a monthly basis, on schedule for each release, and now live 24/7 on Steam Early Access, with no unscheduled downtown. That’s a lot better than other games that have been coming out in the last couple of months. Big MMO-type games typically have a lot of difficulty shipping and remaining stable. He’s proud of the development team, and of the playing community for supporting them through this period. Turns it over to Starr.

2:42 Starr. One of the things that’ll be done as they do more hangouts, to incentivize the player community to join in and ask questions, is giving out prizes. Holds up a DeathAdder Chroma box. Four physical prizes and five or six digital prizes will be given out as the kickoff for this. Chris, sitting next to Starr, drinks from a Coke can nonchalantly. The first prize is a DeathAdder Chroma mouse from one of their new hardware partners, Razor. The mouse lights up in all sorts of colors and can be customized. Lum the Mad – Scott Jennings – will be selecting names from the chat room to determine the prize winners.

3:31 Scott. The winners will be picked by an incredibly scientific process known as picking a random number and matching it with a name in chat. The winner for the first prize is Dominus. Starr waves the box for the mouse off-camera, and FireLotus does jig supportively. Lord British remains stoic. The prize will be sent through the mail.

3:55 Starr. Just like they have Alien Effects support in for Alienware, another partner, they’re working on Chroma support in so Razor devices will light up and show game state like they do with Alienware. Chris puffs up and smiles. Starr holds up the box again and taps on it with his fingers. That’s why the prize is especially cool.

4:10 Chris. Soon you’ll have a dance party on your mouse.

4:13 Starr. Yes. Thanks Lum. Moving beyond prizes – R14 was one of their most ambitious releases. Chris turns back to drinking from his Coke can. It’ll only be topped by R15, which will be based on Unity 5.

4:32 Chris. That’s a big announcement, he notes.

4:35 Starr. They hinted about that, though. But it is a big announcement. He set up Chris for saying that. Starr smiles at Chris. Chris grimaces, nonplused. Release 15 was a very ambitious release for them because they introduced a lot of fundamental systems – encumbrance, banks, pledge rewards, and a major overhaul of the crafting system which involved materials that give different effects on the items a player would make. Because of that, there are issues to iron out. There are still some with harvesting and crafting which they’re still working to solve. They’ve resolved a few of those, but there are still some outstanding. They’re working on one with the recipe book, but they’re not sure they’ll be able to fix that until later. But if someone starts a new character, and they’re careful not to buy recipes marked “disabled,” they should be okay. Overall, they’re pleased with what they were able to accomplish in R14; they’re excited with everyone being hooked up with their pledge rewards, being better able to see what housing will look like in the final game, as players are choosing what houses they’ll actually be using rather than just the biggest or strangest housing available to them. Turns it over to Chris, who he addresses as Mr. Spears.

6:26 Chris. Every release is going to be bigger than the previous release. Earlier it might have not been as obvious, but it’s going to be more obvious going forward. They’ve had more hotfixes and patches put out than before. Some bugs can slip through, because they’re a small team, and they only come up in odd situations, like one player coming in, then another follows him in, then the first player leaving, and a third player coming in. The recipe book fix will come, just it may not be in the form of a hotfix to the current release.

7:30 Starr. That will definitely fixed for Release 15 one way or the other.

7:37 Chris. Internally, it’s a bit painful for them to do hot fixes, because they’re going through the transition to Unity 5 this release. They’ve done some more testing on that, some things look better, its more stable. This whole switch will be done for Release 15, which will be a bit rough, because they’ll be taking a couple of steps back to take about ten steps forward.

8:11 Starr. At this point, they’ll start answering questions, before they get on to the second prize.

8:20 FireLotus. As a reminder, in addition to the questions they take from the front page posting, they also take live questions from the chat room. It’ll be easier to find in chat if they’re marked with “Question:” in front of them. They should also be kept short, so as not to hurt her brain by making her think too much. The first one is from Baron Drocis Fondorlatos, who wants to know whether R15 will have stealth, and whether the dev team can go over a bit how stealth mechanics will work and how players can counter-act stealth attempts.

8:56 Chris. Stealth will be in. Right now the only questions left for the first pass of the system will be how it’ll appear to other players, and whether the stealthed player will be visible. Two things will be in for Release 14 – Vanish and other Moon Magic spells – which aren’t exactly stealth skills, but will allow a player to turn invisible. It’ll have different effects in PvE and in PvP. In PvE, it’ll basically be an impact on the distance that a player is aggro’d on by the enemies, so you’ll be able to sneak right by them, just due to the shorter aggro distance. The stealth will however be broken by a lot of things – for example, if you get aggro’d on by a different enemy, if you take damage, or if you take actions. In PvP, there’s still some questions – for example, whether they should show anything at all to the other player, or just make the player completely invisible. There are some problems with how stealth works in other games – for example, turning on a GLD bug for their video card to see the players in stealth mode. They might show players to some extent, just with a kind of predator type effect.

10:20 Starr. In addition to Moon Magic, the Light Armor tree will also have some stealth skills. Sun Magic is meant to be the counter-point to Moon Magic, and the school will have some spells that can undue stealth effects. There’s nothing finalized, but some of the things they’ve talked about include the Light spell maybe having some effect on it, and AoE damage breaking you out of stealth. There’ll definitely be ways for players to discover other players in stealth, and break them from it.

11:05 Chris. There are two extremes they can go to. Tries to think of the name of a certain game. Starr. Shadowbane. Chris. He knew it ended in –bane. In that game, there was a class that had stealth in it, where you couldn’t find the player who was under a stealth mode at all, and they could easily kill you. As it comes in Release 15, they’ll be going in the other extreme, where if you’re under stealth, and someone is actively looking for you, they’ll probably be able to find you or reveal you. You’ll be able to tap target players, so if you click on where another player is in order to attack, you’ll be able to break them out of stealth mode. It’s really for ambushing in PvP, and in PvE, of course, it’ll be used for getting around enemies. One of the other skills that’ll be going in under the Moon Magic is a Teleport skill like Blink, except you’ll be able to teleport directly behind them, facing their back, ready for a Sneak Attack. This can be combined with Vanish to create a potent attack on someone. A player would cast Vanish, then use this teleport spell, and then perform a Sneak Attack. But if they’re trying to find you, they’re going to find you.

12:43 Starr. That one probably won’t be in R15. Chris, perplexed, expresses his dismay. Chris. It’s going in. Defiant. Ignore Starr. Smiles. Notes that he’s an eternal optimist.

13:00 FireLotus. The next question is from Blood0men, who has had some concerns about the unavailability of housing lots in Release 14, and wants to know how it’ll be addressed in future releases.

13:12 Chris. Better. Starr. They’re absolutely aware of the problem. Going forward, every future release will be adding more land, more scenes, and more lots for players to place their homes. For Release 15, they’ll have at least one story town, and maybe two. Additionally, the wilderness around the main towns will have at least the same density of player towns that you see in the Hidden Vale in the current release. That means there’ll be somewhere between 20 and 25 player towns. And, while the ones in the Vale only have village and town lots, some of the new ones may include city lots and row lots as well. In any case, that will mean a ton more housing lots available if everything goes according to plan. Cautiously. Which it often doesn’t.

14:38 Lord British. He’s sure it will. Starr. Yes. Chris smiles. Readies to turn it back over to FireLotus for more questions. They need to do another prize before they go on. Chris incredulously questions the rate at which they’re giving prizes out. There are nine prizes that need to be given out.

14:59 Starr. This prize is digital. Demonstrates that he’s not holding any box with his skillful miming abilities. Its $10 of add-on store credit.

15:08 Scott. The winner is Sean Silverfoot.

15:15 Starr. Congratulations to the winner.

15:21 Chris, interrupting, as Starr slyly slides a Plantronics box onto the table. On housing, the dev team will be running some ideas by the Dev+ backers to get some feedback on current designs. One will be about on how they’ll be selling lots in the game once it goes live.

15:56 Starr. The overall goal is ways they can meter out and increase fairness. They have a few interesting ideas they want to discuss with Dev+. For the last few releases, they’ve been so heads down that they haven’t been leveraging the power of their Dev+ group, but they’ll be making a conscious effort to do more of that in the future. They’ve started this just recently by giving the Dev+ group some information on the game’s pledge distribution. They’ll be doing more by this Friday. Turns it over to FireLotus.

16:52 FireLotus. The next question is from John Redbeard, who wants to know about resources – their quantity and respawn rate – whether it’s where the dev team wants it to be, and what players can expect basic items to cost in terms of resource costs.

17:12 Starr. In general, any numbers for anything are best guesses, which they’ll later need to iterate and test against. He wouldn’t advise anyone to take the level of density of nodes, or their yields, as permanent things. All of that will also be affected when crafting skills come online, which they hope to have a first pass of in Release 15. Right now, the basic functionality is in, without any of the tools or skills having any effects on the outcome. In R15, both tools and skills will have an effect on the length of time it takes to gather, the kinds of yields that players will get, and how easy they’ll be to find.

18:21 Lord British. Even to the degree that they might be lucky, and the state of one of the resources might feel correct to players at this point, this needs to be put in a broader context come later in the development process. Some resources will be rare in some parts of the world and common in other parts. Right now the world is tiny and they want everything to be available, so they’re spawning things in zones for their testing use, and the same resources might not even be there, or might be radically reduced in those locations, for the final game. Players shouldn’t take any of this as a reflection of how it will be in the final game.

18:58 Chris. When you’re early in a game design during development, there’s a million variables that are interdependent. Right now, it’s pretty simple. Things are somewhat placed appropriately based on travel time between them, and how they expect people to collect thing. But there are a lot of variables, and not everything is nailed down. For R15, a little more of it will be; it’ll start to feel more like a crafting system, and not just a feeling that players can just grab some valuable materials sitting there waiting for them to pick up. Meaningful crafting skills, the effects of tool use, and the length of respawns, will all start to come in. Naturally, as these systems start coming in, everyone should realize the game will start to feel less like a laid back “theme park” – and some people might start to find these activities more tedious than they were before. For instance, gathering time will be going up significantly – though there’ll also be a skill for reducing gathering time. They’re also going to be doing a lot of work with balancing the resources over the next few releases.

20:36 FireLotus. There’s another crafting question from rxv, who wants to know if there’ll be a crafting skill, where items could be broken down into resources for crafting purposes.

20:50 Starr. There’s no final design for that, but it’s definitely on the roadmap, since they definitely want something like that in the game. It’ll probably appear closer to summertime. Expect more details in a couple of releases from now.

21:03 Chris. The thing they would hope to avoid is someone creating 97 daggers and then selling them all to a merchant. They’ll definitely want to get away from that – whether it’s to make something, break it down, and re-use it, or to just take an item and enhance it. Starr. Next.

21:33 FireLotus. The next question is from Kendrick Darrow, who would like to know how accessible the Novia map will be in R15, and whether housing will be available on it.

21:41 Starr. The housing question was already answered. As a reminder: at least one or two named story towns will be in the release, and in addition, there’ll be between 20 and 25 player towns – so, lots of housing.

22:00 Live stream suddenly goes silent as Starr continues to talk. Chris drinks from his Coke can as Starr is talking and emoting with his hand. Chris leans in on his hand, and then leans back. Lord British begins to talk and gesture with his hand very seriously about a probably compelling topic.

23:02 Lord British, as the sound comes back on. He was just looking at some pictures of the south-eastern quadrant of the Novia map, and because of the level crafting and the rich detail on it, he thought he was looking at an adventure map. It wasn’t until he re-read the post that he realized it was the overland map.

23:39 Scott. The audio is down.

23:41 Starr. Chat said they lost audio. Lord British. It now says its back. Starr. Okay.

23:47 Lord British. He’s excited that the team is putting out such an incredibly quantity and quality of playspaces to explore in the next few releases.

24:07 Chris. Abe deserves a shout out for the map. He had the exact same experience – he looked over Abe’s shoulder, and, thinking it was an adventure map, was concerned that there weren’t that many places to hide or any PvP spots. Abe then made sure he knew it was the overland map. A lot of the new tools are helping out a lot.

24:58 Lord British. Players are going to love it. There was a big debate on how to execute the overland map, between a paper style map and a 3D modeled one. The reason these debates happened was because they really weren’t achieving the quality they wanted on either side of that fence. That was one of the biggest back-and-forth debates on the whole project. Just this week, on seeing the Novia map, they realized the debate was going to be over, because the map looks so good that everyone will be excited about playing in it.

25:48 Starr. They’re giving out some more prizes. Holds up a Plantonics Rig Flex box. From their partner Plantronics.

26:01 Scott. The winner of the Plantonics Rig audio headset is Pyro.

26:10 Starr. Congratulations to Pyro. Shows off the box, then moves it off-screen. Turns it back over to FireLotus.

26:14 FireLotus. Dean478 wants to thank the team; his question is whether we can expect to see the connection between Underworld Ascendant and Shroud of the Avatar.

26:37 Starr. They’re all excited about Underworld Ascendant. Ultima Underworld was the first game he did QA on when he started his career in video games. Lord British, interrupts. As well as at Origin. Starr. Starting in Release 16, there may be an object that appears in the game that’s a connection between the two games. Beyond that, anything would probably be much closer to launch, since that would involve a lot of story-driven material

27:33 Lord British. He’s very excited about the wave of Origin alumni who have had a similar career arc of having a Camelot era at Origin, then went off to work for “the Man” at big firms, and now are back to community support and their original playerbases. He’d include Shroud of the Avatar, Star Citizen, Underworld Ascendant, and a few others. The developers of those various games that all worked together at Origin have also been good friends over the years, and are extremely supportive of each other stepping across this threshold. They’ve already sat down with the developers of Underworld to talk about detailed ways in which they can collaborate on fiction, to make sure – just as before – the two worlds are interlinked in a way the players will appreciate.

28:57 Chris. He didn’t know the developers, but did play Ultima Underworld, and loved it. Since the project, he’s been working with them and has been very impressed. They’ve threw out a lot if ideas for collaboration, to which they had to say “no” to – only to have them throw out some more ideas. Starr turns it over to FireLotus for the next question.

29:23 FireLotus. The next questions are from Amber Raine. First, she’d like to know, since many decorations are now pledge items that are unavailable to others, whether they’ll add more decorations to the game. A similar question in chat was about whether there would be more craftable decorative items. Then, she had a second question. Starr, smiling. About darker themed decorations. FireLotus. Yes.

30:00 Starr. He personally made sure this question was going to be answered. Chris smiles. Starr. In the shift to getting pledge rewards linked to accounts, a lot of the decorations became linked to the pledges, and as a consequence, less available to everyone else. There will be more decorations – though this’ll be balanced with preserving the value of the pledge item decorations. None of those rewards will be bound to an account, so they can be traded to others, and they have a definite in-game value. They don’t want to introduce many, to devalue them. They definitely plan to put in more, however, and plan to have most of them come out from the crafting system. It’s a great question why there aren’t darker or Chaos themed decorations – and why there’s a giant ankh in the game, but no giant Chaos symbol. He notes he should be abusing his authority to make sure those are higher in the priority queue. Amber should be thanked for reminding him.

31:29 Lord British. Although that’s true technically, he wanted it in for this release. Shows exasperation, emoting with his hands. He always has to come and rescue Chaos, and also lobby for human body parts.

31:44 Starr. He’s just too responsible to do it himself. Turns it over to FireLotus for more questions.

31:49 FireLotus. The next question is from BludLustinBusta, who wants to know about archers, and what type of work will be done on archers in the future.

32:34 Chris. Something might come in the next release. They know that archers are underpowered right now and aren’t really feasible as a class. Part of how they have to do development is they can’t spread love equally for every type of playstyle for every release. They probably won’t get that much love in the short term, and still not feel competitive. They’ll probably need to get a pass of their own, because archers have a very different playstyle from other people. It’s not just the combat mechanics – they also need more environments to benefit the playstyle better. But they will be working on both of those things, and make archers work. However, this is one of the first releases where he felt he could effectively play a magic user – he thinks they’re getting close on that. He recently did a duel with Starr – and though he played with some cheat armor he pulled from a cheat area – and fought against magic, but killed him easily. Starr. Thanks Chris for sharing.

33:35 Starr. Archers definitely need love. One of the things that will be seen in the coming release is spaces more amenable to that playstyle. There’s an expansion to the dungeon kit, with really tall underground spaces – including bridges and crossways – and there’ll be a couple dungeons built in that style in R15. These are better for archers to play in, because they allow archers to snipe skeletons from those overhead bridges. People who play archers will be able to enjoy those opportunities. Turns it over to FireLotus for the next question.

34:21 FireLotus. The next question is from Ice Queen, who wants to know if there’ll be an option for Lady and Lady Marshal instead of only Lord and Lord Marshal for those playing female avatars.

34:43 Starr. That’s something that he feels they should support, so will look into how they could do that. Then there’s also an issue of whether a male character could identify as a lady. Chris starts to smile a wide grin, as his cheeks redden. He would assume that would be possible.

35:07 Starr. The next prize being given out is a digital prize. Star mimics holding a box, as Chris looks through to see nothing is there. Another $10 in add-on store credit.

35:21 Scott. Digriz is the winner.

35:28 Starr. Congratulations to digriz.

35:32 FireLotus. The next question is from Shiva, who would like to know if there are any plans for a Veteran Reward system or a Birthday Reward system per year played.

35:47 Starr. That’s a great idea. That’s something they’d like to get in – though it isn’t on their shortlist for Episode 1, but definitely something they’d want by then, if not right afterwards. In a way, they’re already doing that with their monthly hat/mask reward from the Grand Tour quests. So there’s already a rhythm of a regular reward of some kind.

36:28 Chris. Part of why that wasn’t already planned for, is because that’s one of the things subscription games use as a trick to keep players subscribed. The game is subscription-free, so they didn’t have to think about that, and find ways to artificially make players stay in the game. But they’ll try to find ways to do things like that.

36:49 Lord British. They should definitely make sure they have a way to capture people’s birthdays.

36:56 Chris. They’d have to want to give them. Starr. It wouldn’t be their personal birthday – it would be their character’s birthday. Chris amazes at Starr’s perceptiveness.

37:03 Lord British. That’s a good point. Though they get that automatically, by definition – based on when the character was created.

37:08 Starr. They don’t care about players’ real lives, just about their characters’ lives and characters’ birthdays. Turns it over to FireLotus for the next question. Chris puts on a show smile in anticipation.

37:16 FireLotus. The next question is from Tahru, about item storage capacities – what the type of storage limits will be in houses, chests, in banks, and so on. There’s a similar question from chat from Krellin who wants to know about whether there’ll be a way to drop items on the ground around yourself if you’re overloaded.

38:03 Starr. There are already limits on item limits on lots and in buildings, based on their sizes. That’ll be republished. He thinks it’s about 2,000 exterior and 2,000 interior on a castle lot – though like all numbers, subject to change. In a basic sense, the way it’ll work is the larger a lot, the larger number of items you can store on it. Right now, containers can store unlimited amounts of items – long-term, all containers will have an item and weight limit to them. The better quality item, the more items and more weight it can hold in it. That’ll also be a factor in how much you can store on your property. As far as being overloaded is concerned, right now you can right-click and delete any item in your inventory. For dropping items on the ground – that’s something near and dear to Lord British – and he desires to provide that ability. There are lots of issues with it, which is why, since UO, almost every MMO has restricted it and chosen not to allow it. However, they have on the schedule at least a run on that, so they can experiment with it. There’ll be aggressive decay timers on items.

40:16 Lord British. The same thing is true about picking up and touching items in the world. They’re slowly through and taking things that were static and non-interactive props like books that were glued to chairs and table-tops, and are replacing them with books that players can pick up and move around. His theorem is that anything that doesn’t appear to the player to be nailed down, ought to be able to be picked up. The game should also react appropriately if the player tries to walk off with it without permission – and have an impact on the player’s virtues, or anger the owners, causing them to perhaps call the guards. The theorem of taking and leaving behind goes together, in his mind. They’re moving up to that very carefully – they want to make sure it feels as natural and fully open as possible.

41:22 Starr. It’s something that’ll be iterated on continually. In Release 14, an example is with the books – which are now books with stories in them. The person who’s doing that is also doing map-building, and also customer support, and also does the standup notes, and so on. He’s like everyone else on the dev team and wears many hats. So that will be continually worked on, and done iteratively over releases. Turns it over to FireLotus for the next question.

41:53 FireLotus. The next two questions are from chat, which are both about converting wearables to decorative items. The question from Amassing is whether there’ll be a way to display our Grand Tour quest hats in our houses, and the one from Gareth is about whether weapons and armor will be placeable as decorations.

42:25 Starr. That’s absolutely something they want to support. Their schedule is a backlog – a huge mass of tasks, bugs, and other things they want to get done. Each release, they take some subset of that to tackle, based on dependencies, what they have available, what they’re getting feedback on, and so on. This is an item that they’ve wanted to get in, but has been kicked down the road several times. They definitely want things like stands for armor and plaques to hang weapons. He’s not sure when that’ll be put in – but hopefully within the next couple of releases. Turns it back over to FireLotus.

43:38 FireLotus. The next question is from Lupus, who would like to know about some of the problems they’ve seen with the crafting system, including pricing of ingredients, and when the dev team will take a more focused look at crafting and getting it to a point where they’re comfortable with it.

44:30 Starr. At the moment, they’re running full tilt to get functionality in, and the bare minimum of content and data to support that functionality. What players saw in R14, and what they’ll see in R15, is their focus now is on getting in new functionality and there’ll be less worry about getting the balance done correctly, and making sure that it’s all seamlessly integrated. Probably, starting with R16 and R17, they’ll start to focus more on balancing the content, getting more pricing set up, and also start to regionalize the resources – where they’ll be abundant more in specific scenes or areas of the map. What you’ll see in R15, however, is more of the same focus on getting the basic functionality in. They’re grateful for the players being patient with them, since it’s really messy right now. It’s the price to pay for making a Flaming Sword of Threshing however, so you can take cool screenshots with it.

46:00 Chris. A lot of the development that went on in this past release on crafting was internal – about what happens when they want to replace items – whether they want to take them out, swap them, or keep them around – they want to make sure the recipes everybody is using all matches up. That has to be done through verification with the server – when people craft, they need to make sure that people have the raw materials, which gets verified through the server, then that gets taken out of their inventory and they get the item they want. They need to be able to prevent exploits. Some metrics were also put in so they could see what people are making and where they’re making it. All of this cause some chaos with crafting this past release, but will also allow them to scale up the crafting system in future releases with less problems. They’ll be sure that when an item is taken out that affects a given recipe, they know about it. Waves his hands. Magic!

47:33 Starr. They’re giving away another prize. It’s another digital prize of add-on store credits. Mimics holding a box.

47:42 Scott. Eternal_Knight is the winner of the prize.

47:52 Starr. Congratulations to Eternal_Knight. Slides the Plantronics box closer to Chris. Turns it back to FlireLotus for questions.

47:53 Lord British, scoldingly. Notes that Starr is zipping through the prize winners and not being properly celebratory. Fist pumps. Hurrah for Eternal_Knight.

48:03 Chris. Eternal_Knight should buy a greyhound!

48:08 FireLotus. The next question is from Myrcello, who wants to know whether the fees for lots will be dependent on the location in the house – whether the fees in story towns will be different from those in player-run towns, and so on.

48:30 Starr. The current thinking is that the upkeep fees for owning a lot in the game will be purely be based on lot size. There currently are no plans for variability based on location. They, however, reserve the right to implement that if they think it’ll help the game economy.

49:01 Lord British, to Chris. Players in chat are noting that greyhounds aren’t purchasable anymore.

49:08 Starr. They’re off the add-on store are and are now a rare. They’re still in the pledge rewards, just the brindle greyhound has now been taken off the add-on store – so it’s very valuable if someone has one.

49:21 Chris, slyly. He’ll start a grey market for greyhounds. Nods.

49:26 Lord British. No producing them on the side. In UO, there was actually an employee who went off on the side and was making money on the side by creating rares.

49:38 Starr. They don’t like to talk about it very much.

49:42 Lord British. Anyone who does that will be busted by them, though he notes it was an interesting scam.

49:50 FireLotus, perked up. She’s interested in the idea that they can do that. Lord British smiles, chuckles gregariously.

49:55 FireLotus. The next question is Tahru, who enjoys the random deck system, but finds combos challenging and would like to know if this would be aided in the future.

50:10 Chris. There’ll be more combos available, including some in the next release. He didn’t get that many in, since he’s been distracted by Unity 5 and other development issues, but there are about 20 on the schedule. They also plan to make it so that the combat bar is not locked to the bottom, and players will be able to move it around to be more in their field of view, so players who have a hard time keeping their eyes on the combat and on the bar at the same time will be helped. There might also be other things that will help this. They’ll do some tuning on the timing of things as well.

51:33 Starr. He wants to emphasize that the biggest barrier to the combat system is the interface and player interaction with it. He hopes that as they get closer to beta – or even alpha – that they reserve time to iterate on a few interface options for combat, to optimize that experience. It’s far from where it needs to be.

52:15 Lord British. He’s going rogue by mentioning that you can’t use combos in a locked deck by design. That’s to encourage people to get off the locked deck and into a rotating deck. He was one of those most reticent about how deck combat would feel, and one of the biggest proponents of adding in a fixed deck – so to be similar to a traditional shortcut bar, enticing people to play, where as they went on, players would feel confident about moving over to a rotating deck. However, he’s getting over to the point of view that players shouldn’t be started in the game with a locked deck, so people can dive in and play with the unlocked system – which is the fullest and best way to play. It’s also the way they want people to play – so they’re not doing players a service by starting them with a locked deck. Smiles. He’s turning now to watch to see how the chat room burns.

53:48 Chris. People can play how they want to. However, it’s kind of a different style. If you’re playing with a locked deck, you’ll always know where your buttons are and will never need to look at your combat bar at all. If you’re playing with the dealt deck, it’s a bit of a slower experience, making players deal with multiple things at once, and is a bit more challenging to play. In the end, they’ll be balancing the two, so one or the other isn’t absolutely the best. The combos are always going to have more powerful results, because you’re putting more effort into actual casting – but it will be a slower playstyle.

54:35 Lord British. But as much as there are hiccups, and needs for balancing and a learning curve, he’s gained substantial confidence that they have the foundation for a new and compelling method to have role-playing game combat transpire which hasn’t existed in a previous game. So they’ll work very hard to refine it to where it’s easy to understand, intuit, and play. Mastery will, of course, require a lot of time and effort, and skillful players will be the best. He thinks they’re on the right track – but players should continue to give the dev team advice to help them stay on the right track.

55:21 Chris. Though right now, starting people off with a locked deck may be the best system, in the long run the hybrid – with a few locked and the rest rotating – will end up being the best. The optimal way to get going this release was to grab a two-handed sword and start to level, and then sell off a couple of skills. That was in part by design – because if a lot of people end up selling Dodge, they need to either fix Dodge or remove it. The best way to play so far was to immediately switch to a dealt deck, though the locked deck will get a lot of love in the future. Starr passes it back to FireLotus for questions.

56:14 FireLotus. The next question is from Tarsin, who wants to know when there’ll be more deep dives; specifically he’d like one on Kickstarter goals, where they are, and where the challenges are to meet them.

56:36 Starr. That’s a great request – that the dev team should try to schedule in the next month or so, specifically one on Kickstarter goals.

56:58 FireLotus. Tarsin also had a second part of his question; whether the Q&A sessions will be coming back to the forums.

57:06 Starr. They’re talking about that, and talking more about how to integrate it into their process. They know it’s missed by backers, and want to figure out a way to start it up.

57:25 FireLotus. The next question is for Chris – who had earlier been pushing the greyhound. It’s from redfish, who wants to know what the deal is with the Chihuahua bark for wolves – and whether it’s a recording of his dog.

57:37 Chris. It’s not his dog. He is the audio guy, but its taken form a source from the Internet. At some point, he’ll sit down and go for more than a day doing audio, aware that the audio hasn’t kept track with the rest of the quality of the game. Great visuals and gameplay are coming in, but the pack leader of the wolves is still barking at you like a Chihuahua. That’ll continue to improve every release, and every release will be hopefully better than the last. His dog barks like a big dog – for a 10 pound dog, he barks like a 20 pound dog.

58:35 Lord British. Everything’s relative.

58:36 Chris. He has big lungs for a little greyhound. Starr turns it back to FireLotus for questions.

58:40 FireLotus. The next question is from a source where she forgot the name; but is a question about fishing in the game.

58:50 Starr. Lord British interrupts, fist pumping for fishing. Starr. They definitely want to get that in, though there needs to be some fundamental parts of the crafting system in before fishing gets in. R15 will have the first pass of crafting skills. Once that framework is in place, they can start to tackle fishing – which they hope to have in by the beginning of the summer.

59:18 Chris. They have a crafting hub – a scene for crafting only, so they can try out different things – and in that scene, there’s a lonely pond with a boat in it, and a chest with a Fishing Rod of Prosperity and six mugs of beer – which is a fishing kit. He’s sad every time he sees the pond, knowing its neglected.

1:00:02 Starr. The next prize will be given out. Another Plantronics Rig Flex headset will be given out. Holds up the box.

1:00:14 Scott. He just reconfirmed his dice rolling results, to make sure people would believe him that it was random – the winner is Amber Raine.

1:00:33 Starr, holding up the box. Chaos!

1:00:36 Scott. Notes Starr didn’t tell him to do that. Starr. Notes that they’re in a separate room, and is a complete impossibility. Congratulations to Amber Raine. Claps and does a giddy ‘yay!’

1:00:45 Chris. It’ll be nice to listen to Avatar Radio on. Starr. Yes. Spread Chaos. Turns it back to FireLotus.

1:00:52 FireLotus. The next question is from Artemis, who wants to know, since some portion of the game’s population won’t have a house, how vendors will be handled for those players.

1:01:09 Chris. The first thing that’ll come online is a public vendor. Just as a note, they’re being careful to call the NPCs that are now in-game merchants, since there’s been lots of confusing conversations based on vendors and merchants. A group of public vendors will be in a public space like merchants are right now, that everyone will be able to use. They’ll be almost the same as player vendors – the difference will be the number of items they’ll let you put on them, how long they’ll hold the item for consignment, and the percentage fees based on the sale. They want those limits, and to make public vendors a little more costly, because there’s a good chance that even the people who have houses will sometimes use the public vendors, since their location will be more convenient for passing players. That’ll be the first thing to come online, so they don’t punish people who don’t get a house. Then, they’ll move over to player vendors, which will have identical functionality, but with some changes to numbers.

1:02:40 FireLotus. The last question from the website comes from Baron Drocis Fondorlatos, who wants to know if people playing in Single Player Online will be locked out of the shardfalls if they don’t consent to the possibility PvP, and whether the same thing holds for other PvP-only areas.

1:02:57 Chris. That’s the plan. That’ll probably get into to R16. If you’re on Single Player Online and try to go into a PvP area, you’ll get a warning saying that it’s a multiplayer environment. There’ll be a deep dive on PvP some time dealing with some of these issues.

1:03:33 Starr. One of the topics they’ll try to have a discussion on with the Dev+ backers is PvP and loot – specifically how they can increase the impact of death both in PvP and PvE, how they can increase the impact of looting, and whether there are circumstances where they can expand what can be looted off of a player upon death – whether by the system, or by other players. They’ve heard a lot of requests for this, and have some ideas on how they can do it, while still preserving consent in all of those interactions.

1:04:34 Chris. There are a lot of plans to making both PvP and PvE more dangerous. They’ll go over some of those ideas with Dev+ backers, and definitely move the needle over to make it feel scarier to die in terms of loss. Perhaps also talk about it in the next hangout. Starr turns it over to FireLotus for the next question.

1:05:05 FireLotus. The next question is from Materio, who wants to know if armor skins will match the material type, and if so, when players can expect that online; whether it might be in R15.

1:05:26 Starr. Potentially, there’ll be a set of armor that comes online with dye and tint change. There’s two ways they change the color of any clothing – one is on the system size, based on the materials used to craft it – and second, there are also areas on the armor that can be set by players through dyes. The goal is to have a few examples of that in for R15, though that part is also tied how they do the shaders, which will depend on how they transition to Unity 5. It’s at risk whether it makes it in, but they’re trying to make it happen. Long term, the source materials of any object will reflect in the final hue of the object, and players will have some ability to hue all or parts of gear.

1:06:46 FireLotus. The next question is from Nemo, who would like to know how the shift to Unity 5 will affect the system requirements for the game.

1:07:04 Starr. Unity 5 does run better than Unity 4, for sure, and they’re very happy about that. He think it would however be optimistic to say that it would lower the system requirements. They think they’re in line with the target requirements for all other 3D games that are going to be coming out at the end of this game.

1:07:55 Chris. Clarifying on PvP zones – if you’re playing Single Player Offline, you won’t be forced into online mode. However, a lot of people use Single Player Online mode to get around and avoid having to do any PvP in those zones, taking away the risk. So, they’ll be fixing that.

1:08:44 FireLotus. The next question is from Envy, who’d like to know more information on combat stats on mechanics, and whether there could be a deep dive on that topic.

1:08:55 Starr. There should probably be a deep dive scheduled on their current thinking on combat.

1:09:15 Chris. PvP, Kickstarter goals, combat, and others will be good deep dives.

1:09:34 Starr. Two of those will be done in the next six weeks. Chris grins.

1:09:44 FireLotus. The next question is from FireStar, who wants to know about PvP where there’s a standoff between melee and ranged players, whether there’ll be an auto-chase feature in the game, and whether there’ll be any tweaking to adjust how that works.

1:10:14 Starr. He definitely doesn’t think there’ll be an auto-chase, because that removes some of the player skill from the equation – it removes a lot of the positioning strategy in combat.

1:10:42 Lord British. They also don’t want to make it a game which requires the type of arcade skills where they fight against the lag and other performance issues – or just the ability of players to stay on point with someone else. Combat will soon take into account things like full and partial cover, and as that comes into play, that’ll encourage people to position properly. That’ll definitely work for PvE, and he thinks it’ll also have a definite effect on PvP combat.

1:11:33 Chris. For PvP, there’ll be a number of things that’ll be changed and improved. Part of it will be the new danger of players being able to attack from behind – which was mentioned with some of the Moon Magic skills. Attacks from behind will be extremely deadly, and also running backwards will be slower than running forwards, and that’ll immediately add some danger to running away. Players will have to adapt – so if you’re player – he notes he knows one such player that might be in chat at the moment – only carrying around a sword and a shield and are in plate mail, you might have to change your strategy a little bit. Points aggressively at Starr, sitting next to him. Starr smiles, turns it back to FireLotus. Chris smiles and nods contentedly.

1:12:23 FireLotus. The next question is Maroon, who wants to know if there’ll be any plans to focus development on major dungeons and quests within those dungeons.

1:12:40 Scott. Asks and receives permission from Starr to answer that question. The next release, Necropolis will be released, which is the first single-player scene other than the tutorial which will be plot and story based. It’ll be the next scene after Ardoris. There, you’re told to hire a spirit talker and talk to the undead in Necropolis. It’s somewhat linear in that you’ll be taking a journey from one end of the scene to another. Within that, there’ll be some opportunities for combat, and other experiences outside of the main quest line. Scott Jones is doing a lot of the work on building the dungeon, and both he and FireLotus are working on the dialogue, based on the original story work by Richard and Tracy. He hopes players will enjoy it.

1:14:06 Chris. That also touches on some Unity 5 stuff. Switching to Unity 5, you won’t see a ton of visual differences; you’ll see some in shadows being smoother, character models looking better, the lighting looking a bit better. However, they won’t have a pass to update everything to show of the new things in Unity 5 – it’s not a magic switch where the whole game looks suddenly better, but opens up a lot of options for them to look better. The Necropolis will be one of the one or two scenes they did look at in terms of beautifying them with features from Unity 5. He doesn’t know if that’ll happen in time for R15 or not, though the scene is being developed right now. That will only make it more beautiful; though it’s a beautiful scene as it is under Unity 4.

1:15:32 Starr. It’s time for another prize; this time, it’s another digital prize. Mimics holding a prize box.

1:15:40 Scott. The prize winner is Fox Cunning. Though he can’t get greyhounds with it. Chris, jumping in. E-mail him, and he’ll send you a greyhound. Star smiles and shakes his head.

1:16:08 FireLotus. The next question is from Baron Drocis Fondorlatos, who wants to know how much better they think the AI will get as the game continues to develop.

1:16:15 Starr. Hopefully a lot better. There’s actually a huge backlog of specific behaviors they want to get in play, so you aren’t just going up and doing a DPS war against every AI that you come across. Most of their problems so far has been spent on fundamental issues like spacing and pathing. They think they’ll have some good solutions to those issues, which will go live in R15, which means that the programmer working on AI can put in more AI behaviors, and enemies will be more exciting to encounter, and actually have some strategic differences in how you need to interact with them.

1:17:04 Chris. Everybody on the team is very senior and wears many hats. AI programming is generally not something that a single person does. Usually, there’s a whole team for AI on bigger games. At least one more additional person will be moved over to work on that and help out on it. They have a lot of things that will lead to more interesting creature behaviors. It’ll happen release by release.

1:17:54 FireLotus. There have been a couple of questions by players, including Ice Queen, about whether there’ll be other choices for houses available from in-game vendors, versus houses available through pledge rewards.

1:18:16 Starr. There’ll definitely be more and more decorative options to the things you can add to your house – both external and internal. They’ll also be putting in some functionality for ceiling decorations, more functionality for exterior decorations, and some for roof decorations. They definitely understand there should be more content and functionality.

1:19:08 FireLotus. The next question is from Gareth, who wants to know whether there’ll ever be restrictions placed on in game names.

1:19:26 Starr. Long term, there’ll be white list and black list filtering on the names, similar to how chat rooms operate. There are no current plans to filter based on role-playing or theme. Right now, they’re relying on player reporting to deal with names that are offensive. There have been a lot of reports about people having various references to body parts in their names. Chris smiles and nods. Starr. They’re working on that as they come across it – but there are no current plans to enforce names from a role-playing point of view.

1:20:40 FireLotus. She notes all the interesting kinds of games she sees in chat. The next question is from Raven Swiftbow, who wants to know whether all of the items in the add-on store will eventually be phased out before the live launch, including the lot deeds.

1:21:06 Starr. Lot deeds aren’t linked to a phase out, but they are linked to a fixed number. Eventually, they’ll sell out for Episode 1. As for the other items, their current plan is to continue weekly phase outs until they get to a minimum level of representative items for each category – wearables, housing, tools, et cetera – and stay at that baseline. They don’t plan to phase out everything, just to make sure that the add-on store is reduced to a minimum representation in each one of those categories. Those that they phase out will have their in-game resale value increased.

1:22:13 FireLotus. The next question is for Chris and others working with crowdsourced art, about whether there’ll be a new request for new player created items.

1:22:33 Chris. There’s actually a new bounty list that hasn’t been put up yet – it’ll be largely crafting items. Someone in the chat, not sitting next to him, created a ton of new crafting elements that need to be made. Those will be put out to people, and hopefully there’ll be some announcements on it pretty soon. They know a lot of people would like to contribute to the project, and they’re not giving them that opportunity right now. One of their big goals is to let the backers take part of creating the game however it makes them happy to.

1:23:26 FireLotus. The next question is from Lord Thomas, who’d like to know whether there could be a climbing kit to reach areas on the overland map that you wouldn’t normally be able to reach by walking.

1:23:40 Starr. Right now they specifically don’t want that functionality, because the map of Novia specifically has some punch points that players are required to go through – either a control point, or a dangerous dungeon, a pass underneath the mountains, and so on. Allowing people to climb over the mountains would allow players to shortcut those pinch points, which they believe are important both for the story and the progression of the story and for the regional economy and the transport of goods. It’s a fun idea, but would harm the game in other ways.

1:24:30 Lord British. He would mitigate that by saying, they occasionally talk about Ultima-esque forms of transport like the hot air balloon in Ultima VI. Shows his age by being confused as to whether it was in IV, V, or VI. The hot air balloon would drift in the winds and be hard to direct anywhere. They may ultimately come up with some things like that, but they’d have to think about how they’d affect the plot and economy.

1:25:06 Starr. That’s all the time they have for questions, but there’s a final prize giveaway. One digital prize, and one physical prize. They’ll start with the digital prize first. Slyly slides a keyboard box across the table, in front of him and Chris.

1:25:28 Scott. The prize goes to Krellin, who wins a sweet keyboard. The second is Jurten. Lord British interrupts. Starr said the first one is the digital prize, so let’s get it straight. Scott. The digital prize is for Jurten.

1:26:12 Starr. The keyboard is a Razor BlackWidow Chroma keyboard. It has his favorite marketing blurb on it: “clicky keys.” That’s what it has.

1:26:32 Chris, presses on some demo keys on the box. He wonders if everyone watching can hear it. For anyone who misses their old days on the IBM Selectric, this has a responsive, mechanical key. It also lights up from the back for a dance party. They’ll light up depending on your health, and depending on whether you’re in combat or not, or whether you have a player near you. So the keyboard will tell you if you’re low health or dying.

1:27:16 Starr. Thanks to everyone for the questions. They try to focus on the questions they have answers for. When they don’t answer questions, it’s not because they’re ignoring them, it’s because they don’t have an answer or aren’t comfortable with the answer they have and need to think about it a bit more before they talk about it. All of this is meant to be a conversation about their current thinking about the game and where they’d like to take everything. None of its written in stone. “Don’t lawyer me bro.” If those things change in a later time, that’s a normal aspect of iterative development. The community is incredible. He hasn’t experienced a community of this caliber – both being loyal and also being brutally honest. The only time they ever draw the line is when someone accuses them of something slanderous or libelous, for legal purposes. Other than that, they invite critique at all times. The recipe book thing is still being worked on, and on their hotfix list. Please be patient.

1:29:06 Chris. He seconds everything Starr said about the community: the community is awesome. There’s some websites they visit that are crawling with trolls, that don’t care what they’re saying, just post pointlessly negative things to get attention. He’s happy that the community for the game is so positive. He also loves that the community is realizing that they’re developing the game with them, and trying to listen to feedback. A lot of the things that get discussed in the forums – especially in Dev+ –actually end up being the game design. It’s also sounded as if people were missing his walls of text, especially on combat. He’ll try to do one of those, and also an AMA – ask-me-anything – type of thing – getting into IRC and answering any question, to Starr’s dismay. He blames the baby for his inattention to the community. He’ll try to get rid of it. Starr smiles and shakes his head, then facepalms and slowly recedes his hands from his face. Starr turns it over to a so-named “Ricardo.”

1:31:12 Lord British. Thanks to the community, and also to the team. He was in chat talking about cards he keeps flashing up. Flashes up some elite cards. Lord British space fighters from Yugio, and shield of the Avatars form Magic the Gathering. They need to develop some cross-card game card game to use all of the Ultima and Portalarium related cards all in one deck. If he’s missed any, he wants people to let him know.

1:31:58 FireLotus. Thanks to everyone for joining, and asking excellent. All of the questions are reviewed, and about 30 minutes are spent before the hangout discussing some of them. They become discussion points – and aren’t falling on deaf ears. She looks forward to some deep dives coming up. More information will be posted on the community announcements on the forums and websites as soon as they’re scheduled. She’ll see everyone in New Britannia.

 

Wow! Awesome

 

Dreams really do come true thanks Redfish

 

Great work putting this out in transcript format, nice being able to scan through that as a review of the main points and questions answered from R14 postmortem. That should be especially helpful to those who missed it or have audio difficulties, but also nice to have for those who caught it live. Thank you

 

Many thanks, redfish!

 

Thanks for doing this Redfish!

 

Thanks Redfish!

 

Thanks redfish. I fell asleep some watching the replay *G*

I'd like to ask a question. Could we get these get together s started a little later. Maybe 4 to 5 central?

 

Most excellent, redfish..... Thanks

 

Party on, FrostII.

 

Thank you for making this happen. So much easier to follow when interrupted.