Rest in Peace Bag Mode

Korim, not my Napa picture, just grabbed it from the interwebs. Not to derail the thread, but to answer your question I played on Baja from shard-birth to the account existing up to a year or so ago when the EA/Broadsword financial portals botched things up, at which point my old home likely IDOC'd, . Any other UO questions/banter, feel free to PM.

[RIP] Bag mode, placing objects on ground outside of a player property & a somewhat comical ghost mode with OOOOOooooOOO' s ..... Hopefully they will make up for these in other ways.

 

It doesn't matter - this isn't my game any longer. Goodbye SotA, goodbye community!

 

Very sad. I loved it, loved the immersion of it, I felt forced to start and keep using list mode only due it's bugs :-(

 

Not to sound chaotic evil but if he's leaving, can I have your stuff ;-)

Sorry, I couldn't suppress the response. I am evil you know. Or was that one of my alts?

I keep getting mixed up which was which

 

Yeah should have only chosen 1 display mode from the beginning. Its a shame , I prefer the immersion of bag mode when it is done well. The latest game I can think of is Life is Feudal . this game has bag mode done right!

The list mode we have is always going to be more usable and faster to use. Even if it doesn't pull you into the world in the same way as traditional ultima style bag mode.

Still I was totally surprised at the beginning when I heard that shroud was going to be using 2 optional interface modes for inventory. Think of all the wasted resources and time used to develop bag mode and now its all being thrown away. Bad design decisions...

 

So basically what I'm hearing from everyone is that there are only 2 reasons why only 3% of players where using bag mode.

1: They didn't know about it.
2: Because it was buggy and needed to be fixed. Which also accounts for it being so much less practical that nobody wanted to use it when they tried it. Of those who tried it and went back to list.. I can't help but wonder how many would've kept using bag mode IF it was debugged and polished.

That said.. the quoting of 3% as a reason to drop it is something I personally find very annoying because it feels like basing a decision on misleading data.. The rest of the excuse is fine. It's not an absolutely critical part of the game and limited resources are a legitimate concern.. but "yeah not enough people are using it because we never developed it and so we're going to stop developing it" just doesn't sit well with me. I would've felt better if they had just left the 3% out.

 

Bag mode was the default mode way back with an early release. I had a hard time deciphering the icons, so went to list mode and never went back.

You also have to be careful with bags... KoDT Bag Wars Saga.

 

With inventory items numbering in the 3 or 4 figures - bag mode was never going to be practical. It's a solution that lost it's relevance once the MMO aspect took over.

 

Bag mode was ruined for me when you couldn't place a bag inside a bag.

It ruined the ability to actually sort the inventory.

 

getting rid of bag mode isn't a good sign for the future goal of item drop in the world.

 

I could see how a forced bag mode might make an appearance if a treasure hunting system were to go in. You open the chest and see a clutter of loot in the chest. The 'take all' button would be removed from this type of chest and you would need to remove the items manually in bag mode into your inventory...so potentially more valuable loot could be hidden under the artwork of other items. The more loot you drag into your inventory the greater chance more powerful monsters spawn... similar to some other game I've played in the past!

 

Hmm.. Neat idea, but I'm not sure it makes sense for the game to alternate between one UI and another.

Something I've suggested before though is the addition of a short loot timer, so looting would work more like harvesting (but I think quicker would suffice). For a lot of reasons... But one of the reasons I didn't like Take All is because it gets you into this instinctive grinding where you don't even know what you're picking up, cus you aren't paying attention.

There are definite gameplay upsides to bag mode IMO but maybe this could be made up for in other ways.

 

I'm also one of those that originally used bag mode, but was forced to switch to list mode when bugs were not being fixed.

Agreed. By that logic and reasoning, let's run a query to see how many % of players bothered to do any quests, let alone finish them. I'm guessing it will be low enough that quests should be removed, rather than improved.

 

hahaha!

I was in the 3%, but I admit I only used bag mode because of Ultima.

 

Well....on the bright side, without the need to accommodate 'bag' mode hopefully this means more work can be done to tidy up the current inventory UI, perhaps allowing meaningful filters etc. instead of the default ones and so forth (ie a "crafting tab" that doesn't show all crafting items, and a "housing tab" that also shows all equipment now that most equipment is also deco....) etc. Once you start picking up loot and such, scrolling around to try and use your repair kit on your tool, or trying to pick specific items out of your inventory is pretty time consuming. I'd like to be able to see the ability to craft a bag, name it 'ore', stick it in my inventory and have freshly mined things go into it, just as an example. I expect accomodating bag mode was likely the reason why we saw no real progress with the inventory/system/ui.

 

May be the bag mode should have been fixed - or the old, bugged one, replaced?

I also liked the bag mode and also, like Barugon, and I suppose a lot of other players!, didn't used it because it was difficult to handle - in the state it was yet.

What would be so difficult to put in a matrix and make things stackable???
Look at WOW, it works wonderful and looks ok. To place a matrix mustn't be the way you see borders
In other cases this game took over design ideas from WOW, why not in this one?
Well, I understand the decision to reduce errors. But on costs of an essential feeling?
At that moment we received new great icons for every potion to distingt them from each other...

 

@DarkStarr, @Lord British

May be a forum thread to ask players, how many were waiting for fixing, would have been a nice gesture ...
How should they know, there is no plan to fix it? And 3% using it says nothing.

MOST players, I would say, didn't finish the mainquests! Would you say, more than 5% have done them until now? I couldn't belive, if I am watching the quest feedback over years.

If I am thinking about a lot of quests, they should also have been deleted because it took months to fix them - and some aren't fixed until now

I think it's no problem to focus with all energy on essential stuff until launch date. But such a very hard cut. It would be time after to fix it and bring it in a moderate condition, I suppose

It's the same as a special designed offline mode: every month a few steps and it would work. And after waiting for so long, a lot of players wouldn't have problems to wait a few months longer.
But making a hart cut gives no hope ... and this is what all backers for an offline experience are waiting for ... some confirmation for their patience and hope to their expectations.

Well, in hope in the name of all good Virtues, may be there are things in life, which deserve more than a fast decision, in a world where fast decisions are made too often ...

Keep on the good work!

 

An inventory à la Divinity Original Sin would have been a good idea indeed.

 

I only used bag mode in the Ultima games because I didn't have list mode. Fighting with things like items not stacking, or, them stacking when you don't want stacks. Click to drag 1 pixel that is smaller than your mouse pointer's click foot print. Never have been a fan.

 

I can't help but wonder now.. what % of backers aren't playing the game at all because they're waiting for launch?

If they had just come out and said.. "sorry we let this slip but we just don't have the time to make it usable by launch and it would look bad to so many new players. It's not a critical system so we're turning it off and focusing on other things" That I would understand. Of course, "we might come back to it in the future when we have time and resources to deal with it properly" would've been nice too.

Ok shutting up about the % now.