Saw lord British was working on Episode 2 story

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Arkah EMPstrike, Dec 7, 2018.

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  1. Arkah EMPstrike

    Arkah EMPstrike Avatar

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    Saw this in the standup notes and got very excited. All the questions and cliffhangers left by episode 1 and the Lost Vale got me amped up to find out more of whats going on. Loving new brittania's lore so far.
     
  2. Rook Strife

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    They need to integrate it a lot better in episode 2.

    I have well over 1000 hours in this game and can tell you very little about it's storyline or lore.
     
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  3. Cora Cuz'avich

    Cora Cuz'avich Avatar

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    Agreed.
     
  4. Floors

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    Here's my understanding of it :

    The obisdians are bad, they're all dead, they wrote a prophecy about the virtues which is all twisted, you have to do a bunch of quests about truth love and courage that have nothing to do with that and then
    a giant weird robot that is basically seeming to be bad but is actually good asks you to go get lenses, get one fixed, get pages in a book and then you go to the confluence chamber through the shortcut in the mines,
    skip the lich fight, and then see a child of chaos and a couple ghosts of the obsidian wizards (???) that are waiting for you to put the lenses on the book to make it a prophecy book. Then you go back to the robot lady and
    get a cloak of the dead after you do all that. No boss fights :(

     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2018
  5. Cora Cuz'avich

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    My presumption (and hope) is that, being episode one of five, the current main quest is just the setup/intro to the story. So it feels a little lacking, as the meat of the story doesn't really kick off until episode 2.

    That said, I find the lack of background lore in the world really upsetting. Nothing is more frustrating than finding a really cool set of ruins, with no clues as to what it was or its history. Even the current NPC towns don't seem to have much in the way of backstory or history, they're just sort of there. Most disappointing of all is the contents of books. Most of them seem to be fairy tales, and very few seem to have info on the setting. I was playing Skyrim a bit recently, and the way the books you find in the world fills in the history of Tamriel or provide foreshadowing to many of the quests is one of my favorite things about the game. And the fact that something like that, which requires little in the way of tech or implementation to realize, is so lacking is so much the worse.
     
  6. Floors

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    Agreed. The majority of the books in this game were truly awful and felt like rush job. However I must commend the players for making their own books that add to the lore at least somewhat. Those are few and far between all the "junk" books. The guy that made books about Lord British and the constellations was great. The ones were you could tell it was actually a labor of love and not just copying some Aesop's fable just to get a "book" out.

    I swear... give me 2 weeks and I could rewrite every so called book in this game to be much more interesting. Most of them are less than 5 tiny pages so it's not like a ton of effort.

    If I see a book called "The thimble and the Rose" you KNOW I'm not reading it... What about "The ruins of Moon" or "The obisdian truth" or "Evard's Life and Times", "The child of chaos", "The Ascended Masters", etc. Just something ... sensical. Something having to do with the story.

    I know we can't use the Ultima lore which is SUCH a shame. But yeah, I agree 100 percent.
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2018
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  7. Cora Cuz'avich

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    I was going to add, setting the game in "New Brittannia" may have been a mistake, since it means they only have about five hundred years of history they can talk about. Probably the single coolest thing in the game is realizing what's in the bottom of the Hilt, but they can't actually say what it is. Regardless, that (and the Epitaph) are places that should be filled with scraps of letters and old orders and documents from the Obidians to flesh things out. But every scrap of paper is just an "unintelligible note." Same with Skrekk, how cool would it be to read all kinds of Kobold lore and history? But there's nothing.
     
  8. Floors

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    Yup. I imagined it all anyway. I imagine Libris is the Lycaeum. I imagine alot of things to make this game more fun and feel more connected. I even pored over the U3 maps and the Sota map imagining what ruins should be where and what dungeons should still be there. The fact we vaguely share maps with U1 and U3 is one of the coolest "not an easter egg"'s we have.
     
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  9. Cora Cuz'avich

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    It'd be cool if, going forward, every new or uncloned scene had at least two books/letters written that referenced the new scene or an element in the new scene, which are then dropped into a number of current scenes in various places. (It'd be even nicer if they did this retroactively every release.) Like East Vauban, there's obsidians prowling around, doing some sort of research on zombies, and poking around some old ruins with a secret. Maybe a few books in homes or other scenes referencing the old ruins, and a letter on the desk of some official in Brookside or Graff Island mentioning increased obsidian activity in East Vauban. (And why is there not an obsidian wizard at the end of that cave with the zombie tanks with research notes in his inventory?) Little things that tie all the bits together would go a long way to making this feel like a world and not a collection of unconnected game levels to beat.
     
    Last edited: Dec 7, 2018
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  10. Jason_M

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    I'm very glad to see the wheels in motion and the captain at the helm :D

    I absolutely agree. I love exploring and am often surprised and pleased by what I find - but it's a feeling that doesn't last long. It's like exploring the Aztec and Mayan temple complexes but having no idea what you're looking at and then eating lunch at McDonalds. In some ways it's like how the old Windows 10 lock screen that showed fantastic photos but there was no way to find out where that place is. The curiosity drove a bunch of people to petition for a mouse-over.

    While much of the history before the fall is lost to us, a great many mysteriea date to the Obsidian empire.

    I like your idea about sprinkling lore about. Amanda in Etceter is a good example. A ghost without much to say but she connects to the local lore.

    How about a quest in Hallowed Plains given by a Kobold scout or a concerned medium on the other side that explains the origin of the conflict. An engraving or mural on a random temple saying the dedication of the temple....

    Maybe the developers could set up an email account where players could email their lore ideas to inspire them. History as we imagine it comprised hundreds of little fragments discoverable in the world and originating from hundreds of minds.
     
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  11. the Lacedaemonian

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    What would really engage my curiosity would be an unknown millennium of historical ruins, unexplained at the oldest extreme, and increasingly becoming a little more clear as to what had happened in the recent past (the Obsidians). Something far more expansive would really engage an awe-inspiring sense of mystery and instill in the adventurer a desire to seek out anything to do with that mystery of the proto-Britannian civilizations, regions, ancient-ancient events, and so on.

    Mirroring the Earth's advancement through each of it's incremental Ages, it is fascinating in real life that at 0 AD, there were mysterious ruins with unknown histories dotting the landscape of post-Bronze Age societies, each in flux itself. Such an expansive New Britannia would capture me deeply, even after the contemporary story thus far has somewhat jaded me. I assuredly would become thirsty for more scraps of story if ideas of a deep fantasy history in New Britannia were possible to be discovered in any given scene. As it currently stands, try as I have, there needs to be more depth to the TIME this world has existed and what it has endured within that scope.

    I remember back to Ultima 6, the first game I played that held such depth for me, though young and immature, now possibly nostalgic, I can still precisely define why I was held in a state of mysterious, inquisitive, explorative rapture: random NPCs all had something interesting to say when you least expected it, there were MANY curious mysteries to stumble upon from early in the game, and many of the characters were interesting. The idea of a core group of companions must come back. NPCs can do things that players cannot. NPCs are never in a bad mood and do not project their feelings onto you unless it pertains to a plot. I think this can be better leveraged going forward. It should be something worth a few brainstorm sessions.

    I think the main reason I remain here is because the Ultima nostalgia is more than simple nostalgia: it was among the very first PC games I experienced, and there was a mystical, fantastical, DEPTH to them that even a young me could appreciate. I suspect if I was my current age when the Ultima series began, I would be even more tied to this project out of sheer unwillingness to let the more vapid, simplistic games we see today take over the market.

    The intellectual tinker, the courageous explorer, the roguish knight, the unhinged mage, and the silent ranger are character builds I hope to one day experience, roleplay, and establish as my own PCs. That simply does not work with the state of fiction we currently enjoy.

    -The Lacedaemonian, also known currently as Hyperlight Drifter.
     
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  12. Arkah EMPstrike

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    Its pretty in depth and implies alot of shady things going on. The sword of midras book helps tie it all together better, but i got most of the lore from reading notes, talking to npcs and paying attention to the dialog during the story.

    And the lost vale is a wealth of information that has even more mysterious foreshadowing
     
  13. Cora Cuz'avich

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    Too much is sketchy and implied and foreshadowing. Not enough is concrete. At the very least, the history of the major cities should be fleshed out more fully. These places are inhabited, and have been for some time. We need a solid footing to launch off of when getting into the more mysterious stuff. And a timeline would be nice. Obsidian Order was when? Some lore says the order fell only recently, some implies it fell a while ago. If it was recently, why is info on what happened so lacking? Because they don't want to spoil the novels, which we may or may not get, and shouldn't be the main source of lore anyway? We only really know about two of the Ruins (the PvP areas on the map) because they were featured in the novels. That info should be discovered by exploring the ruins, with the novels giving more insight, but not necessary to figuring out why they are ruined.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2018
  14. majoria70

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    I absolutely love to explore also and to me one thing that's missing is ambiance. Like in the game Wizards and Warriors a single player old RPG you come across a sad and sorrowful lich ghost who has been forced into this pittiful form by an evil aberition Lord Cet. He took his soul and music is his only way to block out the the torment of what hes done.

    Some voicing makes all the difference imo. We have wonderful voices already here in this community as you can see on the Caverns website owned by Sir Teckle and many narrations by Asclepius, Lord Baldrith, Doctor, and many more.

    We have always wanted to contribute to the game but have not been given the opportunity. Also Womby and Woftam have awesome voices. So much talent here. To read a few lines imagine that in game. We also have the voice of Lord British who is our very own talent.

    Edited
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2018
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  15. Beaumaris

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    The Truth is Out There
     
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  16. Floors

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    Doo wee doo wee do weeee... dom dom dom dom
     
  17. jregel

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    What was at the bottom of the Hilt and what would *you* say it is if Port won't/can't?
     
  18. Cora Cuz'avich

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    Another semi-related gripe (since I'm clearly in complainy-pants mode now about underutilized elements in the game) is the "underworld." It's actually really cool, having all these sewers and caverns and mines interconnected, but they're also kinda underdeveloped and useless. They'd be a great way to get around in the early game, except they're mostly tier 5. Instead of opening up the passes on the overworld, it would have been better to have just downgraded most of the "Passage" scenes to tier 2, expanded them to make them a bit bigger/longer, and make sure the areas of the sewers where they connect to the passages have lower tier mobs. Then, once you hit a point where you're doing tier 2 areas, you have a way to get around the map aside from lunar rifts, at the expense of time. It'd be a slog to get from one end of the map to the other this way, but it'd be doable at a low level. Higher level players would still find running through the passes more convenient. There's plenty of ore nodes down there, which would be great at low levels, but not so much that higher level players would farm them. And, for those players that don't want to enter PvP zones in the main quest, they'd likely already be aware (or have a pretty good idea) of how to do that, since they'd have probably come across some of these areas in their explorations.
     
  19. Cora Cuz'avich

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    It's the remains of one of the Guardian's pillars from Ultima 9. It's sort-of referenced in the novel, when Evard mentions there's a "secret" reason why the Obsidians built a fortress at that location.
     
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  20. Anpu

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    I personally like the lore being vague. As that creates questions...
     
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