SPO and SP Offline

The whole combat system is MMO taking over single player experience. After all it doesn't matter if you have 50 spells in a single player game because its quite easy to design a system where you can pause the game and access your spell list and chose the one you want. Look at dragon age on console, you can do hugely complicated tasks with only the number of buttons on a controller

Not to mention the whole forced virtue system, shared between characters is another attempt to please the PvP crowd. In single player games I can be evil with one character and good with another and in between with another whatever I felt like. Its only the PvP people who care if another person plays different alignments with different characters

 

Agreed. No pause, means you can't use a menu when you need a more esoteric skill or item. Now the deck system was created to get around that kind of thing. It's biggest strength, imo, is the ability to fit so many abilities in so few keys. I'd kind of like it, if it didn't pull my already strained attention from the combat.

 

The reality is we've not seen much in terms of concrete offline play or functionality. I remain hopeful that they won't just take the online game and add a save/load cycle to it.

I agree that seeing a town full of mini-castles is just silly and for that reason, I may mostly stick with the offline game (depending on how it actually firms up). Maybe they'll end up imposing some kind of zoning for houses...

 

You are more sanguine that I, good sir (uh hopeful.... not bloody ). I don't even expect a proper save/load system in offline. We have very little info to go off of, but my money is on single player modes running almost exactly like multi-player modes.

 

If an entire city becomes decorated with thrones of bone and what not, then that's how that city grew to be. That's the beauty of player content, it grows!

Actually, most MMORPG-fans expect action-based combat now-a-days. I don't believe the combat system has anything to do with how MMORPGs used to be... more like it's designed so that it stays away from being a twitch game.

The magic system is incomplete. The devs states many times that they're working to implement spell reagents for casting. How we gain access to these spells is still up in the air.

This is unrelated to MMOs. Daggerfall was a single-player game and it was MASSIVE. This is pre-alpha. Standard video game development has the "world building phase" right before the game enters beta. If it feels empty, it's because the designers are focusing on other things and the artists are still building their assets.

Just having a bunch of foliage in an area doesn't mean the world is more detailed. Too much foliage can prevent players from seeing anything at all.

"Probably" is word that shouldn't be used to forge opinions. Of course it can "have an impact" on the multi-player but that's not necessarily a bad thing. We don't know what they have planned.

That's the beauty of having instanced hexes. It means you CAN make an impact.

The original GuildWars is a good example of this. If you do a mission and get certain NPCs killed, you can actually see the impact later on in the game. All it has to do is make a specific check for every party member. In your game, that NPC is dead and will never come back for quests and such, for other players in your group... that particular NPC might just be absent. If they come back to the area, that NPC will be there waiting for them.

RG has stated that he personally wrote dialogue for a lot of the NPCs in the world. Again, this is pre-alpha, so content isn't being implemented into the game yet; just systems. Not to mention that "an extremely large world" =/= MMO. The Elder Scrolls games aren't MMOs and they have that problem.

What's a "real" conversation system? My personal experiences with NPC interaction shows that it's anything BUT an MMO-chat.

All of the compromises you listed aren't factual. I'd wait until Beta before being worried about "maybe" and "probably".

This is RG we're talking about, he knows how to do single player experiences. His goal is to do BOTH game modes correctly. Make a single-player game and add multi-player features; there's no need to take anything out. You're worried because, right now, the most important SYSTEMS are the infrastructure of the MMO part. Once they get that done, you'll see tons of single-player content.

Once this hits Beta, you'll see.

 

I hope you're right. I really do.

 

I agree with Gix, RG will not let the single player offline experience get brushed to the wayside. I understand that they need to keep the community excited and engaged (thus, PvP, etc) but his gaze will turn to the offline game here at some point (hopefully, not too long from now)

 

Oh how I hope that you are right. As other Kickstarter projects show there is a huge demand for offline SP RPGs right now.

 

I've kind of got a foot in both camps - I like the idea of playing online with friends (and foes!) but it's a MUST for me to have a good storyline and good game mechanics to immerse me in the story.

If they put effort into improving the dialogue system (please please Port. improve the NPC dialogue!) and used clever game mechanics to mask the fact that others are busy completing the same quests as me (e.g. sick guard in owls head is healed when I heal him, but on others computers he's still sick - for me I should see him walking around healed or at least visibly healed).

I'm a bit nervous about how this will play in terms of immersive story... but I still have faith in Lord Brit + Team Port. at this point.

 

Yeah, the "Ultima inspired" Divinity Original Sin has been top of Steam + GOG charts for a long time... people want a game with a plot!

 

~clicks the 'Strange! I always thought that actually saying whatever I had in mind was way closer to a conversation than being slapped with premade replies' response option~
~clicks the 'It was certainly what we did in the good old games time' follow up multiple choice~

 

If you look at Lord Darkmoon's other posts, you'll see that he isn't talking about dialog trees at all. He's referring to the lack of intimacy that mmo chat interface has compared to standard single player games. In most single player rpgs you have portraits, or the camera locks in on who you're talking to. It creates a sense of intimacy which is completely lacking in a plain box with text.

That being said, Richard already told us he was looking into fixing cameras on NPCs as an option in a previous thread, so it's not as big of a concern really.

 

I agree with a lot of your complaints, although I don't think they have to do with a MMO-SP divide.

* A lot of MMO-oriented players might also not like how player housing drastically affects the look of cities.
* A lot of MMO-oriented players might also not like auto-attack.
* A lot of MMO-oriented players might want to let players to be allowed to hide.
* A lot of MMO-oriented players might be dissatisfied with how they implemented magic.

As for the size of the world and the number of NPCs, as a fan of the single player Ultimas, I don't think this is a problem as long the NPCs aren't filler NPCs that are all exactly alike. We were talking about this in another thread; larger cities is something I always wanted in the single-player games. I loved exploring large cities in the single player games and hated when it turned out cities were small.

You're exaggerating when you say the in single-player Ultimas every character had a detailed background though. If you download a transcript of the U7 dialogue from The Literal Ultima, look up Sean, a typical NPC merchant character. He responds to only a handful of prompts: name, job, jeweller, precious materials, finest craftsmen, gems, Fellowship, philosophy, Britain, buy, bye. Name, job, and bye, are standard. Gems and buy do the same thing. Everyone replies to Fellowship and philosophy. All of his answers are a relatively short. There are a lot of NPCs in U7 just like Sean.

Would it be cool if they had more of a background and talked some more? Sure. But that would be going beyond U7, plus its not necessary for every NPC to spill out their life story to you, either.

* * *
Anyway, I think you're seeing a divide between MMO and SP demands that isn't necessarily there.

 

Here's my response to you:

PRE-ALPHA

ALPHA

BLACKBOX

BETA

 

There are some good points being made here. Which is not to say that there isn't a genuine concern about said divide.

 

Exactly, it is not about how the dialogues are written which I think are excellent. And it is not about the fact that you have to type in your sentences, which I think is cool, too.
It is about the presentation of the coversations. You don't focus on the NPC you are talking to and there are no portraits. It is even possible to look in a total different direction while "chatting" with an NPC...

 

1) You assume that english is my mother tongue and you're throwing concepts like "appeals to authority".
2) You communicate that I'm not worth a personalized response.
3) You failed to explain why you believe so.
4) My point is that the OP has no evidence to begin with... Because there's no content in a PRE-Alpha. There's actually more data that showcases what the developers are trying to do.

It's not a matter of "defending the game/team", it's a matter of communicating what you guys should expect from a developer build. Portalarium wants us to influence their decisions but any discussion of "content" based on what we see in the game is futile.

This is the time to talk about how we feel about the various systems. We're building a house and the plumbing's not even in yet, so why are we talking about the wallpaper colour?

 

You're taking this overly personally. The fact that I didn't give you a personalized response has nothing to do with whether or not I think you're worth a personalized response. It only means I didn't give you one, and that could well be because the quote I provided from that article explains the problem perfectly adequately.

As for English being your native language, you use it well enough. It makes no difference to me if it's your first language or not. The notion of an "appeal to authority" is not one specific to the English language. It is a type of fallacy. You could well be a native English speaker and not understand it. That's why I provided a link to a Wikipedia article that talks all about it.
Lastly, there isn't much evidence at all, that I have seen anyway, which explains how the single player game is coming along and what the plans for it are. We really don't know much about it at all, which is part of the point of this thread. The other part of the point of this thread, as I see it, is raising awareness of the fact that people do very much care about the single player game. Neither of those ideas can be dismissed so expediently by saying, "Richard Garriott is in charge, and you should have faith in Richard Garriott." That's all.

So anyway, it was one thing to point out why it's not right to dismiss these issues just because some people have faith in the guy in charge. I'm not especially interested in derailing this thread by further discussing what assumptions I apparently made. You can PM me if you like.

 

I totally agree with all what you have written in this thread, Lord_Darkmoon I share you opinion that - at least what we know until now - SotA has far too much compromises and focus on the mmo aspect. By this time this is one of many threads where people declares their concerns that the single player and PvE aspect of the game is underappreciated. We ask for companions, we ask for a better way of the presentation of the dialog system (you made an excellent proposal), we ask for a vision - an outline of the game, we ask for many things regarding the single player aspect of the game - and got no answer until now

 

I too think it will be interesting to see how diversity of scenes and NPCs are handled. I don't need every NPC to have a detailed backstory or even every scene to be totally unique. But there needs to be enough variety to keep things fresh and interesting. This isn't the dev team's first rodeo, so I think we have a lot to look forward to here. Future releases that push content instead of systems will be great to see.