State of the single player experience?

@Lord_Darkmoon,

The game should definitely be playable with more of this off. But we have some more ways to go; player appearance and NPC appearance should be able to be more unique than it is right now. That would allow the nameplates to be turned off. Injury should show up when health is impacted. That would allow health bars to be turned off, it would also let us hide some of the numbers like "x got hit for x points of damage". I think once all of that is done, the interfaces could be polished a lot to bring it closer to what you expect.

But I'd still expect some bits of interface like the utility/combat bar. Keep in mind that this was always in Ultima also, until Ultima VII, which also is where the combat system started going downhill. In fact, every Ultima until Ultima VII was pretty interface-heavy, including the chat box even.

 

Well, yes. Because that's in a MMO setting.

If you wanted to you could go single and you'd not see any of those party lines on the left (I never do q.q), the hot bar - if you locked it - can disappear too, nameplates - I hit "N", I think?, the upper right hand icons wouldn't be needed in SPOff so could go away too and then would remain the chat - which I hope they work on.

 

Q1 (specifically March) should put a lot of guesswork to an end and then we can comment with actual thoughts on the experience of offline!!!!!!

 

Yes, this will be when it gets interesting,

 

Lord_Darkmoon, you really do speak my mind about many aspects of the single player. That IRC style dialog is one of those aspects of any single player game that I also strongly dislike. I'm okay with them in games in the style of Baldurs Gate or Neverwinter Nights. But Morrowind? Not so much. With the perspective change, my attitude towards the game changes, and IRC style chats ruin the immersion for me. Text windows, as cool, resizable and movable and even practical as they can be - they just aren't for me. Also, I prefer multiple choice options over keywords. Despite having these keyword based dialogs in previous Ultima games. But I can live with those, still. There's new stuff all around, and that is good, but a healthy compromise seems to be best. It's easy to see. I'm worried. I just really-really long for a true single player story, with the gameplay I can really fall in love with. Without sacrificing a small goat or feeling prodded to go online to experience this the way it "should rather be".

Then there is the already talked aspect of character personality. And that starts out with what they look and sound like. There just needs to be a lot more detail for character faces. My love for character portraits isn't going to die anytime soon. And they haven't gone out of style, either. Pillars of Eternity may be a retro western RPG, but that's what SotA wants to be as well, in many ways. SotA then again wants to be a lot of things...

Someone mentioned these --- and I sure also prefer not having name plates, question or exclamation marks above NPCs. If there's something to do, I want find out about it through the much more personal effort of talking and connecting with those characters, or being witness to their problems and situations.

 

Some good news is that the devs increased the char limit for chat text above people's heads. People requested that so they wouldn't have to look down at the chatbox. These were multiplayer folks who wanted that.

So, that in itself is a step in moving away from the chatbox.

 

We have no question or exclamation marks and never will (which I agree is horridly immersion breaking and annoying). As for name plates, those take .05 of a second to disable with the hit of "N". I agree it would be nice to not have them auto-enabled, but that at least is a significantly easy fix.

 

I think that if SotA is started in offline mode, some settings should be auto-enabled or automatically turned off. For example nameplates, healthbars, any floating numbers and texts.
Also the backpack inventory should be turned on by default.
The chat window should NEVER pop up automatically for example when you enter a new scene or discover something.

And I would very much prefer a different dialogue system. I am not saying that we should remove the type-in of texts but that it should not be in an IRC chat window. Maybe a small parser window that pops up right above the head of the hero and the texts NPCs say are shown above their heads. Something like this. But come on, an IRC chat window that you can put in the corner of a screen and resize so that it takes the whole breadth of the screen? What does this have to do with an NPC conversation? Now there is even an option to disable close ups of NPCs during conversations. I mean, really? I don't care what people do in MPO mode but in offline mode I want to have a close-up conversation where I can focus on the dialogue and the NPC and the conversation should not feel like an IRC chat. And this should not be an option, it should be so by default.

 

Sensible defaults like that - just for the single player experience - do make sense, I believe. It's really nothing that should bother a lot of people. We will see what settings we're actually going to find in the menus later on. Probably quite a bunch.

 

The New Years update was both kinda interesting, but also has me worry a little.

A bunch of really nice looking screenshots. Great locales. Absolutely stunning looking, Aerie Castle, for instance. Not just another clone of Neu Schwanstein, as seen in every other cliche fantasy story, or even the Disney logo, these days.

And then a call for contributors to create NPCs. A long long long list of NPCs. That could possibly make them quite a bit unique. But it's just gonna be "a farmer", "a smith", what have you. As cool as the idea is, to have the community add to the game like that ... somehow it doesn't inspire much confidence in me that any of these they're going to have anything to say about the plot of the game. Not that every character has to. What doesn't sit quite right with me is that these could turn out to be characters existing in their own little bubble, each, with little to no awareness what anyone else is doing or what's happening. We'll just have to hope they'll write these characters well.

 

We don't solicit backer submissions for NPCs that are key to the plot of the story. They are in the background and can be spoken with for flavor, but all plot-centric NPCs are written in-house (Richard Garriott and Tracy Hickman wrote the main story line NPC guidelines, and Gina and I flesh them out into complete NPC scripts).

We also flesh out the backer-submitted NPCs similarly. They may comment on things going on around them (generally for each city we have 10 to 20 plot beats depending on the area and most NPCs will have an opinion on them).

We also reject submitted backgrounds that clash with the story. We haven't had to do that often (in fact most work well with it) but there have been a few.

 

Hello, everybody! =) It's been a little while. We're at the end of march, and more information about the game has been out, but I wasn't able to keep track of everything. So let's ask that question once more. What's the current state of the single player, does it look different from a few months ago? Just a short while ago, I read through post on the SotA Facebook page, about "The Rise", a large dungeon that would connect players to various other areas and smaller dungeons. It sounds interesting. However then goes on to say that it is targeted for experienced groups.

So, do we have a party in the game now? Are you going to have friends with you on your journey? I mean ... characters? Like Shamino, Dupre or Iolo? Or does this mean there are areas in the game that you as a single player, will likely not be able to survive at all? In that case I'd hope areas like that see their difficulty level adjusted if the game is actually started in single-player offline/online mode.

So what else is new? Anyone here who knows more? <3

 

The single player mode will be included in Release 28 later today. See https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/release-28-instructions.48179/. But don't expect that mode to reflect the final single player experience. The Devs are just starting work on it.
Quote from instructions:

Single Player Offline: While Single Player Offline mode has been working internally since the start of the project, the work of making this available to players will begin. Additionally, features and content specific to Single Player Offline Mode will move into full production.

• 
  
• Single Player Offline Enabled: Players can now enable Offline mode. Please note that progress made in this mode is not stored on the server and will be overwritten when patched until the "Save Games" feature is implemented.
• Offline Features Delayed: Allowing functions (AI, conversations, pathfinding, housing, etc.) to work robustly on the client without server verification took slightly longer than planned, so we had to push offline features (save games, companions, offline economy, etc) to later releases.

 

Somehow this is disappointing but ok...
I still just really hope that the SP offline mode does really feel and play like a true SP game. And there is much more to this than offering companions and a different monster respawn. I hope that the devs dedicate A LOT of time to make the offline mode a real offline experience.

 

There is still al VERY LONG way to go until SotA really plays and feels like a true single player experience. Even DarkStarr admitted that.
If you ask me, basically the whole SP game is still missing. Before SotA can feel like a single player game there are still so many features and elements missing and so many changes have to be made that I have to say it would basically be another game.

My fears are that some of the let's call them more prominent members of this forum seem to steer the game into a different direction. I have to say that I sense even some hostility against those who are here for the SP part. Maybe the UO/MMO fans fear that development time might be taken away from features they think are more important, I don't know. I just have the feeling that there is an aggressive push away from SP and more towards MMO. Here on this forum the MMO crowd seems to have the upper hand and influnce the direction the game is going.
But I am reading opinions and articles about SotA on other websites, too and those mostly show a totally different picture. It seems that most SP fans write their opinions not here on this forum but on other sites. I read through some websites in the last few days and I have to say that the overall opinion about SotA seems to be rather negative. It was even depressing reading some posts full of disappointment and anger.
By this I want to say that there are much more people looking at SotA and voicing their opinion than there are here on the forum. Those voices should definitely not be ignored and they are asking for a true SP experience. So the SP game has to rock, it has to be solid and great as - according to all of those SP fans outside of the forum here - SP fans will rate the game for the SP part...

 

Just keep up with the suggestions, bug reports and whatever as it pertains to single player offline mode. There are a lot of silent voices here and many, many, more that aren't even on the forums. But yeah, it's going to be a long wait and I do not see that changing.

 

A good animator could probably fix those concerns for you. While they currently look like puppets, a few subtle movements from manually key-framed animations can make a huge difference. Is that something they'll invest the time to focus on? I hope so.

As a character animator, I guarantee you that: even if my goal is to make a static image, the character will look dead until I play around with all of the bones and controllers on the character's face. That's what "animation" stands for

Making a character blink or flap his/her mouth (like the NPCs are currently doing) is not enough.

Thing is, that suggests that all of the non-important NPCs will have nothing relevant to say about their situation in relation to the plot; they'll just... exist.

 

The "single player" perspective and functionality is a contentious issue here largely because of the presence of a few naysayers who jump on board any thread like this in order to preach the doomsaying stuff about shroud and claim things that are often untrue and extreme. As such that tends to put some off from responding to a thread like this, but I can tell you're genuinely just curious so I I can hopefully describe a few things.

#1 about the single player experience... A lot of people will respond trying to lump story in with the single player experience and will try to say that there is no story content because of multiplayers existence. This is untrue. In fact, I would not look at it like certain someones have said that there is an "MMO without people" but rather it is and will be a single player game and the story by and large is being designed to be agnostic of whether you play alone, play with just a few friends, or play in the global sandbox at large. The story is still the story, and you are the one true avatar - and that story is already appearing in the alpha game right now (and its pretty nicely done so far actually from what ive seen of it). I wont ruin it for you but basically there's three simultaneous "Events" that seem unrelated at first that are kind of causing the world to go to hell in a handbasket. Much like in Ultima 4, only through the virtues can these situations be made right. Now you can see this in game right now, but of course not everything is done and the story elements are still being put in game. I think you'll be pleased!

Second, pledging wont have much impact if you are playing single player offline anyway since all content, all lot deed types and everything else will be available to you. In fact, as single player offline the sandbox world is probably even more open to you than it is to those of us who play on the online world since to us we're largely competing against the avatars/ players.

Third, as far as balance and unique features to Single player - again, I think single player people will be pleasantly surprised in many ways. There are going to actually be unique companions to the single player game t make up your adventuring party (if you choose them) and we've been told anyone who's familliar with the ultima franchise should not be surprised when we find out who they are. FURTHERMORE, it's already been stated in the Q2 schedule that release 31 is going to be the specific combat balance pass for single player offline mode. Prior to that, the balance passes on the crafting and economy should be in effect not just for the online world but also for the offline world. Balance and polish of course are always going to be a part of the process.

And finally, to address some thoughts on the immersive factor in the world... The game has a true day night cycle with its own planetary bodies that revolve around having impacts on life inside the game world. NPC's will *NOT* just stand around as they do now, and as so many will try to tell you is "intended" because it is "MMO like" but in fact almost all mobs and towns in the game will have their own day/night cycles and behaviors. In fact we're already starting to see this come into place in towns like etceter, wolves playing with each other and hunting their prey in the wild. Now these behaviors are still being worked on, but they are an intended part of the game in both online and offline. Offline single player mode will be more unique in some of these areas because unlike the online mode once you clear many areas they will stay clear.

And no, by the way, portalarium hasnt "only made two" posts about single player offline in all this time. They in fact talk about it ALL of the time. People just only tend to hear what they want to hear. The truth is, because of the hybrid nature of the game, almost every announcement about a place or feature or monster applies to both the online and offline modes. In fact, the future looks rather bright for the near future of single player offline. The first ever iteration of that game mode was released this last week and while it is only the barebones start it's at least a signal that they're starting down that road of seperating the online and offline, single / multiplayer game elements.

I hope your interest in the single player portion of the game is well rewarded with features you like! I know i'll be playing a lot of it as well, even though my heart rests within the online community.

 

Hurray everyone is the ONE true Avatar ! @Bowen Bloodgood

 

That just makes so much sense.