Shroud of the Avatar - Update #11, Stretch Goals and Bonuses

What's wrong with pets? I think they are pretty cool.
Most people here seem to hate online games, and taming / controlling pets was a major feature of Ultima Online. So their reaction to this is predictable.

Me, I'm all for it! It was a blast taming creatures in UO and walking around with an army of critters at my command. The higher skilled tamers even managed to tame dragons.

And really there's no reason something like this shouldn't exist in a virtual fantasy world, even a single-player one.
 
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Yeah, I think pets are a cool addition to an MMO or even a single-player game. Selecting your pet, training their skills, etc, adds another layer of customization to play with. I'm all for it.
 
As Matt Barton would put it:

"Now for me, nothing really evokes that magical feeling of verisimilitude more than pets. So we've got pets out the ass in this game."
 
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Game is funded, stretch goals are out, RG declared himself GröDaZ (Gösster Designer aller Zeiten) but with everything I read, I still don't know about what he actually designed (or shoots for) regarding the story, character system, world interactivity etc.. Overall the game just dosn't seem a good match for me. I just don't think I share his interest in the online aspects and the single player aspect remains vague and my worries regarding certain design decisions e.g. combat, scene size, companion system, etc. have not really been addressed. I'll wait a few more days, but I feel I'll probably withdraw my pledge at the moment.
 
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companion system, etc.

Yeah - has anything been said about companions yet? Truth is that I was a great fan of Guild Wars 1 and in particular experimenting with different hero loadouts. Kept me playing that game for many many hours. If SOTA turns out anything like that would be great (for me). OTOH some of the MMO crowd hated that aspect of the game, since they couldn't get anyone to group with them. So Arenanet were always in two minds as to how far to allow you to play with hero parties.

My take is let players do what they want - if they want to play with an NPC party let them do that. If people aren't grouping up with other randoms, then it's because they don't want to. You shouldn't force multiplayer down people's throats.
 
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I'm really sorry for saying this, and I don't want to be a jerk, or ruin anyone's enthusiasm, or sound very negative either, but everything I have seen up until now of this game and its creators reeks of trouble; including the pitch that looked one of the most insincere of all time, the god complex of "Lord British" going as far as dissing fellow game designers, these so-called stretch goals, the online-offline miscommunication, the lacking story and world information, the housing-pets MMO aspects, the neutral art direction, the "placeholder" graphics, and the - thus far - empty promises.

I know many people idolize (sometimes even worship, geez) RG, and his name should mean so much in this business, but I just can't bring myself to pledge to this dodgy kickstarter. I very much hope that I am wrong, and my gut feeling is misleading, and this game will turn out to be great.
 
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The game is 2 years from being completed. I don't think it's fair to call it all empty promises unless you hold every other kickstarter to the same standard, some campaigns haven't even shown any working demos, even with placeholder art. They also made this comment today:

Creator Portalarium, Inc. about 2 hours ago
@Peter, the main focus of the story line and quests is very single player focused. Trust us when we say that if all we were trying to do is create a UO experience then we would not be partnering with people like Tracy Hickman to create a full flushed out story line as deep or deeper than any Ultima title.
 
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Creator Portalarium, Inc. about 2 hours ago
@Peter, the main focus of the story line and quests is very single player focused. Trust us when we say that if all we were trying to do is create a UO experience then we would not be partnering with people like Tracy Hickman to create a full flushed out story line as deep or deeper than any Ultima title.

This is good to know, but why don't they put this on their main kickstarter page. If you do a word search on the project's front page you will not find a single instance of the word(s) "single player" which would confuse and put off many people.

I am keeping a close eye on this project as world interaction and living world seems to be keywords that are used often in this project.
 
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That is a good point Spoonfull and trust me Chris said there is a lot of info done already. There were a lot of questions answered in an inprompto chat yesterday with LB:

http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19832

Some key things:

Belief System: yes, we will have virtues... the exact words I use, for virtues you all know is still in debate. Clearly I do not want to cross any legal lines, but the virtues words are also clearly public domain... so... let me figure out how to do it... but fear not, you will know it!

Story: I feel the best Ultima stories I wrote when working with Warren Spector, as he is also a better story teller than me. While then, and now the story is still under my clear leadership, Warren and now Tracy are invaluable!
 
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True, true, I was generalizing there, sorry, but that is only one of my many concerns. And those are only that, concerns.
I suppose the only thing that will be able to nullify these concerns is the game itself, completed, released, and awesome. If that is not the case, I will at least be able to say that my hunch was good.
 
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Creator Portalarium, Inc. about 2 hours ago
@Peter, the main focus of the story line and quests is very single player focused. Trust us when we say that if all we were trying to do is create a UO experience then we would not be partnering with people like Tracy Hickman to create a full flushed out story line as deep or deeper than any Ultima title.

That's interesting - but why then did they introduce all this MMO nonsense into the campaign in the first place? It's pretty clear, in any case, that they haven't the budget or the time to make a decent MMO. Maybe the answer to this has something to do with DRM...
 
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That's interesting - but why then did they introduce all this MMO nonsense into the campaign in the first place? It's pretty clear, in any case, that they haven't the budget or the time to make a decent MMO. Maybe the answer to this has something to do with DRM…

Um, no? Let's not make things up things about drm. You have the option to completely play offline if that is what you want. They have already stated it was drm free. I think he is trying to make it so, although you have a single player game you can be social with your friends as well in a persistent world. I have brought up they need to bring more updates for single player info and they stated t hat the updates they have given were the ones requested the most. They also said Tracy had just came on board but there is an overall structure there. I did point them to this forum to see what people are saying.

The game has already been in development for some time so a lot of the infrastructure is somewhat there. I'm hoping personally they do an update on story.
 
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