Shroud of the Avatar - Update #8, The Fallen Keep

Myrthos

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In the eighth update for the Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues Kickstarter some concept art for The Fallen Keep is shown.
One of the scenarios we are building starts with the player outside of a former keep. The dark forces that lay siege to this keep, eventually overtaking it, now defend their spoils against your attempts to retake it.
Below is the latest concept art from Stephen Daniele depicting the Fallen Keep. If you look closely, you will see that while it was under siege, one of the towers was badly damaged. This will allow the clever player (with ranged attacks) to attempt to drop the drawbridge by destroying the crank seen through the gap at some angles. There are other, less obvious ways, into this keep, to be discovered by the more exploratory player. Those other ways may leave the keep more defensible when the tides are turned yet again!
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More information.
 
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So the clever player will destroy an object made of wood with arrows?

They really have learned from other kickstarters though (Tides of Numenera is currently at update #6). Their videos had something of a dysfunctional family, but all the pertinent information was there. With the possible exception of explaining their vision for the single player mode.
 
This video goes a long ways toward describing how the single/multiplayer aspects work.

Markee Dragon's interview with Richard Garriott

thx for the link. Still, it seems a bit improvised. In the RPG interview, allegedly, RG said something like "if you're a craftsman, and you want to pass to another area and you have to go through a dungeon to get there, you'll want to have an escort" to which the interviewer asked if there will be NPC escorts, and RG allegedely said "well, that's a good idea. I haven't thought of that". Facepalm-y stuff.
 
thx for the link. Still, it seems a bit improvised. In the RPG interview, allegedly, RG said something like "if you're a craftsman, and you want to pass to another area and you have to go through a dungeon to get there, you'll want to have an escort" to which the interviewer asked if there will be NPC escorts, and RG allegedely said "well, that's a good idea. I haven't thought of that". Facepalm-y stuff.

An interesting aspect of Kickstarter is that it invites the player base to directly interact with the developers during development without any encumbrances from publishers.

The obvious good side to this is that it's possible for some really great ideas to be implemented into a game. The obvious bad side to this is if the developers allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the feedback and cause them to stray from their original vision and goals for the game.

But another downside that I've noticed lately is that kickstarter backers sometimes tend to fail to fully appreciate their role as backers. That they are, to a certain degree, participating in a game's development and are therefore being provided some access to the 'brainstorming' that goes on behind the scenes - the good, bad, obvious, obtuse, and brilliant.

One area that I see being criticized again and again is the in-game artwork despite that it has been stated over and over again it's all preliminary stuff so that other gameplay mechanics can be tested and sometimes showcased.

The ideas and the demos are pre-alpha and normally the player base wouldn't even see this stuff, at least not during development, if ever.

Shroud of the Avatar continues to have a handful of gameplay mechanics currently being discussed that I find interesting but at the same time there are a handful of gameplay mechanics that I'm not so interested in. But I decided to back this game and will play along and give my opinion about things to the developer.

Crowdfunding is still a very new concept so time will only tell just how well developers walk the line of adjusting course based on sound backer feedback while keeping true to visions and goals for their game.
 
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But another downside that I've noticed lately is that kickstarter backers sometimes tend to fail to fully appreciate their role as backers. That they are, to a certain degree, participating in a game's development and are therefore being provided some access to the 'brainstorming' that goes on behind the scenes - the good, bad, obvious, obtuse, and brilliant.

I'm following T:ToN's campaign kind of closely, and there, a lot of backers come up with suggestions that seem even to me, a non-PS:T fanatic, pretty derpy. So yeah, like you said, there's still a need for a strong artistic vision on part of the devs.
 
To me the problem isn't the single player mode or how it has been explained, but the apparently unbridgeable gap between single player and MMO content (designed to be played repeatedly). Can the content from a single player game be indifferently played by several players and massive amounts of players? Can a boss you kill stay dead both in single player and multi player? Probably not, so how is this addressed?

Maybe I missed things but my thoughts are that this could be a hidden gem if they had thought through everything in great detail (and it would help if they shared the gist of it all). But… NPC escorts hadn't crossed their mind…
 
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