Let me open with a personal story.
I can still clearly remember, on a grey wintery day in the early 1990s, being sat in front of my Commodore Amiga, wired up to an old second hand portable television, and playing Ultima V; the prior game had been only my second ever RPG but it had left a deep, indelible impression upon me with its far more adult, meaningful morality than could be found in the rest of medium of the time. With how it encouraged you to lead a virtuous life, that the Quest of the Avatar was forever, rather than just a victory point you reached and well done, a winner is you…
At the exact moment of memory, I was using the included Journal to trace my way through the Underworld and follow in Lord British’s footsteps; not just because it was one of the goals of the game to rescue him, but also because it was a lovely piece of design, a sense of actual connection with a shared, if imaginary history. Here I was, holding the actual physical Journal! But even deeper still, because in some strange way, I wanted to thank Lord British for what he’d taught me. I wanted to bring him, and the values he symbolised, back into the world above.
At some point during these experiences, I heard the unexpected sound of a car on the road outside. It was my parents, who never normally visited, and certainly not unannounced. They had come to tell me my Grandfather had just died. And I remember how, when the funeral was over, and I had time to go back to simple escapism, Ultima V helped me through the emotions ahead.
Which is why today, Shroud of the Avatar is such an unbelievably painful disappointment. If I met Richard Garriott in real life, perhaps I’d like him personally. Perhaps I’d even thank him for all the pleasure, and yes even support his prior games have given me. But for a game that at the Kickstarter pledged itself to be the "Spiritual Successor" to Ultima, there is
nothing of the Virtues within them.
To make sure we’re all on the same page here,
this is what the Kickstarter was when it was announced.
Now let’s look at the actual facts; Critics of the game didn’t understand what the Kickstarter was? How heart breaking is it when someone who taught us that Honesty was a Virtue can lie, if only to himself, and think that’s honestly even close to the truth? Look at just how much of what we were promised turned out to not be true in the final game;
"Since then, most every other RPG has focused more on level grinding than on "role playing", which has been reduced to a few initial character choices. While advancements in graphics and sound have been phenomenal, in many ways the virtual worlds we play in have become less real. Less open. Less immersive"
The actual gameplay, outside of Real Money Trading and purchasing house decoration in the Add On Store is
nothing but level grinding. There’s no "immersive" world because there’s no way to interact with it like Ultima (especially 7 or UO); it’s designed like World of Warcraft where you cannot drop items into the world, or interact with them outside of specially coded quests. There is no way to drop a sign on Lord British’s head or poison his bread because you literally don’t have that much freedom.
"Once players are introduced to the game, they will discover their own story woven into the immersive world and lore surrounding them. Players may choose to follow the life of the adventurer or, if they prefer, focus on exploration and discovery."
The quest lines are all fixed, generic to everyone… and still only 1/3rd completed so far. Every character has both Crafting and Adventure XP bars and can be both at once. There is no "exploration" or "discovery" at all because the scenes are all small scale, fixed instances.
"Deep original fiction – Ethical parables, cultural histories, fully developed alternate language text"
And this is where the game goes from being just badly designed to being an outright ethical scandal.
You were promised, as part of the Kickstarter rewards, a copy of the fiction in the form of the Novel "Blade of the Avatar", written by Garriott and Tracy Hickman. But after they’d sent out the .pdfs of the novel, and because they keep running out of money, Portalarium decided that they’d release a second version of the novel, with 4 more chapters…
Oh, they blamed the publishers for why prior backers now weren’t getting the full lore, but had no difficulty at all in double charging people for those extra chapters, as well as declaring it would soon be a
Trilogy of books.
Elsewhere in the Pledges, "Design your own NPC, with their own conversations!" got downgraded to "Name your own NPC".
And then they started adding arbitrary cut off dates for Pledges, so anyone not upgrading before then didn’t even get the same upgrade path.
Now the reward system is an ungodly, complicated mess which needs a spreadsheet to work through. Look at those footnotes, I mean,
just look at them!
But here’s a simple way to understand how it works;
The Shroud community recently congratulated themselves for helping a poor soul with Stage IV Colon Cancer. And that’s a good thing! A fine example of Compassion, and I truly mean that. What absolutely
isn’t a virtue is the fact that because he has to downgrade his account now, an account he spent $25,000 on,
he’ll lose all the benefits of that account even if he pulls through and can reinvest the same figure back in again. The game isn’t "Launched" yet, remember. There’s no reason why he can’t still be seen as a backer. And it’s all because Portalarium, desperate to keep people invested, and encourage people to raise their pledges before cut off dates, have deliberately designed the system to be literally Feudally unfair to anyone who doesn’t have the ability, or just can’t keep investing any further.
And it gets worse.
When Portalarium signed up for the Kickstarter Terms and Conditions, they committed to asking for the amount of money they believed could finish their product, as well as all the rewards. We now know they deliberately lied about how much they actually needed,
just to "get out of the pickle" they found themselves in at the time. 3 years later, and a further $10,000,000 they still haven’t completed even Episode 1,
and now are brazenly stating that unless a second Kickstarter succeeds, they won’t move on to Episode 2.
And the remaining community’s reaction to that? "Oh good! As long as you let me have more exclusive content for backing it a second time!" Portalarium made a legal commitment to at least try and give you the promised rewards of Episodes 2 – 5, and they just walk away from it, whilst the backers rub their hands and hope for more ways to make real profit from that.
It keeps getting worse; back to those Kickstarter quotes.
Player housing:<
Player housing will live in the persistent shared world, so real estate will have location value….
Let’s just cut to the chase on this one;
Player housing requires a Lot for the location, and a Housing Deed for the house. Currently, nearly 6 months after the Land Rush of Kickstarter etc Backers ended,
the lot is still only available in the Add On Store for real money. Sure, there are now monthly lotteries to perhaps win one, but Real Money Trading for gold, to allow you to buy more tickets, is also legal… so good luck getting one!
This is literally again putting the needs of RMTs ahead of actual game design, indeed, when the RMTs attempted to fix the very first lottery, and then Portalarium said they were minded to add free tickets for normal backers,
they howled so much about it that the free tickets were removed in under a day.
Here is the Official RMT of Shroud of the Avatar, Markee Dragon
complaining about how unfair it was that people who hadn’t donated tens of thousands to the game had a chance of getting a home. Seriously. He really does.
If you’re going to enter in the…the…the…the ‘other players’ for this, the players who don’t own land, then what are you doing for the people who do own land so there’s an equal distribution out to everybody?
Markee Dragon of course often visits Portalarium’s offices to discuss how to design the economy by the way; Remember when you donated blood to the Healers, and gold coins to the beggars in Ultima? Apparently we’re supposed to be donating to the Rich now.
And the lack of virtue doesn’t stop. Remember this from the original Kickstarter?
The results of all crafting elements have value as consumables and components in the combat system, as well as maintenance and upgrade elements for housing and cities.
Well item repairs now are tied too… are you ready for this…?
A PREMIUM CURRENCY. Yes, we were promised time and time again back in the day that the game would be Buy To Own, with no microtransactions because those ruined games. You can see such a claim in
another Lord British interview here, for instance.
The part that is not good for players, but has been good for the companies that made a lot of these games, is how to squeeze money out of ‘free-to-play’. And that’s the part we are avoiding like the plague. It is actually a good monetization strategy to take a ‘free-to-play’ game and fill it with tons of microtransactions, and then tons of ways to leverage you, to try to convince you to either start making microtransactions, or spam all of your friends to hopefully find one of them to make microtransactions. And while that’s proven to be a very successful business model, I don’t think it makes for very good games. And since we’re trying to create a ‘gamer’s game’, we’re going to avoid that monetization strategy.
Yet now you’ve got a B2O game designed in F2P ways with MACROtransactions AND a Premium Currency. A currency that even gives P2W advantages (via the potions of obsidian, how does 50% more stamina for 7 days sound eh?), as well as which warps the basic gameplay so even crafting repairs are expected to need the benefits of premium spending.
And that’s before we get to the time where Portalarium’s own staff were caught quietly posting positive Steam reviews to try and avoid the ratings tanking.
And what about all the times
that they’ve deliberately allowed harassment of and banned critics of the games from their forums? Unlike Portalarium, I’ll stand by my comments publicly, so I’ll say here that’s my personal story again: But years later, and this time of my removal from the Steam forums because I tried to warn people of scams and deceptive comments.
Do you remember how you once taught us to defend the poor, uphold personal honesty, act fairly in all our dealings with our fellow man?
Your latest game now bans you from the community if you try and put those lessons into practice.
I wonder if you even know that’s how your former, true fans feel, and how they are being treated today?
And even what happens to the villains we once were told to avoid becoming in Ultima V;
one former Lord Blackthorn, who was involved in that harassment of me was only banned from the Steam community when he changed his view of the game to negative as well.
Indeed even
claiming that Portalarium is leaking personal information to you about people’s families, and using that to threaten critics of the game is entirely acceptable, and laughed off as "just throwing stuff out there" when reported to the Community Moderators! If only he’d "just thrown out there" he was about to be employed as said Mod when he put up a positive Steam review too…
Meanwhile, the same individual claiming to be defending the game by making people afraid for their family remains not just uncensored,
but is allowed to open discuss claims a previous Moderator supposedly made about a PM he claimed another critical individual had sent.
And I could go on and on and on… But let’s stop here and ask again; are we former backers really just completely ignorant then of what the initial Kickstarter was about? Or is it really the case that Shroud of the Avatar is nothing like what we were promised, and has nothing to do with the "Spirit of Ultima"? That the game wasted not just our money, but tore our heart out after decades of believing in the worth of Lord British… whilst sociopaths and scammers run rampant over a game that should in all honesty be renamed Shroud of John Galt.
And for most other people, is just frankly a crap game anyway?
