Shroud of the Avatar: Garriott's Ultima MMO successor thing (no more wipes)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Shroud of the Avatar: Garriott's Ultima MMO successor thing (no more wipes)

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30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

He bailed after the seedinvest campaign. IDK why people are so hard on alexander delarge, he's always a good sport when these things go belly up and if it weren't for his posts this subforum probably wouldn't still be limping along.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2018 00:08

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 16:06

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

TBH I still like the parts of the game that I liked. In the first few areas there were a shitload (ok like 15) NPCs you could talk to in a freeform manner about various topics. It was janky but it was really novel and it actually did work provided you were ready to apply some old fashioned MUD Logic. There was a kind of interesting main quest and a kind of interesting side quest. If they had concentrated on that stuff and made it a solo game I might have even enjoyed it because maybe they would have finished that poo poo. Like it never would have been good, it looks like garbage but the combat deck building thing was an interesting take on action bar combat and there was a real sense of discovery. Mobbing through the underground grouped up with 10 people, with no idea where we would come out was a genuinely great experience and I don't think I've had that exact feeling with a game for a long time. Lots of "what's down here?" and "what does this do?" There were a lot of weird puzzles and points of interest that were never really fleshed out, but could have been, I think.

I still really believe that Atos ruined the game by being left in charge of a bunch of MMO mechanics and having no loving idea what he was doing. My posts in this thread lay out all the weird poo poo I was constantly running into. The biggest thing was that I was mainly interested in more of that "mobbing around the underground" experience, but the group mechanics were entirely hosed up. Healing was broken, damage mitigation was broken, aggro was broken, and group activities were broken because the designer was worried about things being too easy so he'd nerf rewards for things if you were in a group.

Ultimately I paid less than $60 even with the telethon stuff I bought, played over 200 hours, and made a friend I still chat with. I regret not just doing what there was of the main storyline and bailing out, but I was interested in the economy & crafting because it seemed to have some depth, but it made so little sense that I ended up just popping open the code to see how it worked and it turned out it was just moronic top to bottom. I spent like hours making a helmet that had a 3.7 HP bonus over the default iron helmet.

I think if it had been just as unpolished and janky as it was, but had a better focus on the things that were interesting about it, I'd probably be defending it to this day. But it was a fight between a good RPG, a bad MMO, and a shameless cash grab, and the cash grab won.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 12:32

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

They had an ability that was the equivalent of the wow priest ability Fade, and the tank taunting an enemy would overwrite it and cause Fade to end early. And this was, as far as I can tell, on purpose. I will never ever get over that.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2019 12:37

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Lum_ posted:

I indeed am, so kindly look elsewhere for commentary on trains

(there's plenty of ex-employees who apparently have been leaking to the reddit, including lots of stuff about me which because of said NDA I can't refute or talk about, so fun times)

Suffice to say I'm working in a very boring job learning kubernetes and am happy for it. If I decide to wear a game dev hat again I'll work on a mod and if it blows up I can yell at myself.

yoyoyo but do you remember when that guy went around the office waving a plastic fishing pole at people and filming them

# ¿ Mar 21, 2019 01:37

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Mr. Pickles posted:

what about the time he put an iPAD on a selfie stick and attached the contraption on a RC device, then put his face on the iPAD and made a video about how he was still around in Portalarium (ipad face on an rc car) while actually being in his girlfriends condo in new york, how bow dah

Believe it or not I'm not talking about garriott, they let some random grognard into the office to harrass their staff because he was a big customer/influencer as part of their beg-a-thons, and you got to see the barely-concealed rage and shame from the developers as he busted into darkened rooms where 6 people were crunching and turned on the lights so he could waggle a plastic fishing rod at them.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 04:50

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Gynovore posted:

Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 were very good. Pretty sure that 1 was the first 3D RPG with full 360 degree viewing and movement.

Famously, John Carmack saw UU1 at a trade show and said "I bet I can make it run faster." He then built the tech for hovertank 3D (which would shortly after be used for wolfenstein, once id got out from under softdisk). He was right- UU1 had a ton of graphical features that wouldn't show up again until doom, but wolfenstein could run on computers people actually owned and made way, way more money. That was a theme of Looking Glass's entire history: system shock released the same year as Doom, but could only run on computers with a CD drive because of the huge size of the voice files.

Oh and yeah ultimate underworld was not developed by anyone associated with garriot, it was made by looking glass.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 09:08

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Should have been a hello neighbor reference

# ¿ Apr 11, 2019 04:23

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

DancingShade posted:

I know nothing about Notch other than "Minecraft" and "Hollywood Mansion" but I like him already.

The funny thing about notch is he was already semi-well-known as a psychopath on some corners of the internet because he worked on wyrm online for awhile and was the perfect example of a wacko who works for a niche game and lets the power go to his head. I think a goon posted chat logs a couple years ago of notch going on a power trip because the guy had criticized the game's bugginess on the forums. Even during the minecraft years, he did things like compare server owners to drug dealers, but he was so out of the game at that point that there was a very "if only the czar knew!" vibe where one of his psychopath deputies was blamed for everything.

So when he emerged at an alt-right wacko a couple years ago it was not even remotely surprising, but the minecraft CM was still like "I looked up to him, how did it come to this?!" as though there were no red flags prior to that point.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2019 03:54

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

soy posted:

Ya everything started going downhill with serpent isle. UO was good despite LB and he made sure to ruin it with patches and then sold it to literally the worst company ever. I think he was just super pissed at players for not respecting his wildlife simulator code that they had to remove.

I loved casting dance in ultima 7 and just making the npcs all dance for no reason. Also it was great how you could cast armageddon and basically ruin the world and effectively lose the game.

I think it was raph koster who was into the wildlife sim, garriot either had no opinion or was actively against it. Koster had a blog post a few months ago about the anniversary Q&A where he basically said in a roundabout way that the stories garriot was telling, he was not actually around for because he was completely absent from UO's development, and he tells all the stories wrong.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2019 05:29

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Koster's a game industry veteran which means he never says anything bad about the people who deserve it, but he created that impression when "expanding" on a story that garriot told wrong that people had asked him about.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2019 05:30

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

I'm pretty sure koster despises garriot.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2019 19:23

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Ironically, today it is again possible to make a successful game all on your own - look at Stardew Valley. People like Garriot and Roberts don't want to go to that trouble themselves anymore, though.

Stardew Valley took several years to make, though, not 3 months. It's a level of discipline almost nobody has, let alone segway man.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2019 03:44

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Chris
Tech Lord

# ¿ Dec 31, 2019 02:47

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Thank you for bumping this because I had not seen the picture and now I have.

# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 01:16

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Rhymenoserous posted:

The Idtech engine seems like a big deal but pretty much is a drop in the bucket compared to source, unreal and unity.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2021 06:18

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

Didn�t the director or some other higher up with Final Fantasy recently say he wanted their MMO to be accessible in terms of *not* being a daily grind, peoples� time was limited and he wanted them to be able to enjoy it in short bursts, or as something they could play all at once if they did have a chunk of time to play then could put the game aside until the next expansion? And his opinion was MMOs need to take that direction in the future or the genre was not going to survive?

It's easy enough to take that position when you're on top, but I've worked with a couple people who used to work at turbine and they're irrationally terrified about completely normal gameplay decisions, because they have PTSD from "a bunch of people stopped playing between content drops and then the game went into a death spiral because every person who quit made it marginally more difficult to find people to play with, leading more people to quit".

# ¿ Mar 7, 2022 01:22

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

de horizon dot fun

# ¿ Apr 16, 2022 10:22

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

I think that now there's too many concurrent scams competing over the same 10-20 thousand marks so it would probably be hard to get in now

# ¿ Apr 18, 2022 07:35

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

I hadn't actually looked at this thing in awhile and holy poo poo, they really do release new unity-purchased assets for purchase every single month like clockwork.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2022 16:44

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Lum_ posted:

That's slowed down because even purchasing an asset off the store requires some development work to have placed in the game.

That's why it's so crazy that they maintain this level of consistency when like, they don't have any paid staff, do they? Are there people volunteering to integrate purchased assets into the game to make chris spears money? No wonder he feels comfortable keeping the game going while he works on something else.

March:
* Cat ears for your character
* Castle Tower Teleporter
* Tiger/leopard cub pets

January:
* Heart themed furniture items
* "Wizard's Tower Village Home"

December:
* Stone Five-Story Home w/ Veranda
* Enchanted Wyvern Eggs
* Ornate Wooden Semi-Circle Display Table

November:
* A couple dozen stone statues
* Ancient Xenossian Helmets
* Playable music
* Epic Snowy White Pine Tree

And just on and on like this. How is this still an effective way of making money, it's bizarre.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2022 23:47

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

I've been enjoying reading the forums and catching up

quote:

To answer an earlier question, I think the shift to "heritage" and "no trade" items is probably unrelated.

Having been here through the kinda timeline of events, my understanding (and I could be way wrong here) was that while large sums of money were changing hands buying and selling Sota "stuff" none of that money was actually going to the developers of the game.

For example, player owned towns - completely unavailable to buy from the "source" and yet thousands of dollars being spent since the only way to get one if you didn't get one initially, was to buy one from another player letting one go. After years of waiting for towns to be made available again, I ended up buying one through the secondary market myself, and I'd have MUCH preferred to throw that cash at the devs but there was simply no mechanism to do so.

There was a time when the only way to get a commission free vendor was to buy a "bundle deal", and you had to buy in about to the $500 mark to get yourself a tax free village deed and a commission free vendor, a house, and a handful of deco items. So people would buy these bundles on disposable accounts, strip the assets, and resell them for a profit, with commission free vendors going for $150-$200 (if memory serves) and the property deeds for about the same, plus itemizing all the other rewards and you could turn a tidy profit.

So, okay. Dev selling a bundle to a reseller is still selling a bundle, so they get paid. But they only get paid once. That person quits, decides to sell their stuff on - that's another new purchase the devs are denied since a reseller will often offer the items cheaper or piecemeal (rather than only in a bundle which was pretty limiting). And then that person sells it on and so forth.

And then there was the expiring of things to create rarity, which was quite frankly, shooting oneself in the foot. The scramble of resellers to buy things because they are about to NEVER BE AVAILABLE AGAIN would create a short term surge of income, but then that's it done, never again. However, these assets still have to be maintained (like old houses that nobody can buy that get leaky roofs and need dev time to fix), bugs will happen that need fixing, and there are ongoing costs to maintain all this glut of stuff that can never earn another cent for the devs. It just didn't make sense.

The other problem was, someone coming to the game new who missed out on pledges and kickstarter and etc. sees all this beautiful stuff everywhere and is saddened by the knowledge that they will never have it unless they cough up megamonies to some third party through potentially questionable transaction means. That or, the cost to entry for a new person in a new game being told they need to immediately unload a few hundred bucks...well, it was off putting.

So we saw a grandual change.

Before heritage, we saw devs directly selling things like vendors and deeds, at prices far less than the secondary market.
While I support this move because I'd much rather my "...omg need the shiny thing impulse purchase..." support the game in some way, I also understand the people who DID buy up loads of things as investments, with the intent to sell them on for profit - for them, this was a breach of faith. Suddenly, the CF vendors and crafting stations that were worht $150 last month are worth $30 this month in unlimited supply from the faucet. At this point, "speculation" purchase, and purchase with intent to resell, dried up significantly.

I know there's still people who do the real money market thing and make a profit, but I also know that a LOT of those players moved on once it became clear that things could change on a whim and that this wasn't a good investment choice.

It was then that we started to see heritage items - some original ones, some that were semi-close-but-not-quite-the-same as reward items, and then finally the full vault system which sells functionally identical items other than the "vault edition" tag and the fact that they aren't sellable. And while I personally was, and am still very much against, the concept of heritage items as decorations because of the myriad of problems they cause when trying to do collaborative deco projects and the resultant catastrophic permissions system change (that we are still stuck with, making shared lots or deco-for-hire a thing of the past), I absolutely understand the reasoning behind it at the time, which was, if players want to buy stuff for their personal use, and not to resell, then it shouldn't matter. The no-trade literally seems to have been added for the specific purpose of limiting re-saleability so that if you wanted a shiny beach ball, you had to buy that shiny beach ball from the devs. I'm ok with this.

Long winded history aside, where we are now is:

Devs buy/make/adapt assets, put in game
Players buy assets from dev. Devs get paid.

This makes sense to me, and is straightforward. But, I'm the sort of player that buys toys to play with them, not to collect them or hope they increase in value later on or as some sort of investment. Am I a little bummed that I picked up a tax free city deed last month for 10% of the price it cost me for one a couple years ago? I guess a little maybe, but at the same time, I got loads of enjoyment out of that deed and it was certainly worth it to me at the time. The fact that I can get MOAR for CHEAPER, from the point of view of a buyer-consumer, is always a good thing. I just assume any money spent on the game is gone. Its entertainment. Like theatre tickets. The fact that I can enjoy my pretty things for years is a bonus.

I don't need to own the world. I don't need to sell crafted items in an MMO on ebay. And I don't want to worry about nftcryptowhatsit. I just want to play and enjoy the game, buy cats to ride around on, and trees to make my town aesthetically pleasing, and new outfits. It would be nice to gift things to friends to pass them on (I still am not a fan of heritage!) but I think in terms of relative evils, this is the lesser one.

# ¿ May 1, 2022 22:43

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

I guess SOTA was already an NFT game

# ¿ May 1, 2022 22:43

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Did they ever fix any of the aggro-manipulation abilities? Like their version of the wow spell "fade" (a personal aggro-dumping ability) would be undone if the mob took any damage at all from anyone (including the tank). There was a million things like that, none of it worked at a basic level, so it was impossible to do any real grouping, the whole game was everyone just training up every skill to become a one-man army.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2022 05:06

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Lum_ posted:

This appears to still exist for some reason

https://www.ironandmagic.com/

it would be very on brand for this to come out a year after web3 collapses into a hype-driven scamheap

Why are the land parcels "coming soon". They know you can just sell air to these crypto dunces, right?

# ¿ Aug 15, 2022 17:13

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

yoloer420 posted:

Whoa! So is my boxed copy still playable in offline single player as per the Kickstarter promises?

I assume not, but actual question.

I actually think it is, I saw a post where somebody pointed out that there are still people playing the game, even right now

# ¿ Oct 7, 2022 00:04

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Node posted:

What does "session based" mean in this context?

Usually means you match into a game, like league or overwatch or something.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2024 23:30

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

My favorite chris spears memory was asking in a livestream what the plans were to fix the issues with aggro and him just being baffled like, "uh, aggro's working very well!" Bear in mind, there was effectively zero grouping more sophisticated than zerging down mobs in the game at the time so I'm not sure how he came to that conclusion. Among the awesome issues the aggro system had, there was an ability like the priest "fade" ability in wow- it'd dump aggro. Only, it did it by applying a debuff to a single targetted mob, and it would break on damage. Any damage. I worked out that taunting a mob that another player had Faded actually provided a net negative in terms of keeping the mob off the Faded player.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2024 03:39

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

Actually those guys really loving hated people playing together. The only worthwhile combat activity in terms of loot for the game's entire lifespan was mining silver in some high-yield places that spawned a lot of mobs to defend the silver nodes, and they decided that people were getting too much silver by grouping so they made it so that the silver veins wouldn't respawn on a reasonable timespan if you weren't soloing them.

EDIT: Silver was really valued because all the gear was player-crafted, but it all sucked no matter what you did, but there was a period of time where players hadn't seen high-level enchants yet because leveling enchanting required like 10s of thousands of silver so people were sucking it out of the economy rapidly in hopes that there would be some way to make gear that wasn't dogshit (there wasn't)

# ¿ Feb 13, 2024 03:41

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 16:06

30.5 Days: Nov 19, 2006

BattleMaster posted:

Both; it's a scam and they haven't hired anyone yet to do the token "look like we're doing work" stuff, but won't find anyone willing to do the job because it's an obvious scam

I would absolutely work for an obvious scam since I wouldn't have to do anything. I would collect make-work money publicly and proudly.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2024 20:23

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Shroud of the Avatar: Garriott's Ultima MMO successor thing (no more wipes)

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