Shroud of the Avatar: Release 14 Instructions Posted; 32-Bit Support Dropped
Starr Long has posted the instructions for Release 14 of Shroud of the Avatar on the game’s official site. You’d best hit up his post directly for a full list of new and changed features that this latest Release will bring to the game beginning tomorrow, but our event entry for it contains what are likely the most significant pieces of information:
- Scenes: Brightbone Pass will expand the mainland while another Desert scene will expand the Vale. Portalarium will also add the Shardfall biome to the game, along with a shardfall scene (this is the biome for the Open PVP scenes).
- Unity 5: Portalarium will begin transitioning the project to the latest version of Unity. For R14, it will most likely be a separate build, purely for testing.
- Banks: Players can now start storing things in the bank. This is also where all your pledge rewards will be at the start of the game, so you won’t start so encumbered that you cannot move.
- Encumbrance: The weight of items will now factor into how much you can carry. Your carrying capacity will be derived from your Strength stat.
- Pledges Tied to Game Account: Your pledge will now be tied to your game account. This means you will start the game with your pledge rewards in your bank storage.
- Customization: 3 new wearables were added to the game including the Lord Marshal Coronated Helmet, Knight Cloak, and Baron Cloak.
- Combat: Various skills will be added to finish out Earth, Water, Blades, Bludgeon, and Tactics schools.
- Housing: Lot Deeds will be introduced to the game so property claiming will first require purchasing a lot deed in the game (or receiving one via pledge rewards). Also, more basements will be available.
- Crafting: Portalarium will also be adding more Alchemy recipes and ingredients including the ability to put magical enchantments and stat enhancements (durability, weight, value, etc) on gear.
- Shopkeepers: Prices will now fluctuate based on available stock, and each vendor will have “I will buy” and “I will sell” lists. This means that the fruit vendor might not be interested in buying that sword from you.
- Creatures: The bestiary will expand to include Man-Eating Plants, and Water Elementals.
- Fall Damage Revamped: Falling damage is now calculated based on distance fallen versus time that the character is in a falling state. This should fix most of the crazy falling damage bugs (ex. killed jumping off a fence but surviving a fall from the top of the lighthouse).
- Book Content: We have begun to replace blank, pre-placed books in Owl’s Head and Kingsport with books that have stories in them. Please note that currently, you have to have a book in your inventory to read it.
- NPCs: “Barks” (what NPCs say to each other and to you as you pass) have been retuned so you will hear them more often, but only once every half hour or so. More clues for questing opportunities in your area, less desire to murder the barkeep who keeps repeating themselves.
- Windows 32 Bit Support Dropped: Our minspec for Windows has been Windows 7 32 bit with 4GB of RAM. That 4GB is the maximum memory that a 32 bit Windows OS can use, so even if your system has more memory it cannot be addressed. To make SotA run in this environment, we have spent considerable effort to reduce runtime memory utilization. This results in longer load times and reduced quality on many assets. Recently, Microsoft announced that Windows 10 (to be released in October) will be a free upgrade to Windows 7 (and higher) customers. This removes the upgrade price barrier for those who are still running 32 bit Windows 7, and therefore we are no longer going to support Windows 7 32 bit as our minimum spec. Our new min spec will be Windows 7 64 bit with 6GB of RAM. For R14, we will still provide a 32 bit build, but we will no longer provide support of any kind for that version.
- Mac 64 Bit Builds, 32 Bit Support Dropped: We finally got a fix in Unity 4 that allows us to create 64 bit builds for Mac. This should solve many of the performance and stability issues that mac users were facing. For R14, we will still provide a 32 bit build, but we will no longer provide any support of any kind for that version.
You’ll note that the last two line items above indicate that Portalarium have dropped 32-bit support for both Windows and OS X users. There will still be 32-bit builds of Release 14, but as is indicated above, these will be unsupported builds; bugs that pertain specifically to the 32-bit architecture will likely not be addressed.
I am very worried about the single player part of the game. All they are talking about for single player is the story. I read that there have been many questions asked in the SotA forums regarding single player related gameplay features but I haven’t read one answer to them yet. I think that this is really strange. Wasn’t single player one of the huge selling points of this game? Has the concept changed for this game?
Single player was why I kickstarted this game for a not insignificant amount of $$, and it seemed like at the time the focus was going to be on single player. Seems like the MMO fanboys had louder voices… either that or Richard Garriott was just playing us all along.
I get the feeling that the shift towards MMO occured around the same time, Portalarium hired Starr Long…
I hope that they will provide a full-fledged single player experience that plays like a true single player game. But I am really worried about this.
By the way, SotA should not have been an MMO. On the Kickstarter website it says in the FAQ: ” Though Shroud of the Avatar won’t be a massively multiplayer online role playing game, it will be a multiplayer game.”
It was one of the selling points, and…if there’s a competent single-player experience to be had, Portalarium haven’t let much slip about it. There are quests and fragments of storyline that you can find in the Releases, but nothing that’s particularly engaging or telling (to my mind).
The game does currently seem much more like an MMO — or, more generally, a multiplayer title — than anything else, and not just because features like housing and PvP seem to be getting all the attention. It’s little things too: the card-based combat system is very MMOish, concerned as it is with deck builds and combos, for example. (I gather that it works well enough for multiplayer combat, but it’s really quite poor as far as single-player combat systems go.) The inventory and crafting systems are serviceable, but a lot of it comes down to list management…that’s another example, I suppose.
I don’t know…to be honest, it’s less its status as an MMO or not that concerns me about Shroud, and more the fact that it just doesn’t have a good feel at the moment. It seems competently put-together, for the most part, but it feels kind of empty and flat at the same time. Its world just isn’t interesting…yet. (I hope it’s a case of yet.) There are some nice-looking places to explore, but past the scenery there isn’t much else at present.
I agree. The scenes right no feel as if they are just in the game for people to fight monsters and do PvP-battles. There is nothing interesting there going on or to do or to find. I hope that they will make the scenes more interesting during the development process.
My main reason for not backing this was, that it always looked and felt like a MMO pitch to me. It was the same thing with Elite:Dangerous. Sure, there was talk about single player experience and all that, but nothing they said convinced me that either game would be anything but MMO.
Not that I have anything againsta MMO games, they just aren’t my cup of tea. Oh and dropping 32-bit support sound sensible. If someone still clings on 32-bit machines and OS’s they should just bite the bullet and move forward.
If you read through the Kickstarter page and take a look at the earliest videos then this didn’t seem so much to be an MMO. Yes there was a multiplayer component mentioned with crafting and housing but overall the game felt more like a single player game. This seems to have totally changed…
My thought on single player is this… They’re still building/testing the whole thing. Why build single player content that might need significant rework while you’re still building systems. Systems have to be finished first. Level/single player design comes later, and they may not want to spoil it since replayability for that type of content is going to be much lower. Seen the same thing in other testing I’ve done. They’re taking advantage of the fact that all the systems are designed to work in an MMO style without needing that structure, that way they’re wasting less effort.
That’s certainly a responsible approach.
The only issue with it is that what works for an MMO doesn’t necessarily work for a single-player game. (The opposite is also true.) It’s all well and good if systems are finished first and the single-player content worked on later…but if the systems are built purely to an MMO spec, the single-player experience will still suffer for it. In fact, it already seems to be.
But not all single player features are “compatible” with and MMO style. So it’s not the story we are worried about but the feeling of the game. We are worried that it will feel like walking around alone in an MMO and if you look at most single player games that is not how a SP game should feel like. Let’s take respawns for example. There is fundamental difference between respawns in an MMO where they are neccessary and respawns in a SP game (where they are actually not needed and even don’t make sense). What about a sense of achievement? When I kill the dragon will it stay dead in SP or will it respawn? What about companions etc. I think that features such as those, features that define a single player game, should be thought about rather early and not shortly before release.
First rule of design is know what you want to do before you start figuring out how to do it. I know that sounds obvious, but changing direction mid-project is a sure way to fuck it all up so that first step is pretty important.
Despite the pressure from backers saying, “Do this!” and “No, do that!”, I can’t imagine a veteran team like that behind SotA forgetting this basic rule or consciously abandoning it.
That being said, an MMO designed with a solid single player experience in mind should in no significant way be required to make sacrifices on the part of the single player mode, as an MMO generally has all the same features of a single player game but built upon a framework that allows centralized servers to track the I/O and in SotA’s case provide a limited level of interactivity (items, world changes, whatever weird story-related shit they’re planning).
While they are creating new assets/content regularly, they are simultaneously developing the core engine that brings those assets together. The engine is what’s important and always comes first. Everything else is having the right personnel to grind out new assets, write quests, write the overall story, etc., and can be handled easily after the engine is (mostly) done.
I wouldn’t get too worried about the single player aspect based on the updates we’re seeing as the game progresses. There’s just no way they’re going to forsake that aspect, and if they do it will be a serious mistake that will harm the game as it was promised to be delivered, damage their reputation and trustworthiness and ultimately hurt their bottom line in sales and word of mouth advertising.
And WtF, you mistakenly said “64-bit” near the bottom of the article when it should have said “32-bit”. Also I think Portalarium made a mistake when they said Windows 32-bit could support 4 GB of RAM. I think it’s around 3 GB, as strange as that sounds (someone please correct me if I’m wrong).
Ah, yeah, I did mess that up. Thanks for spotting.