Shroud of the Avatar: Seamless Building Interiors
As Sergorn Dragon noticed earlier, this video from Kotaku gives us a glimpse at a very important aspect of Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues’ 3D world. Watch for it here; it’ll happen at around the 0:41 mark.
The First Age of Update: Corrected the headline, per Sergorn below.
You should just name that “seamless housing”, this is not a player house 😛
And this is important I feel because majority of games will just have interior of houses on separates maps.
This is rather nice that in spite of using a dual scale map, they’re trying to retain a Seamless feel.
Fixed!
Oh, I am so glad you all picked up on this!
Yes, that IS a player house… well at least in the prototype form.
A strong team is made up of independent voices who all lobby for what they believe and a leader who respects his or her staff will both listen well, but still take charge of some final decisions that are critical to the experience they are crafting. While there was much debate on our team about housing, and I am sure there will be more. I was insistent that housing must be seamless.
Housing is continuous and seamless. It will not “teleport” to an indoor instance. I feel strongly that this completes the reality of the space.
Housing will be part of the world map, there will not be stacks and stacks of instanced neighborhoods. I feel that only housing that is built around a town core with services that will be of interest to a passerby is interesting. Endless neighborhoods of just houses is boring to all including the owners. This will mean there is much less housing than you might expect in other games. I just don’t want a game full of endless or empty neighborhoods. We have discussed hotels or apartments for the masses if demanded, but I would like to avoid that too.
There are two parts of a homestead. The house and the lot. We plan 3 types of “lots”, villages, have many small lots, and a few central services. Towns have fewer larger lots, and a vibrant central core. Cities have stronger defenses, the best central services and only a few large lots. If you own a house, we plan that you can sell the lot it was on, and move to a new lot in a new town. Thus your house and its collections will relocate to the new location. But, house size is also limited by lot, if you want a large “guild house” or “tavern”, you may need a lot that is larger than most in a village.
We like this plan also, because it allows you to move into new lands as we make them available. Or for players to group into a town and call it their own. I would like nothing more than to see the city of “Ultima Codex” or Pax Lair” or The Syndicate” spring up in the new world!
– Lord British
This seamlessness is a huge selling point, something that too few modern 3D RPGs do (even the ones that do offer otherwise mono-scale worlds to explore. So it’s nice to hear that it is a feature that has been heavily lobbied for — even deemed essential — in Shroud of the Avatar.
So, for that and for further explaining it: thank you!
And I like the thought of an Ultima Codex city, although sadly I wasn’t able to pledge at a level that would allow me to get a rent-free place of my own. (And personally, I think having an Ultima Dragons castle/town/mountain fortress would be the best, anyway.)
I almost yelled with glee when I saw the seamless interiors. When I first saw the videos on the Codex I was impressed… but my immediate concern was whether or not the game would follow the usual “interior on separate maps” like Neverwinter Nights and the likes.
So I was extremly happy when seeing that video at Kokatu where your character seamlessly entered the house (and then went ot play the piano :D)
The lack of seamlessness in games is a big issue to me. Take the latest Elder Scrolls games for instance : they do a lot in term of creating the same kind of big interactive worlds Ultima had : they have schedules, NPCs activities, things you can move around… and then you have every build and sometimes cities that are on a separate map. And that breaks the flow of immersion.
I blame consoles for this really because it seems pretty clear to me they can’t handle this form of fully seamless world – it pretty obvious while looking at how terrible the consoles versions of the latest Gothic and Risen (games that I consider some sort of spiritual succesor to Ultima in term of virtual worlds, and who really do it all seamlessly) games run when played on consoles.
So anyway I’m happy you’re aiming at that seamless feel. That’s the same with the overland/areas transiton right ? It feels like there is basically no loading and that’s really cool.
Each time you have come on here your grace, I have to say your winning me over. I’ve been a weary, but I’m coming around as more info is coming out.
Thanks for the detailed post.
Thank you Cookie Monster!
If you have other questions or concerns, please voice them.
First it gives me a chance to clarify our plans, and because the game is in prototype form, we still have plenty of room to adjust to meet the desires of those we are building it for… like YOU!
– LB
Do you intend to rescue gaming and MMO’s from the current Dark Age and bring forth a Golden Age as you did with Ultima Online, Lord British? The market could really use a new sandbox MMO and the current industry seems to have forgotten how an RPG is supposed to play out.
Perhaps you could teach them a lesson, Your Excellence?
I am very critical of the MMO genre and the plague of MMO’s built in the WoW model. While I am not knocking WoW, I am tired of MMO’s where you click on every NPC with an “!” over their head, click on all but the obviously stupid chat offerings, then select the quest out of your quest log, to then follow the arrow on the map, to arrive at the level 1 grinding fields, and then repeat. Over and Over again!
SotA will create a persistent shared online presence for all players, but no “!”‘s, no quest logs, no arrows. Players will follow they own path, take on combat or entirely NON combat roles, and live in a vibrant, expanding and ever changing world.
I believe we can create a new type of online persistent world, that fixes a lot of the same old grinding behavior of oh, so many MMO’s these days.
– Richard
I remember a very old interview, maybe about the time Martian Dreams was released, where you talked about multiplayer shared story. In this context each player would handle one of the main character (Avatar and Companions).
Now, 20 years later, we may have it with SOTA ! 🙂