Greetings Friends and Fellow Avatars!

Tonight I have a fairly focused edition of Update of the Avatar.  Only a few topics but each have alot of info with them.

• Underworld Gets Tracy Hickman and Steam Greenlight
• Single Player Offline Features
• Abe Weighs in on Crafting the Novia Overworld
• Let’s Talk About the Economy!
• SotA On The Road Again!

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Underworld Gets Tracy Hickman and Steam Greenlight

As previously reported, former Origin protégé, Paul Neurath, is rebooting the legendary Ultima Underworld games with the Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter campaign! It has been more than a decade long wait, but the stars have aligned and Paul has at long last freed the rights to move forward with the franchise. The team is especially excited that, just as the original Ultima and Underworld shared a connection on backstory and fictional elements, so too will Shroud of the Avatar and Underworld Ascendant.  They also  announced that SotA Lead Story Designer and co-author of SotA’s Blade of the Avatar novel, Tracy Hickman, has signed up to pen an Underworld Ascendant novel as part of their $750k Stretch Goal.  Unfortunately at this time the kickstarter is not fully funded yet.  However there is still over a week left. I wish the team the best of luck.

It was also pretty cool to see that Underworld Ascendant was Greenlit on Steam this week:

As some of you already know, Underworld Ascendant has been Greenlit on Steam! Only took a week. Not sure if that’s a record, but mighty fast. Huge thanks to all the fans who gave the game a big YES and helped bring us to the attention of the tens of millions of players on Steam. We are still in early prototype development, so many months to go before we’d have a build for Steam. But sweet that we’ve got a slot warmed up and waiting, for when we do.  – Underworld Ascendant Update #16

For more information on Underworld Ascendant, follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

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Single Player Offline Features

As many of you know, both the Single Player Online and Single Player Offline modes hold a place near and dear to my heart.  The single player Ultima games holder a nearer and dearer place in my heart then Ultima Online did… and I paid for UO for 15 years even.  The story and exploration I was able to do in each single player game throughout the 80s and 90s provided great inspiration for me as a designer, artist, and writer.  It also helped drive my unending fascination with fantasy and science fiction books and movies.  Starr long posted a long thread in the forums this week with more information for players such as myself.  Single Player Offline mode will be great for those times I am traveling or have little to no internet connection.  This info needed to be shared and sooner rather then later….

[A SotA Public Forum post by Starr Long]

Greetings Avatars!

This post is intended to be a quick update on some future plans for how we will handle Single Player Offline and how it will differ from the Online modes of play. None of this is set in stone but it is our current thinking so, as always, feedback is welcome!

As you review this remember that Offline Mode is completely separate from Online Modes. Characters cannot move between these modes.

As we have stated elsewhere, we have to build the sandbox first and then layer the narrative on top of that. It will totally fail if we try to do that in reverse. Please be patient and know we are as committed to the Single Player Offline mode of play as we are to online, we just have not implemented it yet.

1. Save Games: One of the benefits to our distributed server model is that even though we are a client-server game, we offload some of the server work to the local machines of our users. For offline mode, the server (including all data) will be entirely client side so we can relatively easily provide the ability for users to restore their game from backups; aka Save Games. For Episode 1 launch, we are planning to give players the ability to have multiple Save Games!
2. Companions: In Online modes, companions will appear to the players from time to time along the story, but they will not travel with the players. We did it this way for the Online modes because we did not want clones of these key NPCs in the same party of players. For offline mode, we don’t have to worry about this though! This is, by far, the most requested feature, and we intend to provide a small set of Ultima like companions that will journey with you. They will still periodically go off to do “their thing” as part of their virtual lives, but for the most part they will indeed be companions. We intend for them to each have robust conversation and AI so that they truly feel like individuals (as they did in the linear Ultimas). In combat, they will have commands similar to the pet commands we have now. For Episode 1, we have a long wishlist of features that are probably outside scope, but…
3. Spawn Rules: Some scenes will never respawn (creatures and resources) in offline mode (clearing a dungeon for example). The scenes that do respawn may do so on a very slow timer, or only if there is a game state change that requires them to respawn (ex. a Town Siege by the Undead). We will balance this to make sure the game feels like it is reacting to the player, but it is also providing enough resources for crafting.
4. Content: There are a few items that we are not going to sell in game in Online mode, including the Castle and Keep sized lots. However, we do plan to make those available in Offline mode along with a handful of other items yet to be finalized.

-Darkstarr

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Abe Weighs in on Crafting the Novia Overworld

The above screen shot is of the Perennial Coast located in the southeast corner of Novia, which Abe Robertson has been working on for Release 15 (launching next week). Abe recently posted to the forums about his work on the Perennial Coast. Here’s what he had to say:

[A SotA Public Forum Post by Abe Robertson]

Hello everyone, today I wanted to take a moment to share a bit of the organic process behind the construction of the Novia Overworld map, and share some screenshots that won’t be released to the public until later this evening.

Before I get into that I just wanted to quickly and informally introduce myself. I’ve been with Portalarium for about 5 months. My game career has historically been focused in level design and systems design for multiplayer shooters, but I also have an art background (which I haven’t been able to leverage as often). I love working here because traditional job titles are blurred heavily, and I’m a jack of all trades by nature so I fit right in.

One of the first tasks I was assigned when I started here was to do a polish pass to Hidden Vale. Unfortunately, the time window was fairly short and I was still learning the ropes so I didn’t have a chance to take it as far as I wanted to, as is often the case in game development. In the case of Novia, much more time was allocated, so I was able to work in some R&D to improve on all the areas I’d felt Hidden Vale was lacking in. I’ve broken it out into specific topics for your convenience.

Trees

The original Overworld trees were constructed with efficiency and brevity in mind, but were lacking in style and visual cohesion with the rest of the scene. I reconstructed these from scratch to match with the terrain texture palette, with a bit more of a stylized silhouette and colorful look. Interestingly, the texture resolution on the new trees is half that of the old ones.

Additionally, I constructed several new objects to add variety to the scene, including tree stumps, bushes, and tree size variants to break up the repetition.

Hex Visuals

This was an experiment I did in the first week of production on the Novia Overworld. It ultimately ended up being scrapped in favor of a more organic look, but interesting nonetheless.

[Click here to read the rest of Abe’s public forum post]

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Let’s Talk About the Economy!

Game Design is not an easy thing to do. In fact Richard himself has made comments to such an effect.  I see it as something that is difficult it is to be great at it, but how there are so many who do a fair job.  Systems upon systems in any game are layered and affect each other. With Selective Multiplayer the need for balancing these as well as provide each element to have a risk/reward system makes this even more difficult. As mentioned above, I am a huge fan of the single player modes. There are days where I simply want to play solo, without seeing or hearing or even dealing with other players. The ability to interact with other players vendors however has its use that Single Player Offline won’t have.   With the mention of a new stance of how PVP zones would be handled in the R14 Post Mortem Google Hangout, I contacted Starr, Chris, and Richard with my concerns.

Personally, I felt that removing the rewards of the area but still allowing players to explore these gorgeous and interesting areas of Novia would be the best way to provide balance but also freedom for all players to explore every nook and cranny of this new world.  Forcing a Single Player Online player into Open Multiplayer felt too much like forcing a situation that didn’t need to be forced.  As always it was worth bringing up my concerns directly with them.  Richard and especially Chris were invaluable as always.  Chris posted soon thereafter to the Dev+ Forums and then today to the Public Forums.  Some great information that needed to be shared.  As a fellow designer myself who has created very much less complicated systems then what Shroud has, understanding and learning from the dev team is something I want to have.  Understanding the teams thoughts, processes, and goals is invaluable for backers of all backgrounds and levels.

[A SotA Public Forum post by Chris Spears]

This is a shortened version of the post I made to Dev Plus earlier this week. Now for public consumption in a slightly cleaner version! Enjoy!

Who wants to talk about economy? Ok, to be honest, I’m going to start by talking about economy but since almost all systems in the game are linked, I’m sure I’ll wander over to other more interesting stuff before I’m done. This will be a mix of concepts that are already true (but I want to make players aware of), ideas that we have mostly locked in stone, and then a few ideas I’m just adding in so I can see if players gasp and scream. I probably won’t tell you which is which though as that would ruin my fun… Also, about 80% of this talk will apply to online stuff so my apologies to the people most interested in single player.

So the world of online game macroeconomics is different from the real world in many ways but the desired state of the market is the same. That desired state is an economy with a small, but consistent, rate of inflation. Also, just like in the real world, we know we won’t get it exactly right and that we need to very carefully monitor things to see what is causing fluctuations and have easy ways to correct things. Also, like the real world, we must have mechanisms in place that let players correct inflation through their natural behaviors and competitiveness. Before diving into the specifics of those systems though, I wanted to give a brief overview of game economies and then hit on a few ways SotA might be different.

Game economies! So for any non-barter economy to work, there must be an accepted form of global currency. For us, this is the ubiquitous gold piece. This is the only form of currency that merchants, vendors, trainers, etc will accept. I will provide reasons and examples of why players might not use gold amongst themselves later in the post.

The rough rate of inflation can be approximated by looking at the growth rate of the approximate amount of gold assets or items which can be sold to merchants for gold in the economy divided by the number of active players in the economy. For this to happen we must have fairly balanced inputs and outputs to that pile of gold. Also, for the real business guys out there are mentally correcting me, yes I realize that inflation in the real world is really based on what things costs(CPI), not the net sum of wealth but for this discussion I think this is easier to understand and helps us track what we need which is are people adding and destroying wealth from the system at our desired rate.

Again, for clarity, this is the macroeconomics level; not the market level. So that means for calculations into inputs and outputs, we only care how much gold can be created by the game to be added to that total player pool. For example, if a great brown grizzly bear is killed and skinned and a fabulous bear pelt is created the only thing that matters is how much that pelt can be sold to a merchant for. So the merchant might only pay 15 gold for it so that is how much that object counts towards the macroeconomics inflation calculations even though players might be paying 5000 gold for it on the jobs board (more on that later)…

[Click here to read the rest of Chris “Dippy Dragon” Spears’ Epic Economy Forum Post]

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SotA On The Road Again!

SotA is hitting the road hard for next month, taking the message to the people about how awesome this game is (and getting better every month)!

First up is the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, March 3-6. We will be guests of Razer at booth 602 at the GDC Expo

 

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Next up, Richard Garriott, along with our buddy Chris Roberts from Star Citizen, is on the MMORPG.COM – Future of Online Games panel at PAX East, March 6.

 

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Richard Garriott and Tracy Hickman will be on a SXSW Interactive panel moderated by Starr Long entitled Linear versus Nonlinear Narrative in Video Games at 3:30 PM Saturday, March 14 in the Kodosky room at the Long Center.

Starr Long will also be giving a talk at SXSW Interactive entitled Crowd Sharing: Crowd Funding and Sourcing in Games at 11 AM Sunday, March 15 in the Kodosky room at the Long Center.

 

That is all for this week’s update.  May you all have a safe weekend. I am looking forward to tabletop gaming and relaxing with a good friend and attempting to stay warm up here in the frigid midwest.