Good Evening Friend and Fellow SotA Avatars. As promised I wanted to do a secondary and more editorial post on the 2016 Wondrous Winter Telethon with my thoughts, rants, “squees of joy”, etc.

Here are the videos again as well for quick reference:

 
Before I jump into it, I feel the need based on past interactions with certain Shroud of the Avatar community members to preface this article with a reminder that I do not hate any staff member current or past in regards to Portalarium, nor do I think that they are not trying to bring us the best game they can. Just because I disagree with a choice or decision does not mean I do not respect it. Just because I most likely will end up ranting about one thing specifically in this article, doesn’t mean I hold bad feelings towards any of the staff. I just found their approach or statements to be ones I found in error or not taking some things into possible consideration at the moment. This is one of the reasons Starr coined “Don’t Lawyer Me Bro”. Much of their deep dives and hangouts have been designing on the fly discussion.

I think Chris Spear’s response to my general frustration of them trying to please too many people gives a good insight into their design strategy at the moment as they really focus on finishing the base architecture of the game so we can finally reach an Alpha stage..

I think we are definitely trying to please a lot of different audiences with different expectations. I think there are some Ultima 1-9 fans that fall into Joel’s camp. They don’t care if it tile based and old school graphics, they just want the story…. BUT that is a small audience and if we made a game for just them then we would like have a hard time expanding our audience beyond 30-50k tops.

The bigger challenge is the Ultima vs UO gap. Honestly, even with UO there was already a player desire so divergent and strong that it forced them to split the game in half to split the open PVP and the role players. Just targeting the Open PVP audience is an incredibly passionate but honestly small audience.

I still believe we can make all parties happy. Just taking a bit longer that expected. ~Chris Spears

The areas that I am going to basically focus on in today’s post in regards to the telethon are the 3 that stood out the most for me as what held the news and information that affects Shroud of the Avatar going forward for the rest of this quarter of the calendar year. They would be in no particular order: Crafting, Combat/Skills, Core Systems/Architecture. There will be a few outside things tossed into the mix, but this covers what I think the team covered best and really gave us great information/discussion on during the Telethon.

• Skill Decay is Good. I like how it works and their plans going forward. Chris covered a lot of information at once and while as someone who has experience on a much lower level than Chris, I was able to follow it beautifully. For those of us who can’t always play a lot due to real life stuff it would allow us to only accumulate skill xp debt and then when we want to work on increasing those areas all it takes is more time to build it back up and then improve without the actual loss of skill points in those areas. From a long-term perspective I love it has a “use it or lose it” but at the same time, it doesn’t penalize players too harshly either. Would still require a lot of tweaking and balancing over the life of the game.

• The skill advancement is bad for some skills and they are still working to balance them. Some skill trees I have no interest in and so it is good that Chris is keeping tabs on the community and trying to keep the math working well for how skills increase… I have always known that some will be harder to level and others purposely, but it was good that Chris reminded the community because I think many forget that fact that a skill based combat system requires such nuanced balancing and increased cost on some things.

• I totally agree that Combat does feel sluggish, slow, and terrible. Speeding it will be good. In fact Chris nails a lot of the issues and Starr adds a little that supports Chris’ feelings. Animations of Combat vs Movement of Characters was one topic specifically discussed in this. I play Crowfall and other games currently in development that are also in pre-alpha and I find their combat more enjoyable for me still at the moment. I will have more on combat with my last item on the list.

• Wands and Staves! Glad they keep coming back up for discussion. Yes they are more of giving bonuses to primary magic users (bonuses like entombment, focus, etc). I like that they don’t want wands to just be a bow but at the same time a base magic ranged attack of some kind that has a similar cost to base physical melee attack and based physical ranged attack would be good in my opinion but at the same time. Mixed feelings still on my part on this.

• SO GOOD THAT AI PATHFINDING IS A SEPARATE PROCESS FINALLY!!!!!!! Having this architecture done will do so much for optimization as well as allow for massive increase in content creation. And my favorite part is it will help with major adjusting in regards to combat “Mob Aggro” which needs work.

• We finally have gotten to the point where modifiers in crafting is moving in a right direction finally thanks to more completion of the base crafting system. I was praying they were still doing this. I was starting to question it because it does truly takes a long time to not only design, but code such a system. Adding this architecture for equipment, items, food, etc will make for a much better system for the total life of the game. The architecture of how variable recipes work and what modifies various stats and effects takes a long time but adds so much fun variation and flexibility for players to approach how they want to craft as well as use equipment in various situations (short-term and long-term)…

• Richard and Lum changing their focus and not worrying about extra NPCs and focusing on the quest/important story NPCs then adding more later so you can actually test the storyline, since story is one of the most important features of this game. This was one thing I have a major beef about how they were seemingly managing their workflow.

• If you look at their video 2 for the telethon and start at [2:30:10] you here a discussion on archetypes of weapons. This is where I would have loved to have been in their hangout or in IRC to challenge Brandon “B” Cotton when it comes to parts of his explanation of archetypes of weapons. Personally, I believe his view of going the route of “situational” is wrong in my opinion.While I like the idea of skills and attacks that do more damage from behind. I think bolstering it only on daggers via crit is not the right way to do it. I may be asking too much, but I think there is a much better way to go about it. Breaking down the base archetypes of weapons in the games into their fundamental differences and approaching it that way would provide for some interesting expansion of not only combat but those specific skill trees as well. Magic users that really want to specialize on a specific tree are speaking up on wanting that play style and the devs are giving them some serious thought. I feel the same is deserving of the physical attack skill users.B talks using bladed weapons for a point of comparison as looking at archetypes and skills. So let’s stick with that so we are sharing the same point of comparison. I want to pick the Long Sword, Short Sword, and Dagger as just 3 archetypes. The Long-sword would have the longest reach and due to its weight the most base damage. But due to its weight would also have a slower attack speed and longer animation. A Short Sword would have a shorter reach and weigh less and so would have a slightly faster attack speed. A dagger would have the shortest reach out of the three and the lowest base damage and weight, but by far the fastest attack speed and fastest attack animation. Currently a long-sword and a dagger take the exact same amount of time for the base attack animation to complete and reset, this loses immersion for me completely. Attack Strategies when using each of these archetypes is gonna be different. Also when it comes to basic attacks/auto attacks daggers with their increased speed would have a very different style because skill attacks wouldn’t be as powerful. In reverse your skills would be much more powerful with a long-sword. The reach of a long-sword would also give some great benefits over a dagger just due to range, but then skills that allow for quicker movement to get into range would allow for dagger users to have to be more strategic against some opponents.

  There are different skills that too would be easier to do with certain bladed weapons. Stances and attack styles change a lot too. Someone with a long-sword would be far more likely to have one attack style then someone dual wielding lets say a dagger and short sword. The dual wielder would have a much more square stance. The other combatant would focus on using the weight and range to try to win. Once you figure in dual wielding and other things the combat and additional variables add so much to combat. It becomes a combat where strategy and skill will determine the winner more often than not. The combat design is something near and dear to my heart and is something I would love to discuss with the dev team in-depth someday.I think that having some skills that can only usable with certain archetype weapons would not be a failure. It could add some unique animations and attacks in general that would add variety and depth to the game.

  I think having weapon archetype skills for players who really want to only focus on a certain play style and specialize/level up to lets say level 100 of a certain area, just like some magic users, would really add some fun expansion to the weapon trees. At the same time balancing it and having it be a skill that is not so important that it feels required to have if you want to pursue that style. Maybe have at the bottom of the blades tree a “specialization” option where you can spend time focusing on one type of that archetype of weapon. You would actually have debuffs then when you use the other types and would have to specifically spend time working on them if you want to dual wield with one or switch to one if your main weapon broke and you couldn’t repair it out in the field. If you chose not to go that deep into the tree, it doesn’t affect you at all.

  Obviously balance will be a huge issue with adding specialization but having it for magic and physical trees would be great.This would have to be something post Episode 1 release, however. No way in reality would this be something I would see done between now and then. But I challenge what was said in the hangout from a design aspect and I think you can not ignore attack speed, reach, and base damage as major aspects that come into play with archetypes. Looking at damage numbers and forgetting about other aspects was simply in error in the view of how to tackle that problem and would require much deeper thought in how archetypes of weapons affect combat and skills in general. I literally face-palmed when attack speed was not even considered and only critical hit and damage was what was the main statistic used. I know the hangout discussions are off the cuff and “design concepting” on the fly publicly, but it just bothered me.

• I feel bad for how many times Starr, Richard, and Chris have to repeat certain answers to the community. “Will there be enough lots for ppl?” is one question that we keep hearing and it is at the point where some questions honestly makes me feel like some community members are either not reading past posts to catch up on stuff or they are just not listening to how many countless times some things are asked and answered. Maybe we need a Sticky Post with these most asked questions or a page on the main site that has these so people can easily read them and stop asking them so much.

Questions that I don’t recall were discussed but I believe have been brought up before:

• Why is it when you hit “s” to back pedal in combat your avatar completely turns around and thus can’t keep attacking in the direction you were previously facing while you move? You have to hold down right mouse while backing up to be able to do that and it feels like it complicates combat.
• Will we have the ability to use the right mouse button during combat be for anything other than camera control? Can we map something for offhand basic use (off-hand attack/off-hand basic shield block) like we have for left click for main hand basic attack/use in combat?

Yes the weapon archetype issue is a big one for me, but combat in general is. I love that they are speeding things up and trying to improve combat. I really want the expansion of both magic and physical combat skills to be widely vary and allow for much flexibility in play-style and even specialization by players. I truly believe in a deep system with so many levels like what they are doing with crafting would work with combat as well. Yes it will require a lot of work over time, but the nice thing is if the architecture is there, it is something that could be done down the road. Attack speed variations with the various weights of weapons is still a beef when it comes to the combat animations and i hope the changes they make help a bit with that, but I am not going to get my hopes up. I still am waiting for a true Alpha or even a Beta version of this game before I judge it and lay down a rubric with scores as to how I feel about it. I have many mixed feelings about the game still but I really wanted to put these thoughts and feelings out there. For example, I have been fairly consistent in my dislike of the “deck” system we have for skills for combat. It has its moments where it is an interesting system. However, I still don’t think it is the best possible system for this game, nor do I think it will be the most fun for the most players. But I respect their attempt to try something new as well as to do what they feel will do the best for the game and the community. Until the game reaches a certain stage of development and polish, it is not worth the time, nor would it be wise to be too overly critical of something that still needs a lot of polish and balancing. Thankfully Chris and some other staff members over at Portalarium know this about me and so when I do direct some of my feelings at them, I get really truly awesome responses, and for that I am grateful. My level of experience when it comes to system and game development is limited due to only being part of a few projects.

As always, your thoughts and discussion are always more than welcome. Please comment below and share Ultima Codex as always with friends and peers.