Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
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Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
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Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#2Kickstarter page is not up yet, but there is a live streamed announcement via http://www.lordbritishpresents.com/.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#3Kickstarter page is not up yet, but there is a live streamed announcement via http://www.lordbritishpresents.com/ .
Odd. I'm seeing the kickstarter page myself. Already 200+ backers.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#4> Multiplayer Online Game - which can also be played solo player / offline
I remember when UO came out...I never played it but I wondered if it would be the end of good single-player RPGs. Luckily, it wasn't, but it was basically the end of Ultima as a series, though arguably it wasn't a causation. In any case, it's hard to imagine an RPG world that could be designed successfully to be a MMO and a good single player experience.
Good single player experiences are bespoke storytelling affairs...and to abstract it out to accomodate MMO interaction would seem to necessarily dilute it.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'm not at all against games that just end, rather than try to shoot to be a world in which you can fully "live a life" and in which the world is infinitely evolving. It's not that such a prospect isn't interesting, it's just that it inevitably leads to the kind of feature creep that leads to bugs and outright brokenness (insert reference to SimCity). I'm OK with games ending after 50-100 hours (or even 10, in the case of the Portal series), if those hours were fantastic.
I'd contribute if Lord British were going to make a modernized version of Ultima VII. Even though the limits of its world are obvious in retrospect, it really was way ahead of its time in creating a believable digital world for the single-player, and the constructs it used to maintain that facade (and have a story arc) would not have worked if it were a MMO.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#5I remember fondly Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld 2.
Incredible titles, way ahead of their time.
Ultima 7 has probably more sophisticated interaction mechanics than 99% of the games today.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#6I grew up on the Ultima series - in fact it is exclusively the reason I became a programmer and game developer. I do not know how good this recent iteration will be, but at least it looks like Richard is keeping a close ear to his community. In all honesty though I would have settled for a 2D/isometric non-MMO (in the spirit of Ultima 7) -- I think that's where his original fans lie.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#7> Multiplayer Online Game - which can also be played solo player / offline I remember when UO came out...I never played it but I wondered if it would be the end of good single-player RPGs. Luckily, it wasn't, but it was basically the end of Ultima as a series, though arguably it wasn't a causation. In any case, it's hard to imagine an RPG world that could be designed successfully to be a MMO and a good single player…
Yes, my experience compels me to agree. The best compromise I've found are Diablo-style co-operative stories, where multiple people can go through a very engrossing story as a group of adventurers, and progress to the game's final end. I argued that the great failure of SW: The Old Republic was that it removed the one element that made Knights of the Old Republic such a success: the engrossing single player story.
Massive online environments, by definition, prohibit a single character from being important. The natural solution is the instanced single player game, allowing large party sizes which scale difficulty based on the encounter. A corollary of this is that any true, persistent MMO must be sandbox type, allowing individual players extreme freedom to write the stories. The best example of this is EVE, and a lesser known korean RPG Lineage: The Blood Pledge, which allowed players to control castles of each kingdom, creating incredible game histories due to player competition alone.
It is clear that the single player co-op and the MMO are now distinct genres, catering to different play styles. Attempts to bridge this gap have generally failed from a storytelling perspective, even in great games such as Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#8I'd pitch in if they promised to base the engine off Ultima 8.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#9I grew up on the Ultima series - in fact it is exclusively the reason I became a programmer and game developer. I do not know how good this recent iteration will be, but at least it looks like Richard is keeping a close ear to his community. In all honesty though I would have settled for a 2D/isometric non-MMO (in the spirit of Ultima 7) -- I think that's where his original fans lie.
I have the exact same experience. Ultima7 made me a developer, and was my first dive into editing bash scripts (that fucker was impossible to get working in windows95). Enabling the debug mode and hacking on gumps was my favorite pass time.
Re: Lord British launches “Shroud of the Avatar” on Kickstarter
#10I'd pitch in if they promised to base the engine off Ultima 8.
Why not ultima 7? Ultima8 wasn't as interactive as ultima7 imho.