Richard Garriott Unveils 11-Minute Shroud of the Avatar Demo

[StewShearerOld]

Richard Garriott Unveils 11-Minute Shroud of the Avatar Demo


Richard "Lord British" Garriott demonstrates crafting, questing and puzzles in a new Shroud of the Avatar demo.

When Richard "Lord British" Garriott <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122584-Lord-British-Presents-Shroud-of-the-Avatar>announced Shroud of the Avatar, he immediately stoked the excitement of countless fans of classic role-playing hoping for a return to the form he helped to foster in his landmark Ultima series. The new MMO, in turn, looks as though it will be incorporating a number of features that are decidedly old school, several of which Garriott himself demonstrated in a recent video of a "90-days-in" prototype of the game.

The demo begins with Garriott taking his character out into the wild to collect some wood. After fighting off a spider he approaches a tree and starts chopping away at it with an axe. Eventually the tree falls over and Garriott, wood in tow, returns to a nearby village where he uses a sawmill and carpentry bench to craft a chair that he then positions in a house and sits in. Garriott took this as an opportunity to reflect on his philosophy of game world interactivity, "When creating a highly detailed interactive virtual world, it was always a big deal to me ... that all the props you see were useful in the way you expect them to be useful," he said.

Following his adventure in chair making, he heads to a nearby tavern and spoke with the bartender. Rather than selecting from preset text options, Garriott types in questions and text that the NPC was, impressively, able to respond to. The discussion eventually veers toward the subject of a nearby dungeon. Though no quest is explicitly assigned, he directs his character to the mentioned location and explores it. "There is no quest log. It is really up to you as a player to see what is happening a game and make decisions about what you believe is important," commented Garriott. After a bit of quick dungeon delving and puzzle solving, the demo ends.

While still clearly in an early form, Shroud of the Avatar looks to be shaping up nicely. Granted, some of its more classic sensibilities could limit its user-base. That being the case, things like the <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/123125-Richard-Garriotts-Shroud-of-the-Avatar-Kickstarter-Doubles-Its-Goal>impressive success of its Kickstarter would suggest that there's an audience of gamers hungry for an experience akin to what Garriott is trying to offer.

Source: PC Gamer






Permalink

 

[Elate]

I know it's early alpha.. but it looks like it was made 10 years ago. Quite ugly.

It looks very... Underwhelming. Great, so we can build and sit on chairs, and type out conversations with an NPC. It just seems like they're adding things which haven't caught on for good reason, they don't work so great in practice.

I think something like this might make a good single player game. Unfortunately for an MMO, I believe it will flop horribly. I can get behind the "Details need uses" idea, but not at the expense of making the game boring. The combat looks especially dull so far.

All that said, I'll keep an eye on it. I always like to keep an eye on new ideas.

 

[Nooners]

Interesting to watch, but there's a lot of things that I think will turn off a modern audience.

No quest markers, no dialogue trees...

I hope this is good and does well, but right now I'm...hesitant? I guess? Well, we are only 3 months into developing this thing.

 

[The Great JT]

That actually looks really cool. I remember hearing how a lot of games tried to put the role-playing back in the RPG genre, but this one actually looks like it succeeds.

 

[Tiamat666]

I know it's early alpha.. but it looks like it was made 10 years ago. Quite ugly.

It looks very... Underwhelming. Great, so we can build and sit on chairs, and type out conversations with an NPC. It just seems like they're adding things which haven't caught on for good reason, they don't work so great in practice.

I think something like this might make a good single player game. Unfortunately for an MMO, I believe it will flop horribly. I can get behind the "Details need uses" idea, but not at the expense of making the game boring. The combat looks especially dull so far.

All that said, I'll keep an eye on it. I always like to keep an eye on new ideas.

Yes, graphically and gameplay wise, it doesn't seem very impressive at the moment. But considering this is only 3 months in development, it actually is impressive how much is going on already. I really, really hope there will be more combat options and animations though, and it doesn't just turn out to become UO in 3D. I also hope that they will have some neat ideas for the crafting, something to make it interesting and not just a grind.

NPC conversations by typing actually makes sense for an MMO. I suppose the rationale behind it is that they want the player to converse with NPC's in the same natural way as they will converse with other players. Have a unified interface.

 

[mad825]

Interesting to watch, but there's a lot of things that I think will turn off a modern audience.

No quest markers, no dialogue trees...

No dialogue trees? wow, I mean wtf? so instead of possibility combing these features he just went one extreme. Yeah, I'm not really happen with the episodic gaming, I'm glad I didn't contribute.

 

[HanFyren]

Haven't had time to see the video yet. But the description reminds me of EQ in a good way.

 

[masticina]

Mmm I hope that resource managment and managing your inventory won't take to much time. Don't get me wrong yes there is joy in preparing to go out on a mission but.. Ultimate inventory at times was a b&%#h to work with.

 

[Uratoh]

What it really reminds me of is 'classic' Ultima Online. And I think it's supposed to. That game had a kind of magic to it before they...I hate to say 'catering to the casuals', because it wasn't strictly 'casuals' but they kept trying to broaden htheir audience and it got more and mroe dilluted until it wasn't a special unique experience anymore.

There was a kind of uniqueness to worrying about a guy with a halberd in grey robes jumping you and taking your stuff...while at the same time knowing other peoples' enjoyment was tracking down these people and ending them.

I played Ultima Online, and I was a TAILOR.

 

[MPerce]

I saw him present this at RTX last week. My nerd cred grew three sizes that day.

On the game itself, I'm reserving judgment. It's tough to form an opinion on a game that's only 3 months old.

 

[1337mokro]

I actually really liked this. I always got so bored with regular MMO's where really all you CAN do is quest and fight. If you are not fighting something then you are not playing the game. If this game basically allows you to be the dirt bag tavern-keeper that harasses people about their bills and occasionally bashes a trolls skull in I will be a very happy Avatar.

Though I do already know what the main quest for this game should be.

Figuring out what's a Paladin.

 

[Ayay]

I love what they are trying to do , it will never work , but i still love it. When or if this ever takes off it will become streamlined and first patch will bring quest markers and hints. Most ppl wont be bothered to think anymore .

 

[DarthFennec]

I am very excited about this project. Clearly he's trying to go back to the roots of what made the Ultima series so brilliant, before it got assraped by EA. Long have I wished for a modern game that did away with silly things like quest markers and dialog trees, in favor of a more dynamic and natural system such as this one. Honestly, the NPC dialog system in this demo looks impressive as hell. I'm really excited to see what this turns out to be, and so far it's already leagues better than Ultima IX or Ultima Online.

 

[DarthFennec]

Similarly, in a game with hundreds of quests, being devoid of a quest log is an unforgivable sin. You cannot expect players to know where to go in a large-scale world with hundreds of quests, and they should not need to consult a walk-through or guide simply to navigate your game.

You don't need to consult a guide. Just keep your own quest log, by hand, it's not that hard. Why would you need the game to do it for you?

I'm also not super-fond of the puzzle as there was no indication of how to solve it anywhere in the chamber that I could tell. A puzzle which requires that you hammer all of the choices via trial and error is not a good puzzle.

Sure there was ... hitting a torch changes the color of the surrounding torches, that's obvious from just hitting a few. So obviously the puzzle is about changing the colors of torches (since that's pretty much all you can do in the room), and making them all the same color is a really obvious thing to try to do. You don't need a sign to tell you that, you just need to use your brain a little.

 

[DarthFennec]

Because this is 2013, not 1989, and games should be designed with the current audience in mind.

A quest log exists for a very specific reason: convenience. No, it's not a tool to "baby" the player, it's an essential device used to help players keep track of the many hundreds (some more recent games veer into the thousands) of quests that a game can have available.

Expecting the player to keep a pen and a spiral notebook to record the location and details of every single quest they come across in a video game isn't "fun", it's homework, and you're not going to retain players by expecting them to take notebooks of their video game. I'm sorry, but at some point, calling your game "old school" stops being a good excuse for poor game design.

"Games should be designed with the current audience in mind." Actually, games should be designed with a current audience in mind. And the audience I think he's going for here is people like me, who have always thought quest logs were stupid, and who have always thought games were much more engaging and fun if they required you to keep track of quests/draw maps on graph paper/organize your own damn inventory/etc, rather than babying you and having the game do it for you. Role-playing games are better when they draw you into the role of the character as much as possible, which means that as much action as possible should be offloaded from the character to the player. That's why grinding exists. Even though it may be boring at times, it helps draw the player into the role more, and that makes it that much more rewarding in the long run. It makes it feel like the player is actually doing something worthwhile in the game, and it rewards them for their real-life skills and actions (for grinding it's patience, and for quest logging it's organizational skills). Automating those things just makes for lazy players, and boring games.

Even Ultima Underworld, a game made by Garriott, seemed to acknowledge this fact, because it came with an in-game journal system that allowed you to take notes of the locations of important NPCs, item caches, quests, etc. And that game didn't have nearly the amount of questing that newer games do. It's obviously not such a bad mechanic to have if he himself inserted it into one of his games.

I've never played Underworld (my DOSbox doesn't seem to want to run it), but from what you've described, it seems to me that the game provides a way for you to keep track of quests by hand, and it doesn't fill them in automatically. In that case, Underworld has done that part properly. A note system is just like using paper, except you don't waste any paper, so that's even better. Anyway, even if he had an actual modern quest log in one of his games, why on earth would that change my opinion on the matter? It just means that he would have written a less-than-perfect game. It wouldn't be the first time.

I've seen Garriott's older games, where he's often done some of the most obscure things that you would almost never have figured out back in the day shy of reading the guy's mind. And this small snippet of a puzzle suggests that he hasn't learned from those days, that he still thinks trial-and-error puzzles with no clue as to how the puzzle works are reasonable. Which means that later "puzzles" in the game may end up being so obscure that you'll need walk-throughs to figure them out. That's not a wise decision.

Yeah, games like Ultima II were sort of terrible at telling you important things, and that got extremely infuriating, I agree with that. And yeah, maybe he'll put problems in this game that are too obscure to solve without a hint, and maybe he won't include a hint in those cases. When I see that actually happen, I'll agree with you about that, but in any case, I maintain that this particular puzzle doesn't fall into that category.

Here's an approximate analogy of this "puzzle": You take a few coins and flip them, hiding the results from me. You then ask me to guess which ones were heads and which were tails, and let me have infinite guesses, and tell me that I can't leave the room until I guess correctly. No one in their right mind would call that a good puzzle, but that's exactly what this torch puzzle is. It's guessing at combinations until you get it right. Anyone can do it eventually simply by testing every possibility.

It's actually not like that at all. Here's a better analogy: You take some cards and lay them down on a table in a grid pattern, some face up and some face down, and you tell me to pick a card. When I do, you flip that card and all surrounding cards, and tell me to pick another card. You also tell me that the cards need to be flipped in a certain formation, and that it's probably a fairly simple formation. Of course, none of these hints are explicitly told to you in the puzzle room, but they're all there implicitly, and they're all readily available to those who are willing to use their brain a little.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Good to see the return of the parser. I can understand the hate for parsers but let's face it, they are better than predetermined options. If you can create your own questions instead of choosing them off a list, that's better, right? The only problem is no one has been able to create one as sophisticated as it should be. Ideally the person you're talking to should always understand you unless you're talking nonsense, reply realistically and never respond with generic answers. If we look at what we've achieved with graphics, surely this too is achievable.

 

[Fulbert]

It always pains me to see developers waste so much time, so much effort, so many creative ideas, so many beautiful art assets, on MMOs. So sad.