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KickStarter Shroud of the Avatar - Lord British's Not-Ultima Online 2

taxalot

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Must be pretty amazing to be immortalized like that in your favorite game series (kinda sorta).

RG's wife is also in the game. As a major character. What does she think about that, I wonder.
 

Zep Zepo

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I'm glad they outed themselves as a bunch of insufferable cocks during the Kickstarter.

Dodged a bullet there.

Zep--
 

taxalot

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I keep saying the Ultima community is strange and peculiar. Here's some proof of that in action :

http://ultimacodex.com/2018/04/spam-spam-spam-humbug-103-first-impressions-shroud-of-the-avatar/

I dare you to try to listen to that podcast ; between the stuttering, the sound quality, the accent (is one of these people the midget from Twin Peaks ? ), it's only barely audible in "form", but the content is also ridiculous. They go at extreme lengths to ignore the elephants in the room : "oh yeah, the text window is too small" "there are some balancing issues with the skills and dungeons".

How about the fact the game is obviously unfinished ? That the towns are filled with big lots of nothing ? (I've just visited the equivalent of Britain, called 'Britanny' this time, it has several huge maps with NO npcs that you can actually talk to, get a quest, or anything. NOTHING.) That the performance is absolutely scandalous ? That the art style redefines what is ugliness ? That the whole thing is bugged to hell (last night I had to friend someone outside of the game and use a teleport scroll to get out of an island location because the boat captain was bugged). That the storyline, while having charm, plays particularly strange, bugged, and amateurish ?

FFS ! I'm playing it right now. Last night, they broke the map entirely (it's web based), and right now, the maps I'm seeing on my screen looks NOTHING like the area I'm in.

Isn't this what you should mention in "First impressions" ?

These are the people that backed SotA, that buy its terrain lots and items, and this is the kind of people Garriott now relies on to make a living.

Needless to say, I'm not particulary hopeful for the future of the game with such a crowd.
 
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Big Wrangle

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Those kind of people are either way into brand loyalty or suffer from severe buyer's remorse.
 

taxalot

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Codex 2013 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
From the official newsletter

028b1b34-c9bf-4adf-bd30-c86d6879dbec.png

"We do not give a shit about balance or quality, we just want people to log in more."


On the other hand, from the same email :
15e514d1-251e-4237-bddc-7e371fc8958f.png


By this point this is just a medieval Second Life with basic combat mechanics.
 

Junmarko

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"We do not give a shit about balance or quality, we just want people to log in more."
Can never fault them for talking about it...

http://sotawiki.net/index.php?title...t=0&redirs=1&profile=default&search=framerate

PatchNotesreAlphaR1
*There may be framerate issues and slowdown in game, optimizations are still in progress.
16 KB (2,756 words) - 00:00, 8 January 2014
................................................................................................
Release 50 Community Livestream/The Making of Physical Goods
19:44 brief highlights framerate "improvements"
81 KB (- 10:53, 19 February 2018

:rpgcodex:
 

Zep Zepo

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So... How many Codexers feel stupid for being a Kickstarter person?

I put in $1 so I could shitpost on their Kickstarter.

But I withdrawled it (or they might have banned me, I forget) before they reached the goal.

Zep--
 

taxalot

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I am an early kickstarter backer. I knew what I was getting into, to be honest, but the Ultima series has sucked so much time of my teenage years and early adulthood that I knew I would play the game, however bad, at some point, for curiosity's sake.

I was not expecting the associated rabbit hole.

Also, just to be clear, this doesn't prevent me from having fun with the game but I am an easily pleased gamer. And you have to be, with this game. I wonder if the Ultima community is not just people who dropped gaming and picked it up again for this game, and are therefore more willing to ignore its faults, because really, pretty much everything in this game is not only unforgivable, but the more you hang out in the forums, chatrooms associated with this game or Ultima fans you cannot help but wonder : is it denial, or are they really oblivious to the game's faults ?

It has to be a mix of both, because really, the game is being panned everywhere. Steam reviews are mostly trashing this. The french forum listed a series of positive reviews, but the only major french publication to have reviewed it, Canard PC, has completely trashed the game.

It's pretty unbelievable ; you have to take this game's purpose litterally : when you start playing it, you really are getting yourself into another, much different world, alternate reality.

As for my progress, I'm starting to wonder if I'm not actually already 1/3 of the way done. If so, something is also wrong with the length of that game despite its huge size.
 
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Junmarko

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The loneliest blog in the world
http://blogoftheavatar.com/
SotA_02-26-18_21-14_1-768x432.jpg

If one of you makes a move and leaps out to grab me in some sort of fit of vengeance, just be warned, I have a sword, and I’m fully prepared to use it.

Plus, I’ve been in some in unsavory water and you’re likely to contract something terrible and catch your death. Again…

:shredder:
 

Zep Zepo

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I am an early kickstarter backer.

I as/was as well. I had hopes, but the KS just became massive decline as it went along.

I LOVED Ultima Online (b4 they fagged it up).

Honestly, I'd probably still be playing it (UO), BUT, they care beared the shit out of it.

Such is life...

Zep--
 

taxalot

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If you want to see how deep the rabbithole goes, take a look at this one year old thread and at the mental gymnastics it takes to justify this bullshit.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...here-really-ok-with-this-sort-of-thing.81211/

Their justification for reselling 20 bucks an item they got for free off the Unity store :
I completely understand that without complete information this could be frustrating.

Assets like these are often only free if you do not resell them like we are. Even if it was free it doesn't just magically appear in the game without any effort. It takes actual development time to get it working in the game properly. Many hours in fact. Sometimes the textures have to be adjusted. Often we have to make levels of detail versions. We have to make simple colliders. We have to set all the proper decoration and permission flags. We then have to spend time adding it to offers and the add on store. That costs money. It is not free.

Also, this happened on the official Ultima Dragons discord, when we were talking economic models and I mentioned how shitty were lootboxes, paying mods, pay to win, SoTa's,

[18:05] WtF Dragon: I don’t like the sound of a game where progression is tied to passing exams.
[18:06] WtF Dragon: I think I’d rather shell out cash.
] Moa: Why do you hate video games @WtF Dragon
[21:55] WtF Dragon: Why do you hate paying developers for their work? Or are we done asking each other inane questions?
(...)
[
05:18] WtF Dragon: Well, I'm just going to put that whole stream of mental masturbation in the ol' "TL;DR" bucket. Under the subheading "RPG Codexian Game Snobbery".
[05:19] WtF Dragon: A.K.A. The reason a talented developer like Obsidian is stuck making Infinity Engine games fifteen years after that stopped being novel.

I do not think this counts as private conversations, and you guys are mentioned so whatever. But more importantly, if you want to know the reason why SotA sucks, then the explanation is in there somewhere.

This is the guy owning ultimacodex.com , principal relay between SotA and the Ultima community, and who once again defended the F2P model of Ultima Forever and Dungeon Keeper Mobile.

SOTA is great. PoE is shit. Move along.
 
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taxalot

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When I tell you it's just medieval Second Life, this shit proves it.

In a couple of months, people will be selling pretend sex. In the meantime, it's nice that some people will be able to pretend they went "dancing" this weekend and totally "hooked up".
 

Max Heap

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When I tell you it's just medieval Second Life, this shit proves it.

In a couple of months, people will be selling pretend sex. In the meantime, it's nice that some people will be able to pretend they went "dancing" this weekend and totally "hooked up".

Look, the average Ultima fan is slowly approaching an age where prosthetic hips are becoming a part of their life's reality.
Setting up virtual dance parties to pretend you are just as active as in 1993 is really just covering the demands of your target group.
 

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