Creating innovations is not easy, as Richard “Lord British” Garriott is currently experiencing with his selective multiplayer RPG Shroud of the Avatar.
The idea behind it was, according to some videos from the time of the Kickstarter campaign, to create a single-player RPG where you could invite some friends and experience adventures cooperatively if you wished. It should also be possible to switch to an open online mode to meet strangers. However, as some from the community noted, the game evolved during development into a classic MMORPG that can be played offline.
From Selective Multiplayer to MMORPG
The change is said, according to several fans of the game, to be driven by players from the Ultima Online faction who are supporting the development of Shroud of the Avatar with a lot of money. They would prefer to have an Ultima Online 2. In the official forum, it is already being read that the developers should please do something about the single-player and friends online mode. These two modes would disrupt the balancing on one hand and ensure that too few players are seen in the online mode.
As one currently hears less and less about the single-player mode, and such statements lead to the focus apparently shifting more towards the MMO part of the game, some fans published a kind of open letter to “Lord British” via Facebook. In this, it is pointed out that Shroud of the Avatar is supposed to be released in the first quarter of 2017, but the single-player part of the game has so far offered almost nothing except an offline MMO experience. There is trust in the underlying story developed for the game, but the mechanics of a single-player game are simply missing.
Single Player is more than just story
This is evident, for example, in the quests. Although decisions with consequences were promised, no consequences can be seen. A child, for example, will never be reunited with its mother because she is in a housing zone where, for technical reasons, no instance can be created where the child returns to the mother. The dialogues would feel like an IRC chat, and there would be too little to explore. Grinding would be necessary to explore some areas and defeat boss monsters. This would disrupt the flow of the story.
The world would feel far too empty, the partly strange decorations of the players in terms of housing would negatively affect the atmosphere, and the cities would only seem like hubs inhabited by robots that have no connection to each other. In short, Shroud of the Avatar does not currently feel like a single-player game in single-player mode, let alone like a single-player Ultima. And there are fears that there will be too little time to get this done by the release in the first quarter of 2017.
However, one does not want the developers to turn Shroud of the Avatar into a purely single-player game, but rather that this mode is not neglected. It should have the same priority as the MMO mode, and the MMO part should not negatively impact the SP part. A response from Lord British and the developers of SotA is still pending.
