Richard Garriott and Starr Long talked about the selective multiplayer RPG Shroud of the Avatar and specifically about the “Player Generated Content”.
Currently, the team is focusing on the MMO aspect of the game, which brings some challenges that we will address shortly. The MMO part is intended to be as robust as possible, offering players a lot of freedom due to the sandbox nature. The economy in the game is completely player-driven. There is a limited amount of gold in the game world, and players craft all items themselves, creating a circulation of goods.
Work is still underway on the economy
However, this system is currently struggling with some teething issues. Because 10 percent of the players hold 90 percent of the gold in the game. This means that 90 percent of all players are poor, and especially newcomers find it very difficult to establish themselves in the economy. The developers want to address this, but they are not revealing how yet. This is displeasing to the top 10 percent, as they believe that life has always had rich and poor people. After all, they worked hard for their wealth.
However, they do not want to change crafting since a flood of items would completely ruin the economy. Meanwhile, they are also working on many new game systems, including treasure maps that players can create themselves, as well as book covers, and they want to revamp the UI and work on multiplayer-friendliness. Meanwhile, Richard Garriott explained in an interview that while he thinks the story he wrote for the game together with author Tracy Hickman (Dragonlance) is very good, it nonetheless ends after several hundred hours.
Players should create their own quests
Therefore, they want to give players much more options to tell their own stories and create their own quests. Later, players will be able to give NPCs dialogues and place monsters. Already, it is possible to write notes and distribute them in the world, allowing other players to experience small quests through them.
The highly controversial system of introducing open PvP in certain areas of the game – including quest areas – and thereby “forcing” players into PvP is being closely monitored. They do not want a situation like in the early days of Ultima Online in these areas, where players who do not want to engage in PvP but rather follow the story and complete quests or gather resources are constantly attacked and thus lose interest in the game. If this occurs, they want to react immediately.
The MMO dilemma
As mentioned at the beginning, they are currently focusing on the MMO part of the game, which has a negative side effect: Especially new players who were not part of the Kickstarter campaign in 2013 think that Shroud of the Avatar is an MMORPG. The other game modes, such as the single-player mode, confuse these players, and they do not understand why great importance should be placed on quests with decisions and real consequences. But that is exactly what has been announced and seems to put the developers in a dilemma now.
They do not want to anger MMO fans by introducing game systems that go against the sandbox aspect, but they also cannot simply ignore the announced features and completely change the game. Because many also expect a complete single-player RPG. However, many of the features no longer align with how SotA has developed. For example, quests with consequences can be mentioned. Especially in housing areas like towns, the instances cannot be changed due to housing.
This leads to quests having no consequences. An arsonist, for example, will never go to jail or an NPC will never be able to die. However, many expect this from the announced “Single-Player narrative structure with decisions and consequences”. How the team plans to manage this is still the big question.
