f13.net

So, at this year SXSW Interactive in Austin, Portalarium (http://www.portalarium.com/) unveiled their two super-seekret projects they have been working on beside the two casino games (already released).

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33518/A_Postcard_From_SXSW_A_New_Lord_British_Game_In_The_Texas_Sun.php

- Ultimate Collector, the company's first original game, which will take the form of a social network game paired with a television show hosted by Garriott, the pilot for which has already been shot.

I can't really describe the bizarre, nerdy awesomeness of Garriott hosting a TV show, really  :heart: :uhrr: :ye_gods: :drill:

http://www.trademarkia.com/ultimate-collector-85208116.html



And then, *drums roll*

- Lord British's New Britannia (working title) will be a social networking game built around Garriott's famous alter ego, which he wholly owns - as opposed to the Ultima universe, which Electronic Arts has the rights to.

(for what is worth, he also fully owns the proto-Ultima "Akalabeth" name, if I remember well)


From http://blog.games.com/2011/03/15/richard-garriott-lord-british-social-game/

"the eminent game designer and his team at Portalarium are participating in Accelerator, a SXSW competition for technology start-ups that has served as a launchpad for services like Foursquare in the past. Through this, the company is looking for $3.8 million in funding for both its Lord British game and Ultimate Collector. The latter is set to release first in the second quarter"
 

Fails, calling it now.

"Social! Networking! Casual! Synergy! Paradigm! Disrupt! Shazbot! Abracadabra! Sesame! Friend!"

I shout the magic words at the money door, but it opens not.

Way to make the really tough calls.  :oh_i_see:

I'm going to steal that and pass it off as my own somewhere.

Bloody Infidels, Ye will suffer!

(http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/3782/garriott2.jpg)

 :why_so_serious:

I'm not mocking, I'm sympathizing.

There is a TV/gaming crossover to be made, but this is not it.

(This is it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qammSSEwhiE))

I'd let someone else pay to see more of that!

I would watch that!

Oh my god, what is that?  Is that for real?

Hmmm, we might be onto something here.  Seriously, I do indeed believe people would watch that.

It's not real, but it is hilarious largely because that is exactly how it would pan out.

There are only six episodes.  The others include

The cheating player (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qyYg_bfrlw)
The annoying sidekick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKD5pKzzXvU)
The ripped-off customer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-32RxlHiGU)
The old schoolfriend (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpUd6mAdgQI)
The charity cold-caller (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcTPqiIAWCA)

One of the comments from the annoying sidekick is "Hiya! It's me, Imoen."

Those vids are priceless.

"Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale" now officially announced on Portalarium corporate website:

http://www.portalarium.com/index.php/products/ultimate-collector

And there is also a brief blurb about the "Ultimate RPG" Garriott is working on:

http://www.portalarium.com/index.php/products/ultimate-rpg

It's like Farmville had a Downs Syndrome baby.

Lord British has poisoned the well in Austin for game development. If you think otherwise, you're a goddamned liar and possibly an idiot.

He wants to make it Ultima Online Two 3, but discussions with EA over the name are still ongoing.

A bunch of rambling:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-12-12-garriotts-ultimate-rpg-could-become-ultima-online-2

Portalarium's "Ultimate Collector" trailer, featuring Richard Garriott  :grin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E7UagUs_ng

Soooo.  It's the Sims:Online, but online?   :headscratch:

Kill Jester is the best one of those videos.

http://www.lordbritishpresents.com/

I'm SO ready to be disappointed that I will probably end up liking what he's going to show :P

More details emerge, O' Seekers  :grin:


http://ultimacodex.com/2013/03/lord-british-presents-a-countdown/

(http://i1.wp.com/ultimacodex.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/20130301-160040.jpg)

(This one below is an image straight from Richard Garriott's twitter feed)

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BESvMoYCMAAPf_4.jpg)

A Kickstarter? I'm surprised.

Yes please.

The plot thickens?

http://ultimacodex.com/2013/03/lord-british-confirms-the-ultimate-rpg-will-be-on-pc/

So, ummm, that logo...


(http://i.imgur.com/iRyt2sm.png)

And the alternate title of this thread, I dunno, I just

Well, yeah, it resembles (Ultima III) Sosaria...  :awesome_for_real:

http://ultimacodex.com/2013/03/revealed-the-ultimate-rpgs-map/

(http://i2.wp.com/ultimacodex.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/map_11_final.jpg?w=640)



Announcement incoming (and maybe, just maybe, this topic will need to be re-located in the PC section...Not that it would imply a less amount of suckyness :P) .

Live on Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0

Well, he's here live right now showing the original manuscripts he used to scribble in class what would have become the lore for Ultima.... that quite moved me I am not gonna lie.

http://roosterteeth.com/home.php

Garriott, explaining why young people that haven't played any of the previous Ultima games should care about this one:

I wish I 350 dollars cared about ironically owning a signed Lord British cloth map. I just want to frame it and stare at it and giggle.

Why does that map have a vagina?

I actually watched some of it.

I was kinda embarassed.

There could be something here, but there's too little to go on to believe in, well, any of it. Looks like Unity, may have the MMOz, may have some choices, may have the socials. All of Miscreants shouts from two years ago (I'd make that my sig, but it's too old!).

And ten years (and btw through Tabula Rasa...) is a hella long time, which includes a few Elder Scrolls and Mass Effects for the choices and a couple of Dragon Ages for the party/choices.

Call again in two years maybe?

I wish he would retire and just go away :(

Because endgame is getting to fourth base.

It pains me to agree with you on that point, but yeah.

George Lucas effect.

For the record, George Lucas is a master troll and made billions at it.

I don't dislike the guy as much as some apparently do, but I definitely dislike how he keeps talking about himself in third person all the time. Actually, not all the time - he's not even consistent about it! ;P

I don't dislike RG as a guy. I dislike him as a Lucas, taking a dump on his legacy. I dislike that he wants to remake UO for the facebook generation but sell it as an Ultima. So, fuck that dude. Also, that game you're buying? You're not, really.


Nominal fee, another $80 for the other 4/5ths of the game. But then,


I think that's where my brain broke. Talk about having no design doc or vision driving the project.

Honestly, at this point I am tempted to keep $25 in the hat just for alpha/beta access and the lulz like we had in UO. It just sounds so naive and terribad.

And the comments continue to entertain, especially in light of offline stuff like InXile and Obsidian are working on...



And the true spirit of Ultima, remember when Iolo livestreamed Stones and everyone "liked" it?


And irony:


(because the upper pledge levels get free limited property for life)

This post brought to you by an evening playing Ultima 7 and drinking bock beer then reading this utter fucking nonsense of a project. (all those quotes are dev quotes from the KS comments)

That reminds me of the "good old days" when new private UO shards popped up every day, and the main feature of 97% of those were "FREE CASTLE 2 THE 20 FRIST PEPOLE WHO JOIN!". Those shards never lasted very long

"The adventures of the Avatar and his faithful companions Dudebro and Yolo"?

edit: hey, my old UO shard (http://darkagerp.com/) is still going! Even though I remember us having to troll everyone on IRC to keep voting in those "top 100 UO shards" lists that were all the rage in the early 2000s.  :why_so_serious:

The Kickstarter is halfway there after two days. Interesting times ahead.

Stop giving money to this guy.

Whose been out of the game longer? Him or Chris Roberts?  :oh_i_see:

He's past the xpiry date. Fuck him.

This. Also, all that shit Sky posted just makes me go :ye_gods:

At this point, it's not even about shitting all over the Ultima legacy so much as making fuckstupid decisions that Ultima Online should have taught him a decade ago.

It looks very much like a new Ultima game with enough tweeks to the setting to stave off the lawyers.

This may turn out to the be first kickstarer I give money to. I want to believe in UO2, the MMO you can also play offline.

He's just going to take your money and blast off into space again.  Maybe build his next castle there.

wat

I cannot wait.  I am excited but not engaging in kickstarter; still miffed about U9.

ITT: proof humanity is incapable of learning.

Yes, folks. This game will be both classic Ultima period rpg AND pre-Trammel UO. And despite how much we talk about microtransactions, we won't pester you /all/ the time. And they're going to hock ads while you play with fiends. I do like 'you can play essentially and likely literally solo/offline'.

Why do I love KS?

HAHAHAAHAHA  :awesome_for_real:

"There's no way we're going to stop letting people give us $3000+ for in game houses."

That's better than I was doing selling UO real estate. Best I ever did was $300 for a villa north of Vesper.

Sounds like multiplayer along the lines of Diablo and Dungeon Siege.

Thank goodness Kickstarter is there as a safety net or this poor hapless man might end up like Curt Schilling.

I do wish this pledge level came with a copy of the game:


For $10 I'd love to grief and exploit in this game.

Wait, you can actually have a Kickstarter where you don't have to give jack or shit to the donor?

Fuck me. I've been doing it wrong.

Yeah, usually it's a $1 "So you can make comments" or $5 "Show your support with a cuppa" kind of thing.

But then you really don't have to deliver anything anyway, but it's nice to have the promise of something.

Damn my ethics!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0/posts/425574?ref=activity

3 days into the Kickstarter and we’ve been receiving tons of great feedback, probably more than we received in the last year through our social campaign to find out what people want! Based on one of the most common concerns, we’re making a few small changes.

First, the game can be played offline, no connection required. The character used for the offline version of the game will not be useable in the online version of the game for obvious exploit/hacking reasons. We are going to investigate ways to export your online character to the single player version of the game but the offline character will not be importable into the online version.

Second, the offline single player version of the game for those who purchase it through KickStarter will not use any form of DRM. We had been holding off on committing to that because we don’t know what our final distribution system (Steam, GOG, etc) is going to be and some of them use DRM. We may have DRM of some sort on post-KS sales but we’ll commit to keeping KS versions DRM and “phone home” free for the single player version once launched.

Third, the offline single player of the game will not have any microtransactions. We know this is kind of a no-brainer since it is offline but we wanted to be perfectly clear on that since there was some vagueness in a few statements in one of our video chats.

Except for how close some of us might be hoping this is to the Ultimas we kinda remember 20 years later, is there really anything substantive to talk about yet?

And seriously, this is yet another example of why I don't get Kickstarter. People really are paying $3k for a house they don't know the value of in a game that doesn't exist from a guy that hasn't launched a game in 15 years (he was not involved in the TR that ultimately launched) who is only collecting just enough money to get him in the door of some of the places that may publish it who haven't yet had their say on what it will be?

I swear Kickstarter was created by zombie PT Barnum*

If we see just a Google Play version of this in two years, I'll be shocked even that launched. I'm all for being excited by the potential of something. But come on. Whatever happened to waiting until something was purchasable, ya know, before you purchased it?

* Ok fine, David Hannum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There's_a_sucker_born_every_minute)

This project is only representative of one facet of KS. While there is a lot of bad stuff (and this one is pretty epic imo), there's a lot of good stuff if you do your homework.

This one just sounds so bad, and apparently they think sitting through hour-long rambles with Lord Ego is the best way to convey information.

No. I mean, this looks like a terrible project, but you just can't boil it down to a give/get transaction. That's not what people are buying, they're buying the chance to recapture their bullshit pre-Trammel glory days, the feeling of being thanked on some credit screen by ~LORD BRITISH~, or whatever. All these Kickstarter computer game projects live in a weird intersection of nostalgia, business, and charity, and if you just look at it like a robot beep boop pay money get thing transaction, you will never understand it.

There are lots of projects where you can and do get lots of actual value back for your money; ironically those are the ones probably outside the 'spirit' of Kickstarter the most, just based on some of the other product categories where KS essentially shut down the ability to use a KS as a way of just doing preorders.

By the way, does anyone know if he still answers his phone?  I need to call him up and tell him I beat U6 in one month, sixteen days.

If you pay enough then your character can be a Lord. I will be Lord Palmer. Other players will know I paid $3,500 for the game years before it came out because it will be written over my head, and they will respect me for it. So I assume.

Seriously though, I see it as being a bit like playing the lottery. It makes no economic sense to buy a lottery ticket (unless you want to contribute to the causes the lottery supports, but then it makes more sense to just give that cause some money). The odds are that however much you spend on tickets, you will never win that amount back, let alone become filthy rich (otherwise the lottery would make a loss, right?) Yet people buy tickets because they want to imagine that it might come true.

Yea i coulda been clearer. Kickstarter makes sense for a number of things, it cuts out the VC/Angel/Series Round shared-ownership middlefolks and all that. I don't decry its existence.

But investing in vaporware doesn't make sense to me, particularly for the pre-Trammel crowd. Unless they've been playing pre-Renaissance private shards and nothing else for the last 12 years, they should long since have become accustomed to announced games not always launching, or taking a completely different form by the time it launches, or sucking when it launches, or changing direction after launch (why I also don't get lifetime MMO subscriptions), or any of a hundred other things that happen between "hey wouldn't it be cool if" and the store shelf/steam sale once a publisher puts its stamp on it.

I get what these people think they're getting. It's the same area of ego that used to get stroked by getting a beta invite (before it became a marketing term), or by starfucking, or discovering something before others (ala the Eternal Septemberists), or anything else that makes one feel unique for a moment.

I'm just saying it's dumb.

But to be completely honest, I'm also a bit jealous. I wish I could get into something as much as some people do. At some point I became burned out on the idea of a promise in video games.

Go read those comments. If you were a sane UO player, they're HI-larious. The boner for open pvp is so huge and sad. I particularly like the heroic statements by the angelic anti-pks, who in my experience were just noto-pks. If it's red, it's dead and never mind the griefing blue alts used to turn people red so you could log into your heroic Lord Douchebag and save the day.

I also like the bizarre pleading to let people live the life of a farmer. Ffs, plant a garden. It's cheaper and you'll get food out of it.

Also, there's vaporware and there's vaporware. There's little whiff of anything good in Garriot's project. For Torment, there's a lot that sounds good. While there's always the chance things will go badly and the game will be awful or mediocre; there are some projects (the Romeros) that you can see the stank a mile away.

For me it boils down to: is this a labor of love project (wasteland 2 and shadowrun) or is this just paying for shovelware.

Why is there no bonus to basically assassinate Lord British in-game?  Surely some Ultima griefer made it big and is willing to shell out 6-7k for that.
 

I'm really surprised how accurate this year old PA rip on kickstarters looks like Lord British's pitch.

(http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/i-jbBQTJT/0/950x10000/i-jbBQTJT-950x10000.jpg)

Pre-Trammel, eh?  Should be good for some viewed-from-the-outside hilarity, assuming a playable version ever materializes.

Nononono, pvp is essential for the little people. Of course Lord British shouldn't partake in it. Who knows, an npc might fool him.

needs a new trollsite, shit-starter is starting to fit in.
A lot of KS projects I felt are just blatant money grabs, stuff you'd think the majority of people would not support.
But I was so, so wrong.
There's just way too many shit being funded.
Too damn many.

Why pay when there will be a bug that'll let you do it for free?

This one just made my head hurt.

inb4toiletjokes

Ya, if Brenda wanted to kickstart a real sequel to Jagged Alliance I'd be there in a second but with John in the mix I'm staying far, far away.

Lottery-wise, there are some chances this game will actually get released, and be quite good. Not many, and that's why it is a lottery, but it's far from impossible. Lottery-wise.

While I'm looking forward to this project, I laugh at the great job they're doing in alienating the MMO and single player crowd at the same time: in the kickstarter comments section, you see a lot of people that can't wait to see the next UO and don't realize it's not aimed at them; on the other side, you see a lot of nostalgic ultima players hopeful for a "back to the roots approach" who don't understand what the multiplayer part has to do with this.

The clusterfuck is epic, although it's no different compared to other RG's projects: interesting visions and ideas, thrown together in a confusing matter (and often opposed to the latest "common sense" game design approaches), and it's up to the rest of the Dev Team to come out with a somewhat coherent picture.

Well, whoever the mouthpiece is on KS has already talked about disagreeing with RG on a lot of things.

And it's beyond commenters wanting the next UO, they want all the things that got removed from UO because  :uhrr: like open pvp.

Since I've started playing U7 again, I could see a co-op component to the game with friends sitting in for Shamino and Iolo etc. But I think that sacrifices some of the personality of the game and I don't see it working as an instanced game around a social hub. Especially when I can't ever interact with anyone if I choose an offline game, that statement just smacks of 'well, fuck you if you want to play it purely offline'. As someone who /enjoys/ playing games solo, it's so tired hearing the old tropes about 'but you'll really want to play with your friends'!

Anyway, yeah. I agree they've managed to alienate the mmo and classic fans. But at the same times it seems those fans have deluded themselves into thinking they're going to get what they are dreaming of.

But that's the beauty of Kickstarter for games. At this stage, everyone just sort of imagines their ideal game in place of what the obvious facts are pointing to.

I see people asking why RG would kickstart if he's spent 140 million attempting to recreate the dinosaurs using ancient mosquito blood after seeing Jurassic Park on TV. The real question is... why wouldn't he?

$50k and 20 days before this is funded.

So, what are Garriott's chances of delivering something on time and on budget?

I feel like anyone from f13 that gives money to this Kickstarter should get a swift banning. Should we start a line to the left?

Some might just fund this to see the trainwreck happening. Personally I think you shouldn't encourage Garriot, but at least that would be a sane reason.

I'm quite fine watching the train wreck from the sidelines, thanks.

Provided they share the backer-only elements of the trainwreck here, I'm fine with someone else backing this project. It's going to be funded; we may as well wring as much joy from that as possible.  :awesome_for_real:

This is the first time I've ever watched a kickstarter's progression carefully. It's quite fascinating.

I wish there were a graph to see pledges over time. He got about a half mill on day 1, and then things started to slow right down. Over the last week, the funds have painfully trickled in. It seems likely that he'll make $1 mill, but that if he'd gone for $1.1 mill, he'd have been out of luck.

The base pledge is $10, a "guild pledge" to expiate the sin of having pirated one of his games over time. Total raised: a whopping $460. Strangely enough, looks like people expect a real reward for their money.

250 people have pledged $40, even though the $33 tier has exactly the same rewards. Poor reading comprehension?

1,609 people pledged $60, no doubt more than the cost of buying the game retail, in order to get a floaty "Founder" title, and early access to the developers' blog. I can almost, kind of get the appeal of a Founder title in an MMO. But this isn't an MMO.

The comments are incredible. There are people who are rabid fans of this game already, even though we no virtually nothing about it.

Something like this? (http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0/#chart-daily)

Interestingly it has stayed at constant $25k-$30k for several days now, maybe Garriott is funding it himself to keep it going...

With most KS, the base pledge just tends to be people pledging a token amount so they can make comments and see updates for backers only. Expect a bunch of cancellations at the 11th hour.

One of many reasons people favor KS over IGG, especially the horrible flexible funding setup.

By comparison Veronica Mars movie (http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project/#chart-daily) hit $2mm in its first day. Just sayin'.

Ok, not a fair comparison. But still, Shroud seems to have limped to its goal. Which again doesn't fund shit beyond a datapoint they can bring to the real money people.

Oh yea?
Fuck you guys


http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-suck/

It didn't limp to its goal - it's got more than two weeks left.

It wasn't an extreme day 1 success, but it is going to make a lot more than its target.

Most Kickstarter projects only just get over the line, but we've become so used to "GAME FULLY FUNDED IN 24 HOURS" that it distorts our view of how Kicstarter functions.

Because most of the overnight funding projects are pretty good projects. Torment sounds good, has been talking a bit about the world and teasing things. (Trying to keep it in video games, because board/war/rpg are similar but different).

I just popped in today for my morning 'wat' and today's was delivered by Tracy 'the Hutt' Hickman. Who pioneered story in games (titles not mentioned, Dragonlance? Because I don't remember him at Black Isle) and trots out the old 'gameplay hasn't changed in 30 years'. Now, I was gaming 30 years ago, so that's pretty fucking funny. But the kicker was the pod people delivery, full of odd pauses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AteG_NXZF2o

Stretch goal: Buy Tracy Hickman a neck.

Richard Garriot can suck my balls with that "most designers suck" line. Why?

Ultima IX. Tabula Rasa. Now fuck off to your castle, ye twat.

He's calling out Raph!

The awesome thing about Tabula Rasa is that his design was so bad they scrapped the entire thing and rebuilt it entirely differently.

I guess they just couldn't comprehend the genius and his fourth dimensional spreadsheets.

And the redesign sucked as well though maybe not as hard?

I enjoyed the early beta (f&f), though I think toward the middle and end they moved in the wrong direction.

You can definitely make a case that he had the most important part in the first fully narrative RPG story (at least the first commercial one), which would be the Dragonlance modules. The problem is, of course, that the story is actually terrible; but it WAS new.

Fuck this thread. Locked.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=23087

This is kind of graveyard news, but ran across it and was amused at how much of the author's experiences were similar to mine (though I was born in '65, not '72).

http://techland.time.com/2013/03/11/before-you-drop-money-on-richard-garriotts-shroud-of-the-avatar/

Also can't help but note that this was published under such as mainstream moniker as Time(.com).


Edit:
They seem to be making some progress (six month progress video on the main page -- skip toward the 20 minute mark to see community created content for it):
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/

This game is not allowed on these boards(* (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=23087.0)). Not until it's a real game at least.


EDIT: Let me add, and not in a negative way, that those experiences (and yours) are probably shared by a good 50% of the dwellers of f13. That's probably why we are still here, and why we often like terrible games, to Schild's dismay.

Wasn't aware that Garriott was involved with the original Lineage. But it appears this is correct.