Shroud of the Avatar to put roleplaying back into RPGs, Garriott hopes
Richard Garriott is not the first great designer to turn to Kickstarter as a means to fund his work. But while Shroud of the Avatar, his long-awaited return to game design, directly references the classic Ultima series, Garriott is banking on more than nostalgia.

Evil is running amok

Players will be able to have their own housing
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Kat Bailey posted a new article, Shroud of the Avatar to put roleplaying back into RPGs, Garriott hopes.
Richard Garriott is not the first great designer to turn to Kickstarter as a means to fund his work. But while Shroud of the Avatar, his long-awaited return to game design, directly references the classic Ultima series, Garriott is banking on more than nostalgia.-
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Min/Maxing refers to minimizing the "unnecessary" traits of a player's character and maximizing the most desirable ones.
On the surface it sounds like reasonable approach to developing a character -- clearly you want to be the best at what you do -- but in multi-player games it quickly becomes the only way to develop your character: if you don't invest these resources into those abilities, or select these skills and equip that gear, your character is considered sub-par.
I think it's the bane of every game developer when they devote so much time and energy designing variety and color for their players to explore with their characters, only to have everyone take the exact same path. -
It means the people who obsess over how to best game the mathematics of an RPG instead of caring about the more important things like world, story, characters, immersion.
Fuck those people. If there's multiplayer I don't want to be at a disadvantage for just playing the game as the developers intended like a normal person. You want to figure out a math puzzle you go do that somewhere else.
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From the assassin's own words - Rainz 1997 "The servers had just been taken down to prepare for the huge influx of players for the speech Lord British and Lord Blackthorne were giving throughout Britannia. When the servers came back up, I strolled through Britain with Helios, my fellow guild member. We headed to Blackthorne’s castle where the first speech was being given. LB, Blackthorne, and their jesters were up on a bridge orating to the masses. Unfortunately I wasn’t playing my mage character, so casting spells from a spellbook was out of the question. Luckily my character was a good thief who had high “stealing” skill. I desperately searched the backpacks of those around me and eventually came upon a fire field scroll. After that it was pretty simple, I just cast the scroll on the bridge and waited to see what would happen. Either LB or Blackthorne made the comment “hehe nice try”, can’t recall exactly who. It was a humorous sight and I expected to be struck down by lightning or have some other evil fate befall me. Instead I heard a loud death grunt as British slumped to his death. After that it was just pure mayhem, Blackthorne or another force summoned 4 daemons into the castle and people were dying left and right."
HAHA!
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I am excited about it, but the game play so far really looks generic. I did like Dragon's Dogma, however, so I may overlook it if the game play is fun. Even though this is an RPG, I hope they take into consideration that combat needs to be more than click the enemy and watch the canned animation while random dice rolls in the background determine if you actually hit. Stats are one thing, but the skill of the player should always be considered. Damage dealt could be reduced by penalties for having low stats against what you are attacking, but it means even a low level character has a fighting chance of defeating a powerful foe...even if it's a small one. I would like the idea that I could, if I desired, to possibly open a store to sell weapons, items, and armor. I would like this better than an auction house because then when I am at the store front I could barter or negotiate my sells at the store. I would like to see this game push graphical fidelity on the final release to at least what has been released in the past couple of years. I'll buy the final product, but I don't think I need to fund Lord British as he spent a few million dollars to take a flight into space recently, I'm sure he's got the million to fund this game already.