Popular Twitch streamer House of Mangar Theater, recently had Chris Spears (aka Atos) on his stream for a Q&A interview. Known as Fzol in-game, his November 5, 2019 stream featured a 2-hour chat with Chris about a variety of game aspects.
Fzol’s stream is an astonishing 10 hours long, with Chris showing up around the 1:34:25 mark (Thanks to Viiolette Dyonisys on the forums for this information). In order to make it easier for those who may not have time to watch the stream, here is a summary of the highlights that were given to us:
When asked about why he decided to acquire the game Atos responded that Richard (Lord British) loves making games, but he doesn’t like to manage. Dallas Snell, the other original founder, has retired. So the game needed to move forward and Chris was the guy up for that task. He did not want to take over the company under Portalarium with all its baggage, so he established Catnip Games.
There is much that Chris can not tell us, but he seems to be very happy with how things have worked out.
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Chris stated that his end of the year goals are to have Inkly, Lua and the Episode 2 continent put into the game.
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Lua is set to go in the next release
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A new tab labeled Lua, will be added to the chatbox. You will be able to see your combat calculations here, as your crit, damage, etc changes depending on what you are fighting (there will also be this ability for crafting coming at a later time)
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New quest system is being worked on and will not repeat the mistakes of the past.
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More group content will be added in Episode 2 that you will not be able to solo.
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PVP in Tartarus is still getting kinks worked out, but assured they are coming
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One of the first scenes of Episode 2 will be a system like Chillblain’s Compendium (Challenge Dungeon)
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Many PVP ideas were talked about with Chris agreeing to turn off ransom for PVP and leave it off for one release in order to see how many people engage in PVP during that time. (Watch for an announcement for this – should happen before the end of the year)
Someone commented during the stream: Forced group play is really a bad idea if Catnip is trying to get Shroud’s original backers back because many of them backed Shroud for it’s Ultima single player solo / story aspect.
Chris’ Response to this is that it is something that he hears a lot and it is false. If they focus on solo content, then people are upset they are not working on PVP stuff. If PVP is worked on, people cry that solo content is being left out. They try to balance the two and add content for each. Chris hears many people say that if there is PVP combat in the game they will not play it. He was not shy to say to those people, then leave the game. SOTA won’t be dictated by a single player and that person will have a hard time finding another game with no PVP content at all.
Honestly, this is just a small bit of what was talked about. There were a lot of ideas put forth, some which Chris embraced, others he was unsure of or are low on the priority list. If you have time, it is worth watching.
Give Fzol some love and check out and follow his stream: https://www.twitch.tv/house_of_mangar_theater/
A thread on the forums was also created with people inputting their thoughts about the interview. You can check that out here: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/fzol-asks-the-hard-questions-to-chris.160042/