Shroud of the Avatar - Interview @ Dagon's Lair

Dagon from Dagon's Lair informed us that they had the opportunity to chat with Richard Garriott with a focus on the single player part of Shroud of the Avatar. The inhhteview comes in two parts and is available in both French and English (part 1 and part 2).

So in essence, the way you do it so that the single player experience is not say gimped by multiplayer is by building the multiplayer around it?

That’s right. That’s exactly right. And I also think than when you think of multiplayer, the… in a multiplayer sense, it’s actually very uncommon that your actual friends, people you actually know will happen to be online at the same time you happen to be online. You know if you think of your friends in the world. Most people have maybe a hundred people they would really call their friends and maybe only thirty of those people are actually as hardcore gamer as you are, and so the probably if you log on every other night, once every other night let’s say, the probability of you and your other thirty friends being online at the same time and in the same city at the same time is not a very likely occurrence. It’s actually, you know, it’s not something that will constantly be happening it’s something that’ll only occasionally happen and so I actually think as much… I want to convince people first of all to play online, not offline. But also by the way I think there is no reason not to expose yourself to letting your friends and you see each other because it’s not gonna happen that often, and whenever you happen to be in the same town, or happen to be travelling across the same part of the map, what a great joy it is to say, “Hey Bob, Chris, you know, what’s up? Hey how are you doing?” and make a celebration of the fact you found each other in this virtual world. Now if what you don’t wanna do is play with thousands of stranger tromping across your map, and killing all of your monsters, and getting all the loot ahead of you, and struggling for limited resources and you don’t to play that what I call competitive aspect of what sometime happens in multiplayer games, then don’t. We have a very simple slider that you move and set anywhere you want between travelling literally alone to only with people you know, to only with people you know and the know, so kind of two steps, or frankly anybody that happens to be nearby and so you can adjust and choose your level of comfort and you can change it on a daily basis. You can be going like you know last time I played I went ahead and slide that slider to let other people play and I didn’t like it. Well okay, you‘ll slide it back to solo player, no harm.

For those who don't like to read, there is also an audio version available on Youtube.