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Lost and Found fiction plot holes
- Thread starter UODevTracker
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Hi all, since you care I thought I would just be honest. The plot hole in Avery and Ricardo being released from prison is my fault... more or less. At least, it's my problem... which at this point is more relevant.
The current story arc is based on the information that was in our archive (or bible as some like to call it). My goal now and ongoing is to be true to the continuity of UO while creating an interesting story that will ultimately lead to the restoration of Magincia. The problem is... our archive is updated by the writer who is designing live events at the time (someone like myself) and is only as good as they were diligent. If they fail to document their stuff and then leave the company... well... we end up with problems and have to muddle through. Welcome to my life. So, problems in continuity in the current arc will give you some insight into what parts of UO history were well documented and what was not.
I suppose I could just draw a line in the sand and never speak of the history of Sosaria, but that doesn't seem right. So, I'm going to just press on and rely on the community to help me stay on track. When you find problems, let me know and I will do what I can to fix them. I appreciate you pointing them out to me because it is very important to me to preserve continuity, which is why for example I was like... "We never got Avery out of prison... I need to fix that."
I felt like I should just go ahead and kick this out in the open because it will surely come up again and just admitting it up front is probably the best idea. Hopefully the quality of the events will offset the occasional mis-step in continuity and as you point them out I will fix as many of them as I can. With practice, I will be able to know where the holes in our archive are and just avoid them.
I'm not going to 'un-write' what I have done so far but I will try to tie it back and create continuity if possible. In some cases, I will just have to accept that there is a problem that I can't fix and just move forward... like with Avery being let out of prison on 2 occasions. Maybe they let the wrong Avery out of prison the first time? Would Dawn even know what he looked like? She was on some farm and a Dragon came and picked her up to go to battle, someone said, "There's Avery, we got him out of prison." And they went into battle. I realize that is pretty weak, but that's all I got.
OK, to the immediate continuity problems that I can explain:
To start with, I can fix the one about Minax easy. Demons are just big liars and you can't believe anything they say... even dead ones. That fact is actually going to become relevant in the current story arc pretty soon so it might as well be true about Minax.
According to the archive, Lord Francisco was the royal treasurer and had his own private guard. Avery, the captain of Lord Francisco's militia, came into the lime light during the last arc and somewhere along the way he became this kind of Jack Bauer character. There is nothing that I can find that says he replaced Geoffrey, who has been around since the beginning of the game. In fact, there has been didly said about Geoffrey in some time, but he was in a lot of the single player games and is in the old fiction.
It was my assumption that Geoffrey was still Captain of the Royal Guard under Casca, and wasn't aware until everyone else was that Casca was actually evil. Lord Francisco and Avery represented the good guys stuck in this bad administration trying to do the right thing. It is not a big stretch to assume Casca kept Geoffrey waylaid by sending him on time wasting missions.
The other's I will just try to fix in future fiction.
There was another character mentioned briefly in the last arc called the Commander of the Royal Guard, he was a member of the council like Francisco and was killed with the council. I assume that he was Geoffrey's boss and I was considering promoting Geoffrey to Commander. Stop me if this is going to make a new problem by doing this.
The current story arc is based on the information that was in our archive (or bible as some like to call it). My goal now and ongoing is to be true to the continuity of UO while creating an interesting story that will ultimately lead to the restoration of Magincia. The problem is... our archive is updated by the writer who is designing live events at the time (someone like myself) and is only as good as they were diligent. If they fail to document their stuff and then leave the company... well... we end up with problems and have to muddle through. Welcome to my life. So, problems in continuity in the current arc will give you some insight into what parts of UO history were well documented and what was not.
I suppose I could just draw a line in the sand and never speak of the history of Sosaria, but that doesn't seem right. So, I'm going to just press on and rely on the community to help me stay on track. When you find problems, let me know and I will do what I can to fix them. I appreciate you pointing them out to me because it is very important to me to preserve continuity, which is why for example I was like... "We never got Avery out of prison... I need to fix that."
I felt like I should just go ahead and kick this out in the open because it will surely come up again and just admitting it up front is probably the best idea. Hopefully the quality of the events will offset the occasional mis-step in continuity and as you point them out I will fix as many of them as I can. With practice, I will be able to know where the holes in our archive are and just avoid them.
I'm not going to 'un-write' what I have done so far but I will try to tie it back and create continuity if possible. In some cases, I will just have to accept that there is a problem that I can't fix and just move forward... like with Avery being let out of prison on 2 occasions. Maybe they let the wrong Avery out of prison the first time? Would Dawn even know what he looked like? She was on some farm and a Dragon came and picked her up to go to battle, someone said, "There's Avery, we got him out of prison." And they went into battle. I realize that is pretty weak, but that's all I got.
OK, to the immediate continuity problems that I can explain:
To start with, I can fix the one about Minax easy. Demons are just big liars and you can't believe anything they say... even dead ones. That fact is actually going to become relevant in the current story arc pretty soon so it might as well be true about Minax.
According to the archive, Lord Francisco was the royal treasurer and had his own private guard. Avery, the captain of Lord Francisco's militia, came into the lime light during the last arc and somewhere along the way he became this kind of Jack Bauer character. There is nothing that I can find that says he replaced Geoffrey, who has been around since the beginning of the game. In fact, there has been didly said about Geoffrey in some time, but he was in a lot of the single player games and is in the old fiction.
It was my assumption that Geoffrey was still Captain of the Royal Guard under Casca, and wasn't aware until everyone else was that Casca was actually evil. Lord Francisco and Avery represented the good guys stuck in this bad administration trying to do the right thing. It is not a big stretch to assume Casca kept Geoffrey waylaid by sending him on time wasting missions.
The other's I will just try to fix in future fiction.
There was another character mentioned briefly in the last arc called the Commander of the Royal Guard, he was a member of the council like Francisco and was killed with the council. I assume that he was Geoffrey's boss and I was considering promoting Geoffrey to Commander. Stop me if this is going to make a new problem by doing this.
Yeah, I agree... what the heck is up with those champ spawns? Shouldn't someone have put a blockaid around it? Perhaps some yellow tape?One thing I'd like to suggest is to after all of this is done, is to somehow get some lore and background for things already added in the game, like hell, do we even know what the hell the champ spawns and the harrower is really?
Perhaps tie up some old and forgotten plotlines?
It seems that through the history of UO, sometimes the designers were telling a story and sometimes they were just puttin' stuff in the game.
For example... I could just stick Magincia back up either sheep town or like it used to be and call it good. "There, that fixed it!" But my personal inclination is to tell a story... hopefully a good one.
I'm kind of bummed that Avery's and Ricardo's release were thrown away in one line of a piece of fiction that I don't even have anymore. How awesome is it to think we had left him in jail by accident for so long? It's practically tragic. You can't plan stuff that awesome... I was estatic to have such a juicy bit of story telling to build on. War hero forgotten... sets out on his own to try to put his life back together.... etc.
I'm going to move forward with Ricardo in prison (though I might try to fix the continuity) and Avery trying to put his life back together because I know it's going to be a good story. With Avery I'm just going to drop the part about how long he was in prison. We will never speak of it again. My arc for the next part of Avery's life is much more interesting than "He comes in and says 'Yes Sir' and then goes out again."
The current story is one where the lines between good and evil become blurred and being a "good guy" is no longer simple. To give you a little taste, in the next couple of patches I'm going to put in a 'bad guy town crier'... call him something like "Seedy Informant" and you can go to him and get the badguy news. (We're doing some upgrades to the town crier too so that system is easier to keep updated. Right now Menassa has to go around and update them by area serve on each server which is teh suck) UO is still about The Virtues and the struggle for good to triumph over evil, but I'm looking to put a little more emphasis on the struggle of the player character, not some NPC. In the event that just came out on Friday, it is still easier to be good than bad in Sosaria but that is part of the story, the corruption of a society does not happen over night.
Hmm... guess I'm going to need a talking cat.How or will this affect the Sherry the Mouse statues a lot of us have?
The Sherry that you have in your homes will continue to know what the town crier knows, she will continue to be tied into that system. Sherry is squeeky clean (pardon the pun) and I intend for her to stay that way.