Feedback from a New Backer

Greetings and salutations! I'm Lewis; I'm with a YouTube channel called BrainScratchComms and have had my eye on Shroud of the Avatar for quite a long time. After receiving a somewhat-used NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 via fan donation I'm finally able to mess about with the pre-alpha (my previous GT 910 would not have had a prayer at running this game), so I'm really excited both by the opportunity to promote this ambitious project and by the chance to possibly influence development with feedback.

I'm more of a single-player gamer than an MMORPG fiend (although I'm quite heavily into Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn at the moment), so I'll admit my personal focus is more on the single-player offline mode and the mode that allows private play with friends, rather than the overall MMO experience. I care about as much for stuff like PvP or player-driven economies as I do about slightly interesting magazine articles about, say, the Olympics; I admire the stuff but don't care to follow it closely. So, I'm going to state point-blank that I bow out of offering feedback on any of those aspects of Shroud. I'm here for the immersive roleplay experience and would rather think more about NPC dialogue or general control than, say, how to balance one player's DPS versus another's, or what incentives there are for PvP, or how crafting and gathering factors into social marketplace options... except for one little tidbit: please please please oh PLEASE try to make it so that these systems don't punish players for not being with the game since the absolute beginning of its life cycle, and that goes double for player-owned land plots and homes! By the time I even discover most MMORPGs I've played, economies and land prices tend to be through the roof, or the server I'm on is just plain out of land plots... it's very vexing and the idea that half the game is out-of-reach discourages players--and me!--from leaving our comfort zones.

That being a general hope more than feedback about what I've experienced, I'd first like to say that I haven't done much with the game yet. I'll deposit pieces of feedback or general thoughts here as I go. First general thought is that I love the down-to-earth visual style of the game, which is to be expected with Richard Garriott at the helm, but it's worth noting because it's such a nice contrast to other MMORPGs and fantasy games. While I've nothing personally against the stylizations common to the genre (although the overabundance of bikini armor for the female characters leaves me feeling cynical about how they're trying to appeal to players), it's refreshing to have a game that maintains an "authentic" fantasy look without trying to be super gritty or photorealistic. The overall aesthetic of the game, from the environments to the character models to the HUD design, all comes together to make for a pleasing and immersive experience. On that note, the relatively unobtrusive HUD is quite nice, although I'd like the option to make the hotkey bar smaller (I'm playing on a 720p screen so it's fairly large) and I hope I can more thoroughly move HUD elements around in the final build. I can't seem to find the visual "bag" inventory option that I've seen in videos, a la previous Ultima games--has it been disabled, or am I just missing it? I quite like that visual inventory design.

One UI complaint I have (assuming this is aspect anything close to complete in the first place) is that tying dialogue to the chatbox results in it looking visually confined and cluttered, and I'd appreciate an option to have dialogue and NPC interaction be given its own, more visually-pleasing and easier-to-sift-through dialogue box. This doesn't have to mean eliminating the chatbox functionality; an additional dialogue window could be programmed to function as an extention of the chatbox with a nicer design and font, and a more-organized text presentation, I think? Not that I'm an expert, but I don't imagine it'd be difficult to link the two elements. This would also mean you could have the chatbox open so you could converse with other players, while typing dialogue with NPCs in a second window, without fiddling with what mode your chatbox is set to or anything.

On the subject of dialogue itself, I absolutely love the way the keyword system is implemented here, and the extensive amount of dialogue some of the NPCs have really makes me feel invested in the world. Little things like being able to ask a woman about her cats (individually) make it feel much more like roleplay and less like impatiently scouring town for quest objectives so I can increase my XP and gold-count. The lack of handholding, while I appreciate it in a different kind of game, also lends to this immersive feel. Until I started Shroud of the Avatar's pre-release build, I didn't realize how badly I wanted a modern game of this sort, and that gets me really pumped for the final product.

My last complaint/suggestion is a "Your Mileage May Vary" one and it has to do with general control, or rather, for giving an additional option. I'm aware that many gamers are quite comfortable with mouse and keyboard play, but from what I understand of Shroud's interface--which doesn't seem to have the six gazillion shortcut keys a lot of MMORPGs have in the first place--it would be quite easy to go the Final Fantasy XIV route and adapt the controls to a gamepad, using shoulder buttons to allow access to different hotkey elements (FFXIV takes the console Dragon Age hotkey system and goes off the rails with it). That game includes the free traditional mouse/keyboard interface as one mode, includes the gamepad interface as a second optional mode, and allows use of mouse and keyboard while the gamepad interface is active, essentially allowing you to split control duties between keyboard (for chat), mouse (for general targeting and camera control when the limits of the gamepad might be cumbersome), and gamepad (for ergonomics, analog movement, and general gameplay). This also means that, since you're not using the keyboard for hotkeys, you can just hit any keyboard button to start typing into the chat box, without pausing to re-activate it. It works surprisingly well, and FFXIV manages to cram a whole eight hotkey bars with sixteen hotkeys apiece into the gamepad interface without much trouble--meaning you can hotkey specific menus, emotes, macros, and all.

I realize this suggestion wouldn't sit well with some PC gamers who have reservations about the influence of console gaming on the overall industry, but functionally I see no argument against it. So, food for thought, should a developer read this. A fair number of players can't play on a keyboard for extended periods without suffering hand-aches, and WASD movement does strike many players (myself included) as uncomfortable. I also appreciate being able to freely walk/run with an analog stick rather than a toggle; one of my favorite things to do is to just slow down sometimes and take it all in, whether it's pretty scenery or a creepy atmosphere.

Final note for this first post: the music is absolutely beautiful so far. My compliments to everyone involved.

 

Welcome, Heartless Wanderer! Great feedback so far. Keep it coming

 

Welcome to the community! The game isn't very optimized yet. Performance should improve before launch.

Most of the campaign, quests and single player features are coming later. They want to keep the plot under wraps as long as possible. When playing single player offline you're not competing with any other players for real estate. You can acquire housing with in game gold.

Check the settings in game. You have to turn off list-mode inventory.

You can have multiple tabs in the window and customize each one. One tab I dedicate just to guild chat. One I have all my combat information in. There is an arrow next to the tab name that allows you to customize it.

Make sure to check out all the peasant and merchant dialogue in Ardoris then!

Some of it is made by Portalarium and some of the music has been made by the fans.

 

Actually only one song was commissioned (the opening song by Iolo). The rest were fan created

 

Glad to be here. Since I went to the trouble of taking screens for Twitter, here's a picture of my character:

It performs pretty much perfectly so far on my current rig! What I meant by saying my old GPU wouldn't have run it, is mainly that the GT 910 (and the rest of the GT series) is crap. Dragon Age: Origins chugs. That should be a pretty good indicator of how shyte my previous graphics card was. Not a single prayer of doing this game justice. Fortunately the GTX 760 is a fantastic card and can run a fair number of modern games at max or high settings. I'm loving the swaying grass in this game, by the way. Plant life in other games tends to be really static.

I'm aware of these things. I only mentioned it as it's the one thing about MMORPGs that bothers me, how the competition for land and the player economies can totally leave latecomers to the game in the dust. While I'll be mainly playing the single-player and private modes, I do intend to dip into the MMORPG mode! I love that idea, just having a game where players have the option. I just hope these modes are appropriately balanced. There's no need to make the MMO mode super solo friendly if the single player mode exists, but if the solo mode's enemies are just as hard as the multiplayer mode's, then things get ridiculous on that side instead. Have they mentioned anything about their plans for balancing the two? I would assume enemies just have different stats for single play and group play.

Thankee-sai, lists are boring.

Oh, I know how multiple tabs work, my problem with dialogue being exclusively accessed through the chat is that it seems rather crammed-in. Having a dedicated dialogue window that only appears while you're chatting up an NPC would enhance the experience of chatting with them. Give it a fancy-nice window design, a special font, and so on... yummy. All that delicious writing in an appropriately shiny wrapper.

Not that I'm not enjoying myself with the dialogue as-is, but it would be nice.

I shall do so!

Hey, that's pretty cool. I knew fans were contributing but I hadn't heard that about the music. This is a soundtrack I want to stick on my phone and listen to when I'm relaxing.

 

Welcome to the community Wanderer, and also welcome to the single-player-experience-fanclub.

NPC interactions has been a high energy issue for us SP fans for a long time now. We clamored for quite a while about the desire to have NPC conversations in a dedicated window, but the "tab" system was the best option we were given. In my opinion it is pretty immersive-breaking and inadequate, but there ya go. (We actually had to really struggle to get the close-up of the npc character added as well, it used to be that the camera view stayed in its default position when chatting with npcs.)

It isn't all doom and gloom, the devs have stated many times that most single player mechanics will be added later, after the multiplayer aspects. So a lot of us are sitting, waiting, in various stages of patience.

 

I'm really crossing my fingers for the single-player mode to be great, because someday, the multiplayer servers will die. That's inevitable. But Shroud of the Avatar could be a classic right alongside Ultima 7 and the others, and down the line, it's the private modes people are going to be able to experience for posterity. I think the developers should take that into account for long-term development.

 

The Poets' Circle has many of the songs up on SoundCloud. You can probably assemble a partial soundtrack currently, but there will be a full soundtrack released at launch. I believe the full soundtrack is included at Virtual Collector tiers and above. I believe it will also be sold separately as well.

 

Hello and welcome to you The Heartless Wanderer. Thank you for your great feedback. It is always great to hear how the game is feeling for new players. It is important for the development of the game. Also most importantly your post is very fair and open minded about advising us of what you see. It is a pleasure to meet you. I look forward to hearing more.

 

I'm hoping to increase my pledge to the level of getting the physical release with feelies over the coming months, but alas, I could only afford $55 this month. Real life sucks.

When I have time between video projects I'll definitely be playing with the pre-alpha more, that's for certain! I'm fascinated with game development in general, so being able to participate, even in a peripheral way, is exciting for me.

 

Here is a playlist for everything on SoundCloud currently:

 

There's actually a few missing from there. Do you happen to know who maintains this playlist?

 

Thanks for directing me to the playlist. I'll be listening to that for a while, I imagine.

 

I believe it's Grandmaster Bard @Holt Ironfell.

 

@The Heartless Wanderer although this isn't a perfect solution and I definitely agree and want a 100% supported controller setup I managed to get a system to play the game with a controller. https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...streaming-to-a-nexus-player-android-tv.26106/

 

Welcome The Heartless Wanderer

If you want to have more bags, you'll either need to buy Backpacks from a vendor, there is one in Ardoris that sells player made bags, or you'll need to find the recipe and craft them. I fiddled with this a bit and I believe that is the way to have multiple bags to hold your items in a visual way rather than a list.

One thing you'll find about the community is that there is a LOT of passion. Many of us don't always agree and sometimes we REALLY disagree, but I believe that passion is essential to the development of this game. At the end of the day, no matter what we are passionate about, I believe the majority of us want the game to be the best it can be for both single player and all the other modes

 

I've worked out ways to get games to play with controllers when they arent meant to--and I also have a Splitfish controller as well, which sort of does the same kind of thing with its nunchuk--but that lacks one of the best advantages of true gamepad control: analog. WASD, however precise you may be able to make it by steering with the camera, is still a four-button movement scheme, limited to exactly eight directions in relation to the camera. It's also limited to two speeds, tied to a walk/run toggle or to a walk/run button. Analog control is fully 360-degree in potential motion as long as it's actual analog control (and not eight-directional control mapped to a stick), and can potentially be programmed to vary your speed in a more precise way than simply having a fast speed and a slow speed. There's no way to "trick" a game into having analog control; it needs to be supported natively, or it just won't happen.

It's a big point of conflict between gamers (who for some reason feel compelled to argue which control method is "better" between gamepad and keyboard/mouse) that the keyboard offers quicker access to more buttons, and the mouse offers much more targetting and camera control speed and precision. While these things are true, a gamepad offers much more in the way of comfort for the hands, and more complex, intuitive movement control with an analog stick. In this day and age where both PCs and consoles can easily support both control methods, I believe developers should move away from limiting themselves to just one or the other. My experience with Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn made it clear to me that it's even possible to use both at once if the genre benefits from the combination of control options. We all just need to start thinking outside the box of our familiar control limits and experiment with new things.

Besides, having a pre-implemented gamepad system just removes one chunk of the work if down the line a console port happens. So it covers another base in the potential long run as well.

I'm aware of how bags work in Ultima games; I was asking how to switch from list mode to backpack mode, so that my inventory resembles that of the later Ultima games.

 

Some use the bag mode, I havent checked it this release, but in previous releases it was not working correctly. For example you could not create little colored bags to separate for example reagents, armor, or crafting tools and then set them on a table or at least in a chest. I tried one day and took a lot of time crating the bags and then sorting the stuff into the bags but when I tried to move them to my chest I could not. It gave me a note saying you cant move bags with items in them or something like that and also things you pick up dont go into the correct bag, they just into the main bag so you have to keep sorting things, so it is no help. Also you cannot do a take all in bag mode. Anyway I hope they fix it, plus of course I want to be able to sit things on tables if I want, little bags included and eventually the floor if I want, but that's not coming until later. Oh and also sleep in beds. Of course I don't want much, but don't get me started to mention fishing and gardening and work orders. Oh well all that is coming so *sighs* and returns to explore R20.

 

Welcome to SotA, The Heartless Wanderer.

 

Thankee-sai?! <3 I have to keep myself from saying that every time I read The Dark Tower...

MdG