Towns too simular

I have been following you guys on and off over the last 3 years of development and have liked most of what you guys and gals are doing, with a few exceptions that I hold resevations on hoping that they will get better but one thing that does seem to be bothering me a lot is the fact that you have incorporated several towns into the game now but it really doesn't feel right.

Why you ask, well the answer is this - I just spent an hour running around looking at all the towns and from what I saw in that hour was 4 different towns and several cut and paste versions of them. When you started developing the game you told us that each town will be unique and different from all the rest so that each town will be fun to explore, and what you have given us so far is cut and paste towns with a few tweeks here and there.

Don't get me wrong the contence of the towns are great but how about changing the layout up abit so that there not all copy and pastes of one another. As it stands you may as well have done the same thing that lords of the rings did and have the same template duplicated and instanced as that is how entering the copy and paste towns feel.

You did such a fantastic job of Ultima Online and even the Offline single player Ultimas when it came to town design by making sure none of them were identical or simular so I'm failing to see why you have cut corners with SOTA and done this

 

I agree with you Matheryn.
Most towns are copied templates of existing towns, and are placeholder instances.
They are meant to change and become unique.
I think that there is a big story yet to be told, about empires and histories, but we are not yet worthy .

 

Welcome Matheryn!

As @Birko indicated, there is no need to worry about the cloned towns. It was announced before they appeared that they would only be placeholders. If you compare the towns of Kingsport and Solania, you won't see much similarity, but they are built using the same general template. Likewise, the cloned towns will end up being unique and not recognizable as having the same template as other towns unless you know beforehand. The same is true for the new adventure areas - they are all clones of existing areas and will change with time.

This is the advantage (or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it) of playing a game while it is still being developed. You see things that are only half-finished and experience buggy game mechanics. But at the same time you have an opportunity to help improve the game by submitting bug reports and giving feedback. The devs have already changed many things based on player feedback.

To those players who want the best possible experience when they start playing, I would recommend waiting until the devs have declared that the game is officially launched. Even then, they plan to continue to polish and improve different aspects of the game.

 

I did the exact same, and was disappointed.

But this eased my concerns

Do you think they will be completed before final wipe?

 

My understanding is that they will not be completed before the final wipe. Some players were worried about claiming lots in those towns when the permanent lot selection process takes place right after the final wipe, but the devs have said that even though the towns will change, lot placement will not change and that the re-design of the towns will take place with the claimed lots in place. The biome of the town will stay the same.

 

Just wait until R29-R31, when between 100 and 200+ new PRT's hit the Overworld Map and they're all (almost) identical.
Seven TIMES as many zones/lots have to go into the game in the next few release than currently exist today, to satisfy pledge demand.
You ain't seen nothin' yet, with respect to copy&paste.

 

it just seems like they are creating more unnessecary work for themselves, where infact it wouldnt take much work to have drawn up and created different towns to begin with and implemented them instead of copy and paste template towns then having to go back and remove or rework those towns later around existing player housing ect causing more disruption. Then you also have the possibility that they could also turn around and say they dont have time to change them and that the towns will stay the way they are. As for player own towns im not too worried about them as the owners also had the chance to design there own towns aka plot locations themselves with the devs so i dont think that they will be too simular even though simularities will be seen. It seems that for lack of a better analagy that they are being men about his and doing it all the hard way.

 

Overall, it may take more time to clone towns and then go back and redress them. But to get something in place by July, cloning is faster.

 

This is definitely an issue. With regards to player owned towns - well I don't think it is all that reasonable to expect the devs to make them all unique.

The NPC towns on the other hand - I did expect them to all be unique with a character all their own. But now I'm super concerned because to fill in a lot of the towns before final wipe, they are just cloning them. Then saying they will come back and make them unique later. I just don't see it working - many people will see through the thin veneer.

 

I'm fine if the overall layout is cloned, but they apply different biomes and decorations. I think that is the plan.

 

We are the designers of the Player Owned towns.. and as new content keeps getting put into the game the more and more possibilities there will be..
like many mentioned above, many npcs town now are just placeholders... and later one the devs plane to go back to make them more unique.

 

The hundreds of cloned scenes, especially PRTs, are going to very likely stay that way not just at post-wipe, but also post-launch. The only promise I think they're making is any story-based NPC town that you have to visit to complete the main campaign will be polished and unique by launch. Every other scene, be it PRTs, wilderness scenes, or otherwise non-story related, is secondary and they'll get to it time permitting for whenever they deem the game is launched. They may get to a few, but don't expect those to look any different save for a biome change, if you're lucky.

POTs are a somewhat different thing and they're giving owners more and more freedom to customize those over time.