Nearly 18 month on, my view of the game

So i have been playing this game for nearly 18 months and I thought i would write up my thoughts on the game.

This is my opinions and will not represent everyone, or maybe even anyone, else. This will be long post, going though all the aspects of the game and my take on them. When i drafted this, it is surprising to see the sheer amount of systems in this game for a new MMO. Abeit many need more depth added but that can happen over time.

I have done this for me, but thought I would post it as other may be interested, but obviously happy to hear other peoples view and opinions.

First a little about me, as this may help people know if my opinions would even be close to theirs.

About me

So I have played games since the mid 80's. I am not an Ultima fan, well to be more precise, I have never played an Ultima game so I dont know if I like Ultima. I am however a big fan of sandbox MMOs and player driven economies, this is what made me give Shroud a go.

My MMO history before Shroud is as below

SWG (pre jump to light speed) - 6 months
Eve Online - 13 years
World of warcraft* - 3 months (while still playing Eve too)
Runes of Magic* - 6 months (while still playing Eve too)
The Repopulation (kick started) - 3 months
Archage - 1 year
* Only played these as my room mate was playing.

So as you can see Eve is by far the biggest influence, so don't be surprised when a lot of this post compares things to Eve.

I'm a gamer rather than a roleplayer. Graphics in games mean very little to me, interface design matters, but not the level of graphics.

Even though i spent most of MMO game time playing a non-consensual PvP game (Eve Online) I am not a PvPer. I don't actively dislike PvP, I just don't generally spend much time in game PvPing.

How I feel about the current state of the game overall

Obviously i enjoy this game, I would not have spend 18 months playing it if i didn't. I have even taken small breaks in that 18 months to prove I was logging in because I wanted to, not because it had become routine/habit.

Is it the best game I have ever played? No.
Is it the best MMO I have ever played? Also No.

Given the above, why am I playing it? Well I enjoy what im doing in game, but what I have seen over the last 18 months is that I very much agree with the direction of travel of the game. The current state is good, and I would say few MMOs are above mediocre at release. To me comparing a new MMO to a game with 10+ years of continuous development is not a fair comparison. I played Eve 6 month after release, I can say there is more to do in this game than there was in Eve back then. So my hope is that if it continues along the direction I have seen over the last 18 months then this will become (at least for me) a very good game.

 

Systems and my view of them

So now i'm going to go through the different system and give my view on them. Some of the these systems I have very little experience of, and will tell you so.
To me this that is not a problem in a sandbox. If I do like every system and aspect of the game then this probably means the sandbox is too shallow.
My opinion is that as long there is a significant (what significant is is up to Port) amount of the community that enjoy and use a system/mechanic then it has it's place in the game. The (virtual) world is a poorer place if everyone is the same type of person, in a sandbox there should be room for different types of people and play styles. In the 13 years i played Eve there is still whole areas of the game I never experienced.

Progression System

The classless system I love, I love that fact I can do anything on the same character if I invest XP in it. Note I said anything not everything; I explain that more in the deck system area. On the hard cap vs soft cap debate that happen often on this forum, I am firmly stand in the soft cap base, maybe this is my Eve background that also does not restrict player progression in any/all directions.
The pooled XP mechanic is good comprimise of traditional XP level progression and usage progression.

Adding attenuation was a great global solution to not limiting the scenes based on soft caps. It gives much more freedom to the scene designers, allowing them to make interesting lower level content without it being unbalanced for progression for higher level characters.

I like that progress is diminishing returns and not exponential power progression. In WoW a scene full of level 40 characters would be slaughtered by 1 max level character (at least when I played) regardless of what the lower level characters do. This does not mean I'm pro level playing field, player skill should matter (and I think does in this game) but character progression should give you an edge (not an I win button) too. To me, if you want all player skill, and character skill to not matter then don't play an MMO. MOBAs (to me an MMO on fast forward) and survival games generally do a much better job in this area, go play one of them.

Death Decay

Not bothered if they keep this or remove it, in my experience this is working as intended. I have never lost more than it would take 30 minutes to recover (probably less since Upper Tears was introduced). The decay pool only building while in adventure scenes was a very good change, makes it more casual friendly. I think many people don't fully understand this system, the amount of newer players that give up on something after they have died 2 or 3 times in a row. I always tell them that is exactly when to continue and even if you can't do it learn all you can about how to do it, because dying after those inital deaths is insignificant.

Deck System

So the deck system is what I love most about Shroud. To me it is the deck system that allows the open progress and classless system. Without the limitation of the deck system the classless system could not be a reality. For me, the deck system behaves exactly as ship fitting does in Eve. Even though i can learn to use every skill and weapon, I can not in a given fight bring all that XP to bare. Try making and using a deck with every skill you can use in it, that will be your most useless deck.

I loved theory crafting in Eve and love building decks in Shroud equally. Group content you can't just steam roll leads to specific decks and tactics for players. For control points my guild did exactly this, they would have players with set roles, and therefore decks, that made the group greater than the sum of its parts.

Crafting

I generally am a crafter in most MMOs. I like the shroud crafting system. It has simple crafting for non gear. Basically for non gear you just gather/buy the materials and craft it at the table. The depth in the gear crafting is huge. I have not seen the this level of depth in gear crafting since SWG. The choices a crafter make for gear really matter.

There are few thing that I think should be improved.

Refining materials needs to be less time consuming. I understand that generally to have worth things need to use player time. But refining is basically watching a bar go up. This is the ONLY reason I have an alt, so my alt can refine things while i do something more fun.

I don't like the way water has become a ingredient in many new recipes, water is so damn heavy, can we not assume the tables have a water source, you can still charge for the water but i don't have walk around with it.

I would also say that crafting progression is brutally slow compared to adventuring progression. Now i'm at a position that this is no longer a huge issue for me, but im not the kind of person that thinks because it was hard for me it should be hard for everyone after me. I would like to see crafting XP easier to come by, though not to the level of adventuring XP (as there is no decay). Maybe the double XP amount be the normal amount for crafting.
Lastly, as is known by Port, the recipe book need a serious usability overhaul.

 

Economy

Generally the economy is good, could be improved by removing things from NPC vendors, but that probably has to wait. Without enough player base you need the NPC to augment the player economy. Even Eve, that is generally considered a great player economy, in the early years had much more NPC buy and sell orders as the player base could not fill the all the supply and demand.

Gold i think needs to be devalued or maybe add 2 decimnal places to the gold value. My reasoning for this is that for fine tuning the NPC buy and sell orders is hard for low level items. While player vendors can sell things in batches to have a cost not be whole number, NPCs can't. This leads to it being hard to balance for low value items. If an item is only worth 4 gold you can only fine tune the amount by 25% increments....

Longer term I think the economy need more consumption. Gear durability is probably not the answer for this, good gear is too hard to make to be short lived. I think some new mechanic needs to introduced to consume items out of the economy and drive demand. Look at what brewing has done for the wood market. I think there needs to some type of mechanic that is a global solution to this (as attenuation was for XP) where you can consume any item in return for something that is not gold. Maybe somethign like a guild can collect "trash", hand it in weekly and depending on the value of that "trash" handed in the guild get a guild wide buff or something.

Questing

I'm not a quester, but I would consider this a weak area in Shroud. The weakness is in mechanism not the quest themselves. I think everyone agrees the journal (same as the recipe book) needs a serious usability overhaul.

Music

I don't really have a view on this as such. I will probably never make an ABC file. But I have friends that love this aspect of the game, so that is good with me.

Deco

As with music, deco is no really something I have got into. My house looks liek a storage shed. I would be more likely to do more (non functional) deco if it was easier to do. Snap and align and stuff would be great, but sounds like ALOT of work. Even just having a key for each axis, that when you held down that key in deco mode it would only move the item in that axis, would to my mind, be a HUGE improvement.

Housing

Housing is useful. I especially like the housing because I hate storage limits, i'm a hoarder. With housing although there are storage limits they are very large (especially for basements) that effectively there are no storage limits.

Agriculture

Agriculture is good, it is comparable to agriculture in Archeage. The AOE aspect of agriculture was a very good addition.

Roleplaying

As I said in the about me, im not a roleplayer, i'm a gamer. So my views on the roleplaying is limited to say the least. What I would say is that it does feel like roleplayers are limited by gamers (like me). Roleplayers tend to self limit themselves whereas gamers will "game" a system. This means limits are put on to limit the gamers that can have an adverse affect on the roleplaying aspect of the game. More global solutions, like the attenuation, could help free these limits for the roleplayers.

 

Real Money Transactions

This aspect of the game does not bother me. Nothing you NEED in this game is cash shop only. In fact allows me to "buy" items with spare gold that I would otherwise have to spend real money on.

Player owned towns

I think player owned towns is a great system in a sandbox. I have no idea why someone would want to live in a NPC town. I would rather live in a town that is actively maintained by a player, putting far more hours into it than the devs can. An NPC is town is built and forgotten about until a refresh pass is made.

PvP

As I said in the about me, i'm not a PvPer but also not adverse to PvP. I think PvP should be in a MMO, especially a sandbox MMO. When all is said and done it is cheap content, as PvP is player generated content.

From a completely personal point of view I prefer group PvP and I like PvP to have a reason/goal/incentive, not just for PvP sake. My experience of PvP in Shroud is limited to say the least, so I will just say what I expect from PvP, I dont really know if this game achieves them or not.

Open world PvP should be balanced in a way that in the game of cat of mouse the mouse has fun as well as the cat.

I have no problem with the ransom system - PvP loss in Eve was much more harsh.

I know many people say arena's kill open world PvP, but I have to say the Arena system in Archeage I thought worked really well. You could queue up at any time and be teleported when there was someone to fight. It had different mode, 1 vs 1, 3 vs 3 and 5 vs 5 then the same again but balanced so it would normalise gear and skills. There was a cool feature that the arena was actually in the game world so you could go and sit in the seat (blocked from the actual arena) and watch the matches.

Proposed player generate content

This is a great idea, Dev free content, at least once the tools are built. There are players that will dedicate huge amounts of time to this and i'm sure make some brilliant content. Look at mods for other games. My only concern with this is it need controls, there needs to a way to stop people creating the best place to farm X Y Z. Be that loot or anything else. Ideally this would be a global thing like attenuation is for XP but for anything else that can be "farmed" from player generated content. With the global controls in place you don't have to put too many limits on what the player can create.

 

NPC daily routines

Im not a roleplayer, so for me this is just inconvience. But on the flip side it is not game breaker for me either.

Control Points

I like control points they are challenging group content. My only bugbear with them is corpses disappearing after the last wave, making looting very hard. it would be better if it worked more like the new Upper Tears from the looting point of view.

Guilds

As with all MMOs, player groups are the cornerstone of the game. Guilds I think are lacking currently, at the moment are really just a chat channel, and some housing permissions. I would like to see more goals set at a guild level. Giving people a shared goal is generally a good thing. The kind of thing I suggested in the economy consumption, but im sure there are many other ideas.

Puzzles

I really like the puzzle in the scenes. Some are hard, which i don't mind, as the ones i have done generally make logical sense and there are clues if you spend the time looking for them.

Dev communication

Generally the communication is good. The only thing I would like to see is some earlier communication about changes and balance with a feedback thread before the solution is implemented. The comunication is A is broken because of X Y Z so we changing it work like B. What I would like to see if what is the design goals you are trying to ACHIEVE for A. So before you design and implement B, write a post like below :

Proposed change to A

Why change A
<List of problems with A you are trying address>

Design Goals for new A
<List of what you are trying to achieve with A>

Constraits for new A
<List of high level constraits for the solution and what it can't be>

Our inital thoughts for the solution
<What you are currently thinking of how to fix A>

Then let us comment on this and give suggestions and feedback. Generally player understand many of the mechanics better than the Devs. We have spent many more hours using them. currently you get feedback, but not directed feedback. If you give us your design goals then we can suggest things that heading the direction you want the game to go.

 

Game Modes

Game modes do seperate the community but I think are neccessary for the game to not be sharded (seperate server). The benefits of us all playing in the same world far out weigh this for me. Like Eve it means we all have a share history. Everything happening it relevant to some degree to every player.
The huge implication to the game modes is that it removes scarity from the game. I can just spawn my own instance. if you have read the Long Earth books they are an interesting read about how society could change if scarity was removed. This is the situation we are in in this game world, the only limiting factor is player time. But as i said I consider this overall a benefit.

Story

As I have said, i'm not really into questing. So the only thing I would say is I think adding the POT row deed for finishing the episode 1 storyline was a great move.

New user experience

I don't think the game is great at this, even after all the new experience passes. But on the flip side I think every sandbox with enough depth suffers from this. In a game where you can do what you want, how to guide new players?
With the depth of gear crafting and the deck system it is never going to be easy.
Personally I always advise new player to check youtube for learn how the progression system works with the XP pool and understand the basic mechanics of the deck system. Once they have a basic understanding of that I advise them of the huge benefit that buffs give in the game.

Buffs

I'm a fan of choices. So I like the fact there is many and varied buffs, limited with a global control of you can only have so many of each type.
The only thing I would change in the buff arena is a pass of food, not that food buffs are bad (in fact the opposite) just that I would make all food buffs useful. To do this I would make "lesser" food not be lower strength of buffs (and therefore have next to no demand) but instead have lesser durations.

Virtue system

Not really something I get involved with, so dont have anything to say.

Gathering

Gathering works well, as said in the game modes, there is no scarity so this is just a function of player time. This system is ok.

Stealing

No experience at all, so no comment.

Fast Travel

I'm not a fan of your friend list being used for teleport reasons. I think regional markets would be good, but that boat has sailed at this point. So I would not restrict fast travel based no regional markets.

Books

Never done it, but seems like a very good feature for roleplayers and other player generated content.

Events - both player run and Port run

This is also an area of the game I don't get too involved with. However many of my friends in game love this side of game. So all good and as said in the game modes because all play in the same world this is all shared history and lore.

Dress Up

The pattern system is a good way to allow indivuality without breaking the crafting economy. I personally again don't use this feature much, probably my Eve background where your character is just a portrait. Many friends love this system and the dying system. Obviously this still needs expanding but that is true for many of the systems.

 

Thank you for your well written and deeply thought out posts! I agree with quite a LOT of it. I am a quest lover myself, but I also love that I can personally set a goal for myself and work to achieve that goal in my own way and my own time without pressure from the game or others. Deco, gardening and crafting are my things. I wish fishing were better, but i have high hopes for it in the future! I played UO for a very long time and it will remain my very favorite game but SOTA is my new addiction. I have to WORK to limit my game time and find myself thinking about it when I should be thinking about other things LOL! I look VERY much forward to seeing where this game goes.

 

I think I love you.

 

Nice work!

 

Thats the only incorrect tthing you said
Well written. and yes to re-iterate a couple of your points - its the quest system that blows (and its miriad bugs) not the quests themselves and the PvP has no real purpose yet, hopefully after the zoned pvp theyll work on worldwide things.

Personally Id start with the good old simple Order/Chaos type system uo had where you could sign up to side a or b, (which was only way to get order or chaos shield at the time) and then your flagged as a war-enemy (orange nameplate)
wherever you are on the world.

From there Id expand it into some sort of 3-4 way faction like system where there are 4 main bases and come up with a system that achieves what uo`s faction system did which was to have a purpose for characters of all types to be in it,
for those not familiar thieves were needed to steal the sigils to be captured aswell as pvpers to fight and defend them but also tamers to have the siege engines that were dragons and even crafters too as their were faction craftable items.

But thats all for the future... as you say this game has more content than most at launch and its an issue always where people are comparing new games to ones that have been out many years, its very hard for that reason for a new mmo
to come out without getting much negative criticism as everyone always wants everything. These things take time and yes we all wish it had x,y and z in already but hopefully with time it will come and maybe some new and unique stuff too.

 

Good read,and very fair outlook.

Thank you.

 

Agree with almost everything here. I will be sharing this with people in the future, when they wonder about the game.

 

Excellent posting. Glade to see the view point from a player who actually spent time playing the game and trying to understand the game mechanics.

 

Awesome post and one of the best write-ups I've seen. Well done!

 

Thank you for your well thought out post. It makes a pretty good overview.

 

So I watched the live stream last night (R55 live stream part 2). This had more details (at a high level) on the planned features for episode 2.
Watching that just further reinforced my view that I agree with the direction of travel of the development of this game.

Spung

 

Spungwa thanks for an extremely intelligent, well written, thorough, and fair review. You are a well behaved dirty bastard as an Eve vet. I too spent many years in EVE. SOTA is like a mix of SWG, EQ, EVE, some of the best games ever created. Each had many problems early on.

Lets hope SOTA pushes forward and continues its path of improvement. In a few years we will have a really amazing game.

 

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head in one key fashion, the format that Portalarium should take for a true Reviewer's Guide handed to the media.

Maybe I am old-school in how I think a true review should take place, but taking the time to explain it by headers and categories does not always seem to be the way reviewers present their comments.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your thoughts about Shroud in a well detailed synopsis.

/toast