What Games Are Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games

I've played games for decades (pong rules!) and never gave much thought to how I learn the common "language" for them. I found this very insightful.

 

Great video! Thanks for sharing. SotA has evolved into a game with so many features that all of these look relatively simple. Here's hoping there's more hand holding to come so new players can check out all of the different play styles and even careers in-game.

 

Very interesting.
Shows, how important it is to keep it simple.
"What is really important to know now."

 

Not really "hand holding" but there are a good number of long term players who help out in game and on Discord. https://discord.gg/az5JQd3
https://sotahelp.knack.com/sotahelp/ can also be a good resource.
If you find articles and videos on the web, make sure you check the dates they were posted, as there are changes ongoing in the game to make it better.
This game is long term and quite complex. Some gamers find it too involved, sadly.

 

Also remember the 4pm (New Britiannia Time) Livestream on Twitch with in game developers. https://www.twitch.tv/shroudoftheavatar

 

Sprint = Left Shift. Please.

 

I find myself wanting to hit the 5 key in other games to go fast, I'm so used to hitting dash in Shroud.
I also defined the E key in lotro, since the UI is already otherwise quite related, and that was a Shroud-original thing because of performance problems with UI events. (processing only one event per frame, and discarding any info on time or modifier keys, which probably either goes down to base unity code or unity example starter code)

 

Wherever it is, I just want to hold or toggle it, not have to double tap.

 

I don't even want to right-click, really. The E key is superior because it's too easy for the cursor to move due to the force of pressing that mouse button/trackpad. Something I really hate is having to click on small targets (buttons, [X] close boxes, menu items) when they are so small that clicking the mouse button moves the cursor away from them. And more so having to drag the mouse from halfway across the screen and then slow down to nudge it into the tiny hitbox.

But double clicks are a special problem because the "one event per frame" event handling and discarding event times means that low frame rate = impossible to double click. (it's at about 10fps that it becomes impossible)

 

This is actually related to one of the topics I don't want to spend too much time writing.

Most people would recognize this:

It's actually a great example of the "180 degree rule" in cinematography. These were just thumbnails that happened to be side-by-side on a photo site. Yet, it immediately clicked with someone, who "spoke that language", and the human mind immediately fills in the blank with some kind of narrative.

It didn't take a lot of effort. We didn't have to solve quantum gravity or reinvent all the internets. It only had to speak the language. My point is that there's a lot of this "game language" that, yes, you'd have to be familiar with, but SOTA isn't using anyway.

There's basic presentation from ~20 years ago that'd be easy to do.



Long ago, I wrote a camera-scripting Minecraft mod. You'd go into free-fly mode, move to a point and point in a direction, then record. Go to the next point/direction, record. Then, you could replay that sequence using linear, cosine and bezier interpolation. This was for making minecraft videos, shockingly.

They already have /slew. They have Unity which would make this even easier. Have a list property of Vector3s on whatever entity is spawning a question or dialog, and interpolate. Unlock /slew globally, and crowdsorce generating these points, which could bed slapped into a forum thread. For bonus points, they could have miniatures or mockups off the normal scene that the camera could look at.

A big issue is that, Shroud is missing a significant amount of well-established language, trying to invent their own, and being way off the mark... and on top of that, they're choosing to defend the wrong hills.

Yes, some of these changes will make Shroud more like other games. It's like people complaining that all modern cars look alike. That's not because car designers stopped being creative. It's because we figured out the optimal car design, between safety, efficiency and production. If SOTA wants to go off the beaten path, prepare to be a niche game enjoyed by a relative few, that's fine. But people seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have the business model of an AAA MMO, but not create a game that'd attract an AAA MMO crowd.

Take for example the dialog box. I still occasionally play a MUD. I become immersed in it, despite it being 100% text. Yet, the dialog box with NPCs doesn't. Why not? Because there's all this colorful 3D stuff flying around the screen while I'm trying to read and understand what's being said. It's distracting. Shroud of the Avatar seems to be the game of a thousand-and-one uncanny valleys. Things that fall into awkward places that don't quite work, and would do so much better, if it committed to being one way, or the other. Either make the hard decision, and ditch the NPC typing-dialog system, or redo it completely in a way that it's not competing with the rest of the interface (or is winning against).

There's so many low-effort things they could do to drastically improve the enjoyment of the game.

 

Well there you go, I did it anyway.

 

That is a great example. I’ve seen it in many other games, but I don’t think the development team has the imagination, expertise or time to be able to incorporate those into the game. This is something that could have been done at the onset when they had the manpower and time.