My experience with the game

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Chemeck, Mar 6, 2020.

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  1. Chemeck

    Chemeck Avatar

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    I'm about to hit my 300 hours in SOTA so I decided to share my thoughts and experience till now. With my honest opinion what part of the game are the most demanding ones.

    I want to start by saying I love the game and I'm pretty sure that I will stay with you for a longer time. The way you learn the lore, find quests, puzzles, player housing, skills mechanic, all of that I really enjoy and I find other people enjoy as well. Since I started (around 3 months ago) I made few of my friends to give SotA a chance, made polish discord with some tutorials and first steps arcticles I wrote, with links to sota forum resources, created forum topics on biggest polish mmorpg sites to encourage people to play (reviews are deadly here), explaining that this game still lives and is a lot better than it was before. Noone stayed and all of them gave me same reason. Performance issues. As long as its not taken care off, the game is doomed, despite it being really good (in terms of content). There are other issues, mainly user experience, when you need to dig outside the game to learn about its core mechanics (and after 300 hours in game im still learning stuff i feel i should know for a long time, like deck or skill system details) and compared to other products, it's really demanding. But not many gonna experience that, since the first experience players have is game performance, and if its bad, nobody will care to continue. What is happening here I think. You can advertise, add new content and do as many events as you want, but if the game runs bad, the player base wont rise much. Just my honest opinion, plus opinions of few of those who didnt stay. Not even one of them told me anything about not liking the game, damn i was worried some wont like the quest system, but no, the only issue was performance. I know I focused on the bad sides, but still, SotA is a game I was looking for to fill the hole after i stopped playing UO and i wont find anything better for me, even if I made different impression just now :p I love it, I'm really excited with 2020 vision and wish you guys all the best :)
     
  2. OzzyOsbourne

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    When you say performance, do you mean network/bandwidth or graphical/memory? I myself had many issue with graphical and memory performance and loading times many releases ago but since then have got a new PC with m.2 HD straight into the mother board with new graphics card and havent had any issues since. For the network/bandwidth side, I find when I play with people on the other side of the planet, either I or they see a lot of lag with the content.
     
  3. Chemeck

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    I mean graphical/memory issues, had few dissconnects during my adventure but overall experience is good. But i cant say much about playing with others, since i play solo a lot :p
     
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  4. majoria70

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    Hi @Chemeck. Thanks for your sincere and honest thoughts on the game. I'm sorry you are experiencing poor performance. It is always interesting to hear first thoughts. I know people who play on Mac machines and linux experience worse performance. I play on an ssd with 32 gb of ram so I don't experience poor performance. Welcome to the game and I do hope performance will improve for you. Did you change your video settings to lower perhaps fastest setting would help? I am Majoria in game if I can help anytime.
     
  5. Chemeck

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    Hey @majoria70, i set everything this way so the game runs pretty well in most of locations, tho time it needs to load buildings and deco is pretty high. The low performance part was about my friends that tried the game with worse computers than mine, but still meeting the needed 8gb ram in game requirements. I think something went wrong with the optimization, when i check it uses 12gb of ram which seems a little high for mmorpg game.
     
  6. KnightFalz

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    Unlike many games these days, SotA provides an extensive manual detailing elements of the game that is kept fairly up to date. As such, one need not dig overly deep to be in the know, and can have that knowledge whenever the whim strikes. If I recall correctly, the introductory guidebook every character gets shortly after entering the game links to that guide.

    As for performance, that is highly variable. For me it was terrible until just recently. After moving the game to a SSD on the advice of a fellow poster the improvement was staggering. If you and your friends already had it installed on a SSD then obviously this isn't the issue. If not, it may be worth exploring. Your performance may improve vastly as mine did.
     
  7. Anpu

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    There’s also the minimum required video card:
    • Graphics: DirectX 11 Compatible NVIDIA 960 / AMD 560
    While not required, you really do need a SSD and install the game on that.

    The requirements for this game is rather steep.

    I believe these requirements are from Unity. There’s some things the team can do for performance, but it’s also up to Unity to keep improving their engine.
     
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  8. Barugon

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    I have pretty high-end stuff (Ryzen 7, RX 5700 XT, 32 GB RAM, SSD) and the game's performance in certain towns (Owl's Head, Ardoris, etc.) is abysmal.
     
    Last edited: Mar 9, 2020
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  9. Chemeck

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    I have SSD for system only, but i will try to clean up some space and install the game on SSD, since now i wonder how good the improvement can be :p

    @Anpu Sure, I understand. I just found somewhere Dev's post about not being able to gain many players, so i posted reason why players i talked into playing the game didnt stay. If you have Ryzen 7 and RX 5700 XT like Barugon and still experience performance issues in MMO game, It's just bad. And i doubt end-user will care if its fault of dev-team or unity team. Those are details normal player wont care about, we just want to install the game and play without issues.

    Edit:
    Btw. are there any MMO's on unity other than SotA and Albion Online? Albion works smooth but well, this game is designed in a 'lighter' way. There was also Battlestar Galactica Online - browser based 3d game with 2m users registered, but they closed servers few years ago. There are stuff like Rust or Guns of Icarus Online, but i think those are just multiplayer, not mmo, tho i didnt play it so i can be wrong. What I'm trying to say is It seems clear that mmo games developers clearly avoid unity engine, but maybe there is team who actually managed to optimalize mmo game on unity and you can reach to them or something? If you cant handle the problem maybe outsourcing it is the option?

    @KnightFalz Some of those are enough, but some not. What is the difference between locked and unlocked glyph? How to make combos, or the funny thing with mesmerization. Many skills mention that it mesmerizes your target, but trying to find WHAT IS mesmerization isnt that easy :p. Normally you would just hover your mouse over the text and read about it. Just quick examples, but there is more, and its all about user experience. Some may seems stupid for advanced players being here for few years, thats why i created the topic. To share fresh opinion.
     
    Last edited: Mar 7, 2020
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  10. Meneliki

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    Hi @Chemeck,

    I'm a "relatively" new player myself (didn't -technically- start playing recently, but I only started really playing recently so I'm still figuring things out and consider myself a newb). My own feelings on the game (which I expressed in my own review) mirror yours pretty much exactly - the game at it's core is (imo) excellent, but it does suffer from some technical issues. You're right when you say that no matter how good the game's content is, bad performance will push ppl away - I'm experiencing the same thing with one of my other favourite games, Stellaris. Great game but the late game is a slideshow and they're only now, after 4 years and a particular influencer mentioning it, trying to fix. New content/expansions are meaningless if the core game lags.

    For me in SotA the overworld as well as all the adventure scenes/dungeons run just fine. It's the larger towns (brittany, ardoris) as well as player owned towns that have performance problems. That said - when I reviewed the game I was playing on 8gb of RAM - when I went to 16gb the performance jump was palpable. (PoT/large cities still lag tho). If you're playing this game on less than 16GB of ram, you will most likely have issues (between windows and sota, i regularly experience 12-13gb of ram being used while I'm playing). Sota is very RAM hungry.

    An SSD will help with game/scene load times(which have improved dramatically in the last while), but it won't help with the moment to moment action. (the data is already loaded into memory at this point)

    In terms of video cards - I don't suspect this is the bottleneck. While the game does have gorgeous lighting, there's nothing about it that would seem to be really that taxing GPU-wise. Unless you're on a fairly old card, you should be fine. I'd place most of the blame on the game's engine/Unity it'self, as in big towns you'll still lag even if you're looking at the ground (i.e. rendering things we can't see). As for CPU, this is also doubtful as a problem source because again, dungeons run fine (enemy AI is most likely more CPU intensive than NPC shopkeep AI, but I could be wrong).

    Anyway, sorry for the long rambly post - was just kinda spitballin' there. I'm no expert, just my gut feelings after having played PC games for so long. Welcome to the game, glad you're enjoying it despite some of the technical hiccups. Feel free to look me up in-game if you ever need a hand :)
     
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  11. Chemeck

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    Hey @Meneliki and thanks :) Yep, I moved the game to SSD and I see a little improvement. Got 16gb ram and I consider it as the minimum, since my buddy with less had high risk of crashes everytime he entered locations, and those were loading 10-15minutes every time. Also, Stellaris is a great game, just like other paradox strategies :) Im a fan.
     
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  12. Numa

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    This is exactly right. Running SOTA on a midrange gaming laptop which is 5 years old. It has a 2nd or 3rd generation i7 (Haswell) and an Nvidia GTX 960m GPU so definitely far from cutting edge. What makes the difference is the 16GB of RAM.
     
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  13. Vladamir Begemot

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    Just don't want this to be totally missed.

    I'm playing a game with 18 quadrillion solar systems, a crafting system that kind of blew my mind in its weirdness for about five minutes, and tons of different new ways of doing things. And have only had to dig for info a couple times.

    On top of that, every time I go out to harvest, I think "Boy SotA vendor restocking would be fun if it only took a couple clicks, like this does.
     
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  14. Magnus Zarwaddim

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    No Man's Sky?
     
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  15. Magnus Zarwaddim

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    I'm running with an SSD and 64GB of RAM, also an Intel i7-7820X and RTX 2070. I don't have many performance issues EXCEPT I noticed several issues. Previously I ran an AMD chip and AMD Graphics Card (2 x R9 Fury's). With that old setup I had a lot of performance issues. That was over a year ago - so it's anecdotal, but I felt the game ran poorly with AMD (this is subjective). Additionally, I noticed in some PoT's with a lot of deco AND other players in it I still have issues. This may just be a latency issue as other players and I may not be synched because of geography or equipment (i.e., there will be performance issues if you and people in your scene have network delay).
     
  16. Elgarion

    Elgarion Dev Emeritus Dev Emeritus

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    Hi there Chemeck and welcome! Glad to see you can post now :)
     
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  17. Chemeck

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    Hey @Elgarion, yeah, we did it! :p Thanks for your help.
     
  18. eli

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    So the way that RAM often works in modern programs, is as long as there is available RAM, old/unused items in memory are not removed: they are only marked as cached. That is because there is a chance that item will need to be loaded again, and because freeing the memory actually takes time. If at any time any program needs more memory, some part of the cached memory is used.

    As such, it is not a problem for a program to use every available MB of memory, and in fact doing so will make the program run faster (less IO wait on disks).

    If you're curious how much RAM sota is using for the purpose of memory leaks or excess footprint, subtract the "cached" value from the "used" value in task manager.

    In general though, sota lazy loads scenes, meaning it delays loading parts until they need to be drawn on the screen. This is great because it enables low scene load-times and the huge plethora of in game objects we have, but the downside is that when you're doing game stuff, your computer is sometimes busy doing load stuff. To run well I really recommend a solid state drive, lots of RAM, fast RAM, and lots of VRAM. 8GB minimum probably will not cut it anymore in a lot of scenes, especially POT.
     
  19. CarlNZ

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    The problem with poor performance in the large towns is due to placeables in player housing. Sota knew it was going to have thousands of deco items in a scene , so should have gone with a lower poly graphics style , but due to the reliance on unity store assets ran on higher poly items. It's a difficult situation to remedy with the budget they have.
     
  20. SmokerKGB

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    This is "Why" your friends had a bad experience.... Minimum requirements is just that: Minimum...

    I find that "All" games take a lot of RAM, so when I decided on 32gb for my "New" system (which I built some 10yrs ago), it was like playing on a totally different machine... I also installed dual SSDs (in RAID O) and now my Widows performance indicators are as high as they go... I also installed a nVidia GTX 760 4gb video card (which actually ran the game pretty well), I recently upgraded to a nVidia GTX 1070 8gb (used card off eBay) I found for $200 (retail $599 you can still buy them new)...

    From what I've read, Windows OS uses a "page file" to swap out programs from memory to disk when needed, under multi tasking where you have many programs running at once, this "swap" takes a lot of CPU time and definitely lags out game play: using SSD and 32gb RAM it's recommended you disable the page file under window performance settings on the SSD drive, so that your SSD has a long happy life (seems like the more "writes" to disk, the shorter its lifespan)...

    My system:
    Win 7 Pro x64 2x 240gb SSD (RAID O)
    i7 4790K CPU @ 4.0 GHz
    z97 AsRock MoBo (Fatal1ty Killer)
    32gb RAM DDR 3 1600 (PC3-12800)
    150 mbps internet (Comcast)
    Hardwire LAN connection
    750W PSU
     
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