The game feels incomplete.

*checks notes*

there were features on the list before dancing animals and rideable cats?

 

Yeah, a cash shop to sell those things.

 

i wonder if the issue here is lack of ideas for each of the areas? maybe this is where the community could come in. we could pick an empty scene and start a post about it. come up with thoughts, stories, quests, map additions on what the area could be. maybe with a well thought out headstart they could go into a "just build-it" mode on the scene instead of having to come up with all the ideas and then build it.

 

@oplek this is a good thought.

I wonder if you would be willing to start compiling an itemized list in your OP, as sort of a "to-do" list of game systems that could/should be more tightly integrated with the world? Could give us something of a list of things to work on.

 

I don't think that's what DarkStarr had in mind when he talked about it as a sausage making process. Sure, when something is unfinished not everything is going to work like when its finished, some components of the game first of all might not be there and you might have to make changes and adjustments, but there's an overall guiding vision.

If you change your vision half way through a finished products, you're going to either have to tear a lot down and rebuild it or you're going to end up with something that doesn't quite work. Trust me I've seen contractors do bad work on houses

At this point, everyone still in the game can just hope for the best and constant and continual improvement. But I think it was necessary to add my 2 cents because I really believe people ought to recognize this is a large part of the issue with not everything in the game seeming to work together.

 

~Sausages are very misunderstood~

 

@Time Lord This data comes from where ?

 

What's hard to understand about tasty?

 

The most important data there is... My own play time (But if you're still not convinced, check out the percentage of things sold by our game in how much applies to hunting vs how much of it is purely for deco).

The difference between Euro German-Itallian, Texas-American and South-Central & North Thailand Sausages is trumendously complex enough to deserves it's own G-20 Summit ~TL~

Thai sausage = bland...
until their new additive,

Thailand's Newest Sausage

 

I wanted to respond before the thread is locked due to sausage violations.

I'm afraid I don't have the energy for that. It'd also probably be "wrong" anyway. It's one thing to notice something incomplete, but how it's completed is as much a part of the creative work as anything else. So all the proposed solutions could do is contextualize why it feels incomplete.

It's also exponential, which is particularly exhausting. Listing out the systems that need integration isn't... but that's about as useful as my vaguely gesturing at everything. It's like a neural net... the important parts are between the points and all the other points. Then on top of that, the sense of incompleteness can come from several layers - "If I can do X, shouldn't I be able to do Y?", "There's a noticeable gap between X and Y", "What else can I do with X?"

We can start with one conceptual "point" - the virtues system.

It's probably one of the first incomplete and abandoned things in the game... but it has a lot of potential to be interesting. If an NPC asks you your name, and you say something other than your name, your Truth virtue takes a hit. Yet, running around Ardoris, smashing crates and barrels that aren't yours, has no effect (to my knowledge)? Shouldn't my "love" virtue be tanking? Or is it that I "love" smashing crates?

The virtue system is supposed to pay attention to what you're doing, and respond, but it only pays attention to a small handful of very specific actions. It feels very incomplete.

The next conceptual point - player dungeons.

Other than adding some XP and money and random stuff to the player, they're completely disconnected from the rest of the game. I create a dungeon underneath my plot of land, containing trolls, skeletons, ghosts, etc. I've literally created a den of evil. How are my virtues still virtuous?

The next conceptual point - the world/story.

...For lack of a better way of putting it. There's a theme in the main storyline about how the NPCs of the game world lament the invasion of the "Outlanders" (us, the players). Yet, some of those players are creating dens of evil right in their home towns.

• Why are the people of Soltown not gathering pitchforks and torches, knocking at your door, informing you that you've violated residential building codes?
• Why aren't you kicked out of town?
• Should the virtue system expand into a reputation system versus different factions?
• Maybe what's "good" and "virtuous" versus one faction is anti-virtuous versus another?

The next conceptual point - the Cabalists and Sieges.

These things are yet another aspect of the game that feels like it "has potential", but seem to be isolated and unrelated to anything else. In addition to the list above, once we add this point,

• If I'm kicked out of town, does that mean I'm on the side of the Cabalists?
• Is my den of evil event related to the Cabalists?
• Does my running past the sieges important to my virtues? Shouldn't I be helping?
• Does my den of evil help or hinder the Cabalists? Does the town reacting to my incursion affect their ability to resist sieges?
• Can I join on the Cabalist side, and fight with the Cabalists?
• Does that mean there'll be two joinable NPC factions - Chaos vs Virtues?
• Will the player dungeons be usable outside of towns, creating bases for assault?
• Can I create a virtuous dungeon, such as a training ground for city guards?
• Can I combine my dungeon with another player dungeon to increase the effects, or cancel it out?
• What does my virtue status have to do with sieges?
• Can towns/cities actually be conquered or taken back?
• Will the NPC's opinions of the Outlanders change as events unfold?

.. and that's just a few thoughts that arise off the top of my head. Every conceptual point (we've added 4) creates this exponential growth of gaps. It's also far more interesting than player dungeons just existing on their own as a disconnected minigame, for example. But the four points all feel incomplete to me. Conceptually, the addition of player dungeons to the game, to me, is total nonsense. They make absolutely no sense... because of those gaps.

If the goal is to complete the game, it'd actually be far easier to start removing things from the game, or cancel future plans. That's often not going to make business sense - it won't fly if player dungeons are axed after people sunk a lot of resources and time into them. But people aren't unreasonable either. There's no expectation of infinitely filling gaps between gaps, and gaps between gaps between gaps.

The best I can really offer is a conceptual model for understanding why people keep saying "the game has potential", and not "it's a complete, finished game", and let the authors work with that.

 

Umm... Well... It's what we imagine, what we see, what we do and how we do it, collectively or not which presents the conundrum of the situation inwhich we find ourselves entangled, as all see a warped world full of faults, missing pieces, imperfections, inconsistencies and more importantly, we have yet to see the whole of our world, disregarding what's been programmed or not. When we take away the "Tech Talk" and robotics of the programming or operating system, when our keyboards & mice are no longer programmed into our memories or touched by our fingers, only then can we better see what is here instead of what is not. Whenever we say there is not a this or a that then we must be comparing what is to some other place which should not be here or has yet to be discovered, "here".

At this point in time the Time Lord is nothing more or less than a doormat to wipe feet on before discussing "the clean room" where robotics and operating systems are the language of the times where raw data and data alone navigates to be understood only to the robots who think they're disconnected due to expected logic in wholeness.

Heritic I may be, yet there's reasons in our world I see for the world to be in the shape it's in as the dirt on the doormat depicts quite well I think, but would be totally disregared within "the clean room":



Our world is not a complete globe, yet this depiction is where robots part ways with our world's depicted reality, as when I say the globe is incomplete, I mean there's a chunk of it gone which was smashed away just as our Moon is, yet a complete chunk went spinning off into deep space without the rest of it we stand on (ingame) today. Today outlanders don't realize they are missing parts of normally should be perceived "back on Earth" and for the NPC, before their world was broken. Gravity effecting time and odd gravity never before encountered, both adversely effecting what could normally have been expected, we judge it by the programmer when we're in "the clean room", instead of what will be "likely never changing". It's normal to feel like one is loosing a friend when leaving normal behind, each piece missing being marked in a grave or a forum's trash can of "the clean room".

How much robot are each of us, that becomes the same deep question our Lord British finds himself in, unable to accomplish what he desires without program & robotics. Never finding a banana on the clean room floor some can loose the ability to even see a banana even if it were on the floor just as the Aztecs didn't see the ships of conquistadors until they concentrated enough to see the ships as ships and just as a fish doesn't know it lives in water till it encounters the open air. Our preceptions here in our game are as such, where the clean room of data is now the normal and the situation of our world is judged only from there, with the rest being heritic.

Want to see the other side of the world?
...then there's only one place you can see it and know what and why what lay north, at "Midnight".

Sausage can get very messy!

~Time Lord~The Heritic~

 

This place is a real sausage party.

 

~TL~

 

A great discussion above.

I agree that Shroud's untapped potential rests with 'the virtues'. The virtues are the top 'lore' feature that could most differentiate Shroud from other MMOs. Indeed, the virtues already serve as a nice basis for quest lines in game. Yet, beyond those quests, I've felt that the virtues are not implemented as a connected-enough, visible-enough, prominent-enough game system as may be needed to cause the gamer to truly ... care ... about them as a central lore feature of the game. I observed the virtues in play during quests, but otherwise they felt out-of-sight out-of-mind during most of my Shroud experience. Beyond causing me to get responses 'right' during quests, the game did not compel me to care about how those choices would affect my experience in Novia beyond. With quests complete, the purpose of the virtues feels complete.

In that light, doing something to strengthen implementation of the virtues as a more-visible, more-meaningful, more impactful game system might be what this game needs to help it stand out from the pack more. For example: Imagine if the virtues were implemented as a clearer progression system, with each gamer more obviously associated with their stature in the virtues / anti-virtues, resulting in different experience opportunities in the game as a result of that status. Or imagine if the virtues were used as the basis of a clearer PVP-factional system, with it being a big deal rise to 'Avatar' or fall to 'Shadowlord' to join a faction. I'm sure we could brainstorm ideas to expand use of the virtues as central lore element to drive game systems.

Whatever the approach, I agree that the virtues offer the best central feature from which to tie together aspects of the game to create that sense of 'completion' described in the opening post. I'd be more excited to see the team work on this than add new Episode 2 story or lands at this point. In my opinion, additional virtue story doesn't go far if it will only be a series of one-off story choices that don't have an impact on the character or their experience otherwise. We saw in Star Wars that when the lore began to die, the reason to care about the Jedi began to die. Similarly here, do we have enough lore-to-game-system-connected reasons to care about being an ... Avatar? If not, it would be great to see focus on that first over extended story content.

Cheers!

 

Trying to keep up with game industry standards?
Exactly what does "good enough" mean?
The Runaway Effect?
Feature Creep?
Scope Creep?
Etcetera?

Here is our comparable fully player funded peer, still discussing how it still seems in Alpha state of game building...



One of SC's other peers, "Elite Dangerous" just recently through itself onto the death nail of "first person shooter gaming" just as Star Citizen did... but were not both of these games supose to be spaceship games? That to me does reflect back here to our SOTA when we speak of things like "wasn't SOTA supose to be a Virtues Game?"... personally I think that question is a sort of "Scope Creep" question, wanting to be everything to everyone for whatever stretch goal funding or hype funding that could be "mined" there, as crowd funding seems to have a very large element of "mining for ideas" in the form of wish list think tank, which is sort of what "Feature Creep" is all about. Elite Dangerous's player numbers dropped and became far more complicated to accommodate such a simple task as growing space legs, which now dominates that game's progress in it's attempts to change into "Planet Side"... why? no one really knows but it is suspect that it's fallen into the same aim as the rest, where 10% of the game's players drive 100% of it's pathway forward. That's not a bad or good thing, that's just something that has happened in most game development where player input is considered... game development has always had this effect grow the longer any gaming title is playable and subject to player critics & creative input.

There's allot to reflect on when considering "a this or a that or a this way or that way", because the game development beast must always be better understood through the study of reflecting peers, stepping back from the micro of it in order to better see and understand more of the over all single huge thing being worked on through "continual development", which all crowd funded games are subject to.

Many things are just bygone coconuts,

It's allot to think about ~Time Lord~

 

Full time dev here, currently developer in finlands biggest web service, as java backend dev 10+ years and with strong C# skills. I hereby volunteer for bug fixing gang, salary is very negotiable and can be payd fully in games currency.
Too much time in hands for netflix and etc, could do something usefull instead.

 

When you're playing offline this becomes even more grating. There is so much empty space to accommodate for player owned lots.
Some cities like Janaaford don't mean much it just feels like a giant filler to look for a wounded faun.

Then you have the 3 introductory scenes that all 3 still act as an introductory scene, while there should only be one any more. References to closed passes while you can just run through them (I don't remember if it was from Jaanaford to Kiln or Kiln to Etceter. While you can just take a boat from Aerie to Exeter. But I should just make bug reports out of this.

 

There is still a lot of game even with some features not where they need to be.

My view is is this: The main story for ep1 is pretty good if you are starting out on your own or with new friends. However I am seeing that the time frame to complete the story is much smaller because people level so fast with higher levels so it seems so short compared to times of old. There are lots of great small side line quests and the likes and some do hit your virtues. I do think as pointed out there is a lot of unused space to add a lot more quests and other things to pull people into the world more.

Player skill system is very well done. Although at higher levels it slows down alot but over time the progression is still pretty good. I do think sometime down the road here we need more new skills for older player base. we were teased with ideas and only one ever came to be.

Player dungeons I think are far from complete. I think the design side is good, but the creature side is still lacking alot. we need single spawners for every creature type, as well xp and rewards for these things. Limiting the numbers per room size is a good way to control the xp as well spawn timers this will limit possible exploiting. Loot options needs to be opened up to allow player to insert rewards into their own dungeons beyond public chests. I think lock and key system still needs to come, as well npc system opening up aggressive npc so that you can create plot twists and even make npc's remember how you treat them. perhaps away to level up npc's and or make skins that allow us to skin totems with a look to make our own boss type mobs and the likes to look how we like to make things more unquie. as it stands now short of exploring player dungeons and some story from some players there is not much reason to hit player dungeons. As a crafter I would love to take some top notch gear and have people get rewarded for finishing my dungeon. I also am still waiting on option for dungeon to force torch only for some added benifits.

PVP, well no reason to really pvp short of testing your build vs another. We need a driver for pvp. make some of these pvp zones have something worth guarding or worth fighting over. Many games use PVP zones to offer specific merchants perhaps needing to hold a keep or something to gain access to merchants. allow players to invest in fortifications and defense. pretty much anything would make things better. or perhaps once the faction systems are in have it so territory can be claimed by a faction(s) thus requiring people to take back X to open up region. Im sure many will have their own input.

I do think we need a lot more mob types. after 7 or is it 8 years of playing we kill the same stuff a lot and would be nice to have more variety. I also think we should have world map boss encounters where a raid like boss spawns on the map and wanders around killing all until its stopped. Make it like that of the giant requiring a lot of help to take down. I think sieges need more meaning. they use to prevent you from entering the towns until cleared. or unless you ran across the siege . I think if sieges are ignored they should spill into the towns until pushed back. we lack a lot of engaging automatic events. We have places that are on time cycles but no real scripted events. these are just my thoughts.

I think loot needs to be expanded every few months with at least 1 new item. it does not need to be a new skin per say but something cool. If loot was less static and had more rng in stats on what drops and or what is crafted it would change a lot. make something like a major critical for crafting that even the lowest player has a .x % to get which can give a new player an item of expectational chance that they can sell or use to compete with end game crafters. this opens up a more random chance for all to get something extra special.

Player towns need more options for events as well perhaps object templates to save current placed objects (deco only) so like homes you could load up a new template knowing it will support your current layout. this opens up seasonal changes for pot owners as well ways to pre-setup events for quick loading.

all in all though the game is progressing forward which is good, but just at a slow pace. just my view thanks.