Chris' R11 abbreviated brain dump!

@Drocis,

What I do agree with you on is that definitely archery and magic needs to be more powerful, or they don't even make sense logically as skills. If archery and magic are weak, there's no reason to for someone to learn them in the first place.

 

I'm surprised that someone in the industry doesn't get it. Steam is where pc gamers shop to buy games. It's like the Walmart of pc gaming - and I mean this in a good way, because I generally despise Walmart. Of course your users and player hours were going to go up when you released this game on Steam...

I love Valve, they are a gamer's developer, like Blizzard is. Even though I'm not a big fan of WoW, I have nothing but respect for Blizzard. Both of these companies know their target market, real gamers. Both them treat their target markets with respect, and oceans of patience. Steam is simply the best at what it does, and that is deliver pc games to gamers.

And I hope the irony of all this praise is not lost on anyone who lived through the first year or two of Steam's debut - spoiler, it was awful, and was voted one of the top ten worst gaming related releases of all time by a gaming website, and that was a well deserved assessment. But now Steam is, quite simply, the bomb...

 

I think you made some good points...but to say someone "doesn't get it" because they're looking for other explanations is not fair. The dev team here does an excellent job challenging the status quo, and to do that they have constantly sought to look at everything in a new way. So make your point, it's valid, but don't assume that they're somehow ill informed about the way the world works. They've been around the block.

 

Sometimes, sometimes not. It seems to me sometimes they forgot the original ultima games.

 

It happens all the time, the developers of a product are not linked umbilically to their clientelle. My guess is that the last thing the developers of pc games want to do after a sixteen hour day working on code, or art, is fire up their pc and play games for another four hours. That's one of the reasons why players always surprise developers, and why very often a hard core player will know more about how a game works than the developer working on it.

The developers may have access to the source code, but they aren't playing the games the way their most avid fans are. It doesn't surprise me at all that a veteran game developer doesn't truly understand how big Steam is among pc gamers.

 

I cant speak for anyone other then my self, but i was one of the ones who joined in for the first time this round. It was well over a year ago when i first heard about it. I didnt know at the time if it would go anywhere. But since like a lot of others i loved UO, i signed up thinking i would keep an eye on it. I never got an email with any updates so to be honest, i forgot about it after awhile. Then out of nowhere 2 weeks ago i get my first e-mail. Yay.. I looked, I saw, I scrambled to rearange finances since it was between pay periods and by that Monday I was in game. Lol

 

I also didnt think your downloader was all that hard....

 

As to the Steam question: For me personally, I played around a little in previous releases (R4, R6), but everything was too choppy to really dedicate more than brief play sessions. Putting the game on Steam was super easy and I guess I won't have to install anything again for a while because steam will keep the game patched and removes a lot of the time dealing with a downloader.

The R11 seemed a lot smoother and looks great! It's the first time I really sat down to play it. Thanks for keeping the game open for so long. I got up to 26 and was really happy to test out the decks, the skill trees, and combat. All my other games totally gut brushed to the side for SotA R11. I don't feel like playing anything else. SotA is really fun and I played for hours over most of the release, but only experienced 1 crash.

I was underwhelmed by magic. I thought that would be the most interesting skill tree to jump into, but it didn't feel very powerful as compared to how fragile you are while wearing cloth armor. I found the reagent vendor in Owl's Head and it just seems like using the spells with reagents are way too expensive at this point. I understand prices would go down when the game economy is up and running, but I wouldn't try leveling a mage unless I had deep pockets or a better way to get reagents. Maybe we could have a deep path in the skill tree to make reagents last longer, or an option to forgo one reagents out of 3 in a spell.

 

I think the game update process makes a lot more sense over Steam, since you get notifications of updates even when you aren't playing and it doesn't just show up on trying to launch the game.

Right now I'm playing through the launcher for the 64-bit build, but I plan to switch over to the Steam build in the future.

 

It seems as though this thread has been overwhelmed by players that have disregarded the fact that this is a construction zone. There are lots of skills that are not available at all. There are some trees that don't even have one single skill. It is impossible to draw any meaningful conclusions of SOTA under the circumstances. Overpowered? Underpowered? How about not finished building it yet. I have spent a while thinking about what skills to purchase for a deck. There are so many paths to choose from. At first it seemed quite simple. Then I figured some other things out what seemed obvious in the beginning was not obvious at all. It was crap. I have played to around level 40. I have changed the way I look at things and the equipment I use at least four times. At the moment are pretty happy using both the primary deck and an alternate. Time will tell whether this makes any sense, or if it's all crap too!

I do agree with the person above they made a joke about how much things cost at vendors . This makes no sense to me. It's impossible to keep your equipment in good shape and buy reagents and arrows or bolts and potions . We simply don't make enough money.

With respect to playing a pure skill. For some strange reason people have decided they should be able to do this- the way they want to. For example archers or mages should be able to take down melee player/ npc before they get to them. Sounds great! Unless of course you are a melee player. Dollars to doughnuts they think this idea sucks. No one said that just because you spent some money on SOTA that you are going to have your own way . My favorite skill is archery . Yes , I noticed that I could not kill anything before it got to me. Oh well, that's the way it is. It doesn't mean it's not possible. It does mean I haven't figured it out yet .

I say, let them finish the game first. I expect it will probably take three or four years to work the bugs out. There's no sense in running around yelling about the sky falling.

 

I like to test and give feedback during the testing phases, not after everything has been implemented and it's harder to change directions. Right now we can test the design and not the implementation. I've seen enough of the combat and magic design to know where it's broken. Implementing a bad design is not going to improve anything.

 

A melee fighter should definitely have options against an archer, even with a powerful bow shot that does a lot of damage. A good example: a shield could block an arrow if raised while the archer is attacking. The archer does his best damage when the target is caught unawares and has no defenses. But if a shield is up, the arrow can be easily blocked.

A rogue-type character might be adept at dodging, versus actively blocking.

On archery, vantage point should mean a lot. I brought up an example in another thread of an archer going down a winding cave passage. He isn't going to be hit an enemy who is around a winding passage, since there is no clear shot. And the enemy is going to be able to ambush him from around the corner and catch him unable to use his bow. A blade would definitely be useful at that point. He isn't going to be much help to party members in that situation with just a bow, too.

Useful for archers: an ambush, hiding ability, a good ground, a good distance, a clear shot, a steady hand.

 

Well people are confusing 2 points. Melee/archery are a subset of warrior/fighters. A pure melee is not complete as they miss ranged weapons and a pure archer is not complete because there are missing melee ability. Where a mage is just a general classification, like fighter. A good fighter should be a combination of ranged and melee while a balanced mage would have close in abilities mixed with ranged attacks.

 

@Death-Knell,

Sure, which is why its confusing to me to talk about "pure archers"... "archer" was never a class in any well-developed RPG I've played.

As for mages... yes, you're right its a class though, technically, magic is just a toolset and weapons are another toolset. A novice mage might not be so powerful to be able to rely on his magic alone. Or he might need to find some types of protective charms or invisibility rings / cloaks or other devices so he doesn't have to fall back on weapons to protect himself. Just my opinion, of course.

 

Close fighting as a mage is not supposed to be a viable strategy. If you want to wear armor that allows you to cast flame fist (for example) and live, then you're not really a mage any longer.

This is why being in melee is not what being a mage is all about.

Cloth------------>Light Armor------------->Heavy Armor
Dying<----------------------Being able to survive in melee

Good mages don't get into melee.

 

Redfish and Baron, you have conveniently Hijacked a thread about stats from publish 11 please refrains from continuing this track and carry it on somewhere else or between yourselves.

This is not about mages or archers it was just some very VERY nice information about what was used during the publish.

Requests about content should be taken to the forums dedicated to them NOT here.

 

@Weins201,

I thought a major point in Chris' post was that the skills need to be re-balanced because melee is too good compared to archery and magic, and this seemed like a relevant discussion.

But if others think this discussion detours the thread, I'm happy to end it.

 

Of these 1000+ first time users, did all of them launch through Steam? That would give you your answer if it was Steam that drove adoption or the contents of R11, or some other trigger.

The takeaway I get from this stat is that there were still many hundreds that never even left Braemar? Of these subset of players, what was their average playtime? Did they log in for the first time, didn't like what they saw or were confused on what to do and rage quit? Or did they attempt to exit the zone but crashed on overland map load (which happens to me a ton while exiting Owl's Head).

Thanks for your brain dump! Always a joy to read.

P.S. Didn't see any sheep in the top kill list. The community will try harder...especially if you put some in Braemar too.

 

I used the downloader for all the previous releases and launched through steam this time. At first just to experiment but then because if I launched it from the library I could select windowed fullscreen which is what I prefer as it takes up a whole monitor but still allows me to switch to other windows on other monitors easily. I don't remember being able to do this from the normal launcher. Plus running for Steam is just as easy as an icon for me and tells my friends what I'm playing.

Yah, I'm a Steam fan now and I do remember what a POS it was back when HL2 came out.

 

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Thanks !