Is there *any* way that SotA could be monetized the way Star Citizen is doing it?

The comment I get most when I show SotA around is: "Omg it looks so ugly" or "It's not even out and it looks already so outdated".
And I tend to agree with their comments, I am progressively becoming afraid that SotA will not satisfy my expectations:
- Next gen graphics
- High quality animations
- Complex combat fighting

I am sure that if devs would show and publicize some concepts of how the final product it will look like they would convince more people to pledge.

 

Out of curiosity, at what point was this game pitched on next gen graphics?

 

Graphics vs the Mind... "two very different directions to the same end"...

I don't wish to bash Star Citizen, because I believe it will be a fine game. But when comparing the 2 games...
The monkey in the above pick has the highest resolution imaging by way of using his eyes and soon after this picture, will actually be going into space
Once in space, the monkey will have a few buttons to operate to be able to perform a few tasks <---<<< this is very similar to the future players of Star Citizen, where they will have "a few" buttons to push while they are playing the game. Yet because of the game's graphics and mixing high tech words for the reasons to press those buttons, the Star Citizen game will always be "easy to operate", because the game's creators must remain within the limits of their audience's limited mental capacity for learning. So, "just like the monkey", there will be no actual resemblance to what it takes to operate the Space Shuttle.
Much of Star Citizen's early content will revolve around being in space, yet there will also be some "simple" planet models, "which will look very nice graphically", yet be far less complex when compared to what we will soon be living in, here in our New Britannia. So, in this way, Star Citizen and Shroud of the Avatar are both approaching the online world, "from completely different ends of what is possible".

In Star Citizen, "the sink doesn't work yet, nor does the shower" and the meals for the crews will be served in prepackaged servings, "whenever that happens".
In Shroud of the Avatar, "the graphics are working yet not as SC styled" and the meals for it's players will be made from each ingredient, cooked and sold by it's players, "whenever that happens within a few releases/months".

The only real difference between SC's monkeys in a can and SotA's monkeys behind their key boards, is that SotA's monkeys behind the key boards will have allot more to think about and operate, before the SC monkeys will...
Graphics vs the Mind, Fascinated, or Involved, SC vs SotA... With both tribes of monkeys coming from 2 very different directions... "will they meet some day?"... we will see
BTW: Can you take a guess at what my "call sign" is there in Star Citizen?...
~Time Lord~

 

the same reason people look at the gosip mags at the supermarket checkouts it has no bases in reality and it's entertaining to read

 

I actually got a Star Citizen account thru Steam when I built my new PC. It cam via the AMD Radeon R9 290 vid card. I had never backed as this , SOTA, is my type of game. But it will be interesting to check out, actually I should go check out that account.

As for the original point IMHO for most people, I think space truimphs medieval fantasy.

 

Aside from all of the other items you seem to have an issue with, this one is probably one of the more inaccurate issues you brought up. It almost makes it seem as if you're just poking the community just to start a fight.... ??
You're comparing a piece of concept art (at a very small size for some reason) to a screenshot from a VERY early stage of the game that is extremely low quality (the jpg itself) and is also very small in size. It also doesn't even look like it was being run at the highest graphics quality either, but that's difficult to tell because of the poor quality of the jpg itself.
How about you compare current release imagery? There are threads for each of the more recent Releases in the forums for screenshots, those would be an excellent place to look.... Release 11 Screenshots, Release 10 Screenshots, etc... the galleries are all of course Here, back to even an R1 one! Contrary to what you allude to in another post in this thread, this game has objectively improved visually since the launch of R1.
The graphics are STILL in flux. Shaders have been introduced and are still being tweaked. Lighting was recently redone and is still being adjusted (the new glowing leaves at night are funny). This game is not even officially in an Alpha state.
Am I happy with everything I'm seeing graphically? No. There are visuals and animations that still need a bit of work.
A prime example is our very own avatars in the generator. When R1 released I believe we had 4? male faces to choose from, with no sliders for customization other than height and a few less hairstyles than what we have now. There is now considerably more customization available at to the look of our toons! Am I happy with the textures for the faces? No, not yet. I'm not looking for Inquisition quality textures, as I know that's not the art style the game is going with, but the overall textures are still as flat as they were initially. I do know that graphics are almost ALWAYS the last improvement to a system though. The underlying mechanics must be working properly first, then the graphics get updated.
Comparing this game graphically to SC is comparing apples to oranges. Chris Roberts has repeatedly said that he's building SC to crush gaming systems with the level of visual fidelity he's putting into the game. Richard Garriott has NEVER said that about SOTA.

 

FWIW, I think the graphics keep improving with each release.

I'm hoping the move to Unity 5 will also come with them licensing Speedtree (if they can afford it) because the grass is the only element that sticks out as looking particularly poor right now. I'm curious if with Unity 5 they'll also be able to do some ambient occlusion and depth of field shader effects that I think will help a great deal.

 

Maybe you are right with the grass But for me the outmoded character presentation is the most important thing to revamp. The hair and beards are still looking like a piece of plastic. And there should be more variations of hairstyles in my opinion. I hope the use of Unity 5 will fix this problem, so the devs are eventually able to create different looking NPCs and player character models. The many Jack villagers are not very promotional

 

I'll cut it here. Wow, that's one totally uneducated post.
FYI: Star Citizen in it's current iteration offers by far more complex and elaborate gameplay than SotA does, and I can't see SotA ever catching up in that department. Star Citizen is going very much for a role-playing experience* with storylines both: player-driven and pre-made by developers, so in every way it'll be game at a very least as complex and deep as SotA, though most likely, with that budget and amount of players, it'll go far beyond anything SotA will have to offer in any foreseeable future. But obviously it's a game in a different theme and by that it won't work for everyone, and there's plenty of space on a market, especially considering that SotA is pitching towards far bigger crowd: a medieval-styled RPG gamers in both: single and multiplayer front. Here I wanted to highlight an importance of that again, cause few other people implied something completely opposite: Market for fantasy RPGs is by far, by far greater than the market for sci-fi space combat games.
*(mind you: not an MMORPG one)

Sorry, but you are wrong on that one too. But it's a topic for a long, and separate discussion. Let's stick to the topic

JPG is taken from SotA kickstarter page. That was the first graphic that they chose to advertise their game with. Your complains are valid, but feel free to address them to the developers, not me.

This screenshot was taken from the current version of a game (or near-current, I actually don't remember) and this very "castle" is still in the game as of now and that's exactly how SotA looks like, and similar stuff is what people will see. Here's the latest video posted on RockPaperShotgun - if you'd like an alternative, in-motion version. Nothing in that video compares even remotely to the mood and quality of concept arts presented in a kickstarter campaign.

You don't seem to be willing to face the real problem.
Lighting and shaders are like spices - they improve the quality of a meal, but they will not make a meal.
Issues with SotA are very deeply rooted. Most importantly: 3D models are just horribly, horribly, horribly bad.
This thing here:

Is sold for 50$. Thats 50$ for using one of the ugliest and lowest-quality 3D models I seen in a games released during last 5 years or so.
And whatever you want it or not - it really doesn't get much better...
(again: 50$)

And I could keep going and going and going.... there's just so many bad 3D models in this game that it's just hard to believe. Even silly trees look bad - the very best SotA tree models are comparable to average Oblivion trees - and that game is 8 years old.

I must have missed something, cause character customization is one of the things people complain most about.

That's another problem with SotA - it doesn't have any proper and consistent arts style. Some things look like pulled from some other games or some random tutorials people do on 3D modeling in blender. Eg. this guy here must be from Star Wars: The Old Republic.
You can create nice worlds these days with graphics that didn't took long to make yet still look great, but you need to opt for some specific, characteristic and consistent arts style - SotA either doesn't have one, or got "we're still learning 3D software" stylization (whichever option you prefer). Cause that's the impression most of the people have, regardless if it's fair to the intentions and (deeply hidden) skills of a developers, or not.

That's true. None the less - OP asked if there's any way that SotA could be monetized in the way Star Citizen is - so the reason why SotA monetization doesn't work is mostly in graphics. There are just so genuinely bad that people get repelled from the game long before they give it a chance to discover anything deeper in it. Until that obstacle disappears - SotA will keep on having huge problems with monetization.
And that's just scratching the iceberg of fundamental problems SotA got.
As someone put it on RockPaperShotgun - this game might have a chance if it'd be released before World of Warcraft. Might.

 

All of the things you are talking about are possible to achieve with Unity 4 just fine.
Changing a version of an engine will give devs some nicer tools, improve a performance (the biggest jump will be in physics engine, but SotA uses barely any of it, so don't expect too much), perhaps allow to use few new effects, but everything you listed in your post is perfectly doable with current version of Unity. Devs just chose not to do it.

 

I think I heard part of the problem with hair and beards is that they tried applying cloth physics to them and it was terrible, so they pulled it off and they are hard and stationary now. But with Unity 5 they were going to apply a new form of cloth physics that should fix them.

I'd also like to see a greater selection of hair/facial hair options.

 

One boy says to the other, "Here, check this out"

I don't claim to be educated , after all, I'm an astrologer which should give you some idea of where I'm coming from

In the above picture, we see an older boy who is revealing some cosmic truth to the younger one. Where one boy knows he can't reach the moon, the other may have the fantasy that he can. To one boy, this picture is his dream, while the other one may see the picture as a reality, both share a concept within the imaginative, yet one is restricted by what he has been taught from rules which restrict the imaginative qualities of anything outside of his education. Where one person may see the picture with the assumption of gravity, the other may see the picture with no gravity at all, yet both could be correct.

It's what is apparent vs the visual thing, or a puzzle game vs something like Planet Side. Puzzle games will play a great part of quests within SotA, where the player will be challenged by many unreal mixed with real situations which will have an effect on a player's karma and how the world's AI will react to the player's choices. SC, beyond having totally awesome never seen before graphics, will be challenged in this regard, because of the constraints that everything needs to be "as real as possible" because that's where SC is going within it's concept. This is one example of where I'm coming from by the comparison. The real vs the unreal, one side of the brain or the other, both have a difference of appeal within their concept design. Yet there are many other differences which reveal themselves as a further part of the dividing line between these two games, where one offers open freedom of discovery, the other is stranded and forces the player's mind to a much more inner reflective. The educated person is constrained by the programing that has been installed on their brain's hard drive, while the power of Voodoo is quite powerful to the believer. When looking at the subject of gaining $ from the general public, "there's allot of general games out there", so SC and SotA (and every other game) must distinguish itself as unique or ground breaking in some way to attract the public's gaming $. Such differences as these, must be first seen in order for one to barrow from the other.

While the $50.00 tower homes of SotA could be seen as terrible from the perspective of their conformity to reality, those same buildings could fall into the category of fashion fad, where the early designers of the building's lay out, were not thinking of functionality when they created windows where there were no rooms. Whether or not those designs were made in storybook as designs that came from those who lived in New Britannia before us, or by our actual design team makes no difference, just as there is no logical reason for any woman to wear high heal shoes, it's a matter of fashion. Where one game is restricted to it's fashion, so is the other, yet both are appealing to different sides of the brain, "yet the world of desire and fashion always changes". From medieval to space, we can see that both games hold one side of the net, yet when they meet and close the net from their different perspectives, they will then hold a place for all fashion to live, the logical as well as the fad world of the imaginative.

Graphics are the gateway to the brain, but not from the brain. If SotA is to capture or barrow from any lesson about SC's funding success, we must see the differences and have them meet, yet not let go of their own unique side of the net as their hallmark, fore if SotA funded for the graphics of SC, it would then not meet it's goal of being a deep quest, and if SC funded for deeper quest, then this would take from it's graphic budget, which must be large or it looses it's unique quality.

Will the monkeys of SC meet the monkeys of SotA? Evolution may meet that goal, yet the games are separate and do need to barrow from each other because space or medieval can both fall out of fashion as well as into fashion.
What is fascinating today, may not be tomorrow... YouTube presence and display seems to me the key to what we could learn to barrow from SC's fan base "but we are catching up!" I didn't think that Steam would give us so much boost, but it did!.. which means that the knowledge of our game's existence still holds value because not enough people know we are here yet to have SC size $, "to afford such graphics", while still maintaining it's hold of it's side of the net.
Holding the Difference and Borrowing More Net Awareness is the Key... "I believe" !
The logical enhancing the imaginative?
~Time Lord~

 

Sky_Walker, with a name like that and your posts here it's pretty clear you are coming from a particular preference for space orientated games; but whilst I have my own worries about the development process of Shroud, you've hardly made a fair comparison with it to Star Citizen... a game which has been noticeably plagued by over-promising for some considerable time. For those who aren't aware of the basic playable content at this moment;

http://starcitizen.wikia.com/wiki/Anticipated_Release_Schedule

In particular, that Single Player has been dropped entirely, and all that is currently active after such enormous fundraising is the dogfight module and the hanger, that is looking at your ship from the outside; much of what Sky_Walker claims to be able to do simply isn't even accessible at this time. Indeed until the Dogfighting module was finally released, many people online were starting to worry SC would be the first, massive and dramatic implosion of the crowd funding scene. Some were even calling it an outright scam. In the same development time by comparison, Elite: Dangerous has gone from Kickstarter to getting ready for full launch of the entire basic game next month. So yes, Star Citizen looks so much better, but Shroud has achieved a much deeper standard of actual gameplay in the same development time, and Elite: Dangerous is already out the door in the exact same genre as SC (and is apparently fantastic).

So whilst I wish SC well and hope you get something playable, I'd be much more relaxed about the final state of Shroud at present than SC. It may not look incredible, but I expect it to basically all be delivered in a working, maybe even enjoyable state.

 

SC's dogfighting module was only like two weeks late and they held it up for show-stopper bugs. They've had demos of the persistent universe module, the racing module and the FPS module that all look fairly polished and far along in development.

The single player module hasn't been dropped. Chris Roberts is just a perfectionist and they're making use of the budget to make an amazing game. You'll see other modules in time. The FPS team hinted the FPS module will be live for everyone to play in Q1.

 

Thanks for pointing that game out Swordmaster...
I enjoyed seeing some of their fan based videos today coming out of Elite Dangerous aka ED. Thanks for pointing that game out to me as I'm sure to be watching this game take shape!... "which it is"... This last July was their cut off for early entry, but I'm certainly ready for their take off.

One thing of note in the SC vs SotA comparison, is that the average pledge value of SC seems to be $95.72 per backer, with SotA's being somewhere like $124.03 per backer... that's something to think about...

Fan based videos from ED... "looking good"!
~Time Lord~

 

You have to divide Star citizens 63 million by the numbers that make up the UEE fleet, which are the actual backers(523610 at the moment). The larger number to the left of it on the Homepage are the registered members.
If you do this you get an average of 120 dollars per Star Citizen backer, which is eerily close to the number of 123 dollars for SotA.

I guess that makes short work of the possible assumption that space-fans have more money then RPG fans.

Something is very different though: the number of backers vs the number of registered people is quit a bit higher with Star Citizen :
Registered for SC 661k, backers 523k
Registered for SotA 135k, backers 42k

I guess this could give some credability to the assumption that RPG-fans have been oversaturated lately (and fed a lot of crap too) and are waiting this one out, while the Space fans seem to be craving a good space-sim indeed.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/flash-mob-flash-dance-r12.16740/page-3
I put my money where my heart and my mouth is
$200.00 USD!
~Time Lord~

 

I'm not particularly skilled at video editing, but I'll try and get it a shot.

Time Lord is generous as always.

 

This game is looking better and better at every release by leaps and bounds. I've backed both games at a pretty high level but believe in the Port team more. Star Citizen is simply better at marketing. The housing page is a step in the right direction for further fundraising in my honest opinion. The cool thing about SC ,and what makes you want to pledge money, is the ship pamphlets that make you feel like you're buying a new car at the dealership. SOTA's should feel like you just stepped into a new home builder's model home and are looking at the floor plans and upgrades available for your dream home. Or an armory if you want to take it that direction. Also, engaging the entire community with small polls and "what should we do next?" gives the feeling that you are truly engaged as a backer. Just my quick thoughts.

 

I agree completely. First thing I noticed this release when I logged in were the turkeys. They looked perfect. And also kinda tasty.

Lighting is getting better, more detail is added and most of the monster models are top notch, imo. Avatars need work, but this is undoubtedly a feature that will get many iterations still.