new player / first impressions

Hi everyone,
My ingame/character name is Stinkefaul and I’m new to SotA.

I’m an old UO Veteran, I played it from 1997 to 2003, and several MMOs after that. Some of them as beta tester (DDO, LOTRO, ESO), but none of them reached the level of addiction UO did. I also played Ultima VII, VIII & IX.

I startet SotA 2 days ago with the Adventurer pledge, but I’m willing to spend a lot more money, when it develops into a game I really enjoy, and not into “yet another MMO RPG”…

So far I have mixed feelings about the game, in general it looks really nice, I like the whole housing thing, with cellars… I can build my own little dungeon under my house!

Also the fact that you can solo play it, most other MMO RPGs have little to none solo content and you die very very often when not playing in a group. OK, in SotA you die also very often, until you get a full set of augmented plate armor, then you are nearly invincible when fighting NPCs, even at lowest levels. Combat still needs a lot of work in balancing! Also fighting looks…. uurgh…
But I like the deck system, it is something new and could be fun, I will test this a little bit more in the next days.

The overlandmap is also a concern to me.
I understand that it is necessary due to a limitation of the game engine. But it really looks a bit out of place. There are only some small paths from one place to another, it reminds me somewhat of Heroes of Might & Magic or Kings Bounty. On this kind of map I also don’t see a reason to implement horses or boats later on.The map should be more like the overland map of the game “Mount&Blade” , bigger, with more open space where you actually have a reason to use a horse or a boat…

Also the very very long loading screens when you enter a new area, especially Ardoris, are a big immersion killer. Maybe it would help to implement some kind of video/animation of you entering that area while loading… Something like the warp tunnels in EVE Online or Elite Dangerous when entering a new star system. Ok, maybe not a warp tunnel in SotA, but you get the idea…

Well, I think this is enough for my first post.
Hope to meet all of you ingame!

Greetings
Stinkefaul

 

Greetings from a fellow newcomer (4 days ago) and welcome!

 

Combat is still being tweaked. If you are looking for NPC challenges at this stage, try out the ghosts in various dungeons, or try to take over a control point like the one in Vertas Pass.

You've joined at an interesting time. In a couple of weeks there will be a complete wipe and we will be seeing exciting new content, like the first player owned town.

 

Loading screen mini games are always fun.

 

Hi and welcome projekt9 and thank you for voicing your very early comments and concerns. Yes optimization and load times will improve much over the next few releases. If you experience a lot of lag and load times it really helps to set your graphics to fastest, the game still looks good with that setting. Ardoris is most laggy to me, but I overall do pretty well. Oh and don't worry boating will be great when we get it. We'll have the waterways of New Britania to explore and fish in. The overland map takes a bit of getting used to, but i have grown to appreciate it very much. The ability to drop in content easily will give us variety in the game. The map is still a work in progress with more detail coming to it. Also I think you have a great idea about the video animation when entering an area or when loading. I know in Star Wars Old Republic it would show you traveling in a speeder to load a scene somtimes. Oh and the map is actually huge. Hidden Vale is only a teeny tiny island. We have seen very little so far. Imagine 5 Episodes of land mass, content, and features coming. For this game at this point it takes visual thinking sometimes and if you come into online please friend majoria and I will gladly show you around.

 

Welcome to the community

 

Herzlich willkommen projekt9!

 

I keep thinking, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to keep the chat window open during loads, guild, party, and whisper chats, along with being able to go over combat stats, deck configuration, inventory, and our quest logs would be great to occupy my time while an animation shows my character walking down a path in the background. I might even find myself looking forward to the load times if they're done right.

 

Exactly! Nobody else had this idea before?

 

There are tech-related reasons why none of this has been done yet.

The first and most glaring: Increasing load times. This would do that. While making them more interactive is fun, it does actually increase load times.

The second: Creation of new tech. I'm not even 100% sure if this is possible with unity engine because I don't have a huge amount of experience with adding more than a graphic and some text to load screens. Unity engine functions on a "scene" basis - the loading screen is what is displayed when moving between scenes. I'm not sure how much character data would be directly accessible and displayable on the loading screen because I've got no idea how those particular scripts are set up for Shroud, so I'm honestly not even sure if that data would be loaded into client memory at that time. I'm also unsure whether or not you could display any of that if you're in the loading screen or if you'd have to be loaded into a scene for that. I suppose if you created a "Loading Scene" this would be doable, but see my first post about increased load times - if this were possible to begin with. I don't THINK it is, but I'm not an expert with scene-to-scene loading as the games I make with unity are mostly 2D and have far, far fewer assets in any given scene than Shroud has, and thus typically load in a few seconds.

 

updated my Display Name...

 

Hübsches Selfie...

 

ist doch gut geworden, oder?!

 

Well there are lots of free verbal chat programs out there that could be used instead.

 

You can walk most places on the map, so I'm not seeing your reference about that.

 

The only reason I would be against this idea is that you would basically be ceding the idea that the long load times are in any way acceptable in the future. For SotA to really work as a functioning flow of an instanced based game then those load times need to be nearly instant.

 

One man's limitation is another man's design feature. Not all the basic systems are in place, nothing has been balanced, nor has much optimization been put in place.

 

I just started playing yesterday, and I'm not seeing long load times as of yet. Do you have a HD or SSD? I have a four-year-old, mid-end system with a SSD.

 

I'm in the game now sorry if I missed you earlier. **cheers**

 

My machine is top notch and SotA is running on a Kingston Hyper X SSD with 550MB/s... and still..

Of course short to no loading time would be preferable, the idea with the loading screen animation was just that, an idea.
But the scenes have to be loaded somehow.
Maybe it is possible to preload some of the data in the background, but as far as I understand the limitations of the game engine won't let you...