15 first minutes feedback (R40)

Well I could create several characters that look different, and train different skills, and have different equipment, and do different starting quests, and maybe be in different guilds (or whatever the SOTA equivalent is).

Or I could try making a different character because I’m not happy with how my current one looks like, and then instead of losing everything done with the first one and having to sluggishly progress with the second one doing quests already done before, I could use it to get objects/gold for the second one. Or decide that finally the first one looked better and not weep because it’s gone forever…

 

You can change your character's appearance without deleting, however it requires Crowns if the Obsidians (CotOs). Visit a New You salon in the major cities (Ardoris, if you are in the Soltown area).

 

Thank you Gargooyle for your great feedback. I know for a fact the devs are genuinely interested in such new user experiences, and actively work on improving them.
I hope you decide to stay.

 

Welcome @Gargooyle , great feedback!

 

The intro video needs to change IMO, i'd like to see it talk about the in game events and of course, give Ultima Online a intro a run for its money. Because at the end of the day, that's what it will be benched at

 

This is called "hitching" and its micro-stuns of the game. You are moving your mouse, a stun happens and it can throw your screen around, usually in the direction your mouse was going, so it stuns and all sudden you are looking up or down. They are related to two main things. One is memory leaks. They have fixed them at times but are back now because they just upgraded to Unity 5.5 and need to do optimizations. the longer your client is up, the worse it can get. Its a good idea to reset game every few hours. The second is heavy logging (Chris has even hinted at this). Server admins know this well, they at times have game logging on their side turned up pretty high for testing (remember, the game is still in development) especially on weekends I think. This is so they can get good reports on issues to fix. You can see these things on server like say a Microsoft Exchange email server, if you jack the logging up, you take major hits on system performance.

 

Is there only one character slot? I don't see any way to create an additional character.

Anyway, after my 1st 15 minutes, here are my thoughts.

1) The little girl makes very annoying sounds, not very human sounding. Is she supposed to be brain damaged or something?

2) Auto-attack seems wonky. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

3) Turning my character via the keyboard is very slow, and I see no way to speed it up. He turns like he's standing in molasses.

4) Character creation is very limited. Only one nose shape? I fussed with the controls for some time, but couldn't really get a good looking nose. It was hooked, or beaky, or something.

5) The game seemed to run a bit slowly, like everything was just slightly lagged. Not horrible, but noticeable.

6) The "Oracle" thing was weird. I answered 3 questions, and then it told me to ignore them all and choose 'bow' for the best experience. So I did, but what was that all about?

7) The whole "click a word" conversation method is pretty retro. I guess it's ok, but it gives the game a certain unfinished feel, like the interface has been grafted in from some old game.

8) It wasn't clear to me at first how to find stuff, like the boat. Eventually I figured out about the icons at the top, in the 'compass' area. But it wasn't obvious.

9) Character animation was weak. Running doesn't look quite right. Conversations are odd looking (the faces especially).

That's about all I noticed in 15 minutes

 

aye, one for now, they have talked about adding more later (in fact, it was part of pledges to have up to 3). I think I recall them saying summer time frame.

 

Here’s my last feedback post since it’s the end of the 4 days of free trial.

I’ve had some fun killing (or being killed by) skeletons and other enemies in the Soltown catacombs and the east perennial trail. That’s for the positive.

Now the negative:
- Once I finished the iron blade quest and the quest for Ashton in Soltown I found nothing else to do.
- The framerate. I said previously that with all video options disabled or set to the minimum it was ok, but then I went to another town (Ardonis I think)… 15-20 FPS… I have read that the devs are planning to work on this for the next release so that’s good, but for now it’s a problem (on Linux; I guess it’s faster on Windows as Unity3D’s OpenGL renderer isn’t known for its performance).
- The merchants have almost nothing interesting to sell. The starting armor is better than what they have.
- The enemies drop nothing of interest, it’s always the same: rusty weapon, gold.
- The towns full of player houses: it often looks bad due to different styles of houses mixed together, sometimes there is random decoration that makes no sense (like the snowman at the entrance of Soltown), and more importantly there is nothing to do there.