Oh boy, here I go posting again. So yes, as alluded to in my Death and Taxes thread this is me talking about another issue that I've found in Shroud. This time it's not build related I promise! This is about how accessible the game currently is, and I don't mean downloading it. There's a few points to cover, so I'll start with a pet peeve of my own. I can't see what is going on So what do I mean? Buffs and debuffs are so small on my screen that I have no way to tell at a glance what is going on. As mentioned in other posts, I have a background in fast paced games that often don't allow you to pause what is going on to see what is effecting you. In Shroud I've found that even when I try to move around the UI, I'm often still trained to look in the top left to see what is affecting me. However many icons look the same, and are easily mistaken for each other at a glance. Especially debuffs. I understand that this can be an art asset issue, but in the time I've been playing there is no visual difference in the confusion debuff that is given out by the Cabalists as there is the focus debuff. Equally the stealth debuff. So I can be effected by these effects but have no idea until my game play is effected. Now a theoretically simple way to solve this would be to make the icons bigger, but that still runs the problem of debuffs looking the same. So I leave that up to the devs to sort because my ideas to resolve that would require a lot more work (eg: visual effects) and that has it's own issues. However some form of scaling might make this easier (but not perfect) and leads me on to my next point. In seriousness, the next thing that I want to talk about is: The UI I know you can move stuff around, but that UI is unreadable to new players. I'll get into some player stuff in a bit, but the current UI is really bad for new players. It's hard to see what you're doing right or wrong and if you watch most streamers, they change it in some way. I don't but that's mostly because I don't know how to do API stuff and I tend to play in the most "noob friendly" kind of fashion. In specific, I voice what I understand, and it is frequently corrected (oh boy, we'll get back to that) but even a cursory look around many streamers streams, you'll see much larger icons to show when spells are up, and other aspects (not including the XP counter thing*) which otherwise make the game easier to understand. As someone who is working alongside mod teams, I can understand stretched resources, I've even had to make icons myself for testing (temp stuff to see if an effect was triggering) and readablity of those things at a glance is a massive indicator to a player. I know many players have played for a lot longer than me, and they're fine, but new players may not have the same resources, and that is a major part of another point. I would love to see this game grow, there's many mechanics that can suck in players (after playing PoE on stream and hating it, but seeing how players get sucked into that...damn) and despite the game's relative age of models, and some occasional clunky animations, there's still some scenes that have blown me away and I've said that when I've seen it. So there's no reason as far as I can see that this game shouldn't grow and right now the way it's set up makes it difficult to recommend to others, except to very specific people who love the Ultima series. Given that the last non-online Ultima game came out in 1999, that makes it harder to pitch to younger people I know. Sample size of one, but you see what I mean. The Chain of Information This is one I've talked about on stream. This is the one I'm expecting people to talk about the most, possibly because its a thorny issue. Information is the lifeblood of a game with the complexity of Shroud. What I do I mean by this? There's the information collected to the player by playing, let's call that collected information. This includes the player's experience without relying on outside sources (the wiki, other players, reading the UI, etc). Then there's information given to the player through text, this includes the new player guidebook, talking to NPCs, reading status effects, and is a lot more "mechanical" in nature, let's call this gathered information. Then there's information spread by other players and the wiki, let's call that shared information. This game currently relies mostly on gathered and shared information, as often a player can have a skewed experience as they are a data set of one. To take an example of my own, I found grinding to get skeleton bones a complete hassle that eventually relied on parties in Eastreach Gap and by sheer grind I eventually got what I needed to make bone armour. However I was often told when I was on stream to farm other places such as the Etceter Crag Mines, which I did, and got bugger all. Now is this me complaining about drop rates, not quite. My issue is, that had I been playing on my own, I would have thought skeleton bones were rare as uranium in the real world because I had to grind for hours to get maybe four or five. However other people were much more successful and encouraged me to continue. For a new player who may choose to play offline, or a player who is not social, that is a dead end of information. I know that the wiki exists, but that wiki is not maintained with drop rates or perfect data because it's not run by the devs (side note: not making this a footnote, but god damn I would never get **** done without that complete beast of a site. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE!) and that can mean that the information is either out of date, or not quite right. When I started playing the wiki still said that Constantan Plate had a lower fizzle chance than other materials, and I would have continued building towards it until I mentioned to Coswald on one of his streams that it said that on the wiki and he corrected me. This leads to a concept that I call "The Chain of Information". I've worked alongside devs in other games where they don't like sharing information because they are afraid that players will manipulate that data for meta purposes, or otherwise breaking the game. However, from experience what happens is worse, as players will judge what a "thing" does based on experience and the correct information suddenly becomes a commodity. A good example is that the devs do ask players to help with their beta testing on a non-live server, that in itself is not an issue, what it does is make those players who play in those servers gain access to early information which is good for devs, bad for players, as those players now have a leg up on what new content contains as well as potential for drops/difficulty/enemy types etc. So when the patch goes live, their main accounts have an information advantage compared to others. I would like to take this moment to say that I am not trying to say that beta servers are bad, or that anyone who is on them is "cheating" or anything like that. I am not assuming malice on the part of any player. What it does do is it allows those players to share that shared information with others, which is great except for offline players and non-social players. Who essentially have to go in blind+ compared to others. So where is this "chain"? Let's say there are five players in this example (A, B, C, D, E) and player D is the anti-social player who comes on and plays by themselves, doesn't talk to anyone, they are an informational dead end. A broken chain, they pass on nothing but link to nothing else. Players A, B, and C bump into each other a decent amount and talk to each other, Player A knows about a new item that drops in one area but is rare and tells players B and C that if they want it, they should go get it. Players A, B, and C grind the area and get enough of the drop that they no longer need it. Player A stops playing (for what ever reason) and doesn't come back. Players B and C meet a new player, E, and that player eventually wants an item that just so happens to be the thing that B and C got a long time ago. Memory isn't perfect and neither is the wiki so they don't remember exactly where they got it from when asked by Player E. They also don't know the drop chance, and may have forgotten how long it took them to get it. This chain of information from A to B, to C, is now broken because the original source isn't there to correct mistakes and it relies on human memory, a thing that even the US judicial system tries not to use as people are terrible as evidence. People misremember things, people can straight out forget and again it is relying on a player to do the work of gathering the information, and either share it with players directly or share it via a contribution on the wiki.& Right now, I'd estimate that a very small percentage of the community knows almost everything there is mechanically to this game (exploits, shroud math, what ever "effectiveness" means) and as such the wiki, the player base, and effectively the devs are relying on a few unpaid players to disseminate that information to other players in perpetuity. That's not fair to those players and it's not fair to anyone. If enough of those vets stopped playing for any real length of time, many mechanics would be come lost especially if it's not on the wiki. A broken chain of information. From my experience with the London 2038 team, I've seen players make stuff up about enemies, weaknesses, and even how stuff works based on biased information that they have experienced but in that case the devs could actually step in and correct that information with objective truth. When they stepped in. This sucked up so much time, and one guy in particular (not that he's gonna read this because he's not on Shroud) has spent most of the last 9 years being the main source of correct information. It has consumed his life for that time, and I don't want the devs to do that. My honest opinion is that information should be clearer to players in a multitude of forms. It needs to be quick to read as say a debuff is, it needs to be correct, and it needs to be up to date. One of the other games that I play releases all drop information as a single webpage where it gets updated with EVERY patch but that is only because they are legally required to. This is because they offer drop chance boosters and under EU law, if you do that, you have to give the odds to begin with. The game I'm talking about is Warframe. The wiki for that, which is now officially recognized but was not for the last seven or so years, pulls this information and formats it so that players can easily understand it and can easily search it. Not only that, this information is updated frequently. I'm not taking time here to dunk on the wiki, they do a great job, but they take their information from people submitting it. That is an effort that many will not go to. Wrapping things up here, right now the ability of a new player to play the game is hampered by them having to do so many steps, and that's assuming their build doesn't in some way make their lives harder. I'm not even talking about me in this instance because I've had constant help from my viewers. I've been corrected on wrong information, when I started the wiki wasn't linkable from the game itself, and only this year was I linked to an API client for finding where stuff drops the most. I was grinding the South Boundless Forest for chain sword patterns, because I didn't think that they had a much higher drop rate in Skrekk or K'rul and I'd only seen them drop in that area. That's the kind of thing that's an issue, where if I didn't have my stream I would have never known and spent a lot longer to get the drop at a lower rate. It still took me months, but it would have taken years at the rate I was going at and the wiki doesn't have that information on it. I await the responses with baited breath. Angus Blackheart *That XP counter thing is really cool, and I wish I had it. Genuinely surprised the team hasn't just made that an option in the options for the UI already. +Putting this here to talk about an argument of "you don't have to do X content" which has been brought up before, it's not about you not having to do that content, it's that you can end up excluded from it, meaning that the choice is removed without consent. My choice not to do taming for years was my decision, not that I "couldn't" do that content to begin with. This argument that I've heard in this game and others falls flat to me because removing the choice to do that content to begin with should be a player's choice not a consequence of a decision they know nothing about. &Love you guys, seriously keep up the hard work, but in all seriousness with the existence of a wiki, the devs should consider giving actual consistent information as this would essentially fix the chain of information as it could now not be broken. A source that is linked in game that could be objectively correct would abnegate my entire issue.
Have a look at @Tirrag's Buff Monitor System. For me, the biggest issue is that the cursor gets lost in the scene. A simple fix would be to allow setting a custom cursor color (white is just not sufficient).
My issue is more that I shouldn't have to mod the game to make it readable, and I'm what I would consider experienced, imagine a new player just playing with purely collected information.
