basic failures of UI design made me quit 2 hours in :/

Exactly
I read the promotional material. It told me that Sota would be challenging in its variety, virtue paths, and complexity.
It also told me that the game would not hold my hand or help me look both ways while crossing the street.
It did tell me that I would learn, both from mistakes and from experience.

 

I guess the game should attract different Typ of players - with different expectations and experiences.
If new players run into usability issues - that might not be issues or accepted learning challenges to other players - it should still be a concern for Portalarium. After all they want to win as many players as possible. Imho such feedback is valuable and can be used to adjust the tutorials or even graphic options

 

Obviously,you were not the friend of the OP.

 

I agree very much haha.

I started the day after persistence and thought that everything felt very natural. I never thought at all that anyone would have any problem figuring out the game but soon released that a lot of people were having troubles. Various Youtube reviews said as much and complained that SotA seemed to be overly complicated for complications sake. Still I thought people were being ridicules. I guess some of it just doesn't click with others as much and that's ok. Having NPCs glow blue was the first indication that it was seemingly a real problem.

 

Black obsidian corpion, middle of the night, did you kill it or did one of your weapons/armors/skills' status effects cause it to become confused and wander away?

Squint at the screen... Try and find your moon-sight skill, screw up your combat deck... Turn the entire world bright green just to figure out if there's a corpse there...

Or the game could be programmed slightly better and show some indicator that there's a lootable corpse a few feet away, which YOUR AVATAR would know because YOUR AVATAR delivered the killing blow and doesn't hear the critter chittering anymore, and because YOUR AVATAR isn't STUPID.

 

to be honest - if they put in ceel shading outlines or something like that i'll sure quit playing because all the atmosphere and such is gone.
Don't even think of make it an option either, because of traps, hidden doors, breakable walls etc...
I hear all time that players dont like the UI - just to be said i like the UI
It maybe can be improved, everything can be improved, but i like it simple.

If i cannot see the Mob i killed, i can use light or Nightvision, and yes i dont want to be a corpion corpse glowing pink, blue, yellow whatever color in the night at the ground. I dont want to see any glowing on items, assets or whatever beside my Shroud of the Avatar
I'm glad that enchanted gear doesnt glow anymore that much it was.

 

A challenging interface doesn't make a challenging game, it makes an unpopular one.

I understand the guy's complaint. He doesn't want to have to mouse over every object in the game at an appropriate distance to determine if it's a part of the background or an intractable object. Making things more intuitive or distinct isn't making it easier.

I play Magic for example, having the cards rule text written on a relatively plain text box in a relatively plain font improves the game's playability. It would benefit no one to have the rules text overlap the card's art or use an obscure font and then say the game is just too hard for you to enjoy.

 

My first complaint about the game design, way back in R10 or so...

It sure sounds after all this time, that this feedback would get a "by design" reply, which is a lame excuse IMO.

No offense brother but that is exactly the problem with this forum, this kind of replies "I will quit if this happens" that totally dilutes the topic and belittles other people's opinions.

If you just re-read the thread, your point about hidden doors has been repeated 3 times, and noone is suggesting to make corpses glow or change the art direction of the game (which is great IMO) in any way, that would never get past the design table.

What we are saying is that its completely unthinkable that the avatar itself has no AI, and this applies to MANY aspects of the game.

The Avatar KNOWS there is a corpse he just killed there, so a button could "loot nearby corpses" and THERE THE ISSUE IS FIXED FOREVER.

I have repeated this at least a dozen times for EACH issue where this blatant lack of functionality hurts our game.

But no I just get yelled at and ignored, and I'm starting to feel like any idea I support will be blacklisted like me. How bad is that...

How worse can it get ?...

Thank you...

 

sure i understand, but i really wouldnt like "outlines" or something like that on whatever.
Maybe i wasnt aware of that this sort of statement i made is such a strong one, what dilutes topics - that wasnt the plan or my intention
The Atmosphere is like Path of Exile or Diablo 1/2 like and not that type of TESO or D3 and i think a lot of this comes from to not have Cell shading etc... (maybe use a key like ALT in PoE to highlight loot? I know alt is reserved, ALTGR maybe or STRG, although i would like to be able to cycle through Decks with STRG and Mouswheel or STRG+1-9 to choose Deck 1-9) .

But you know what, we both agree a lot, but what i always recognize in the Forums is that we most of the time end up in 50 vs. 50 discussions
Its maybe because its no SP, no MP, no MMO, but all the bad (or good?) of it

I say all the bad, because i drive a sidecar and they allways say this combines both the bad of a motorcycle (wont agree) and the bad of a car.
You cannot drive through a traffic jam but you will get wet

 

I agree @Stundorn, we seem to have left a little too many open ends...

We have backed this title with promises of an innovative UI and gameplay design, not a ultima flavored WoW reboot. :/

 

On the other hand, how many secret doors even exist in Shroud, outside of the blacksmith's shop in Ardoris? What, 2 or 3 at the most? Hey, maybe they're secret for a reason.

 

@Ayelis,

Yes, so is what you want is an NPC or game text to say "By the way, there are things you can interact with that don't highlight"? But if the player knew that, and was told by an NPC to go look around on dead people's bodies, then he'd also be informed then, and he'd know how to loot the corpses already and wouldn't need them tagged or highlighted.

Still, I said in my original reply that I understood the point his friend was making, and even said a highlight might be okay if its done right, but there were a lot of other UI things that could be improved also to help out even short of doing that. I was just thinking as a UI designer from the perspective of what the UI can do to help a player learn how to play the game. Its better that the UI teaches you how to play than having some instructional text teaching you how to play.

But, I never anywhere said nothing can be done because of secret doors.

I think some of the other people replying just don't like certain methods the devs have tried over the course of development. For example, one release the devs made all of the ore nodes glow like they were irradiated. I thought this was awful for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it looked awful, and they glowed in the dark, making it easier to mine in the dark than with the lights on. I also thought it was a bit too hand-holdy in that its okay for there to be an ore underneath some corner that you might not notice right away but have to learn to spot, and do over the time you play the game, that this type of thing is fun for the game, and and what they did was overkill as a way to help people.

That doesn't mean there will be nothing that I think will work okay, and maybe some of the other people replying who do not like some solutions will like others.

 

Yes, new players are already accosted by a New Player Handbook when they start the game. I hear it breaks the fourth wall well and good, talking about things such as keyboards and user interfaces. Surely something could be added regarding secret doors and weapon racks.

Ah, but you're the first one to mention them, leading to a trend of people mentioning them, causing me to slowly grow insane and blame you.

Goodness, that's horrible.

But I do think that in games like these, you often get in fights that pull multiple mobs, and you might end up far from where the fight began or where you killed your first mob. Having a visual indicator of where that happened would be helpful. But maybe avatars are directionally challenged? I can imagine that Novia might not have magnetic fields like we are used to, and that might confuse our bio-directional senses. Or maybe it has to do with the avatars' short term memories. I'm sure ripping people's souls out of their bodies so much probably has quite a few nasty side effects...
I don't think anything should glow in the dark, but I do think mobs that are lootable to you should have some sort of sparkle or smoky particle effect, as an indicator to the player that the avatar is keenly aware of something that the player is not.

 

@Ayelis,

Yea I was the first to mention them

I'm concerned more generally with the principle that you want to teach the player how to look around to find things and be aware of his environment. I remember in the Ultima games, you might have a lever underneath a table that opened a door in someone's house, but you had to look around and notice it was there. If I recall correctly, there might have been some quest that introduced you to this, and then from then on you brought the same knowledge to the rest of your gameplay.

That's one way the game can teach a player, through example. But because it might not just be secret doors, or secret levers, or something specific, but anything really, I'd also not want the UI to go too over the top in helping a player that he shuts off his brain and stops paying attention to his environment.

Right now, there's a little sparkle on NPC waves, and possibly you could put that on corpses even in just introductory quests, but even if that were done like that, I think you'd want some way to let the player know how to recognize better something that can be interacted with absent the sparkle. So, possibly some of the things I suggested. The tooltip appearance and display location is IMO is not best right now and that could be improved for presentation, I also think a "pick up" cursor might help. When you move over your mouse over the corpses in the introductory quests, you'd then get used to these cues and recognize them later on. The bottom line was I don't think the way tooltips are presented now is that great or the green arrow is that great.

I'm personally not sure the sparkle is the best way to do things, because the player could also just be informed by an NPC to also check out bodies and that could be sufficient, though an alternative might also be to only show it when the mouse is over the object. That would give you a better sense that an object was selected for interaction. There are other ways to let players know that too I guess.

Or, like we discussed, there could be some solution (aka Witcher Sense) to help a player "find" objects. Definitely, Surveying has to be less useless than it is now. It might also be fun for someone with rogue skills to be able to detect traps. Or other types of sense awareness skills that worked against different types of stealth.

 

I remember there was a subtle fairy sparkle on harvestable nodes, though I haven't noticed it for a while... it wasn't too useful in any case because generally you didn't see it.

 

When you're fighting 10 mobs and stacking DOTs and one of them wanders away and dies somewhere and, due to the nature of the game engine, clips under a small hill or into some hedges or what have you, said NPC isn't going to come point out where that dang corpse went.
I don't think nodes should have it... But I also don't think nodes should show up as the same color as the rest of their environment, even when you've got night vision on. There's a small tradeoff between realism and fun. If you want realism, craft a secret door in your real basement.

 

just wait - a lot of the features I complained about years ago have been folded in and implemented, so there's a good chance finding corpses will get an overhaul soon, too

most of us spent two years without an autostack feature, and then , one release, it's there, like it was turning on a switch.

Personally, I've often thought the easy things the gui needs to have installed, it's already in the code : it's just turned off as a social experiment to see how long people will put up with broken features/missing abilities.

or they can't implement it if someone asks about it, because then it will look like favoratism or something. They have to wait a year or so to fix it.

THE HENDOMAN

 

Frames needs to go away yesterday. the over world and the city scenes need to be as one. you should not be able to tell one from the other. the game is slow - its slow to get involved. It feels empty, there isnt much incentive, and you have to get invested mentally to get in involved. Keep asking myself why am I playing again... Oh the Game looks Great! ....... so does goggle street view.

 

I cannot imagine to miss a corpse to loot. Sorry, scenes are small, Mobs arent that intelligent to hide before dying.
If you loose oversight of what you fighted then you loose 12 Gold and a rusty sword, wow. And because of that we need something strange like sparkles, dust or flies around a dead body?
I just disagree. Sorry.

 

Ummmmmm.....Isn't this why most people play this kind of game? There are myriad games out there that don't make you use your intellect to solve problems! I don't want a game where the only thing to do is mash buttons until my opponent is dead. As far as corpses go, there is already a feature for finding corpses. The Corpses name appears right over it's body. You have to be close enough to the body for this to happen. Use your memory to find them. I get in tons of fights where I can't loot right away. After i've killed everything in the area I backtrack and loot my kills. I'm sure I might overlook a corpse or two now and again but that's my problem. If I want to loot ALL the corpses I killed then I need to either loot them as I killed them or remember where they dropped.

YOU ARE THE AVATAR! You make @redfish 's point by saying this. If you KNOW what garlic looks like in game, you shouldn't need some weird highlighting effect to point it out to you. I find garlic, mandrake, blackpearls,etc., all the time without having the game show me where it is. So, whether the AVATAR is STUPID or not is up to you. Those of us who like a challenge, enjoy exploring and like the UO'ish style of playing don't want to see neon signs pointing to every thing in the game. I cringe when I see that stupid Blue Sparkle with a wave that some NPC's do now. I wish I could cut it off. But, some want to be told which NPC they should talk to and don't want to put the effort in to find the right one.