Blood RIver Notes

Blood River notes - This is all stream of consciousness stuff as I experienced it. Didn't go back to edit. Take it for what it is worth.

1. I stepped into a lunar rift to get here. Why is there no lunar rift here that I am stepping out of? Even if it is now a discombobulated one. Not having one sorta blows the idea of how lunar rifts generally work (for me at least). Would some type of moon gate (square glowing door) like effect be better than the current beam in effect?

2.. After the beauty and tranquility of the isle of storms, seeing the number of corpses here is startling. It felt like I was thrown right into the middle of something visually. Nice job!

3. Not sure it would be clear to a new player that some corpses are human, other elves. Should the corpse boxes clarify this instead of just calling them 'corpse'?

4. I cannot get a word in with the scavenger before picking up the sword. When I enter dialog mode, he says he spiel, then the scenes closes and back to normal view. I wanted to ask him questions but could not. I suppose this is by design to get me to grab the sword. But it can feel broken after having such a lengthy dialog with Arabella just seconds before. It works fine after I pick up the sword.

5. In the second floor of the barn to the left, upon entering the scene, three corpses seem lined up in too perfectly neat of a row.

6. In the same barn, second floor, some of the corpses seem to have partially materialized into the structure. Their legs go into the wood beams of the barn floor.

7. In this same barn, the second floor corpses look almost all elven. And there are a lot of corpses here. There doesn't seem to be a reason why so corpses would be in the second floor of a barn. Should there be a dead knight or something more clearly in the middle of them?

8. The color palette of this scene was great on beaming in. I felt that it wasn't a stark contrast in colors from where I had been. Just a start contrast in scene. That's good to me.

9. Viking house forward and on the left upon entering has more corpses semi-materialized in the floor boards.

10. Scavender dialog word 'tidbits' - I could never get this underscored word to show a green cursor. Same with 'Salvage'

11. The Scavenger cannot answer the question: "Where am I?" This seems like a natural question for a new Avatar coming into a strange new land to ask.

12. The far right side of this map - from the direction coming out of the lunar rift - seems to have noticeably less art work development / item placement than the much busier area to the left. Maybe its intended, but I wasn't sure why this part of the scene was needed. I might have missed something but didn't find much here except the Elven mirror of course.

13. A corpse on the road by the fence in this area looks partially materialized into the earth vs. fully laying on the road.

14. Spice Jars A, B, C, D - titles seem unimersive. How about something like red spice jar, yellow spice jar, etc. etc.

15. If I botch my name with Edvard, it doesn't seem that I can get another shot to fix it. He doesn't recogtnize the phrase 'I am NAME' later.

16. Having played through this scene before, and now again, I notice that I find the elven mirror by happenstance, not because I got the right quest text down earlier. That can lead to an early feeling of not knowing what to do but look around.

17. Combat, ug. So leaving the gates, it is not apparent that the wolves are dangerous at first. They do not quickly agro. The cursor does not turn red when hovered. The wolves cannot be easily targeted (shift targeting is not intuitive to a newcomer, IMHO), and when the cursor does turn read, it is tiny. Definitely not intuitive on what is going on for a newcomer. If one doesn't know to hit Z here to fight, it might be confusing.

18. I noticed I suddenly had a lot of skills for the first time....while in battle. I could have looked sooner but didn't. A newbie might not either. Not sure this would be intuitive to my wife as a gamer for the first time. She wouldnt know what button to hit without some up front intro. Now I kinda appareciate why games like WOW give one skill to newbies at a time.

19. Why is the wrecked lunar rift outside the gates and not where I beamed into the scene? (just a question I had when seeing it). Love the remanant magics still active.

20. The farther reaching parts of this scene seem devoid of critters. A bunny might be nice for a new player to test skills on. Or more training dummies.

21. The boarded up exit is not fully displaying. I just saw a few boards floating in the air there. Not a full fence.

22. Overall, the starting dagger quest feels simply transactional. Not like its setting me out on a virtue inspired quest. Is there a way to make it more impactful?

23. Mavros and father at the cave seem meaningless in this scene to a new player. Why is a kid in the war zone? He wont even tell me he is an elf. Maybe I miss something here.

24. Ultimately I started this scene seeing the remnants of a massacre, and I am leaving the scene now not feeling terribly impacted by that (other than the visual change). I think the issue is that the Scavenger, and the Edvard, are too casual. They are not panicked enough, not worried enough, not war weary enough, or whatever, for someone standing in a sea of corpses. Perhaps there is an opportunity to strengthen their story contributions to express more distress, more remorse, more something that we want the Avatar to feel as well too. As is, the underscored text messages lead me to get snippets of info more so than this ... feeling.

25. It feels like there is too much underutilized land around the scene.

26. Its frustrating, and probably confusing to newcomers, to have boarded up scene exits that cannot be exited. I'm tired tonight and it almost made me want to log out instead of figuring it out. Not a good thing for a new player we want to recruit.

27. Edvard told me about the boat at Solace Bridge. But if I forgot that as an overwhelmed new player, I would not quickly find an exist out of this scene. As is, I spent time starting to feel frustrated again as I randomly ran around the scene.

28. The entire scene would have gone better if I had felt better about my hair style!

 

Yes! I agree with this 100%.

 

You made me chuckle, @Beaumaris , with the remark about hair style.

Yes, good points. It is hard to see things with fresh eyes, and I never even got to that cave in the starting scene, only later when any occupants were no longer there. It is too easy to miss that part of the story.

 

If the avatar represents our own persons, who wants to get a shot at meeting Lord British for the first time having a bad hair day? Haha.

What interests me about starting scene design is this question: For an experienced gamer new to SOTA, what makes it compelling enough to cause that player to slow down and smell the roses? Does the story grab the new player enough to make them investigate? If not, will most experienced gamers just power through assuming it is for newbs. If they do power through, does the scene have enough 'trip wires' to cause the player to get what they need before moving on.

From that perspective, I played this scene somewhat powering through it, experiencing a moment of it, quickly writing the 'top of mind' reaction down, then continuing. I had not been here in awhile, so it felt new enough. I poked around a bit, but didn't dawdle. My take away was that if I had slowed down more, the scene would have played more smoothly. But as is, the scene did a good enough job with its trip wires to cause me to backtrack where I needed to. That is good!

What I felt the scene lacks is a compelling reason for a new player to really want to investigate. It started well enough. The visuals of the corpses (a big change from Isle of Storms) caused me to say 'wow, what a mess, there must be a deep story here.'. The visuals suggested a place where stories of virtue had played out. But clicking too many corpses and finding too many carrots quickly changed that for me. Suddenly the scene felt 'repetitive', 'onerous', 'heavy', 'transactional'. My God, I thought, do I have to click on all of these corpses until I find something more than carrots? That was the first derailing moment. The second derailer came with the Scavenger. The Scavenger has a fantastic opportunity to engage the Avatar in a deeper story but really doesnt. I think what happens here is that Arabella, in the scene before, has set up the Avatar to be thinking that choices lie ahead. But there really isnt a choice here. The Scavenger just sends the Avatar on a transactional task: Mirror, dagger, leave.

The impact could be improved by drawing a clear contrast between Edvard and the Scavenger, leading each to share a much different perspective on the scene, and next steps, to the Avatar. The Scavenger could represent pure truth, leading the avatar to discover the truth of a relic (which we can keep) at the gruesome cost of looting all of those corpses to find it. Edvard could represent pure love, leading the avatar to abandon the search in favor of running to get help for those who remain alive for the reward of the town's gratitude. That would be a grand choice. Transactionally, the player would be choosing between shiny loot vs. the hope for something else down the road. Transformationally, the player would experience a choice between virtues.

Overall, starting scenes in general may miss a fantastic opportunity to align what Arabella sets up with what immediately follows. Instead of what we have, what if: 1) Arabella asks questions, 2) lets the Avatar pick, 3) sends the Avatar through the lunar rift, and 4) the Avatar then finds themselves in a 'real' scenario representing the exact scenario Arabella had just described. This would be teaching moment for the new player - that the virtues are not just about answering simple questions, they are about deeds that the player can now participate in. As is, starting scenes can feel more like the start of chain quests that leads elsewhere. They would be more powerful as virtue tales more fully self-contained in the starting scene.

 

'Massacre' seemed like 2 much 2 soon.

 

I fully agree. There could and should be so much more to those quests. Who is the Scavenger? Is there some secret that surrounds him? What if he was responsible for letting the Dark Elves into the village? There could be some side quest with a twist that would add so much to the scene and to the NPC. The same goes for Highvale and the healer. Everything so far seems so straightforward. You get a quest and you do it. There are no twists or suprises that can change the whole quest midway through. Also what happens to the Scavenger or the healer? Will we ever meet them again? How did they escape Solace Bridge or Highvale?
SotA could tell exceptional stories but somehow it doesn't. Quests are straightforward and simple. It is as if they are done in a way so that MMO fans don't have to tinker with them for too long and instead can concentrate on social activities.

 

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/spice-a-b-c-d.17889/

 

Fantastic feedback submitted. Thank you!

 

So, we're going to be doing a pass on Blood River for R32 similar to Solace Bridge this release and I think you'll like what we have planned, but let me hit some of your points already as a lot of what we have in the scene I want to preserve.

Rifts are one-way. It's not a moongate (what is that again? )

Good catch, we'll try to make this very clear.

That is intentional. My original intent was for there to be a realization this was the aftermath of a last stand and what happened afterwards (I did a lot of research on fun places such as Kigali and Srebrenica for this sequence; it's not what I would recommend for light reading). I tried to make it look more of a battle near the entrance, then the further you progress, the less it is a battle and the more it is the remnants of a genocide. In the rework we'll make that explicit.

We're losing the "find the treasures of killed people to advance" plot point entirely and you will have a more sensible reason for being there and progressing through the area.

We originally had the players meet an elven patrol, they were replaced with wolves at the last minute. They'll be elves again and fight smarter. We'll also have the same sort of guided combat you see in Solace Bridge as well.

No room. We have to make the initial experience within the town itself and gated (literally) to advance.

That's the plan.

Easter egg in the current version as a reward for exploring. Will be more pivotal in the new one.