Compliments and criticisms and suggestions

COMPLIMENTS and CRITICISMS and SUGGESTIONS

Overland map
Worked as intended without problems. Movement from hex to hex could use a speed increase. The map needs some colour and detail, perhaps indicative of the contents or layout of the hexes.

Combat
Worked well.

Multiplayer
Worked as intended and ran smoothly/fast under Windows 8

Stability/performance
The game seemed far more stable, and playable than the previous releases. Credit to the devs (using Win 8 this time instead of Vista). I was able to play along without show-stopping problems. Transitions from scene to scene had no issues in R4.

Graphics
Looked excellent, vibrant, lively. I like vibrant colors.

Conversation system
I am of the opinion the conversation system will be the jewel in SotA's crown. (It needs some refinements though). I understand some people don't feel this way, I hope they wait a few more iterations before they decide. All though, I wish the dialogue also appeared above the head of the NPC speaking.

Loot
Looting worked well and as expected.

Crafting and housing features
Crafting and decorating aren't my forte. I'm a fighter

Aesthetics / movement / controls
Need more variety of plants/trees.
Cave passages seemed too narrow. Also often had trouble discerning where the walls end and floor begins when racing through etc.
Walking up and down stairs is a bit sketchy. I think we should 'optionally' be able to just click on the stairs and be teleported either up or down them, as with ladders.
Please please include a 'cross-hair' in front of the avatar for movement and targeting.
Please include the ability to look directly up. And the ability to look around simply by mouse movement, and move forward by clicking only the right mouse button. Freeing the left button for interactivity.

Party system
I didn't test.

Swimming
Swimming worked very well. Except for one occurrence when in Owlshead my character walked on the surface of the water instead of swimming in it. It was a MIRACLE! That was the only issue.

Hex boundaries/limits
There should be some sort of distinct wooden or stone fence indicating the outskirts of the hex you are in that cannot be traversed beyond, to save you walking up and having to test every inch. Also, the entrance/exits to hexes should be clearly marked by a distinctive archway or such.

Crates
Please make it possible to open crates and barrels and look inside without having to smash them to pieces. Not vital just a personal preference.

Shopping
I really liked how this was implemented. Excellent!

Overall impression
(taking into consider the very early implementation of the systems I think a 9/10 is fair)
I was impressed by the graphic quality, and stability improvement made etc
I think we can look back on R4 as a positive experience.
There are a few niggling issues with systems being in very early stages of development, but I don't consider those faults, as they are still works in progress. Well done!

 

I like this format, so I'll just piggy-back on this thread with my own impressions.

Overall
Very impressive amount of features and content for a pre-alpha. Most core systems represented in some way.
I'm not "feeling the Ultima" yet, but I'll admit that's my own desire. If this game becomes its own thing, I'm curious to see what that is. For what it's worth, Ultima to me was never about the systems.

Map
The concept is interesting - curious to see what's done with the idea of exploration via instanced zones.

Multiplayer / Groups
Seems to be enough in place to foster basic MMO group experiences. Was good to see folks gathering and sharing information. Ran smoothly for me.

Stability / Performance
Both very good - this is huge.

Graphics / Characters
I think a distinct, memorable style needs to be developed and applied globally. Currently the style and quality varies greatly.

Conversation / Questing
Not a lot of affection for this system in its current form, but with usability concerns addressed I think it could suffice.

Crafting
Seems a standard model, and is coming along well. I enjoyed this.

Housing
As the poster above, housing isn't something I have much interest in. Seeing a huge variety of homes in proximity to each other does seem odd though, like different booths at a carnival rather than a themed area. So, as a "housing spectator," I think some zoning laws are needed.

Movement / Controls
Controls seem standard, didn't have any issues learning them. Movement does not feel reliable or natural yet. The claustrophobic dungeons made me fight the camera and controls when navigating.

Looking forward to the next release!

 

Excellent!

 

@ OP,

worked well?? Did you play the same release as the rest of us? Yipes! I'll assume that was some form of typo

 

Was looking for a thread like this, so I'll hop on the bandwagon.

Spoiler: ranting feedback

Combat
I managed to find and have to interact with monsters that:

​

were able to attack me, but I could not attack them​

were alive, but had corpse containers​

were dead, visually, sliding corpses on the ground, but attacking me​

could range attack me, but I could not range attack them.​

I could range attack, but they could not reach me.​

could not pathfind to me, if I was on anything but the literal ground.​

could not be hit, without a weapon​

could not be hit, with a weapon​

removed 1/3 of my health in a single hit, with full augmented plate armor​

had infinite skins/scraps, for skinning​

after I "killed" them, they got up again 5 minutes later and attacked me, even if I was not close enough for proximity aggro.​

had arrows stuck in the air, literally frozen in time & space, dozens of them, until I re-zoned, after attacking them with a bow.​

it was always easier to run past, rather than fight, to get to resource harvesting​

fought with other monsters/animals, and were far more effective at killing than I was.​

chased all the rabbits, six spiders at once! quite the benny hill moment.​

---
Figuring out harvesting was a bit of a chore, but other players helped. Once the tools were on the hotbar, it became less of an issue, but the harvesting animations were the #1 cause of my character being unable to move, and requiring a client kill to recover.
I knew which trees were harvestable because of the videos showing the exact same zone last year, with the exact same tree, last year. Most players didn't know this, though, so there was forever people asking why they couldn't chop down trees with their harvesting axe. Similarly, cotton bushes were unlabeled and unknown, I can't imagine that was discovered by anything other than random chance that this bush out of all the other bushes was actually a cotton bush!
No visual change for the cotton bushes, after harvesting, was a bit disappointing.
Being unable to highlight or see, even temporarily, all the harvestables nearby, was unfortunate. That would be a nice feature.

If the intent is that the hotbar be used for multiple purposes, there's going to need to be a lot more slots, if harvesting is going to be there with potions, items, food, drink, consumables, spells, whatever other things all competing for hotbar locations.

The wand was a neat weapon, until I discovered the particle effect for the energy ball was shown only to the wielder. That was quite disappointing, even my party couldn't see it. When multiple players were using wands, the last caster got the energy ball emitter, rather than there being one per player, that was weird. What that meant in practice was that even though I was using a wand, my energy ball would emit from another user of another wand, in another part of the scene, nearby.

Weapon stats appear to make no difference, so far. I tried every weapon I could find, and fight lengths were the same variation. Again, no way to offer constructive of specific feedback without a combat log with numbers in it.

There appears to be weapon delay, but it's not enumerated on the weapon stats. If all weapons are the same delay, ok... but.. that seems very unlikely. Hiding the (potentially) most important stat like this is a bad precedent, given how other development teams have handled this exact same situation in the past.

Attempts at testing the difference between avoidance and absorption from armor were inconclusive / showed no difference. Again, damage taken & defensive prowess were apparently the same, with the feedback available.

I have grave concerns regarding the ability for new players to outfit themselves, given the rather high resource requirements & initial cost for crafting, and the relatively low resource generators, from harvesting & combat. Of course, if it's not a design goal that all new players craft their own gear, then everything is on track.

Having gold drop, directly from creatures, seems like a very bad idea if the typical MMO hyper-inflation is going to be avoided. Infinite gold taps = overflowing sinks. If this is "just for testing" or "it's just pre-alpha" then put an NPC in owl's head that gives a player 100g every time you talk to him, and remove the gold from humanoids.
I suspect having humanoids drop gold, instead of resources, is actually the plan though, and it's a bad plan if the goal is to try and really address long term hyper-inflation.

I was disappointed that ~all the content shown to date was in the six month demo (or earlier) last year, and the only new scene was the forest village. Speaking of the forest village, it's a bit of a mystery why it was in R4.. It has no NPC's. It has no infrastructure. Does that mean it's more prone to being sieged, or there's no reason to siege it? Why are there watchers there, but nothing to power them?

Given the current R4 design of "one entrance" to hexes, (despite they having six sides and many possible entrances) all I can think about is zone camping, bottlenecks, and competition for lot location. It takes several minutes to run from the zone-in of any current civ hex to the farthest possible lot. This, currently, affects the desirability of lot locations to be the nearest to the zone-in. There is no other consideration for vendor merchants. Further, the larger lots are LESS desirable, as they are typically the farthest away from zoning in. Without mark & recall (even if only to/from civ-hexes) to balance this issue, we're in for a whole world of pain on this topic.

Nameplate visibility distance was adjusted, and I hated that change. It was quite jarring to be unable to see the names of people who were less than a few meters away. Further, without a target window, and without the ability to target players, objects, animals and monsters that were visible, no matter how far away, this was frustrating. Being able to target NPC's, but unable to see their name, that was frustrating too.

As others have mentioned, much of the content was quite cramped, and this lead to skeletons jumping through walls/doors, being unable to see anywhere due to overwhelming forest/trees, being unable to determine if a cave continued or not, and so on. The bandit caves in particular were just... buggy like crazy. Non-aggressive bandits, wolves behind barriers that still tried to pathfind to attack, unusable crafting tables?

What's the deal with the physics enabled pine cones? Why such a computationally expensive feature, with seemingly no function? It's a nice to have, don't get me wrong, but... it seems out of place given the ever-present desire to reduce rendering/gpu/cpu load. Now, if you could light them on fire and throw them, sure, all good!

Conversations; I'm finding myself less and less tolerant of the ongoing issues with the conversation system, in particular, NPCs that either don't know what you're talking about, despite having a highlighted word (seriously, what's that about?!) or NPCs presuming you've had a conversation previously that you haven't. Once I come across those recurring bugs, I just don't want to talk to any more NPCs. Conversations in the bandit caves were particularly annoying, presuming all sorts of things about sashes I had no idea about, but sure, sell me some, I guess?

I'm not sure why I would know about a POI if I hadn't been to the hex on my own, or an NPC hadn't told me about it. I mean, sure, if I actually travel through it, show me a cave or dungeon, but otherwise, nope, how can I have knowledge of that region until I explore it? Just seems a bit off.

 

vjek,

Thanks for the constructive combat feedback. There is still a *ton* of work that will be going into AI combat - you'll see some solid changes for R5.

 

Seriously, good job vjek. You just saved me a lot of typing! I hope the devs actually read it in its entirety.

edit: Hah! Ninja'd by Scrambler! Good to see a dev response!

 

[quote="vjek, post: 153355, member: 17030] Speaking of the forest village, it's a bit of a mystery why it was in R4.. It has no NPC's. It has no infrastructure. Does that mean it's more prone to being sieged, or there's no reason to siege it? Where are there watchers there, but nothing to power them?[/quote]

My guess was that they just threw that 'village' in to give more plots for people to try housing on. I'd be surprised if there was more to it than that.

 

Well, there was mention of entirely player-made towns at one point. I believe that is what such a map is supposed to represent.


I did like the layout, even with all the houses in place it still felt very foresty and atmospheric.

There was also a Town Lot right next to the map entrance, which gives me the impression the devs do understand that those will be considered by many as prime locations.

 

Running through the dungeons, I felt pretty claustrophobic. It seemed like the structures were designed without a character model for scale. That kinda persists in the housing, as well. Most bedrooms are so small, they look more like a nook than anything else.

In the dungeons, the enemies were constantly clipping through walls. I mentioned in another thread how I fought and killed the Lich through a doorway so small, he couldn't hit me. After he died, I couldn't get through it, either. The camera was constantly colliding with the walls and ceilings and I had to keep the distance to my character pretty close.

I liked the layout of the field scene with the elves and the tall grass. If you could crouch, you could really hide in that tall grass and waylay someone.

The jumping is still non-intuitive. There's no accurate feedback of how long to hold the button down while running in order to achieve the height you need to get over a simple fence. As a result, I end up just banging my knees on the fence over and over again. It seems overly gamey; like there is an invisible 'jump' meter that fills up as I crouch and ready myself to spring into the air. I'd rather just have a standard jump height with a single press of the space bar.

Every time I picked up a weapon, I dragged it over my character and he auto-equipped it; which was not great in the instances I wanted to keep the weapon I had, but wanted to loot quickly. I liked the old-school Ultima design of the coffin/crossbones look. A button to 'loot all' would be nice, since the constant dragging from loot (and on crafting tables) makes me feel repetitive strain coming on.

 

Yea, I think these sizes would work well with an overhead view, but with the third-person camera, it can make things claustrophobic.

I totally solo'd the Lich three or four times using the same strategy. I attacked him through the doorway and he never attacked me. Every so often the mages would appear and shoot at me, but by the time I was half-health, they were killed by the spikes. Never did get a cool looking skull torch from them.

Yea, crouching would be great. It would be even more awesome if NPCs had a chance to not see you within their radius if you were crouched.

I agree jumping needs work. I have gotten used to the press-to-build system, but it seemed inconsistent at times. I might prefer to have press to jump, with the length of the press to determine height. Some people think that the press-to-build is more RPG-like and makes you think ahead, but I think there is not enough ability to react at an instant.

I HATE AUTO EQUIP! It's so annoying in the middle of a scenario. I think the only time you should swap gear is when you drag onto your character sheet.

There was a "Take All" button, but it wasn't in the gump mode; it was in the list mode. I was in list mode from the beginning, and didn't realize that the gumps were still there until I saw other people's screen shots. I don't know how to toggle it.

 

There was a toggle in the "Options" menu.

I will take this moment though and agree with the other users, who have suggested that it should be a persistent option on each container, rather than some obscure global option in the menu.

 

Sadly I don't have much time to play much at the moment, but I liked pretty much what I've seen.

Two little Criticisms from me:

1. Graphics need Optimization to run smoother in town or when more players are at the screen (I know this is being worked on all the time; but at the moment playing in Open Mode isn't much fun, because it's getting terribly slow and my machine shouldn't be that bad)

2. Jumping: I don't really like the jumping mechanic at the moment, because I never know how high my Avatar can jump and how long (just like in most other MMOs). I'd rather prefer the Ultima IX way of jumping/climbing, where I knew exactly, where I could jump and climb without have to trial and error all the time...

 

Hi, yes, it was a typo/cut-and-paste error on my part. Combat was as you all have described here.


Regards,