Darkstarrs comment on MMORPG - My opinion

So, Darkstarr posted a comment to a review of SotA on MMORPG.com. Here is my opinion.

This is the comment:
"https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/comment/7326355/#Comment_7326355"

My opinion:

For years and years some of us here have told the devs about all of the things Darkstarr admits are not good in SotA now. But obvioulsy we were ignored. We told about the quest system, we told about the UI, we told about polishing and even about the sounds. And we were told again and again that we would have to wait or that "80% of the polish comes in the last 20% of development"... Obvioulsy it did not. And people here still say "give feedback". Why when we are ignored?

Also fans still defend the game and the devs. They still say that we have to wait. That it is "normal" for a MMO to be released in such a state, that the devs will continue to work on it etc.

No, it is NOT normal! And no one should accept it as normal. Sometimes I just can't understand you people. The devs charge FULL PRICE for a game in such a state and SELL it as RELEASED and you still defend the game? What is going on with you?

Is it "normal" and "ok" to sell a half-finished product and charge full price for it? Why should anyone in their sane minds accept this? This should have ever been accepted - with no game!

What is going on in the gaming industry? We are charged with full price games and get half-baked products and we are told that it will get better yet our feedback is ignored for year after year? And you guys are still defending this? Really???

I can't and won't accept this. If I have to pay for a game then I expect a finished product, a polished product. If there are some bugs in it, ok. If the devs continue to add additional content with updates, ok. But I can't accept it, if devs release content for a game to finish it AFTER it has been RELEASED! This is ridiculous!

And you still wonder about the negativity this game gets? About the bad reviews? About the declining player numbers? Really? It is a conspiracy? Wake up! Face reality! And think about what you spend your money on.

 

Ohai darki.
Well that is all cool and froody and at least partly true.
Ha, you didn't expect something like that, eh?

Your Statement goes from SotA to a more general perspectiv in the second half of Your Post. Let me hook onto that because imo SotA's issues are general industry issues.
KS, early acces, open development and what not kind of damaged the player/dev relation imo.
There are a lot of reasons for that in my opinion so i am only going to name a few.

At first, open development seems to foster extrem player expectations. The game has to become the one game, the game that beats them all. One game to rule them All! That's of course impossible but if you throw down a couple of hundrets or even thousands of bucks you are unwillig to accept that. Players also are forgetting that the one game is something different for every Player that put down a lot of money. That in return fosters tension in the player base and in the end towards the devs.
Add to that, that people are also forgetting that the money they invested into development is a joke compared to industry Standards. It maybe a lot of money for you but compared to what AAA companys burn on development its just a drop in the ocean. Same goes for the Total amount raised. For you and me That's a lot of Cash. But its nothing compared to AAA game. So frustration is rising once more. Add to that, that you are giving important Feedback (at least you think it is, otherwise you wouldn't give it) and See no reaction... Well, that is the point where frustration turns into open hostility. Moderation and baning only Supports the notion of being a victim.
If we want to connect this to SotA, well, let's just say this happend here.... A couple of Times.

Now let's take a Look at the dev side. You are running a company on minimum budget while you are trying to produce your one game. The game to rule them All! Beside Your Day to Day work you have to manage the expectations of Your customers and continue Fundraising. And you have to manage a lot of different opinions. One players Joy is another players pain. You have to separate the resonable opinions and the valubale Feedback from the pointless ideas and constant complaining.
Inviteably, at some point you fail and the part of the players that feel ignored or that feel you treated them wrong Start to rain **** on you. First only in Your forum, after that on every corner of the Internet where they find people that are willing to listen. And from here on you are caught in a downward spiral where one part of the playerbase will always say 'i told you so! I warned you! But you didn't listen to me!' (no matter if they did so or not). And another part of the playerbase will white knight everything you do. As a person can only take so much negative feedback, there comes a point where you will primarly listen to the white knights.
Add to that the semi professionell communication a lot of KS projects have in common and you are in for a rough ride.

I saw this happening in a lot of KS/ea projects i supported. It's not like this is something new or special about SotA. It's not even the worst i saw so far.
The development and subsequent fail of no man's sky is still a prime example of what wrong expectations and bad communication can do.

In the end, we as players have to ask our selves if we want to continue down the road of open development and KS or not.

PS
Sorry for typos or wrong CAPS because i am on my mobile on my way to work.

 

There is a lot of misinformations in the gamers community, in my opinion

A lot of people just think that every game's price should be around $50. Those persons think that you should get a complete game without any bug after spending that. That's simply NOT how things work really. Every game has a variable developpment cost and a variable player base. And globaly, apart for some indie spectacular successes based on great gameplay or nostalgia, developpment costs has grown much more faster than the player base. The expectations in a part of this base are much higher now than those have been ten, twenty or thirty years ago. For exemple, when people played Ultima 7, everything was based on 2 dimensions : AI & pathfinding, design, no sky "box", animations... Moving your avatar was about drawing something like 12 pictures (or "sprites") when, now, even when you have the game engine done for you, you have to deal with millions of poly and infinite animation variations. If you want to limit the price of your game, either you limit your expectations, either you enlarge your player base. Most AAA games do both at once : they are simplified to the extreme (with linear story telling and as few interactivity as possible) in order to attract even the most casual players, and they pay sometimes more in the advertisement than in the developpment itself. Crowdfunding is probably successful because many players don't like that. And here we are.

Now, some people try to defend that Portalarium had a widely enough budget to build an exceptional MMO and they take Black Desert Online as an exemple to make their point : BDO developpment cost was around $11~12 M according to their CEO, including the game engine cost and the first iteration took 4 years to be developped. Again I saw that argument in the comments behind your link. Let's take a closer look at that. I will here copy paste what I already said on this :

• First, BDO developpers got all the money as an investment from the start without having to keep their public which is rather an advantage when Portalarium had to manage the balance between incomes and outcomes at every single time of the developpment... while trying to publish stable releases for every backer at a very early stage.
• Secondly, people simply can't ask for an interactive & deep RPG experience AND compare the result to the most grinding game I ever played. Sorry to say that, but that's just a big inconsistency. Now BDO is not a bad game. It's beautiful. But there is simply no interactivity with objects in BDO. Every single piece of the game is in an instance. NPCs are used as decorations which are walking in the street without any goal or place to call home. There is no story to take care of seriously. And even their instanced housing is inferior, objectively. Also the $12M doesn't include the cost of developpment after the release and this game has certainly improved a lot since that day.
• Thirdly, and that's the most important, developpment costs in Asian countries are not the same as the ones in the USA or in Europe, by far. Having an apartment in Bangkok costed something like $200 per month, few years ago when an apartment in Austin costs many times this price.

Obviously, this comparison is used by people who have no idea what they are talking about. And that's a very contempary problem : as everyone now have access to every information on the internet, everyone just feel like an improvised expert with very valuable opinions on everything without any mastery of the covered topics.

That's, however, easy to demonstrate : let's take SWTOR as an exemple. This game costed hundreds of millions (more than $200 M if I'm correct). The narrative part of the quests was a big success because of the voices. But not all NPCs were able to talk to you (most of those, the non-quest givers, were just static or loosy animated decorations placed on the ground). Every quest was about to kill/destroy something, go get some ressources or others fedex tasks. The performance was crap to the point that the main PvP zone has been totally closed. The pvp and the high end content could be finished after, at most, ten hours, without any exageration. We simply can't say that this way about SotA, and Portalarium just had not one-tenth of Bioware's budget. And there are some others exemples like that which do a favor to Portalarium's choices.

That leads us to the : "Why SotA had to be an MMO?" part of your usual critics. SotA could have been a single player experience. The developpment costs would not have been that high and an "Ultima 7 recreation" made in the same way than "Wasteland 2" or "Pillars of Eternity" would probably have been a blast. But that was NOT the kickstarter promise. The Kickstarter promise was about a "selective multiplayer game which allow us to play solo or online". The intent was to gather every Ultima and Ultima online fans for one successful project.

I too am disappointed with the state of the game, especially on the story telling part (which is not bad but not satisfying and bugged). But that doesn't mean that the developpers are bad guys. Failure is part of everyone's life. Also, nobody can say that they could have done this another way. Of course, if you think that every time a promise is not fully kept, someone has made fun of you and you just want to show how forseeing you have been to notice that before everyone else, there is no point in this discussion. Here, we try to make SotA a better game, not discuss politics or philosophy.

 

I've also been saying this for a long time but aimed at the detractors that are like an ex boy/girl friend that really cant let go and move on.......

Sure there are issues with the game, but issues that have generally been caused by good intentions. I'm 100% sure the developers have not set out to produce a bad product ( and its not imo, it just needs a bit of tinkering), if they are guilty of anything then that is trying to do too much and not fleshing out everything. I believe the monthly schedules hamper them in making full systems and they get themselves into a non finished/optimised quandary of wanting to get much out for us to enjoy that the quality/finished systems suffer overall. I get their intentions of monthly releases, content for all to enjoy ( lots of it) but if its not perfect it will detract from the overall product as many people will attach themselves to what's not right and forget what's good, its human nature unfortunately ( people like to moan). Also with funding tied to the monthly livestream then i don't see them actually changing this development cycle.

I cant shoot someone for good intentions, and i still can easily see the game being a big success but i do believe less new content is key to making a great overall product, we have enough at moment ( i do) to keep us happy and playing, and if i was a new player or a returning player, lots of new updates are a turn off to me as i haven't a clue what's happening if i do return. Its a lot easier for me to come back to a game if there is one massive update every 6 months or so rather than lots of regular ones but that's a personal opinion and maybe not applicable to all.

The game still has massive potential, personally i would like to see them cut down on the content released each month and to fix and flesh out what we already have. The combat decks are a gem of the game imo, and i would like to see that level of innovation and depth to other aspects of the game, performance for mmo/agriculture/crafting/economy/player control resources/factions/fishing/quest/animal breeding/plant breeding/performance/performance etc before we produce other new things. What i do know is that if they do flesh it all out and make each aspect of the game deep and rewarding, with the content they already have and their plans for the future we are all going to be playing for many years, and its obvious they have not given up theirs and ours dream...

 

I think the review was very fair based on the current state of the game. As for Darkstarr's comments I am actually rather heartened by them as it shows that he and the rest of the team are fully aware of various issues and have a plan and intent to address them .

Hopefully those plans will prove fruitful and successful.

 

I agree with @Lord Darkmoon 's summary.
There's also good explanations by @Earl Atogrim von Draken and Lady @Hornpipe .

SotA helped me to learn a good lesson - don't let nostalgia interfere with money. I supported KS projects before if I liked the ideas and artist and spend more money just to make a project happen. But SotA is the first game I spend a four digit amount on - in the hope of getting a strong story and single player experience.
Where this project IMO failed and still fails is expectation management and community management. After riding the wave of nostalgia and fandom for significant funding you shouldn't be surprised if people become disenchanted if reality catches up and it is not properly explained. If people are then banned or bad communication like Chris' third party board posts happen it turns downhill.
I let people with industry experience comment on the project management. However, I cannot help that the weak points cited in most reviews (UI, Quest Engine, Quest structure, NPC interaction) should have been handled by the same developers that are on board since the beginning. I wonder if you need/can afford a stable team size for so long if your income is limited. Quest Engine and quest-vs-MMO are also topics that sound very fundamental for the design of a game and should have been planned early on. I don't think this ever happened despite the many discussions /warnings here on the forum.

Long story short, unless SotA MMO quickly gets a big fanbase - that spends enough money every month - it at least helped develop KS culture and is a good example for future indie developers of what pitfalls to avoid.

 

Point is - it will only work out if enough people are willing to provide the funding until Episode 2 eventually solves these issue. Darkmoon's post was about his frustration with players accepting half-baked products and still keep the faith (and money flowing)

 

Darkmoon only speaks for Darkmoon and not everyone else.

 

This is the question in every investor's mind : Is this project strong enough to lower my risk if I throw money in it? And by extension, this is true for players as well, especially with RMT.

My opinion is : yes, it is strong enough. Their income do not seem to really decrease : They get almost 100K every monthly telethon when they got 150~180K every quarterly telethon some years ago ; The population in game slightly increase in multiplayer (and that doesn't even count the party or the solo modes) ; and most of all, I had more fun playing this game for 4000 hours than I had with hundreds of hours on MMOs like TESO or SWTOR.

I strongly think that the devs want this game to be fun for everyone, even if that doesn't mean that I agree on everything with them. But everyone is entitled with his/her own opinion. And I perfectly understand why other people can be skeptical. As long as they are not running a crusade, of course.

 

It is. EverQuest went life and was half baked compared (SotA is for my opinion polished to an shine compared)
I was with four releases of online games and each was not as stable as SotA.

Is there still loads to do with SotA?

Absolutly!

Is it worse than others at release? Absoluitly not.

Will i nagg about things that do not work/should be added ?

You can bet on it!

 

I rly love the grind part of the game, its hard to get good at game? Yes! and i love it. The game need to get better UI (Like more costum slots etc etc), the problem with the quest log, and other things, but still, its a great game S2, i just have 2 months at the game and i love it.

 

I think everyone in who actually read the last financial statement Portalarium had to make, knows the current community is nowhere near enough to make this game last. Port needs to react and realize that certain aspects of the game need work. If you have read Blood Bay channel, we will be getting more PVP content and more rewards for PVP, while making the conflict more accsible for casuals as Atos hinted something towards factions. PVP is the biggest driver in modern MMO games. Period. SotA still has potential to appeal to its UO fanbase... Go for it.

 

Source, please ?

 

https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-...exclude&Find=Find+Companies&action=getcompany

You can also have a look at the reddit thread.
The short: $300k/month op cost need to be funded by the players

 

PvP is the biggest thing driving me out of games.
Why should I have the desire to share one server with people who consider this one big arena game and everything(one) in it as valid target?
The days where we where forced into PvP and as mainly non-pvp players easy target for the Lulz are happily gone (and not missed)

 

Well yes I agree in as much as I do believe the devs need to concentrate on getting the the quality right rather than churning out more half baked quantity. If they do that then I think people will support the game enough to get us to Ep2, I am hopeful that Darkstarr's post recognises that but only time will tell.

 

This is true. But their cash reserve still grew from $600K at the end of 2016 to $1,1M at the end of 2017. That means that even without seedinvest, they reach a balance here, am I right ? And now there is the release effect with advertising which will be effective in the coming months. The figures are impressive for sure, but obviously, we don't seem to be in an immediate bankrupt scenario, far from it. Sure the game has to improve to convince a larger player base, but they don't seem to be out of time.

 

No one said that? But glad we can agree that the current pop is nowhere near enough?

 

Yes sorry. I edited my post in the mean time. I'm not sure that the pvp is the ONLY way to go, through.