Longtime Ultima player fundamentally disappointed

No i meant the loa-sota fued going on lately. Its like a cooler ready to get dumped on whichever coach wins *ducks*

Also reminiscent of the albion vs sota fued that took over the forum a while back.

Good time to sell rockin chairs and shcatterguns

 

Ah! Thanks for clarifying that sweetie!

Yeah, it is really silly. People are different and enjoy different things. Arguing one is better than the other is purely subjective to the player

 

so right @Addison

 

For me, i repeat, if i spend a lot of time to craft, mine, gather, farm, etc etc, for make an armor, weapon, buy various object useful or for decoration only, i can enjoy this, i can see the beauty of the graphics....when i'm in combat, i can draw my weapon and make many hit, fast, make combo, use spells with a good animation, etc etc....LoA don't have good graphics of object, like windows paint drawing, LoA don't have good combat, rapid, good animation....when in a game you left this two important thing, what remain?.....ok remember the past, but for this, there is much more better title at disposal, for why i buy LoA when i have SOTA?.....this is the question, for remember the past, or for return in the past?
Sorry but this is my opinion, SOTA is the future Ultima, LoA is only a good indie game remember Utlima Online.

 

It's all a bit like brexit, everyone has an opinion on what it should be but no one else has the exact same opinion so everyone is a little dissapointed.

 

Ooh ooh! I can throw rocking chairs around, grunting aggressively and occasionally breaking them apart while screaming at the sky then proceed to rage quit for two hours before returning and making an excellent point that stops everyone in their tracks and makes them think, wow she's right and I am on her side now?!

 

Yet that never stopped you arguing on here.

Btw the sota raw crowd thinks that LoA is “dead”. So theres at least a silver lining today for me. lol

Legends of Aria is dead, bro !!!

 

Does it seem like that, my goodness that has never been my intention. As I stated in my earlier post I certainly like a lively discussion but I apologize if it came across as being argumentative.

What's sota raw? Don't bro me mister I'm probably old enough to be your mother!

 

What's the point of screaming your very personal statements and try to present them as the pure truth?
Sota lacks on many things but it's funny in its way.
LoA may as well but players there are thousands, the business model is way more sustainable and cheap to maintain. They got prolly less than 1/10 of the budget and it's still on early access.
This "my game is better than yours" is childish and not based on ANY objective data, can you recognize that?

PS: Sota raw is highly accurate on the data provided and everybody knows that. You may not like the "way", but infos are highly accurate

PPS: I'd like to remember YOU the actual situation: - - nonUS players with 130+ ping,
- terrible desyncs. I mean a COSTANT "micheal jackson's moonwalking animations and movements"... much fun in pvp
- no PvP updates since months and no clear plans in the near future (who remembers castle sieges advertized on telethon in the 2018spring),
- no UI draggable
- no repair locked gear,
- half NPC zones undecorated,
- massive perfomances issues that will barely be adressed in their totality,
- Quest Journal ...
- Foggy combat formulas not clearly given on website
- plain character customization: magic resistances provided by the magic itself, masteries affecting builds relatively, beside maybe 5-6 schools. 3 stats are not enough to balance combat mech. 1 resource (focus) both for melees and magic users it's hard to balance.
- crit dmg= base dmg + x, where x= 1->infinite: welcome oneshotters (desync oneshots are like caviar)
- looting ransoms require 3 clicks on 2 different UI windows. So you stop fighting to loot people. And you die by that. Imagine how this could be tolerated in gw2/daoc/eso games by mmorpg players. I'll tell you: disinstall.
- " Second Life/The Sims " like priorities and expansions. How many time we've heard "FISH" the last year?
- unacomplished promises: all of you Dukes know that..
- 3 ish animations totally for kinda 100+ spells
- no sheated weapons in 2018
- plate stealthers
- stealth broken with any random cone dmg
- stealth broken with 0 fall dmg
- target lost after exact 45 yard
- softlock target switch
- CCs breakable/ CCs chainable
- RMT allowed but not in the EULA

When you make things very bad the first time, sooner or later you gonna make them again. And the time (aka money) spent is doubled.
I trust devs and i honestly see their will of improving sota. Heck it's very funny for me but I'd really like a "deep quality overview not affected by yesmen or people outside the business since a decade"

 

As long as they break its fine. There wont be a steady market for them if they never need replacing

 

Its really easy to make a list of the problems with sota,

but I could easily list all the things it does well, too. And feeling sorry for the Dukes, the richest and most privileged players in game ? I feel more concerned for the newbies with nothing actually, since a lot of my fun in game comes from my well appointed house.

You say I only present my opinion as truth and went on to do the very same thing. Fact of the matter is we dont have enough players right now as everyone knows, and the stuff that goes on over there where people still obsessed with the game actively discourage people from playing hasnt helped. With even just 10,000 more players Port could hire more people and speed it up.

It isnt like they’re Bethesda, man. Or Blizzard. Theres like 16 people there, and I think they’ve done on the whole an amazing job considering the headwinds. What other game do I have what I have in Sota ? none.

 

List for LoA:

Negative :

-Terrible PG like the first game of 1990
-Armor and robe and weapon make with dpaint of Windows
-Mount is ridicolous, with bad movement, like the first RTS on Pentium
-Awful houses, when SIMS 1 is more better
-Combat??.....=) don't spend a word is better, Pool of Radiance of SSI in the era of Amiga 500 is an action compared.
-Spells??.......=) don't me laugh the movement of the hands when cast is near a comic movie, and the spells is nothing of special
-the animation of all the character, monster and npc is something remember the first rpg on Amiga 500
-and last but not least.....boring, boring, boring and boring, the combat is only a boring thing, for kill some mob, the risk is to sleep in front of computer.
-PVP?.....=)....nice to be killed by miniatures, made with the paint windows, and with a combat system like a rts/turn based/ rpg =(

-the rest is ok, for a game like a title of the first rpg on Amstrad is ok.

Positive:

- Fishing very good
- the raining is better
- weapon on back, but with this graphics make with dpaint, is futile.


Continue?.....no better i stop, ok SOTA have problem, SOTA have many thing to fix, SOTA have many job on optimization and upgrade graphics and content, but SOTA is a big project in continue expansion
LoA is only an indie project, copy and paste of Ultima Online, this is more simple to do, SOTA have more complex combat, mechanics, Housing, Crafting, all in a 3d real Ambient, very complicate to
port an Ultima style game, with this features.

SOTA can become great one day with the job of devs and the patience and collaboration of all the Avatar

LoA can become.....nothing, the game don't is possible to become nothing better than that, the road is marked for this title.

I sure the time give me reason one day....

 

Ok I give up. Everything i mentioned are just lies.
2 + 2 = fish

 

I've stayed off this thread because it just seems like the same old argument that doesn't really achieve anything.
Sota vs. LoA are apples and oranges. The only reason LoA keeps getting brought up is because the Sota fanbase consists of a large number of former ultima players and it is indisputable that LoA is a much more "ultima online" feeling game. Almost feels like playing UO reskinned in a lot of ways. So if you're looking for a new UO, that's a better fit, I don't think anyone's going to argue with that.

Personally, I reject criticism of Sota that is grounded in the fact that Sota is not UO.

Yeah. This is about the only bit of the opening post in this thread that is correct.

The rest betrays a lack of general understanding about Sota or certainly a lack of playtime.

Like this statement. Are we playing the same game here? There's a handful of these quests in the starter areas to kind of get newbies situated, but that's about it. Did you not play past the outskirts? Quests in Sota need work, no denying that, but they are a largely ignorable part of the game. Led around by the hand? I ignored the quests - completely - for well over a year and just played in the sandbox. There's loads of quests I still havent done to date. I haven't done them because they are pointless and have no rewards, but I've never felt compelled to do them or felt like I was in a themepark going from quest hub to quest hub. Not even close.

I think all games have their own quirks. Sota's combat/deck system and its depth and complexity is unique and I've never seen it before, and I've pretty much gone down the games lists on mmorpg websites. The lack of hardcap is something "most games" don't have. Its also got more robust crafting than most of those titles. While some of the systems (such as the virtue system) are of minimal significance in the overall scheme of things, the basics are there. Non-instanced housing is something you don't see often, either. Maybe because its impractical. There's a lot of things in Sota that aren't in other games - not all of them are GOOD things mind you - but you can't say they aren't original.

And this is where your ignorance of Sota becomes blindingly obvious. Combat here is nothing whatsoever like Guild Wars / GW2. Unless you never got out of the outskirts and never learned about deckbuilding. Which seems to be more and more the case.

And this isn't your fault - if the true complexity of the game isn't evident by the time you've gotten bored with the game, that does indicate there's a fundamental problem with the game and how it introduces itself to new players. Perhaps with the addition of outskirts and familiar fetch quests in the very early gameplayto try and give new players something familiar Sota is shooting itself in the foot. When I started playing we had none of that. It was, here's a rusty sword, go save the world. Almost every negative review I've read (and lets face it, there have been no shortage of them) betray a simple lack of understanding of the depth that exists here. And some of these people played 100 hours and still didn't get to it. By trying to conform to the expected perhaps Sota's hidden its true beauty in a really ugly dress and nobody asks it to dance.

Agree with your conclusion, but not the reasoning. The million-minor-quest-task-tree is not a thing here. Not beyond starter areas. Even the main questline and all its side bits can be done in a (very long) day if you know what you're doing. The story/quests has never been what its about, they are window dressing. Its a shame. It could be better. But not because of fetch-quest dilution, its because of really bad quest interface/ui/journal/etc. You spend so much time fighting with the "guess the magic keyword" crap getting the same dialogue repaeted to you (or the npc frustratingly not recognizing half the words you say, even when you're parroting their own text back at them) that you miss the context or story and just enter brute force click mode to try and power through it. It needs serious work. Devs have acknowledged that. Its getting revamped. Hopefully they take the years of feedback/frustration into account in the redesign. No denying that story presentation/quests are a problem. But they make up about 1% or less of what I've spent my time doing in this game, so its hard to judge the game as a whole by that only.


The main thing your disappointment, even if some of the reasons are based on inaccuracies, is that Sota doesn't present itself well to a new audience. I've seen several iterations of the 'starting area' and I still think its bad. Its something to "get through" so you can get to the better bits, but a lot of people get stuck in it. I have tried to bring a few friends here too, and they get stuck in the frustration loop of broken quests, outskirts back-and-forth, oblique npcs,etc. I have to pull them out of there before they ragequit and show them the rest of the game.

I liked it much better when I spawned with my rusty sword, wandered over to Soltown, talked to a guy who told me to go someplace I didn't know where it was, and wandered off into the wilderness to harvest resources, then wandered back to town to the crafting table and discovered my recipes. There wasn't this whole scavenger hunt aspect or mess of teachability, I could just do my thing and figure it out. The implementation of some systems, which were motivated by very good reasons, have really made a poor impression for early game play.

The new player says "how do I make/do....x?" and are told they have to travel across the map and farm cash to buy a recipe and then they need materials from a zone that's too hard for them that they have no idea how to get to and then well....you see what happens from there. We've lost the early magic of discovery by trying to shoehorn people through outskirts and by having glowing blue quest indicators (that half the time are broken or point you at wrong thing). Honestly if the game had been like this when I started I don't know if I'd have stayed long enough to get to the good bits either.

There's been so much focus on the new player experience to try and get people into the game and make it simple/easy to understand but it seems that this experience has gotten so generic that now the feedback we see over and over in reviews is that the game is generic!

 

Yep.

Oh, it's just a another MMO syndrome. And they can't be blamed for it.

Zero deck building tutorials.

Zero interaction with the sandbox or crafting until many forced hours of combat, a part of the game one can ignore for years to come if one wants to.

Those so called tests at the start should not be dividing people up into 3 identical combat fetch quest groups, they should divide between combat, crafting, and social.

Courage takes you to Solace Bridge Outskirts for a combat start, then shuttles you manually to the other two.

Truth takes you somewhere to meet people and socialize / RP.

Love takes you to Soltown and gives you the Outskirts equivalent of crafting quests. Not one quest, but a series of them.

The early perception suffers horribly from forcing people to play a tiny sliver of the whole game, and only that sliver.

 

Personally I didnt think the quests were that difficult. I didnt get stuck either when I was doing it (during R52-R55), theres a million youtube walkthroughs.

Sometimes I feel like people dont want to put the minimum amount of effort into questing these days, they want it served up on a platter and freak out at the slightest difficulty. It certainly isnt like it was in the old days, when we relished completing something after months.

I do agree the storyline itself didnt make much sense, wasnt impressive by modern standards, and felt half baked, but the general idea itself is decent, the obsidians are cool, the shattered moon cool. I think the devs need to go play modern RPGs like Dragonquest 12 and quit with the Red Dead Redemption 2 for a while.

 

It certainly IS like the old days in one way:



Every time I try to quest (I did finish the storyline, and occasionally consider running through it with an alt) I get about ten minutes in and go.... ugh.... why am I killing my eyeballs for this?

 

I don't think the difficulty of the quests is the issue.
I think its the type of quests - talk to this person, go here, fetch this, click this. The quests were "mostly functional" by launch but there were a lot of edge cases in which they would break, either to the player doing something in the wrong order and hosing their quest journal, or due to bugs. The fact that there are youtube walkthroughs doesn't make it okay. I personally hate/refuse to go watch a video on how to do something, especially something in the starter scene of a new game, I simply will not bother if it is so bad that I need a walkthrough to do it because I either missed some nuance, something wasn't explained, my journal was wrong, my compass waypoint was wrong, or I couldn't guess the magical keyword the NPC wanted.

I would have no problem whatsoever if questlines were epic, multi-threaded, multi-scene adventures that took considerable time to complete (more like the main storyline).....IF the rewards were worth it. In SotA, the quest system quite brutally displays the devs' lack of knowledge of their own game. Consider the 'cabalist kill quests' - where you'd end up with 20+ entries in the log to kill a particular cabalist or group of cabalists. Half of these couldn't be turned in even though your quest log directed you to do so, it was unclear who you had killed and who you hadn't, and considering the difficulty of sieges in general and cabalists in particular, the XP/gold rewards for completing this quest was downright insulting. The real reward for finishing this was getting all the clutter off your screen. That was literally the only reason to do it.

You can't present a player with a quest to do that's going to take them an hour of running around/puzzling it out, and have the reward be less than killing trivial monsters for 3 minutes. That's just common sense. If the quests were interesting, progressive, or significant from a storyline perspective, maybe. But the storyline itself is completely lost in the frustration/hassle of fighting through the bugs, the keywords, etc. And as I said, devs have acknowledged this and are doing a rewrite. However until then, at least in my personal experience trying to get friends into the game, that's been the biggest issue.

I had one friend who came in, started in highvale, messed around for a bit and went through the motions, all very generic and same-as-other-games-ish, but less linear (had to run around in circles a lot). He had nonstop compass issues - I told him to ignore compass. He had keyword issues, we had to play the brute force keyword game to try and get him back on track. When he finished highvale, he had a compass indicator to use the lunar rift. And no matter where he went to try and find it, the compass pointed him somewhere else. Finally, after not being able to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do, or how the rift worked, he logged off and never came back. I mean, the broken journal/quest stuff on its own isn't a catastrophic problem, but when a player enters the game and is led around by the nose from quest to quest, they tend to expect that sort of thing. And when it abruptly ends, or leads you nowhere, well...now what? Honestly I think the early quests give players the wrong idea about the game. When I started we had none of that, it was wander off and do what you wanted, and I've always found that to be a lot more fun.

I'm not saying the concept of outskirts is bad, but you're left with a bit of a conundrum : SotA is trying too hard to say "I'm different" with my quest system while simultaneously churning out the same sort of quests you get anywhere - forgettable npc, forgettable dialogue, forgettable task - but with a clunky, awkward, frustrating quest acquisition/redemption system and a horrible journal system. The early vision of 'conversations' with npc has been diluted down to where it might as well just be click click click accept. The responses/"ai" simply isn't fleshed out enough for it to feel like a conversation. So either fix that, and have the 'unique quest experience' you want, or or get rid of it and make it straightforward but deal with the 'its generic' feedback. Personally I'd prefer the former, but at the moment it feels like we're trying to have it both ways and failing at both.

 

Speaking frankly, I love LOA. Out of the many reasons why, here are three:

- nostalgia
- loads and runs smoother (both run Unity)
- fewer instances, a more connected/immersive world

I'm happy people love SOTA and are defending it, I hope SOTA will continue to improve and everyone here will keep being happy. My fondest SOTA memory is with Captain Boris. If SOTA is to succeed, Port has to put the power in its players like Boris Catherine Womby Timelord Sara Pikegirl Mad Hatter (too many awesome ppl I'm missing) who want to make a real impact on Novia.

All the talk about side stuff is unproductive and distracting. Focus on the bugs and game performance and game design.

Edit: 3 more points

1. My heartfelt recommendation is to stop adding content and just focus on design and performance. A house needs to be built on a strong foundation. A foundation built on RMT and greed is not it. This cannot be the legacy of @Lord British

2. A simple survey of # of subreddit subscribers can tell you how healthy a gaming community is.

3. Promises should be kept.

 

And yet LoA is Windows only.