My crystallised thoughts since I discovered SOTA in 2015

And what part of SotA still needs to be "finished" before it's a playable game?

[edit] In all my decades of software development, I've never seen a piece of software that is "finished".

 

there's some great typed up lists floating around here I'll dig up for you.

But if you've never actually sold a product that functioned the way you wanted it to, or at least the way you promised paying customers that it would. You should probably change careers because that's lazy.

 

I'm not talking about features that are not implemented yet but they would like to implement.

They have always functioned as they were designed, as SotA does. For an indie title with so much breadth and scope, SotA is actually pretty solid.

If you have specifics about features that are implemented and but incomplete then please detail.

 

That's what I mean by finished, the vision of the project was met. The game currently doesn't feel like a sandbox and I still don't see the UO connection here, other than the team. Even before the KS they were hyping that up.

So perhaps I'm just hanging onto the past and the years they promised that. But if you pay attention to other forum posts, FB group posts and discord chats, there is almost a unified voice that it doesn't feel like what was promised. So it's either an unfinished game that has almost no cool features, or the direction of it changed and they didn't tell people.

This doesn't mean it's not a fun game for some. And again, maybe I'm being super ignorant, but even the ads they are running for the game, the cool scene about your choices shape the world and you can go multiple routes ect, I haven't actually seen that in game. Like us getting to choose if we want to embrace anger or love in our avatar. Isn't that like, missing from the game? But yet they are paying money to run ads telling people it's something that's possible to do?

Either way, there's a reason the average players connected keeps dropping each day. Slamming our heads together to figure out why people are jumping ship left and right is a benefit to all of us.

Something is wrong here. And IMHO, it's because the foundation this game sits on is generic, minus some super cool things like the way housing decro is done and the overworld map.

 

Not too sure why I am to be terrified.
Steam is not all and cannot count the non-Steam players.

 

I really appreciated all the feedback and comments you guys posted here, @Steevodeevo and others. Despite all critics in last years, we are still here, the game, devs and us, the community. We shape all together a big family still fighting for something we believe in.

Focus your joy on the journey, not the destination

I don't think so, but we are not here to explain why Unity is actually one of the best engines on the market. Every engine has pros and cons, but the good use of the engine/tools determines the final result.

 

I've not yet worked with Lumberyard, and have only lightly poked at Unity. We use our own proprietary engine at my place of employment, so not a lot of chance to really explore these other ones out there. As an end product user, Unity seems to have continual issues with NVidia chipsets if ever you fall off the latest driver versions. Unity is definitely a step behind some other engines in terms of high definition rendering. Yet I still feel like it is a good engine for the job at hand here. It has it's problems but it certainly doesn't suck. But then I tend to be a content is king sort of person. I would turn down a chance to get Unreal level rendering if it meant halving the dynamic objects we could store in POTs/Towns. As far as Lumberyard, at the point they started Lumberyard was most certainly nowhere close to being sufficient to work with.

 

This isn't a problem. Most people play on the game client provided by Portalarium. In fact, certain members have been crossing people over from steam to help with some technical issues.

 

Yep, but also fair to say Unity is a step foward compared to some other engines in lot of things. So, if we just want to talk about HDRP*, can we say Unity sucks? no, not the best but Unity is one of the most improved engines in last two years. Unity has some bad things, but we could make a list of bad things too about UE or any other modern engine.

Games like The Forest or Escape from Tarkov are two good examples of what you can achieve, I have played worse games from AAA studios.

* HDRP: High definition Render pipeline.

 

while we’re all discussing this. I feel launch was more moving from early access/alpha into what would be conceived as a beta. Once they finish un-cloning zones to be what they have intended them to be, finish adding mechanics to items they’ve added to the game for founders packages, final pass on all skills to make sure they all function as intended, pretty much get all the placebos out of the game and replaced the what is intended.

I’ve been steadily playing for the past 5 months. Love the idea of the game, also backed project gorgon and shards online. I occasionally log into those to check them out (always come back to sota because it’s in theory what I want from a game) but to say Sota is a launch ready is like saying both project gorgon and legends of aria could launch tomorrow and the market should just accept it :/ I joke with my friends that one day when shroud of the avatar: a realm reborn launches it will be the perfect game.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful to anyone that is extremely tied to the game, as I love this game a lot and want to see it become an amazing adventure with naval combat, fishing you’d write home to mom about, treasure maps w/ shovel you could throw in your hands and dig up a chest, throwing two horses into a stable to breed and sell the offspring etc. just the realm of ideas I’ve seen are amazing and this community is awesome. I just want a “finished” launch not something that welcomes evolving the mmo market into No man’s sky kind of idea of think “at least you got a platform, expect stuff later”

Sorry for the rant <3 you all.

 

It certainly seems to be the most popular.

 

And I hope that is the case, it's just people moving from steam to the SotA launcher. Then it only appears bad to people who are interested in the game and check the numbers before buying (which is a very large number of Steam users though). But if it's not just people moving away from steam to the launcher, then it would also mean we could assume the launcher numbers are declining along with Steam.

It just worries me because it's a steady decline each cycle, the random bumps higher are not happening right now. And I check it every day because if it falls below the pre-launch numbers I'm afraid that's the proverbial "point of no return".

 

I know Lumberyard was not an option, I was just taking a light poke at the fact Richard's friend Chris Roberts (who is in charge of Star Citizen) switched engines to Lumberyard. Plus I'm sorta an Amazon fanboy at this point, so let's just call it bias, haha.

 

This journey, as the game organically continues to expand, will be remembered.
Mark my words...
Already strories are told of the early years; monuments constructed and feats attained but forgotten before permanence, before the Second Shardfall.
These tales will be transcribed and remembered...
Perhaps the impact of a third shardfall or other cataclysmic catastrophe like an erupting volcano or terrible tsunami can be mitigated.

 

Only MMOs I've really enjoyed more than SotA have been UO, SWG, LotRO (before first expansions). I've played hundreds of MMOs, and been a developer for a couple.

WoW felt incredibly smooth/polished with a great user interface for the time it released, but the game play was boring after about 100 hours in my opinion. I think it continues to dominate because of its polish, accessibility, and marketing, but people are growing tired of its game play.


I think SotA is really just missing polish to a few in-game systems, a cleaner, more intuitive user interface, better guides/documentation on the official website and in-game, and some damn consistency when it comes to terminology. I think the team needs to freeze features for a couple sprints, and have some business meetings to get everything consistent and sensible.

For a game where we are expected to discover things on our own, it seems very non-intuitive - and at times conflicting. Most players don't have hundreds or thousands of hours to spend performing trial and error experiments to figure out how mechanics really work - often contrary to how they are explained.

Game has a ton of potential, and I understand why they felt that they were ready to release - they met their KS goals - but honestly, a lot of players that showed up for release won't be giving the game another look in the future after being disappointed - unless there is some significant money pumped into marketing exhibiting a new polished look along with exciting features (sailing could be big)

The long loading screens are still exhausting. They need to get those under 5s. As beautiful as the overworld mode is, I think it really is damaging to the experience of the game feeling like a connected open world that you get with basically every other modern MMO. It's unfortunate in my opinion that SotA adopted the overworld as a game feature.

Also, the in-game map is crap. It's essentially an embedded web browser navigating to sotamap.com. This feels extremely amateurish.

And for crying out loud, fix the bugs with the quest journal. I still have multiple entries even after resetting quests after R53, and redoing the main storyline.

 

Amen, friend. I don't get it. I never understood why they don't just take the losses and move on. Crowdfunding something is an incredibly risky thing! You are putting money on something that has a real chance at not being exactly what you want it to be. Just move on already... *Fortunately* most people here are really good people, and are just trying to help make a great game, along with some really incredible developers that we have here.


By the way, OP is a wonderful post! Very well thought out, and well said!