My first time with Shroud of The Avatar.

First and foremost I, like many of you am an Ultima Online veteran. I have been chasing that dragon for longer than I care to admit, playing anything and everything that releases in hopes to recapture the glory that was the first MMO experience. As I have grown older I have come to accept that such a quest is foolish as you will NEVER recapture the joy of your first MMO.

I always knew Richard Garriot (aka Lord British) as the man responsible for one of, if not the fondest of my gaming memories and have followed him around the gaming world with the hope that one day he would take us back to Sosaria. I played around in Lineage when I heard of his involvement and even gave Tabula Rasa a try. I would often check up on the Portalarium website for news in the hopes that something would come up, the garage sale game was a disappointment for me but that's just not what I wanted - it doesn't mean it was bad. When I saw the teaser for a new RPG from his new company I was instantly interested and when the kickstarter popped up I was very quick to blindly throw my money his way.

The emails would come in steadily showing me the progress, and to be honest this is the first time in my gaming history that I have played a game so early on. This game has gone from a chat sim with armor and houses, to a chat sim with armor and houses + crafting to more recently something that resembles an RPG with actual combat systems and a little bit of questing. It has been fascinating to say the least and the transformation from release 1 to 9 is really something. I have to say though after playing this latest release, I have put to bed any notion of this being Ultima Online 2, I can see the vision that the team has for this game and in spirit this title is to be more in line with the Single Player ultima games but with a complex multiplayer component layered in. To be quite honest, I am ok with this - but a little sad none the less.

I should also mention that a friend jumped into this one right away with me, I have dragged him through COUNTLESS mmorpg titles since our days in Ultima 10+ years ago and he too agrees that we will most assuredly never again capture that magic. A life long gaming friend who I met at the bank in Brit a chance for us once more to follow Lord British was too good to pass up. Though I doubt he himself will ever read this post, I would like to say to Garriot + crew, thank you SO much for the fantastic worlds you have created in the past and the ones you will continue to create in the future. The memories are worth more than I could ever put a price on, in some worlds you are told a story but in yours it was the tale I could tell later that mattered most.

Lengthy introductions aside, I will now talk about my experiences in release 9!

As I said earlier this was the first time I spent any lengthy amount of time in SoTA. It took me a little while to understand the systems as they really are quite unique but even without a tutorial I was able to gather enough of an understanding that I was making perfectly viable characters inside of those 2-4 hours I played. So for the new players or the seasoned who wish to critique my understanding I will present a breakdown of how I think these systems work.

"The Deck"
Players begin character building by discovering the "deck" system of play. Each player must spend points and allocate skills into a card deck of sorts. You have 20 slots to fill in this deck and it will be shuffled and delivered to you at random when in combat. You have to be smart when building this deck, you don't want to create situations where have nothing but attacks or too many heals. Try to think long and hard about the probability of vital skills coming up and don't be afraid to experiment. The game starts you off with several "pre made" decks to choose from and these can be good for getting your feet wet but you will learn more by building your own. When building a deck you will notice several options such as "draw speed" "discard speed" and "hand size" all of these can change depending how you spend points in your "Talent Tree".

Players also have the ability to "lock" cards to their skill bar so that they will not be shuffled away but you are penalized with increased focus consumption for doing this and I personally do not recommend it.

"Talent Trees"
Anyone who has played an MMORPG in recent memory knows how a talent tree works. You gain points, you spend them and you can travel down the branches towards a path of development that suits your play style. In SoTA however the talent trees work a little different than other games. For instance, in most games putting more than 1 point into a skill will make it more powerful but in SoTA this is not always the case. Here you have a system where spending more than 1 point on an attack skill simply gives you more than 1 copy of that card to shuffle into your deck. If I put 3 points into "thrust" on the swords talent tree I then have 3 copies of the thrust card that I can shuffle into my deck and thus increase the odds that it comes up during play. The talent trees also include "innate" abilities which are just your average passive skills, pumping more than one point into these will indeed increase effectiveness but you will not have to worry about shuffling them into your deck.

One of the most important (in my opinion) talent trees that I think EVERY player needs to go into regardless of class is the "Focus" tree. Within the Focus tree you will find the ability to increase the speed at which you draw new cards, increase the speed at which you discard and determine how many cards you have in your hand at any given time. Some play styles can work by keeping a tight 5 card hand where as others will want to spend the points so they can have 7 or more, it really depends on what you find works best for you but for myself 5 or 6 seemed to be the sweet spot. The focus tree also has some really amazing passives that can turn the tide in battle such as increasing your mana and mana regeneration rate. I cannot tell you how many times combat boiled down to me "outlasting" my opponent, having half a focus bar while they had nothing would often lead to a quick victory.

"Gear Selection"

After you have decided how to spend your points and shuffle your deck you need to decide what kind of gear is going to best suit your new character. The different types of armor in the game all present positives and negatives for players so that you have to make choices, there is no clear cut winner when it comes to gear. You will have to choose between Light cloth, light leather or heavy chain or platemail.

The main stats to pay attention to on armor are "slugs" and "fizzle". A "slug" is a negative effect card that will find its way into your deck and onto your skill bar. The heavier the armor you wear the higher the chance of a "slug" coming up. If I make a character that wears full platemail for instance each piece will have a certain number of slug cards it adds to my deck (beyond the 20 limit) and thus increases the chance that I will not get an active skill during combat but instead get a dead weight or "slug". If you are going to wear heavy armor you will want to spend talent points on the passives that reduce the number of slugs imposed on you for wearing it.

The fizzle rate as mentioned above is another detriment to heavier armor types. If you are a spell heavy player you will want to limit how much heavy armor you wear as "fizzle" can result in spells not going off at all. Cloth armor for instance gives a fizzle rate of zero so if you play a mage type you would want to stick with light types. A hybrid character like the one I designed will find himself creating a balance between heavy and light so that you can get a good amount of defense without making your spells useless or unreliable. As a good rule of thumb I kept my hybrid at about 35% fizzle chance by wearing cloth on my head hands and legs but putting heavy on my chest and feet. Mixing and matching gear in a way that suits your playstyle is key to a properly balanced character.

So with my understanding of the above systems I did quite a bit of dungeon diving and quite a bit of player vs player combat. I found all of these things fun in their own right but definitely in the early stage of development. Release 9 is a good taste of what is to come from this game and I am quite excited for the future, I am going to be posting the footage I took of my character "Allbey Dalmswort" and his companion "Dolan Dillwoont" here shortly so that others who may not have given the game a try yet can see what it had to offer. There didn't seem to be a terrible amount of content outside of random exploration and combat here and I look forward to the further development of questing and stuff to do in general.

Anyway, sorry for the longwinded post and thank you for those who managed to read it. I look forward to watching this game grow with all of you and will see you soon in New Britannia .

 

Welcome Lathiari!

 

Glad to have you with us and watching the game this will grow into. I agree it is different from UO but different can also be great

 

Great post!

Welcome!

 

Welcome to SOTA!

 

Welcome to the jungle!

 

Welcome! Nice written thread. Liked to read it.

 

Hail to thee and well met Lathiari Liked to read your posting.