My R15 Feedback with Criticisms and Suggestions

Greetings everyone ,
after playing R15 for some time and playing through all the stuff I could find, it's time for a little feedback.

Ok, first things first, this was the most fun release so far for me. I found a nice guild for me and my brother and with the start of the Novia Map there was much more content to discover. There's still much to do, but I think that SotA is on a pretty good way.

All those points are highly subjective and I can only speak for myself and my gaming experience, off course .

What I didn't test

- Ok, I'm not the biggest fan of PvP, but I tried some resource gathering in the Shardfalls in the Online mode (since single player got boring after reaching the point where even ghosts and those PvP plants where no challenge anymore). Well, any time I visited one of those areas I didn't encounter anyone, so there was no PvP to test...

Visuals and Performance

- The new overland map is very nice and a huge advancement to the old one (much more details and much better performance). The only thing I noticed is, that in the morning and evening hours the yellow colors are a bit too dominant.

- The new scenes and the town Solania are quite nice. There's still not enough to discover, but it's getting better and better.

- But Performance and Loading Times for Cities (Ardoris, Owlshead) are still terrible. I run SotA on a fast SSD hard drive and it's still taking minutes to enter towns, which is unacceptable. Hopefully it's getting better with Unity 5.

Skills

- The new gathering skills work quite well (at least for mining and foraging). But I don't like, that I gain experience only through successful gathering. I'd prefer to get more experience when closely succeeding or failing in resource gathering and getting less experience when you have no chance or when it's too easy to gather. Another thing I noticed is, that gathering in Shardfalls at this point is worse than at other places (takes forever and the chances are never over 40%). I have no problems with the longer times, but when I really want to take the risk to gather in PvP areas, at least I'd like to see much better gathering chances.

- I still miss a third skill tree besides combat and crafting for Out of Combat Non Crafting Skills. There are infinite possibilities for this and this would set SotA apart from all those other MMOs out there. Possible skills would be Cartography, Scouting, Thievery and Stealth, Taming, Rune Reading, Magic Detection, Charisma Skills, etc. Skill Points for this tree could be earned through various ways like exploring specific sites, clever conversations, successful taming, etc.

- I also miss some additional informations in the skill window, like the recharge rate of skills. For example when using the Offhand Attack skill, your next skill is ready instantly. Melee Spells have rather fast recharge rates (you can use the next skill pretty fast), while most other skills take much longer time for the next skill to be available. I have no problem with that, but I'd like to read about it somewhere in the skill window, since running to the skill trainer all the time gets annoying fast.

Housing

- Individual Housing and especially the ability to enter houses without loading times is still one of the best and unique features about SotA. There's only one thing I'm really missing, and that's the possibility to grant zoning rights to my house trustees. Since I want to share a house with my brother, it's problematic that he can't zone to my property. I realize of course that this would open the floodgates to zoning abuse. So a solution like a maximum number of allowed zoning areas would be a possibility (at least for release)

Overland Map and Scenes

- I hate random encounters and being drawn into the map all the time.For me it's only more annoying loading times, takes me out of the game and most of the encounters are extremely boring at this point... As soon as roaming encounters are introduced I'd like to see those encounters getting removed permanently. Ambushes, etc. are possible without being drawn into the scene all the time (for example give hidden and stealthed enemies on the map a sprint bonus when leaving cover and assaulting).

- Most of the new scenes look quite nice, but they are massively lacking content (which is reasonable considering we are still in Alpha). And there's still not enough single player content (also understandable at this release).

- Some suggestions for additional content in scenes: I'd love some kind of event system like in Guild Wars 2, which is fast, where everyone can participate since player levels aren't important, and where you have something to do, when you just want to play some minutes and don't have the time for doing tons of preparation all the time.

- Another idea would be NPC invasions of scenes, while you are in them. Why should only players be able to get into your scene? Gathering Resources in the Shardfalls was extremely boring, since there weren't enough players and because of that not enough content. And as soon as you know the NPC patterns, there's nearly no challenge anymore. Why not let a group of NPC bandits invade from time to time, that have seen you enter a Shardfall and want you rob you? (stronger encounters possible for more dangerous areas) Or some wild rabid animals arrive, that scent your smell and try to hunt you down? As a side effect this would make stealth and cloaking much more interesting...

Combat

- I played as a light armor melee combat magical fighter and at level 30, there was no encounter left, that I couldn't defeat (maybe except the elite units at the assault points). Balancing still needs a lot of work, but I understand that balancing can start as soon as all skills and spells are integrated.

- At this point Distance Spells are nearly useless, since they take too much time and don't do enough damage. The melee spells are much more effective, instantly cast and are the fastest skills in game aside from the offhand attack (which I always have in my deck five times, since it's free of cost and an instant without skill reload times).

- I highly dislike the reagents and ammunition system, since it's just a lot of busy work and makes encounters with weaker enemies annoying. My suggestion would be some kind of glyph system, where you can power charge glyphs through rituals and with reagents, that get slowly drained when used and need to be recharged from time to time. Anything that reduces unnecessary busy work would be highly appreciated, since this is not a single player game without respawning monsters (the only setup where I'd understand having to carve every single arrow and use reagents for every single spell)

- But I have way more problems with the combo system. First of all combos are at this point so weak, that stacking amd combos are nearly useless. But that's just a balancing thing. I got way more problems with the point, that I'm staring on my skill bar (and sometimes my health) most of the time and ignore what's happening in front of me. Stacking Skills and Combos takes way too much effort and highly distracts from the combat itself. And the symbols for many skills look way too similar.

- My suggestion for Stacking and Combos: Add another skill for Auto Stacking to the focus tree, that can be increased five times ( up to combo/stack level 5). When you draw a skill, that's already in your skill bar, it would auto merge those skills to a combo/higher level skill. To avoid unwanted combos, you could add an auto stack button in the combo window for each combo, where you could disable automatic combinations. This would make the combat system at least a bit less distracting.

Interface, Journals and Maps

- The Interface still needs work. Especially the single Crafting steps are way too unnecessarily complicated. It's unintuitive, needs way too many clicks and needs way too many windows to be open most of the time. And for Story, Quest and Event Presentation the Chat Window just isn't enough (I did the quest in the Graff Gem Mines and didn't even realize when I found the amulet of the quest giver outside. Only by accident I found it in the quest journal).

- The journal works, which is the best thing I can say about it . It's confusing, badly needs an option for sorting and much more options. I miss informations about NPCs (especially their whereabouts and history with you), Maps, Monsters, Items, Crafting, etc. etc. etc.

- I never use the ingame maps, since I rarely find the stuff I'm looking for in them. And it's way too unnecessarily complicated to open the map of the place you are visiting (that's what the "m" button is for, not the compass; please give me at least the option to change it).

- I'm no fan of arrows on maps, where you stop looking on the screen, but just follow arrows (my main gripe with the distracting combat system of SotA). But when I ask a NPC for directions, it's just not enough that he tells me about some obscure house, where some obscure person can be found, that looks like every other character (as an example: in Solania someone told me about an obscure watch tower, where I could theoretically find the captain; but since most places look the same it took forever to find it). Even in the old game Outcast, NPCs were able to turn around and at least point in the direction, where the person I'm looking for can be found.

Conclusion

All those negative points may look like I didn't like this release, but that's not the case. I think this game has already more to offer than many MMOs out there. The game has a lot of potential and hopefully all those empty scenes can be filled with content and fun stuff to discover. And when the unnecessary busywork, the performance issues, the overly complicated/unintuitive interface and the confusing/distracting combat system gets addressed, this could become a really good game, which I'm highly looking to.

Cheers,
Andreas

 

Public Vendors

Ah, I nearly forgot the new public vendor. Well, he seems to work, but since so many people put their garbage on sale and spammed the system, there was no real usage of him. I'd like to see some filter options or different vendors for different products. And maybe an automatic vendor timeout (maybe 48h) for people, who put stuff on the vendor, that don't sell. Because why should they accept your new garbage, if the old one didn't sell?

Stealth

And I tested the Stealth system over Lunar Magic and it seems to work, too. At this point, there's no much use to it, since Sneak Attack is a very bad attack and I'm not sure, if attacks from behind really work as intended. And I had some cases, where an auto attack ruined my stealth attack. And sometimes my character won't go out of combat again, so the stealth skills become useless (during combat those skills are wasted space at this point). But in theory stealth seems to function (even as I stand by my opinion, that the stealth/thievery system should be part of an out of combat skill tree)

Cheers,
Andreas

 

Nice review Andi7275. I'm glad you enjoyed R15, I really did too. The Novia map and so much has been done. I was really amazed with all the work the team had to do with the unity5 transition that so much came into the game. I can barely wait
for R16 which will be here in a blink of the eye, well or a few

lol oops I corrected to say R16, I was skipping a release