My thoughts on SotA

Actually, Chris has said a few times that the combat system is built on a WoW list foundation and can easily be shifted to that if things don't pan out like the hope.

But I do agree with what you are saying. The deck system isn't going anywhere.

 

The locked deck, with the cool down penalty is nonsense.

 

Sugar, I think you're dreaming. We can hope, but when Portalarium says the deck system is here to stay, it would take quite a major game-plan change for that to only be temporary. At this point, they don't have the time to waste on scrapping it.

 

I love the kindness of your tone. I don't think I am arguing that. However, there is already 3 methods of using the deck, so I am sure those will be refined, deprecated or otherwise changed as time progresses. The essessense of your point still stands in the progress cannot be achieved without some firm choices, at least for now.

 

Oh Boo, I can't find it now. Somewhere I heard there where around 150 player owned towns so far, I found a Dev Chat video from Jul where they had sold past 40 towns. I was wondering where they where planning to put them all....

 

I heard 80 PoTs as of the steam release.

 

As of the streamathon there were around 80 with it being stated that they are close to the limit of what they would want in game at this stage. My guess is that maybe 100 is the limit?

 

I do want to keep playing and I don't. It's really hard for me to stick with a single player game unless it's on console. If the combat system and the harvesting system get some tweaks I will be sticking around forever. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep giving SotA the chance it does deserve. Actually, I think I'm doing this one for Richard. * you.

PM me your in game name if you want to play together! I'm looking to make new friends! And some old friends!

*edited for language - Koldar

 

As a professional programmer and Unity game developer, the animations combined with character control in this game make me sad. They really should strive for better, and I worry that they feel it's done or close to. The art quality is low as well, but I think I can live with that. It's a shame though, there are a lot of professional artists out there that could be doing better for them. I guess this is the result of art crowdsourcing.

I'm not worried about gameplay as RG has proven his ability in the past to make a quality game in my eyes, but * the art seems amateur.

*edited for language - Koldar

 

Hi Kaelic and welcome, nah the game is not done, many features are not yet in. The whole pet system is not in, fishing is not in, treasure hunting, taming and much more is not in, so no worries. It won't be released until it is done and we say it is done, is what the development team has said, so hang in there, it is still early and pre alpha.

 

I wonder who is going to make sotahead.com...

 

I don't mind the deck system, and the ability to swap out decks may be its saving grace. However, the combat itself is the worst I've experienced in any game.

There's absolutely nothing fun or interesting about it. If there isn't a major overhaul and polishing at some point in the future then I rather doubt they'll need anything close to 200 towns...

 

The game would have needed a unique art style. If you take a look at other games you can tell what game it is just by the look of the graphics. Take a look at Ultima 7 or Ultima 8 or at more modern games like WoW or Divinity Original Sin. They all look unique. You see a screenshot and you instantly know what game it is. That is not the case with SotA.
SotA on the one hand uses a generic graphical style that seems "semi-realistic" and on the other hand the game uses crowdsourced graphics which makes it look similar to dozens of other Unity-engine games.

I think that this is due to budget reasons. I would have prefered a unique art style but I am ok with the way they are going now.

 

You've designed things using Unity?

 

honestly I tend to agree with the OP, I have pledged and I have even bought an addon or two but I really dont understand why this isnt an open world, this is 2015 it makes no sense to me whatsoever to be honest.

 

Its about having a low budget and limited funding. Open world takes a lot more resources that frankly cost a lot. Wow for example had costs in the millions per year in server expenses.

 

The devs have answered this repeatedly, and I've answered this pretty much daily.

Open World online games with no load screens are exceedingly rare. There is a reason why even massive budget games like World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic have load screens. It may be 2015, but hard drives are pretty much the same speed they were 20-30 years ago. And yet today graphics are better. We're loading more assets, and larger/higher quality assets from disk for every scene.

Most games split players between servers, but since housing and community are important to this game, they want a house to be persistent to all players in the game (not split across servers) and anyone can play with any player and not worry what server they're on. The architecture of the game forces instances and load screens.

Even if they had a $200 million budget like SWTOR, they'd still have load screens the way SWTOR has load screens.

 

Plots aren't perfect but it is what it is, I did see a house plot up on a hill, it was on the PvP map.

 

Yes there is a reason, but honestly the speed of "hard drives" might not be the relevant factor, I think. First of all, 20 years ago, when I bought my first hard drive, it barely exceeded 4MB/s raw transfer speed in an artificial benchmark. Today, my M.2 SSM gives me over 1000MB/s (yes, that's roughly 2 CD worth of data per second). And in comparison to a standard 6G SSD (with apprx. 500MB/s streamed read) there is almost zero difference in loading times in SoTA (although the SSM is double as fast as the SSD). Take from those loosely related facts whatever you want But it's not "hard drives are pretty much the same speed they were 20-30 years ago".

Also, dividing the world in scenes reduces cost in terms of "changes to the world". You need a more complex process if there is "one big map" and must be way more careful introducing them. Stability might also be an issue. Loss of an instance (e.g. crash) might not lead to loss of access to that scene for other people. Scenes are probably more or less unavoidable within the scope of game-building Portalarium is capable of. That's a toad we most certainly will have to swallow in the end. And I really love the "one map" approach...

But having an actually working instance management... and a cap of 100+ per instance, there might be almost no discernible difference to the Quality of Experience UO could provide in that area (as Violation pointed out somewhere here). Feature selection on PvP, PvE, environmental and friend-list/ignore-list attributes could really work some magic here, when selecting people to be in the same scene. Talking with Chris Roberts who will have the same problem (only in the far, far future...) might also help in that regard.

 

Everybody has the right to have a opinion.
But i got two words for everybody that wants to jump the ship: pre alpha.