My thoughts, wishes, etc

Alright, so this was my very first time playing in SotA, although I will add that I'm no stranger to Ultima. (My greatest wish as a young teenager was that moongates were real.) I've also played quite a few MMOs, including UO and I do a lot of text-based roleplaying. I'll also go ahead and put up a disclaimer that I know the game is pre-alpha and definitely still in development. I can only respond to what I saw implemented.

Bug-wise, of course there are going to be some, but the one which really stuck out to me is that my camera would sometimes get stuck after I zoned in somewhere. I'd watch my avatar run around according to my input, but the camera was fixed and no longer followed me or responded to controls.

My biggest problem with the game as it played during this release is the lack of self-evident story in some scenes – for example (possibly a bad/unfair example but bear with me for illustrative purposes), why is the ruined stone building in the swamp full of liches? (And on a side note, shouldn't they really be called wraiths or spectres? Liches are at the top of the undead food chain.) And why so many? Where are the in situ hints and clues about what specifically happened there or was actively going on? This is one aspect that I loved about the Ultima games – you could kind of piece together what happened even in incidental scenes which weren’t directly part of any quest/storyline and the towns were full of “life being lived” details. These are the sort of visual storytelling details which I made sure to include everywhere when I briefly did some scene fluffing for an independent UO shard. With the new approach to the overland map having distinct scenes instead of hexes, the existing areas need to both be a lot bigger and they need to tell their own unique story/stories. (Open wilderness areas with wildlife in them doing normal wildlife sort of things is different, but even then there's room for catches and intriguing spots. Ultima 7 did this well.) I’m just sick of seeing the majority of areas in MMOs existing solely as a pretty backdrop for mob grinding and which never have their own meaningful existence. I want intriguing little details that make it worth sticking around to “read” the scene. I don't want to run in, kill stuff, wait for a respawn or two, and then simply move onto the next area because there’s nothing engaging about the actual locale other than the XP I get from the mobs. Mobs, scenery, and storytelling need to exist as an integrated whole wherever possible. I know there’s a long way to go yet in the development of the game, but this is one of my biggest game design concerns on the whole, not just related to this release, and I think it's one of the key differences between the standard MMOs set-up and a truly immersive RPG. Phew, got that off my chest!

Leveling – I really don't care for it and would much rather there be use-based skill progression ala UO instead. It’s just more realistic IMO and it allows for players with little or no interest in combat to meaningfully progress in the world in the way they choose without actually hampering people who do like combat. The existence of levels also opens the door for level restricted gear, which I’ve always despised. A sword is a sword is a sword, but an advanced sword technique that you can only pull off if you know what you’re doing and are well practiced? Makes more sense to me.

Pet AI and pathing isn't great at the moment. The number of times my skeletal minion went to the position where the mob had been and then just stood there dumbly while I got beat up several feet away? And/or couldn't work out how to get to the mob. Or just ignored me outright. On the topic of pets, there also seems to be some issue with experience points not getting assigned if the pet did the heavy lifting? There where a lot of kills where I received no experience points.

The corpse explosion spell under Death Magic didn't really speak to me. I never used it, in part because of the difficulty of having to select a corpse mid-fight in order to use the skill. I’d love to see it outright replaced with something like an area of effect slow/DOT, with a graphic of skeletal hands and bone shards rising up from the ground. It's a partial raising of the undead, fitting better with the reanimation of skeletons and summoning of liches.

Character creation needs a lot of work, but I fully appreciate that this is one of those things that will come later. On my wishlist for character creation would be at least a few different skins/complexions (beyond the overlay of skintone), different eyebrows, more hairstyles, and tons of sliders that genuinely make a difference in face and body shape. It's always been important for me to be able to really make my RPG toon look like my character, down to the shape of his nose and the lift of his eyebrows. While I'm talking wishlist, what I'd really love to see is a system so advanced and fine-tunable that people could offer face-making services by providing their client with a file of saved parameters that they upload during character creation. I’m dreaming big here, I know.

Unfortunately I didn't get around to doing nearly as much as I wanted due to persistent headaches during both Dev+ and open release periods, but hopefully my feedback will be of at least a little use.

 

I absolutely agree with you about the story aspect. Everything should have its purpose to make the world believable. Why are the monsters in the place they are in?
While walking around in the swamps I was attacked by three liches, four or five skeleton mages and a bunch of skeletons. What are those creatures doing there?
I know this is pre Alpha and the final placement of the enemies has yet to be determined but I hope that the devs do consider placing enemies so that there is always a purpose for them to be there.

 

Great feedback!

You play text based MUD's? That's so funny, someone was just telling me how no one even knows what those are.

You're dead on. I also brought up the whole Lich thing during R10. They seem way too common here, and wimpy and mindless.

But this is the reason why, I think, they're place holders. This is a first or second pass kind of thing. The assets they have are limited at this point in development, and we're seeing what people usually never get to see...core systems that are just being brought up to baseline functionality.

I remember last year when they posted their first video (demo) and I was all upset that the character in the demo was running around with his sword out. One of the devs jumped out into the forums and told me I should probably just "take a break" if I was going to be that disappointed that there wasn't a sword sheathing animation. Well I didn't take a break, I kept giving feedback because that's why we're here. Who cares what point in development they're in? There's only one way to give feedback and that's unfiltered. Otherwise, the devs don't hear what we care about and they don't make a game that we really want.

So sure, the Lich is (probably) just a place holder and they'll throw in some other mob down the road, improve the Lich AI and make it seem more traditional (and believable) to us old timers that "know" what a Lich is and is not.

Amen. If I stab someone with a sword, it should hurt them...cause it's a sword. All these damage modifiers just get in the way of what's most intuitive, swords give ouchies.

I don't think if you were soloing you got any experience unless you were the one that made the last hit that killed the NPC. As for summoned creatures, the AI was horrible and my skeletons and liches usually just stood around breathing down my neck while watching me get clobbered.

Corpses decayed so fast that I really couldn't use corpse explosion, since there were no corpses to explode. But I think that's just something that needs to be worked out. I wouldn't want more damage spells, we have too many of those already, imo. Instead, I'd like to see corpse explosion be something that was more of a utilitarian spell. I don't know why it can't damage the undead too. Or why it can't be used as a time bomb. Say you needed to get a locked door open? Why not pile a bunch of corpses in front of it and BOOM?

 

I agree with your leveling concerns. I for one was a bit surprised that they added it, as I was expecting/hoping for the UO style, with no levels.

I think they are maybe not considering that going "level-less" is a better solution as going with "levels" is going to be a one-way street in terms of grinding and content-gating - everything that IMHO think the Dev team are/were against.