New Player - Initial thoughts after 1 hour gameplay

Hi all, I've been watching SOTA's development over the past year or so and decided it's time to jump in! I'm a veteran player of the Ultima series, starting in 1988 with Ultima 5. I remember bringing the box to my Dad at an old COMPUSA and not leaving the house for days after. I played it on my super fast Tandy 1000SL. Ahh, those were the days. I was instantly hooked. I went back and played Ultima I and eventually played every Ultima released. Back in 2012, thanks to midlife nostalgia, I grabbed online (legit) copies of U1-8 and played most of them all over again. Ahh, Serpent Isle...

Ok, so enough of that. Time for first impressions with SOTA

SOTA, immediately felt like the old days (in a good way). Richard, Tracy, and the whole team managed to pluck my childhood nostalgia out and show it to me. It FEELS like I'm back in Britannia. It FEELS like Britannia needs me again. That depth is hard to pull off and you guys and gals did it. Bravo! Thank you I've missed this feeling.

Gameplay: I mapped the movement controls to the arrow keys with ease and navigated by keyboard for a while until I decided to try out the mouse. Easy peasy. Movement controls are intuitive and mode switching, gump navigation, etc. is familiar. The only knock I have on the main interface is the dialog window (not sure of official name)...

I grew up around the keyboard and having a free chat experience with NPCs is excellent. I'm so glad SOTA is bringing it back. At first I thought the underline hints were helpful, along with the tags at the bottom. But then the context switch from keyboard to mouse and back-n-forth was, well, annoying to me. If I clicked on a hint, then I had to click back into the chat bar for typing to resume. If I was typing in the keyboard and the NPCs response was too big for the window, then I had to switch to the mouse to click the 'More...' hint (typing 'more' resulted in the 'i don't understand' message). Too much friction. Maybe I missed some shortcuts, but my preference would be to have a setting that enables a one-or-the-other style experience rather than a hybrid. Also, the dialog size and placement seemed off....it was too small vertically and yet it seemed to get in the way of the action since it's horizontally centered during conversation. I'd like to either be able to reposition and resize it to my preference.

Some other things....

I know its all rough edges but FWIW mouse input for double-click seemed buggy. Talking to Arabella and then the Oracle (and opening doors along the way) was fine, but when I got to Solace Bridge it started to have a less-than-50% success rate. Opening doors, searching the corpse, reading the letter, etc. took several attempts to successfully perform a double-click that the game registered correctly.

While still on the Isle of Storms, I experienced a <catastrophic error....[something]> shortly after I completed my manifestation and went hand-to-hand with a Watcher (before visiting the Oracle). It seemed to happen right when the Watcher died. I didn't notice any interruption in gameplay though, just the notification. On a related note, the brief experience with the combat interface was cool. I like the soft lock feature...didn't get to exploit it too much but its interaction and visual indicator is intuitive.

Compass feature and POIs are cool; reminds me of Elder Scrolls.

Tabbed inventory is helpful. Not sure what 'Destroy item' means, but I'm going to find out!

Journal is familiar. Bookmarking and 'open to most-recent entry' would be nice. Maybe I missed them.

One other minor nit is wrt the hints that show up in the main dialog window....telling me that saying 'yes' to rescuing the girl in the burning house but not following through will affect my karma is kind of a spoiler. I had to learn that in previous, err related, games through consequences and trial-and-error. Don't take that freedom-of-choice away from me! It's part of the realism. I'd like to see a setting to disable those types of warnings so that my conscience is truly in charge.

Now, I'll see what kind of trouble I can get into tomorrow! That's all for now.

It's an amazing game already. Thank you for keeping Britannia alive!

Ryan

 

Welcome home @veramocor !!!
Awesome feedback

Feel free to add me as Your friend in game. Whisper any time if you need help, advice or company. Looking forward to meet you in game!

 

Welcome Veramocor. I loved reading your feedback. It really makes a difference. Yes the game is still rough to muddle through at times. . So this may help you.

I use the 'e' key to loot and to open doors and chests, but be very careful to not use the 'e' key to close the chest if you do not want to take-all. I cannot tell you how many times I have done that. *sighs and tries not to curse a bunch*. Also you can use the 'e' to plant and get water, point at a bench and sit then use escape or w to stand back up, and I probably missed some, but you get the idea I'm sure .

A couple of things players don't always know is to use the j key for journal, i key for inventory, b key for your crafting recipes which some are teachable and tradeable so don't forget another player can share with you which saves you having to buy them, some are also discoverable only throughout your adventures in chests and maybe from creatures, altho I have not found any on a creature yet that I can remember, the same with the game emotes, players can share some to you and some npc's will teach you them if you talk to certain ones, so click the the 'o' key for emotes, and I don't know why 'o' lol but there it is. We have many of them by the way.

We also have music in this game, instruments and sheet music to play a tune while hanging out with friends and instruments are placeable on a lot you have or one you have permission to place on , Next release weapons will be placeable as well, so stay tuned.

f is for the friends list to add friends or whisper add them there and right click a player, player name, or name in your friends list to see other options. . z is to initiate combat mode or sheath weapon and end combat, which also replenishes your health and focus faster. k is for skills and to see your skill exp bottom right of that window. This is also where you set skills to train, not train, and maintain which is usually available to do after skills reach 40. y is for modifying your deck and creating more decks.

I am Majoria in game. Please feel free to add me to your friends list. I am always happy to help or find you help if I don't have the answer. Enjoy your time. I hope to see you in the game.

oops I meant to say 'right click' not 'write click' so edited

 

that was actually the watcher experiencing a catastrophic error: it was dialog from it before it poofed.

 

Nice feedback. The dev team is always trying to improve, so this is helpful. I hope you'll have alot of fun in the coming days

 

Welcome and great feedback!

 

If you look at that window, you will find that you can edit which dialog you can turn off or on.

It will be gone, and not recoverable.
There are also salvage options, once you get to a craft station for that particular item, though not all items are craft/salvageable.

Turning on and off the hints is also in the settings.

 

Welcome! I started with Ultima IV on my C64 back in the day and played every Ultima after and even beta tested UO. If you have any questions in game, feel free to message "Starman".

 

Thanks everyone!

 

Thanks for the replies and pointers everyone. I played for another 2 hours this morning and got much more familiar with the navigation interface. A couple of updates...

After playing with the options I see that you can customize the usage of keyboard versus mouse quite a bit. That helps indeed. I still would like more flexibility to go into a pure keyboard approach. For example, if the NPCs response is longer than the dialog I still get the ':More...' link which i have to click on. Did I miss an option to control that? Also, my comments about resizing and repositioning the dialog window still stand.

Please disregard that feedback, I was running the game at 3000x2000 and 'Auto' which was a bit much for my test machine's graphics card. The framerate was a bit choppy. I dropped down to 1920x1200 and 'Beautiful' and its very smooth now and input control is no issue.

I agree with @CrandalltheFirst that the options allow you to turn hints on and off. However, my feedback still stands. Currently it's a global setting. I remember the days of Ultima V when I fell of the karmic wagon so to speak and then had to work to get my karma up. No ingame warning told me about that the first time I decided to be, well, evil. Teaching me how to use a bow or open a door the first time I encounter it is quite different, IMHO, in me choosing one way or another in an ethical or moral dilemma. Perhaps 2 settings? Just my 2c.

In other news..., I fell in love with the combat and skills system after defeating the zombies and skeletons on the bridge and leveling up on a few things...Thanks for drawing my attention to the skills system when they level up. I like how it grabbed my attention without interfering with my mid-combat zombie killing. The manual targeting and soft-lock combo for bow attacks was a lot of fun....one request...I love advanced combat. Is there a backlog item to add a manual targeting system where my cross-hairs indicate the exact hit? There were a few points when Edvard partially obstructed my target and i kept hitting him even though i soft-locked the zombie behind him. I had to strafe to the side to get a clear shot. Not a bad experience by any means, but I still could have winged the zombie if I had manual control or gone for a head shot!!

Haven't figured out how to build and use combat decks yet. I built one (i think) but it's not showing (again, I think) when I enter combat. I'm sure its user error.

Love the scenery and the optional quest system already (e.g. strange guy at the ruins).

On to see the strange guy!

 

Make sure you have it equipped each time. When you hit the y key out of combat you can 'modify' it and have it notice your current equipment you have on. It saves that for you in the deck. I have done that before, modified and accidentally unequipped