Observations after 6 months

well then the devs should take notes from Skyrim (an older game already) because I can walk into any town or room or inn or whatever and pick up and move literally anything I see in Skyrim all smooth as butter and without needing a 1070 graphics card... yet shroud is barely interactive at all comparably and people struggle to get consistent fps or reasonable load times with it....

 

I should clarify, because I'm already going to be moderated for these comments.

I'm not comparing shroud to Skyrim or trashing Shroud at all in comparison to AAA games. I would be very happy if the game did well, after all I spend enough money on it.

However, burying our heads in the sand and pretending like there is no issues, or like Shroud is somehow special and unique among games is just not productive at all. The game loads a bunch of items from PoT's and player housing, yes, but it doesnt load anymore than many other games. To pretend otherwise, and to constantly give Port a free pass in it's shortcomings, is to set up the game and all of us customers for disappointment going forward, because there is no incentive to improve.

 

They know it, and are doing their best to remedy it.
The QA performance (stress) test on the 23rd shows they are completely aware of the loading shortcomings....
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.... I mean, why not ?
I, for one, am not ready to fold the tents and pack up.
Hope is always there for the taking.................
Some see their cup as half empty, I see mine as half full !

 

It's more than that. The lighting in Skyrim is mostly pre-baked while people in SotA are free to decorate their lots with dynamic lights and each person can have light emitting items and spells. Also, performance on Linux may not be as good as Windows and Mac because it's using an older version of Unity.

 

Generally Skyrim is out of the consumers view a good examples of how it should look like but I think too that a comparison with Skyrim is just out of the view of a consumer easy…don’t looking just at the visuals on your monitor and I think they are quite different games…more or less it is like comparing apples and oranges.
First of all to compare something with SotA the basics have to be the same and I think for a game this is the engine as the engine is defining what you can and cannot do and how you can do something.
Even if Skyrim is a SP it could be this way maybe compared with the MMO RIFT and for SotA you could more or less compare it with Albion Online or Hearthstone that seems to be using Unity too.
I would guess if you see something in another Unity game it is quite possible to implement something similar into SotA but if you see it in a different engine creating something similar could be difficult and sometimes even impossible.

 

I'm curious about what part of that makes it acceptable for players to wait a full minute to load a scene then be able to run for 30 seconds, then have to wait another minute for a lot to finish loading. I adjust how I play based on the game's performance, I can't think of a single game I'd call good that I'd say the same.
Examples:

• I dodge random encounters because I know they'll have 2 load screens that will take longer to complete than the scene will to clear.
• I avoid entering POTs I'm not familiar with, they are 2 more load screens and might be hoarder nightmares that crash the client.
• In multiplayer screens, I often fall back to spank and tank because it is easier on the wrist and melee enemies have long enough range that evading doesn't work reliably.

 

Absolutely SOTA has more stuff to load then Skyrim and at that, Skyrim doesn't/can't have 50 other people in the zone at the same time. The difference between a solo game and a multiplayer game like SOTA in its core area designs are so drastically different Im shocked someone would say this.

 

Hmm... I remember Skyrim taking a long time to load when entering say a dungeon. Skyrim also didn't have to go out to a server and get information about all the other player placed items.

I'm not saying that SotA can't be better or that it's even currently acceptable but comparing it to a single player game is not realistic.

 

While there aren't that many titles out there that can be comparable to SotA when it comes to how each game client see objects being placed in the zone that they are in and also have to sync with other people that might be on another instance of the same zone, I think everyone here agrees that we all yearn for better performance, though. As long as the devs don't call the optimization being done and continuously show that they are making effort to improve (which I can see the significant different compare to a year or two ago), I'm ok with bearing until it gets better.

 

Most game developers realize that loading 10,000 objects so you can show a player 100 is an inefficient use of resources. Massive empty POTs add nothing to the game, housing should have been instanced with the option to share an instance with friends and guilds if desired.

 

Windows 10 Home 64 bit, Driver Version from 23.21.13.9135 3/23/2018

I was having the exact problem you described for the past couple of releases, updated the driver and the problem went away. I've had similar issues in other Unity games involving light sources and strange behavior rendering on my Windows 8 64 bit laptop as well, which also had an NVidia chipset. The solution then was the same, updating the drivers resolved it.

Not sure what Unity is doing to interact with NVidia graphics hardware in such strange ways, but I've had this as a recurring problem.

 

Still doesn't explain why SOTA is struggling to break 50 FPS on the over world map on Fastest with a 1080.

 

Sorry, I just dont have that issue. I have a GTX-1070 which I play in 4K windows mode (3/4 screen) and on Novia (over world map), I have a solid 60 fps.

 

Are you overclocking your CPU? I have i5-6600, 32GB RAM, GTX-1080, SSD for OS and SSD for game, Win-10, I don't have your issues. Game may get slower in POTs, but I just ignore it, or limit the distance my camera can see by pointing slightly down. No issues on map at all. Try to go into Offline Game, if you have the same issues in the offline game, something is wrong with your PC, if offline game plays great, then your issue may be related to the internet connection, or your NIC perhaps? I didn't really measure my FPS though, if it goes smooth, I don't bother to start investigating for each 5 frames per second...

 

Bouncing between 50-60 FPS on highest settings in offline mode. My network connection is plenty fast, if it is the problem then I'd expect the forum to be flooded with complaints, which doesn't seem to be the case. Linux client is the first problem, poor optimization likely the second.

 

yes, lots more

skyrim is also not massively multiplayer.

...except for the three-or-so times that you did

that sounds kind of boring. i might not have backed. being able to live right in an NPC town, just like in UO, was a major reason I backed.

 

Yet Skyrim manages to be fully interactive where SotA is not. Skyrim you can loot from enemies everything you see them wearing and using as weapons. Every piece of furniture, food, decorations, anything on shelves or tables you can pick it all up.

Shroud you can not.

But sure, shroud has more items being loaded than Skyrim


Look, Shroud is poorly optimized. Even the devs know that and are constantly working on it. I"m not sure why it's controversial to say so or why people feel the need to stick their heads in the sand denying it.

 

No one is arguing that shroud is not in need of performance optimizations. In fact, pretty much everyone feels that way, including the development team.

 

Yet still it is now considered as released, and it is being judged on those grounds.

 

At 6 months I judge this game fun. Worked my fire spec up a little this am, then made a few ingots and enchanted a primal bear headdress. Definitely glad I upgraded my computer. It's been fun tweaking my fire AOE deck.