Overall Feedback on Gameplay for R8

Hey there everyone! Every release just gets better and better! Super excited for the next build. Here are some of my thoughts from this one:


Combat

I must say, combat is feeling a lot more "action-like" and chaotic which I love. The deck system/locked slots makes combat super customizable, which is cool as well. There definitely is much work to be done though.

Hit reactions seem pretty minimal at this time. We're missing some sort of "umph!" to the combat. Something to help players connect to their character and feel the hits a bit more, instead of like we're watching somebody fight while yelling out directions to them.

Extra feedback for low health would be very useful. Hard to keep an eye on what glyphs are popping up, player health, enemy health for specific attacks, slugs we need to get rid of... there's a lot of HUD management going on it seems which takes the players' eyes away from the game itself.

Why mouse-click to remove slugs? Some sort of hot-key or just pressing the key associated to the slug slot for removing would be preferred. Maybe individually clicking to redraw is the wrong way to go? Why not a "redraw hand" action? When you start combat, you get a hand. When you use glyphs, you get replacements for those slots. Slugs cannot be used, but to get rid of them, you have to redraw your entire hand? Just a suggestion. Might be fun to try out.


Zones

Man these zoning load times are annoying. Is there any way to pre-load some of this stuff? Maybe a loading icon on the cursor would be less jarring than switching to a load screen every couple clicks? Just screen-capture the current screen and display the loading bar on it with the same information so we know it hasn't crashed.


Overworld Map

With how slow the character moves, I can really feel him traveling a long distance. A little faster would be nice. If there was some gameplay element added to travel to speed you up, that would work too. Perhaps pay for a fast travel until you can afford a mount (if mounts make it in)? If eventually there will be random encounters on the map, perhaps paying an escort for fast travel would also provide you with safe travel? Could be cool. Would help those who want to avoid confrontation.

I personally miss the old hand-drawn map. Icons and text were much more visible. Everything was very clear. Being able to see the hex grid a little helped with selecting locations to move to as well. The hand-drawn map might be quicker to load for that zoning problem maybe?


Camera/World

Does anyone else get a little claustrophobic while playing? Houses, dungeons, caves... everything seems super tight. This added with the ability to bump into people really starts to showcase this possible issue I think. Maybe when you zoom in, raise the camera up a little so you're not rotating around the player's neck, but his head instead? First Person Zoom might be necessary if we can't make our heads transparent when zooming in. Maybe make smaller objects that obscure the camera transparent, like torches, so you don't have to pop the camera forward on every object collision.


Crafting

To be honest, I've done very little crafting. Something about it seems extremely overwhelming and scares me away from it. I'll try to force myself into it though. I feel like I'm probably missing a huge portion of the experience.


Town Layouts/Signs

I'm having a hard time finding anything in towns. I didn't try it, but can you ask NPCs where a blacksmith is and get some sort of useful tip? Once I have that info, some clear signage near the door would be awesome. I didn't search super hard, so I may have completely missed something. Like if there is no blacksmith in the town, maybe have NPCs suggest a town that has one?


Anyways. Great stuff so far, and for those going to Dragon Con, maybe I'll see you there.

 

Here's kinda what I meant by that comment. I've also played around with key-mapping on the hot-bar example to help me visualize the change more clearly while playing around on my keyboard. Not sure if this combat adjustment would work better, but I figured I'd throw it out there anyways:



For balance's sake, perhaps shuffling or "clearing your head" costs focus. The idea is that combat would become less cumbersome as you skill up and equip yourself correctly. In a roundabout way it might make you feel like your character is improving at combat. Better than *miss* notifications right? This is probably not the best way to fix this issue, but I feel like this example would feel better than the current "remove your Slugs for a chance at Glyphs" gameplay. Thanks for taking a look.

 

Zones

Man these zoning load times are annoying. Is there any way to pre-load some of this stuff? Maybe a loading icon on the cursor would be less jarring than switching to a load screen every couple clicks? Just screen-capture the current screen and display the loading bar on it with the same information so we know it hasn't crashed. (From Crazy Phil's post)

Is it for certain that SoTA will use a "Zoned" approach to player movement when its finally done? If someone could point me to a post on the subject I would appreciate it. One of the things I loved about Asheron's Call 1 was that it was one playable zone, period. Sure you had to go through portals to get into dungeons, but you could run from one end of Dereth to the other if you were fast enough and strong enough. No periodic loading of new zones. Is there any chance SoTA can be like that, or are we fated to always having to sit through zone loads? Just wondering. Its much more immersive if you are not constantly reminded of the fact that you are pulling your reality off of a hard drive.

 

It's been stated numerous times, but mostly in videos. I think Chris may have written it down in a post, but I can't remember where. I'll try to find it, but no guarantee. It is a core design decision, and not like to go away.

 

One short blurb can be found here: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...tier-way-to-kill-immersion.12080/#post-204180
Here is the quote from Chris:

He's definitely gone into more detail, but I think that was in a video (or two).

 

Here's the big vid:

 

You did great in Release 8!!! *BRAVO* *CHEERS*

 

It would be nice to get some work done to get the game to run a tad smoother on the Intel HD 3000 and other lower end GPUs but I understand no miracle will get performance as good as a dedicated GPU setup. Right now I'm still getting under 20 FPS usually in Owl's Head it's been under 10 usually. I'm hoping to get a new computer eventually but I'm stuck with this for a while since I'm a poor college student lol.

 

Is that all?

psh.

 

Good to hear that, Chris I was averaging about 15 fps outside the cities in R8 and dropping to about 7.5 fps (sometimes dropping as low as 5.0 fps ) in places such as Owls Head (Changing the graphics setting from "Beautiful" down to "Fast" didn't affect fps much at all )

 

I'm excited for this and hope I do make it up to 20+ FPS thanks for your hard work!

 

Sounds like a great worst case scenario. Good thing that is way early =p

 

Do you think you could add an option to cap your fps?

 

You know what? I just finished watching a retrospective on EverQuest to attempt to clear my head of what I know now and remember how things used to be, and it's pretty cool to see how similar Shroud of the Avatar is at this time with some tweaks and Ultima flavoring. It's like we've traveled back in time and we're just now starting to walk down a different path on the chaos star.

YouTube: EverQuest Retrospective

 

i dont have anything about loading zones if you find them every 4km and not every km

but not agree with the map traveling time, is so important that it is a reason to make map traveling always avalible without speaking to a special cart npc and pay him gold for the overmap travel.

what is with the old school methods of traveling like horses or Moongates , not good enough anymore ??

 

Oh, keeping movement slow and adding a cost to the overworld map was not what I meant at all (if you were referring to my original post). I was trying to say that I think the travel speed on the overworld map is currently way too slow. If speeding us up isn't an option, my suggestion was to add a way to travel faster on the overworld map (mounts, safe-travel escort, speed spell, etc.).

I actually would prefer to be able to mark Recall Runes like in UO. That would be freakin' awesome! Imagine skipping the overworld map entirely to reach your desired destination. One less loading screen!

 

A fast SSD drives makes a huge difference here also, was playing SotA off of a 3 year old hdd, then switch to a Plextor M.2, the load times are almost non-existent, the difference is night and day...even at this stage of "optimization" <jabs Chris>

*Edit - Crazy Phil! I love your forum picture, you really look well, Crazy! 10/10 believable, some good ideas you have there also.