[POLL] What is your *overall* rating for this Pre-Alpha Release 5? (UNOFFICIAL)

Combat and Magic Skills
Since it was just a rudimentary system, it is hard to judge. It was neat from an effects standpoint and like the concept. Though it was hard to tell how much more powerful putting more points in things were. It is going to need some serious polish to make it on-par with other MMORPGs.

One negative .. if you use the mouse to click on skills . .you can sometimes accidentally drag them off the bar. Should be an option to lock them in place.


Linear Lighting Model
Loved the new graphics/lighting

Add On Store Conversion (Website)
N/A

Weekend Access Keys (Login)
N/A

Crafting
Love the recipe book. Love you can doubleclick to put items on the crafting table.
I still find crafting VERY tedious for experimenting .. drag/drop is very slow and with the sizes of inventories you have. The interface for stacks is clunky .. Can it default to just ONE item . I hate having to say I only want ONE from a stack.
I also think that experimenting is sorta pointless in this day and age .. everyone will just have all the recipes on the internet (already most of them out there) in a matter of hours. Let us discover the recipes some other way .. quests .. buy them .. etc.

Compass
Awesome! Can we have a mini-map for in towns too?

Overland Map Polish
Love the cloth map look. But why is our icon a flag?
Would be awesome to make your own notes on the map.


Combat Floaties
Ehh. I only noticed these when other people were fighting near me.


Health Bars
Great addition. Sure .. it ruins the immersion, but you need some feedback like this in a computer RPG.


New Creatures
Great adds. Mimics especially!

Traditional Combat Shortcut Bar
Ehh .. made it feel any other ARPG. Are we going to be limited to 10 skills like Guild Wars? Or are we going to have multiple layers of hotbars like WoW?

AFK Mode
Neat

New Vale Scenes
The numerous areas I did explore was fun. I didn't have much time to delve into just random areas.

Player Housing
Just still not a fan. But I know some people love this sort of thing.
For me .. it is:
- cluttered - Going into any town or village .. 95% of the buildings are pointless to ME. I think there is just going to be way too much player housing compared to actual game content. I avoid exploring the player villages because ...what's the point?
- Limited - no easy way to find where empty plots are.
- Time consuming - makes getting to the "important" buildings long and tedious. Fun the first few times to walk through the town, but when going to turn in a quest .. oh .. I have to spend minutes running by the same old houses.
- Junky - as I suspected players are going to just put all their decorations in the yard for people to see as they walk by. The different types of houses adds no consistency to the look of the town ...(though I am sure that can be force by limiting lot types).

- Diminishes the importance of town buildings. Some of these player houses are huge compared the town hall, etc.

I know this is "open" now . .and when things have costs it may take a while for a lot to be built up and things will be less junky,

 

For whatever reason R4 did not perform well for me. R5 ran the smoothest yet, so my perception of the change is largely from R3 to R5, and it was fantastic! I am ridiculously pleased with the improvements. So, I had to vote a 5 (and since my R4 review was a 2 [I think] this tempers it overall).

I considered all that I would say about R5, but in the end, Dermott voiced it pretty much as I would, only better:

Thanks Dermott.

Again, very happy with the progress.

 

Thanks all for your feedback! Keep the votes coming! It seems R5 is doing about 5% better than R4, where that release saw a 10% drop from R3.

 

I actually kind of liked the people that put decorations in their yards, i thought it added character to the game and made it feel "alive".

Those that decorated sensibly tho. Not whoever put 30 throne of bones as a fence around their property, lol.

We are going to need to mix quests and npc town into the player housing areas to give people reasons to visit those hexes tho and interact with players in them.

Otherwise I can see why people would avoid "towns"

 

Nothing is perfect but this one was my favorite release since R1, so 4. Im again exited about releases, that is very good.

 

Voted five -

Things are moving in a positive direction - lots of areas to improve but overall positives outweighed the negative

 

Overall it looked and played well. There were a lot of connection issues on Friday night. It dropped my connection a dozen times in a row before I gave up for a couple hours. One thing I wish was better is not just mentioning the new features but how to access them. Are there quests? How do you get them? How do you add the Skills to the attack bar?

Since we're supposed to be testing, it would be nice if we knew what we were looking at and it's "supposed" to work. I know the team is against handholding and spoonfeeding, but come on, we need a little more to work with here. We can discover when the game is released, we need find and eliminate issues.

Combat and Magic Skills
- I think these will be very good when done, but I had no idea how to use them or put them in the status bar. Obviously there was no way to see what sort of damage or increase you got for each point you invested. Need to stop people from using this in towns as it's incredibly distracting and seeing people go up in flames on a regular basis sort of defeats the "virtues".

Linear Lighting Model
- Didn't notice too much of a difference. Game still looks really good.

Add On Store Conversion (Website)
- Didn't use it, don't know what it does.

Weekend Access Keys (Login)
- Didn't use it, don't know what it does.

Crafting
- I like the crafting but some of the recipes are too granular. Do we really need the extra step of taking the sheets to blacksmith table to pound them?
- Coal is going to be the most precious resource in this game.
- Drag and drop is incredibly slow and takes multiple tries to pick up an item
- Far to difficult to select multiple items or move items around in the sack. Would be better for a left click on item to default to 1 and right click to bring up the slider.
- It's pretty neat once you get the hang of it. Used SotAWiki to find all my recipes.

Compass
- Barely noticed it. Without a point of reference or a mini-map it doesn't really help

Overland Map Polish
- It's cute and is easy to use, but it feels completely different than the rest of the game. Unless something unexpected is going to happen as "you walk the path" why not just click the area you want to go to and load the next portion?

Combat Floaties
- What does this mean? Is this so they don't drown in the pool?

Health Bars
- Barely noticed them

New Creatures
- Pretty cool. The Satyr was neat.

Traditional Combat Shortcut Bar
- Didn't really pay attention

AFK Mode
- This is visually a neat feature that became real annoying. People sitting in front of crafting tables, on stairs and just generally in the way. I like the /AFK added above your name, but people sitting down all over the place doesn't add anything

New Vale Scenes
- I couldn't tell you the difference

Player Housing
- This was very frustrating. Nowhere near enough housing and almost no way to tell if a plot was available. I think we need to go back to houses rotate out after an hour or so.
- I like the decorations, but my goodness some of these houses will make Fred Sanford jealous. A couple places looked like utter dung heaps with crap strewn all over the lawn and in every open space possible. Some looked really good, but all I can see is medieval ghetto
- After this weekend I am concerned about the "land rush". I can see having to settle for a plot because you didn't stay up all night and jump in the game as soon as it was open.

 

Im sad to say i cant offer many thoughts. Plans to test went *splat* due to a strained groin muscle and to many pain meds.

My 30 minute impression.


Lighting is good, but increase the distance of torches and such


I didnt get a chance for much combat but found it hard to target. This might have been lack of time to get use to it. Either way tab key for target closest enemy plz.

Map. Its fine, if you get rid of the need to move around on it. And all pop up and animated graphics.If its going to be a transport map then make it one (i.e. Dragon age). Point, click, transport. If its going to be walk around on it, its not the right model.

Everything else seemed good but i didnt get a chance to really delve into it much. I feel like a bad tester

 

I had to vote for a 1...very bad. Since I have been unable to log on for the past couple of releases. Crashes, unable to get past load screens. When I have been able to log on, it's been briefly only to crash on loading screens on map. What I have seen has been a bit better. Still finding the character looks are poor as well as animations. NPCs still looking drab and dull. And I'm not impressed with the paper cut out look of the map. I think a more 3d world map would be a lot nicer to look at.

 

Those are some serious issues. Have you filed bug reports for your problems? I'm sure the devs (and others having the same problem) would greatly benefit from your crash logs. Hope R6 solves these issues for you!

 

Hi,

since I never have experienced a crash at all during all the releases (the worst was a patch breaking my game installation in R5 and a few loading scene stucks in R4), I would assume its either hardware/OS at the lower border of the requirements or it is some fault in your configuration (broken RAM, overheating component ...) or a driver issue inbetween.
What are your hardware (CPU, RAM, video card, free disk space) and Operating system (which OS and 32 or 64 Bit) specifics?
Are other 3D based games running well on that box?

*Salute*
Olahorand