R11 is great but SotA is still lacking something...

I really like R11. Everything seems to come together nicely. It is fun exploring the world, fighting monsters, the new conversation system is a big step in the right direction and the polished overland map looks great.

BUT... there are some elements in which SotA is still lacking which I hope will be addressed the further development comes.

The more I play SotA the more I see that the game is lacking something. Let's call it cohesiveness.
When playing Ultima, everything fit perfectly. Everything seems to be thought-out to the last detail. The world is believable, it's inhabitants are believable. Everything fits. For example, if you want to explore the swamps, you need swamp boots. You discover alligators in the swamp and kill them and they are gone for good. You enter a cave to find lots of treasures guarded by dragons. You talk to the NPCs and they all have a purpose. You can pick everything up. It feels like a world that is alive and believable, with a rich history and everything fits together nicely.

In SotA this feels different right now. The cities don't create the atmosphere of the old Ultimas in which every city felt unique. In the scenes you encounter random monsters which don't seem to serve any purpose at the places you enounter them and they respawn and you seem to find random items on their corpses (unlike in Ultima). The NPCs right now are bland puppets. Even if you talk to them you do never get the impression to get to know them, to learn about their backgrounds and motivations. They stay strangers. In Ultima VII for example when you talk to someone you instantly get to know him and you recognize him later. I hope that this will change when schedules are introduced and maybe more distinct faces. Also you cannot pick up many items. In a cave I found some swords lying around and couldn't pick them up.
Right now SotA feels as if the world and it's inhabitants are empty and are just there to give you a hint and to get experience points. Right now SotA feels like a "game" whereas Ultima felt like you being in another world in which everything had a purprose, everything felt alive and everything fit. This cohesiveness is missing from SotA and I hope that the devs manage to capture it and bring it into the game with later releases.

If you compare SotA and Ultima VI or Ultima VII side by side, walk through both worlds, talk to the NPCs of both worlds, then you will know what I mean. SotA still has a long way to go to reach the details and feeling of the games that are more than 20 years old - despite R11 being a really, REALLY great release.

 

Be honest, what we are getting feels like a MMO....ultima 7 is a distant memory.

 

I still have faith. They could manage to make SotA a game that feels like an Ultima. But for this to work the world has to feel MUCH more alive and less like a backdrop or a "set". Also the NPCs either need to all look and behave unique or they need descriptions like in the dialogues of the old Ultimas. And of course the world needs to be much more interactive (taking and moving around next to every object)...

 

One big problem is the elaboration of the cities by the players. This is barely in the hands of the devs. The many Knight Marshal keeps side by side, stacked Oracle heads everywhere and so on. This has much impact and can kill the immersion.

 

I'm quietly praying that it will all come together soon. I think up until now they have been building all the functionality (still a lot of core systems to go) and then (I PRAY) they will do a pass over it and tidy up the NPCs (make them feel more like real people), weave more LORE into the world (their are traces of it coming through already, but we are only seeing a tiny fraction of the total map, so can't expect too much here) and generally make the world of N.B more believable.

I hope we get quite a few of the solo-scenes in the game, where they can truly tailor it to our actions

One thing that really bugs me at the moment is the spawning system... you kill and elf and then are busy adjusting your character and he just spawns right back into being! Not sure how they can get around that, but it really is an immersion killer.

I'm pretty sure LB and the team will have some tricks up their sleeve in terms of introducing story in this multiplayer world... let's wait and see where this goes!

I kind of like the multi-player side of SOTA, even though I was drawn to this project from an Ultima 6/7 background ( i could never get into UO, lack of storyline/meaningful quests). But they will have to work very hard to make the game live up to the single player Ultimas I remember

 

Well, it would be great if creatures spawned at the edge of the map (perhaps different place then player or other creatures) and walked to where they were before.

 

The pre UO ultimas were special but were teue single player games...u needed a house you used iolo's hut in the woods, sentri's training house in britain, spark's family's house in trinsic, the occasionally haunted inn or just used your own frigate. Or if you needed rest, just hold up and camp...with the risk of a random ambush. The multiplayer aspect of the game adds the community sandbox atmosphere that some gamers enjoy, but does take away from the experience original ultima gamers remember. You can neither compare UO to the original ultimas as it eventually just used the franchise name to sustain itself, nor SotA to the original ultimas for the same reason. The multiplayer aspect will always dictate a different experience

 

Yeah, this house system seems to be killing the game. Also, the more houses are in town, the slower the game runs.

I'm fine with MMO -type systems in the game, but surely there has to be some sort limit for all this, if the game is to be a descendant of single player Ultimas?

The vistas are missing a lot. I've yet to see anything as remarkable as in WoW, Guild Wars or Dragon Age. Right now there's no sense of space. Everything feels cramped. Towns are the worst, with identical houses spawning next to each other one after another.

Why are these monsters walking around the forest? Skeletons? A burial ground? Wolves? Is there a wolfs nest nearby? The happy-go-lucky music playing while i'm fighting three wolves isn't fitting in any way. The sound space NEEDS to walk hand-in-hand with what's happening on screen. Fine, the fiddlydiddly music fits a quiet town. It does not fit a road where i'm fighting for my life. Thematic structure is needed, bad. Even though I'm not a great fan of MMO's, WoW does this fantastically. Music fits the scene perfectly, whether you are just adventuring or fighting a zombie.

There needs to be a HUGE change in the way every area is designed. There have to be cool things in the distance as much as there are next to you. The "feel" of adventure is missing right now.

The game needs to look at Ultima V's cover art for a clue. THAT it where the game should go, visually.

 

I agree, they should have made SotA look like the Ultima V cover...

The dev's need to go back to Ultima V, VI and VII and study how colors are used thematically. How they blend visually. How landscapes and forests are built strategically. Just imitate it. Study how light and shadow are used dramatically, and cohesively with music.

And I agree with the points made in the posts above... and more I thought of personally.

 

One of the goals of SotA according to the Kickstarter campaign is to "create a virtual world more interactive than Ultima VII".
At least right now the world does not feel like the world in Ultima VII and the interactivity is not on par with Ultima VII. You cannot even pick up or move everything you see.

With random monsters appearing in scenes, monsters without any purpose in the place they are in and respawing monsters, the world can not be as immersive, "realistic" and atmospheric as the world in Ultima VII.

If you can read German or you could have it translated by Google, read this interview with RG:
http://www.eurogamer.de/articles/2013-03-28-richard-garriott-und-the-shroud-of-the-avatar-teil-2

In it he basically says that he hates level grinding and that he loves storytelling in games. But right now we somehow see the opposite in SotA. He also says that he loves exploration in games but if you look closely, right now there is not much exploration in SotA. The scenes seem to exist only for you to fight with the monsters there - in order to get EXP and level up -> grinding.
Seeing a bear in the forest in SotA I ask myself if there is a cave nearby in which the bear lives, but there is no cave. The bear just walks around in his designated area waiting for you to kill him so that you get EXP. Even in Skyrim this is more realistic. If you meet a bear then there is a good chance that there is indeed a cave nearby with some bones and maybe some equipment you can find - this is exploration! You can find interesting things and not just enemies.
What we have in SotA - right now - is MMORPG-stuff in which enemies are just there without any purpose waiting to be killed by you so that you get EXP. This is really sad and there has been no word yet from the devs if this will be different in the "final" game...

 

1. Agree with much of what Lord Darkmoon says above - I would like to see more meaningful exploration in maps.
Not just wandering around looking for monsters, but finding a corner of the map where there's a hidden entrance, perhaps some kind of lost treasure (with a system flag so that I can't keep going back to get it again and again, but others can still get it (to satisfy the MMO side of things)). Perhaps you find a worn backpack and in the backpack is a treasure map (they have a mapping system in place, so could utilize that). Then when you get to that place if you 'dig' with a shovel you find the treasure.

2. Better Scene Vistas / Visuals
Some of the new scenes are much better - I think Artie and Abe (at least I think it is them) are doing a great job compared to the older scenes - let those guys lose on the cities to make them look a bit better. We need some scenes that are wide open for exploring, not cramped and channelled experiences. In these vast scenes you could just wander around... perhaps you come across some hermit living in the wild in a secluded part of the scene... not a key story NPC, but perhaps with a really interesting back story and side quest.

3. More NPCs and NPC houses
I'd like to see more houses where NPCs live, and children playing in the streets and that kind of thing.
The world feels a bit dead, especially in big places like Ardoris.

 

Another example that bugged me: I went to the Clink and there were corpses lying around, dead guards and prisoners, but no one seemed to care. What happened there? No one wanted to answer me and everyone just walked around as if everything would be ok...

It's those things that destroy the illusion of being in another world that should feel alive and immersive.

 

I don't think the game is far enough down the development for the 'whistles and bells'. What is being built is foundation and a skeletal structure.......I'm sure there is a lot more to come, I think some people are expecting elements now that are not probably scheduled towards the end of development.

 

I have been complaining on this since R1.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-house-eye-sore-when-grouped.5580/#post-91558

Now it is R11 :/ We might want to start getting use to this eye sore.

 

The problem is that we do not see any advancement in this "sector". It may be that such elements are planned for the later development phases but it is really hard to keep the faith if the only time you heard about it was during the Kickstarter campaign and maybe in a video and every release just screams generic MMORPG.
I would love to see some glimpses of those elements that would make SotA a game with a world similar to Ultima VII and a SP-part that is on par with other SP-RPGs... Maybe one scene that shows at least a bit how the game will be like in it's final form. A scene that maybe shows how monsters will be placed and if they respawn for you and what purpose monsters serve in the place they are, what things you can discover in a scene etc.

 

Agreed. And even walking inside houses feels like you run into a wall the minute you open the door.

What's more disappointing for me, especially since I can't stay connected, is the loading screens. It's like I just finish walking from one end of town to the other, and there's another long loading screen. In time this will probably be optimized. But the sense of smallness and loading screens is totally immersion breaking to me.

 

""BUT... there are some elements in which SotA is still lacking""

Topless barmaids?

 

Indeed. But why stop there? I need spiders with nipple tassels! WHY ISN'T ANYONE LISTENING TO ME!? :O

 

I'm wondering if there should be a set limit for what kind of a building you can set in any particular area. Of course, this should be visible to the claimer before the area is claimed. This would stop the five-windmills-in-a-row -type thing.

 

hah, this was brought up before....but it takes away freedom and some players don't like that.....I personally think it would be a great idea.