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

Discussion in 'Release 11 Feedback' started by Lord_Darkmoon, Oct 28, 2014.

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  1. Gruz

    Gruz Avatar

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    I so much agree with first poster. I really, really hope, that they can invent something new atleast with monster spawning. Hope that this is not just another low budget MMO, which there has been enough for years now.

    Ofcourse it would be mind blowing to get some life in this "living" world, where every NPC and monster now just stands at same places/area for eternity. If they ran out of funds, because they have been doing only housing this far, atleast I wont be here for long. And I hate cities now, where there is castles and windmills in rows hand by hand. I dont want even see player lot areas now, just run quickly through them.

    But, as we speak a game which Lord British himself is making. As I have played every Ultima this far, I only can trust this team to make this the game, that will be remembered long after. A game which made a MMO:s a RPG:s again in a living, breathing world where we all can make our own stories.

    Now I just cross my fingers and hope for the best...
     
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  2. smack

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    In Tabula Rasa, monsters didn't spawn but were continually transported in by ships.

    I can see the same thing happening here, with perhaps rifts opening up in the middle of nowhere that causes monsters to flood out of them. The rifts can be dynamically opened up anywhere in the scene. This gives the game a lore-based reason why monsters continually invade scenes and so they don't magically appear out of thin air.

    More problematic however are resource node spawns. This is where resource veins would have mitigated this visual problem.
     
  3. Razimus

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    @Lord_Darkmoon

    Good post, I agree w/everything, I don't know for sure, but I really hope all the devs have played Ultima VII from beginning to end,
    if they haven't I'd personally want to assign them that as homework, because the elements you describe have nothing to do with an IP,
    they are general details that any good RPG game can and should take advantage of. The game isn't finished by any means, and we haven't
    really seen a sneak peek of what the real single player NPC quests will be like, but hopefully the NPC interactions offline or online will
    be like the previous Ultimas that you've described.
     
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  4. Chulain1973

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    I understand that the devs are looking for feedback from us guys on how the game is going , but I also think that a lot of these posts are missing out on the fact that we are still in Pre Alpha. I could understand a lot of these concerns if the game was all the way down the line in beta and beyond. Please give the devs a chance to build the game before you make comparisons to games that were completely finished.
     
  5. Duffy

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    I think it's the right time to voice concerns. Once a game is in beta stage, it's all shaped out more or less. Beta is more for finding bugs and not about alteration of major decisions already made. Feedback is also about things people like, don't like or even hate. Why not mention it now? I also think the dev's can handle it :)
     
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  6. Lord_Darkmoon

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    I think the more the game shapes up, the more it nears "completion", the more it looks and feels like a real game the more those elements that are missing or don't feel like the way they were announced show through. And then the concern rises if they can deliver a game that will be what was said during the Kickstarter campaign.
    I don't know how much time it will take to make the world feel more alive, to create the daily schedules for NPCs, to give NPCs the personality that makes them feel like living inhabitants of a world that feels alive. I don't know how much time it takes to create a world that is as interactive as the world of Ultima VII. I don't know how much time it takes to shape a single player experience that is on par with other SP-RPGs and resembles Ultima... The game will be out in the first half of 2015 which at least for me seems to be a very short time to do all those things mentioned and create a balanced MMORPG, too. Especially when so many questions are still unanswered.
    So better raise the concerns now instead of waiting until it may be too late.

    The fear many have is that SotA will be a MMORPG that can be played alone. With constantly respawning monsters and bosses, enemies that are just there to give you EXP without a deeper purpose for them to be in the place they are in, lifeless NPCs without personalities and backgrounds and a world that feels more like the static set of a movie instead of a living world like in Ultima VII.
    Maybe we will get a good story and interesting quests but that is not what a SP-RPG is solely about.
     
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  7. rune_74

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    I asked LB in a thread how any of the areas he thinks they still need to work on bring the game closer to U7....his answer was a bit troubling...he said this game like U7 has a overall bad guy(like the guardian) and that he has pushed for interactive objects....

    It's the little things that are missing...the attention to detail I think. When you went into town in Ultima 7 it felt like people lived there....none of the Shroud towns so far feel that way..
     
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  8. Last_Crusader

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    I think the big problem with cohesiveness is that 90% of every town or city is player owned housing. And that doesn't fit because you have a small house next to a giant keep ..and often the yard filled with junk. So every town I get to .. I have to play some sort of guessing game of when I get to the "NPC" part of town to start shopping and finding quests.

    .. and agree with an above poster on loading screens. What captured me and drew me into WoW was the lack of loading screens (unless you were doing far travel to another continent) .. you could travel from one end of the continent to another without every seeing a loading screen. That brought the whole world alive and together for me.
     
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  9. Chulain1973

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    I think the point I was trying to make in my post was missed entirely. I am not saying that you shouldn't voice your concerns about elements of the game now, I was merely saying that it is foolish to compare a game in pre alpha to that of a finished product. The devs ( who have been in the industry for a long time) I am sure, can easily handle criticism but they will have a very definite direction to take the game in and would be ill advised to change that direction based on the opinions of a few people. If they kept changing things they would never get anything finished, to change even the smallest aspect of the game would have a domino effect on many other parts of the game, it really isn't as easy as it sounds.
    I also don't think you can compare this game to WoW. World of warcraft's visual style lets the developers use a very small polygon count compared to most games that were released around that time. They also use a lot of re-skins for the monsters meaning they are reducing the memory that is needed to run the game, which lets them have reduced loading times. If you take into account that Sota is utilising light scattering, bloom, normal mapping, shadow mapping and lots of other effects I think they are doing a reasonable job to keep the amount of detail they have running. Only time will tell whether the game will live up to expectations but I for one, will hold out and see what they come up with.
     
  10. Lord_Darkmoon

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    Do cities serve a purpose? I mean what are the NPCs in Owl's Head doing? Are they farmers? I didn't see any farms there? Are they woodcutters? I didn't see any sawmills...
    Kingsport could be a city of fishermen and trading...

    I think that having such things in the game is important for the world to feel alive. And for this a city needs to have a purpose. In Kingsport there could be fisherboats out at sea which come back in the morning full of fish. You see NPCs unload the cargo and people carrying it to the market where it is sold. Seagulls fly by and pick up fish occassionally. The same for cities that live from woodcutting. NPCs going into the woods, coming back with wood, bringing it to the sawmill where it is processes further. A city living from farming has lots of farms around with farmers working there and bringing wheat, pumpkins and corn to the city etc. There could also be trade. Traders loading up some of the cargo to carts and then traveling to other cities to sell the wares and you can see them traveling around on the overland map.
    This could even have an impact on the economy, as in fishermens towns you can buy fish rather cheap.
    This would add a lot of atmosphere to the game and make the world feel more alive.

    You knew that in Ultima Minoc was a city of miners and Britain was surrounded by farms... it felt realistic which was why the world felt so alive and was memorable.

    In SotA cities are just full of houses and in the outskirts there a player houses. So what does this mean? The cities live from player housing?
     
  11. smack

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    Yeah, NPC towns are pretty lifeless right now. The NPC AI is likely still in its infancy but it would be sad if that's how the towns looked upon release. The smartest NPCs in the game currently are the Simple Jacks that go around turning lamps on and off. The priority is probably on combat AI currently.

    Hopefully this will become a focus once the core systems like combat and crafting and all the skills for them are more feature complete.
     
  12. Joviex

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    Your false logisim i.e. assumption is that the product design is still a moving target.

    It is simply not possible, given the size of this team, and budget, to re-design and implement many of the systems in play, by the perceived release dates (at this point).

    Even given 6 months out (which is about where they are "targeting") you can maybe do 1 or 2 major subsystems, test, and push to test.

    There are somethings which are now creeping across the line of dependencies on systems and sub-systems, and to pull that all apart could almost end up being a re-write. That is just not going to fly.

    And for sure, there is no longer a "hard" date of delivery, but how long do you really think people, and not the hardcore, "I am a fanboi, burn the rest of the world, don't care if its a steaming pile", people, you know, the rest of us, will stick around while this ages on the vine, still as yet unreleased?

    Its called feature creep, and yes, having been an engineer of software for 20+ years, that is why I asked, repeatedly, to the point of people not really loving my "don't let logic get in my face" questions block me from their forum feeds, to see design documentation on these items (in DEV+ of course to start). Sad really.

    Eventually some posts started happening, and all was "ok" for a bit.

    Stick you fingers in your ears, good times, still does not resolve the fact of having a strong design plan before you start to code a single line.

    As of today we have seen zero design "docs" nor has there been a major posting on any major system of the game in months.

    Hopefully threads like this, just like days of yore, piss off enough devs and they post something to shut me up.
     
  13. Chulain1973

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    @ Joviex

    I hope I didn't offend you with my post, you seem quite upset about something ...
    I agree with what most of Lord Darkmoon has said I particularly like his latest post about the towns having a purpose and identity.
    You are correct in that my opinions are based on assumption, I have donated at the lowest level therefore I do not have any insight into what is happening in the developer side of the project apart from what I have saw in video's etc. I certainly dont think of myself as a fanboi (is that the correct spelling ?) as this is the first Ultima type game I have played I am just hoping it is better than the slew of WoW clones that are being churned out these days.
    Could you also please explain to me what logisim is ? I did a quick google search but everything I found made no sense.
    Thanks in advance.
     
  14. Sir_Hemlock

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    I agree with Joviex on the design side of things.

    I wonder how much progress they would have made on the game if it had been 'top down isometric' hence not requiring micro-detail levels etc.

    I don't even know why I'm still posting here because I know how this all ends :(
     
  15. Heavy Smoker

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    Pre alpha, nothing is finished yet.
     
  16. Bow Vale

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    A kind of wish they kept the present system for towns and places of interest but the main map/world would be 'top down isometric'. If this was so, i could see many problems being done away with. Detail where detail needed. Map size could be huge with a better sense of scope and so so so much less work....and combat lag etc.
     
  17. rune_74

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    If we wait until closer to finished, some of this may never even get looked at.

    How do you have NPC schedules when there really isn't any where for NPC's to work other then shops?
     
  18. Fox Cunning

    Fox Cunning Localization Team

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    I agree on all your points, Darkmoor.
    While I am having a lot of fun with R11, most things look and feel like placeholders (which I hope they are).

    As an example, I went out looking for wood as I had never tried to chop down a tree in the previous releases. So I went to the most obvious place: a forest.
    Well, even though I had a fine "harvesting axe", I could not manage to chop down a single tree. I had to go to a bloody swamp to gather some wood!

    And even in the swamp, I couldn't just chop down trees: I had to chop down some specific trees.
    What's wrong with all the others? I know the engine's got its limitations, but that just feels completely off, it gives the world a fake, "plastic" feeling.
     
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  19. Malchor1

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    I think the main problem with comparing this game to previous ultimas is that those ultimas were single player experiences, with well done companions and npc's that made it feel not to single player.The constant need for available content all the time is something mmorpg's must contend with and why SotA will likely never reach those lofty goals of the past. UO couldn't either and dealt with silly content being added to appease the mmorpg masses. SotA has to be viewed and judged based on its own final product.
     
  20. Fox Cunning

    Fox Cunning Localization Team

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    You will agree that we cannot judge the finished product right now, since there is none yet :)

    I still trust that they will do exactly what stated in the Kickstarter campaign (see the text after "What IS Shroud of the Avatar?"):
    Based on that, comparisons to Ultima IV-VII and UO are legitimate.
     
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