R15 Impressions

So just going to rattle off my thoughts here.

Ghosts are nasty.

Novia map looks pretty cool but work needs to be done on roads.. especially though forest areas so they don't slow you down as if they didn't exist.

Grunvald Shardfall imo is disproportionately large on the map. In fact, it's flipping huge! It makes the world suddenly seem tiny as it takes up nearly all of Grunvald. I would cut the size by at least 50%.

I'm a little disappointed some known bugs were not addressed. Particularly suffering double death upon transitions. Bugs like that are particularly annoying and if possible shouldn't wait.

Lighting of ourse is kinda wonky. We all know it.. Unity 5 transition issue blah blah blah.. but what really is getting me is the day-night transition.. is rather more like flipping a light switch. Also I'm hoping as more options become available the day-night cycle will return to a meaningful balance.

No comment on magic except to mention innate skills. Earth innate especially. Must have, can't live with out, no reason not to have etc.

Not sure how I feel about cross over skill points. I understand the intention but at the moment I feel like it is overpowering. Anyone who both adventures and crafts has a distinct skill point advantage over anyone who does either one or the other but not both.

If you're a level 5 adventurer but a level 20 crafter you currently get 40 adventurer skill points.. Perhaps the amount of points you get here should be capped going both ways.

I've noted that when I use the /zone ability to fast travel home.. the game no longer remembers properly where I am on the map. I leave my home town and emerge at some other location the game last remembers me being. I leave Westhollow and find myself at Owl's Head, Kingsport or even Ardoris. That's a bit of a whoops.

It's nice to see we can craft halberds again.

Looking forward to more crafting skills so that crafted items can actually be better than store bought. I know that's been frustrating for people. We've been frequently told crafted will be better.. but right now it's clearly not even equal, nevermind better. Pretty sure I know the reasons for this but will be nice when this situation improves.

Something that's been bugging me for awhile.. inflated numbers.. is it really necessary to have.. at level 20.. stuff I'm killing being 1000 and 1800 XP???? Our strength per level isn't supposed to increase exponentially.. but that doesn't seem to be true of XP. Would it hurt to simply divide everything by 10?

how much XP per kill are we going to need for tougher baddies at level 50? My word. Or is this part of the design of slowing high level progress?

Obviously a known issue but performance really took a dive for me in large towns. We knew this was likely but if some improvement could be made for R16 instead of waiting for R17 for polish then testing these areas might go smoother.

 

More importantly it's disproportionately huge in comparison to how it feels once you get inside of it. I LOVE how the overland map looks, but once I get inside the shardfall it seems like I've been sold a bill of goods. The comparable size of the inside verses the outside is just not believable.

I'd much rather they made the actual shardfall larger to match the map, instead of making the overland map smaller to match the actual size of the shardfall.

 

I think you mean making the shardfall smaller on the map.

There are technical problems with making the shardfall instance too big. I think the instance size is fine as is. Consider also the cloth map which indicates a much smaller (on the map) size. It leaves you the impression the shardfall is somewhere in the middle of Grunvald.. not that the shardfall IS Grunvald. So I walk around that corner and it's like.. holy crap that's big.. now where's everything else that's supposed to be here? On the map, Desolis is like 80+ miles away from the Shardfall.. now there's no room for Desolis..

 

My 2cents-

- I understand the lighting is going to be out of whack per the DEV hangout but wow, I have to stop playing and wait for daytime again before I can venture on. This is even with light/torch/and tone mapping setting off. I hope this will be addressed. I get it, its night time, you are not supposed to see but as it stands now, I cannot play with the current dark levels during night scenes.

- Over world map is really coming a long way; nice Job! I am still not sure what the point of it all is yet but you have made awesome progress. That being said....the travel in the over world map view is excruciatingly painful, I absolutely hate it. I realize some of the hardcore RP'rs LOVE the terrain "realism" (slogging through forest or over mountains) but my guess is all those that love it now are going to hate it after we are forced to use the over world map and they have been playing for some time. Make it one speed and be done with it, I sure as heck hope a lot of dev time is not being put into "hey, this is a sand pit, lets slow people down when they walk through it" just end it, in theory it was nice, but enough is enough.

-Random encounters, what can I say except, please have the option to turn them completely off or give the person an option to not get pulled into yet another load screen/instance! Leave it for the people that love the load times and instancing, but make it an option at the least. Who knows, I may go hunting out RE's at some point for RSS gathering etc, but until then they are a completely burdensome part of this game for me.

-Ardoris - Though there have been visual improvements to the city, the frame rates made my eyes bleed and CPU/GPU hit their limit. Is there some type of memory leak in that city causing the absolute horrid performance???? I could not get out of that city fast enough. On a side note. It looks as though Ardoris is going to be the city where people with housing couldn't find anything better.....just a giant map of houses upon houses upon houses upon houses......

 

Aren't they supposed to be adding roaming encounters on the overworld map too? That will certainly make movement speed matter more. Can't outrun them in the forrest, but get out in the open maybe! I think the overworld map will make a lot more sense once it's finished. Already it feels SOOO much better having other players on there. I love stopping and chatting with people in my travels.