Release 1 Impressions and Responses

I am well pleased with R1! Great stuff! +1 on jumping, and going further...

I suspect that many players, including self, want a similar feeling to Skyrim as far as game control. When we eventually get to combat, a Skyrim-like approach might also be a crowd pleaser. That game seemed to have rudimentary weapon hit location detection, which allowed for crazy stuff like decapitation.

I don't know any Skyrim players that didn't dig on decaps. heh

 

I also said I wanted a game like skyrim but people said skyrim cost 80 something mil. and the witsher 2 also mush more than SOTA has got to work with so
I don't think it will be that good but as good as humanly possible for the moneys raised.
also its all up to you and what you do in the game so its more interesting no hand holding,i like also puzzles in every main mission looks like.

 

What's up with the Volcano??

During R1 as an outsider to the town I noticed 3 major points of interest. One was the Tesla Tower, and at night was the shattered moon. The third was the volcano. I was happy to see that NPC's responded to you when referring to the Tesla Tower, but no one that I talked to seemed to have anything to say about the 'active' volcano simmering nearby, taunting the town that it could decimate any moment now with a single catastrophic eruption.

I know the conversation systems are by no means complete; just hoping that major points of interest that people will notice when entering a town like these three will have plenty of content within the town citizens' dialog (and hopefully lead to quests as well).

 

Your question: "What's up with the Volcano??"
Your answer: "the conversation systems are by no means complete"

 

So true. The conversation system will live and die by the amount of keywords each NPC knows. The free form input is a double edged sword. And there's only so much bandwidth they have to analyze all that data sent to the backend.

Perhaps they should crowd source the dialogue for some of this. We know Lum is looking at the top responses but there's only so much they can do on their end for all that data.

Plus, I'll shamelessly plug my NPC social and knowledge graph idea again. They don't have to bake it into every NPC.

 

You mean this volcano?

 

In the conversations, having more eloquent responses on the negative side will help the NPCs feel more real....When you ask them about things they may have no information on instead of a simple "huh?" or "I don't know about that." Have them lead you back towards something they may know...or about someone who they think might know...weather that other person does or not.

 

I actually thought Skyrim had terrible controls and menu systems. It was designed for use with gamepads(xbox/ps3/pc), A game designed for keyboard + mouse can do a much, much better jobs in all aspects. It's probably the main reason after playing for an hour I want to take a break, it just feels so restrictive compared to games that are made for a keyboard and mouse. Same thing with Fable 3, very obvious they want you to use a gamepad.

(Just thought of something.. can you jump in fable 3? I don't think you can)

 

I'm really not sure what you were looking for in the actual controls with Skyrim then, since it used the same control scheme of just about every first person game out there. Yes the tab menu system wasn't the greatest but the movement system was much better then what we currently have in shroud.

 

Isn't it the same movement system? how is it different?

WASD move with mouse look.

 

You're right, but I'm not sure what games designed to move with mouse and keyboard does it better? I'm pretty sure the game was designed for mouse/keyboard and gamepad....

It does have jump though

 

I was mostly annoyed with the menu/inventory systems But I also didn't care much for the combat... more action oriented... clicking to swing your sword, holding down the button to shoot more fire... just mouse oriented combat with very few moves available at one time... more options at once would have been better.

 

Mouse look in shroud requires you to hold down a button, camera doesn't follow the character when changing direction, skyrim you can walk or run, shroud doesn't provide as full a range in camera angle (can't look up to see where the sun is in the sky) etc. The differences between them are worse for SotA, but I attribute that to being still in development.

 

well the hold down button for camera movement makes sense because your cursor interacts so much with the environment. Otherwise you'd be moving your camera around trying to get the mouse pointer in the right spot, there isn't even a mouse pointer in skyrim(no need since it's gamepad controlled). There isn't a good way around that. Probably the only change you could make is allow players to swap that, so holding down a button (Right mouse by default) brings up the cursor.

 

I don't recall specifically the differences in the movement systems. I just know it was really difficult to turn your character around in some cases in SoTA and I never found that to be a problem in Skryim.

 

Regarding the first release. NPC textures.

I know much of this is 'in development', but if I don't mention it and it stays in game, I would never forgive myself:

Many of the NPCs in the same town look identical to each other. If there aren't going to be individual unique portraits for every character in the game, then every character better have its own unique individual face in game! Unless the story says they are identical twins, they should not look that way! This is something Ultima did right, and choosing not to have the portraits, if I'm not mistaken, was only done because the graphics are good enough to see the detail in the characters themselves now. If they all look the same, then that's not the same level of detail in my book.

Many of us will want to play the game with names and titles turned off, and that means we should be able to recognize people by their faces... I hope that's not too much to ask, because it's very important to me. If having unique character faces throughout the entire game is too much, at least keep them unique within each 'zone' please. Thanks.

 

Dev+ people get to design NPCs, so they'll have thousands of unique NPCs just from that


Part of the similarity is likely also the limited tools they have right now, once they finish the character customization they can make more NPC customization (assuming they use the same/similar tools to quickly/easily make npcs)

 

I absolutely hated the Skyrim interface. And yes, it was totally designed with the gamepad as the primary interface. The solution? SkyUI. You will never play the game without it again.

 

Any Dev response on re-binding the keys for "handicapped" players?

 

I wonder if we'll be able to see the phases of the destroyed moon..
During the Alpha it just kept an opposing orbit to the world's rotation with the sun, which tells me we were stuck in a single day of Novian time, the day of the 'full broken moon'..
I hope over time, we'll see the moon isn't fixed in the sky with the stars, and travels at a different rate than the sun, and the sun travels at a different rate than the stars..

Anyone know?