Release 8 thoughts

Now that Release 8 has come and gone, and even though I put a basic rundown of thoughts in the Poll thread, here are a few Points of Interest from my own Point of View.

First of all, I've read a few threads that are praising PvP and combat, so that's a good thing to read/hear. I'm personally NOT a big PvP type of player, and as such did not partake of any real PvP combat while playing. Still, as a non-PvP player I think it is a GOOD thing that combat and PvP specifically were focused on. Making PvP more balanced and enjoyable can easily help make PvM more enjoyable by making it a more engaging activity. Up until this release, SotA PvM has been at best bland and rather clunky. The areas are fun enough to explore, but the combat itself was very bland and rough. R8 has made good progress at improving combat as a whole for both PvM and PvP.

That being said...

The Card System MIGHT work for PvP because of the element of randomness it adds, but I'm not convinced that it adds much to PvM. As it is currently, character progress is minimal at best (namely find/buy/craft better gear and mess around with skill points until you find the right combination). Without the ability to progress in terms of character quality, getting stuck in combat with a dealt hand of slugs while skeletons beat on you while you either run or hope to pull something useful is more frustrating than fun. Swapping to Locked Cards made the experience much better at least for me.

Resource Gathering I know is still down the road. Both R7 and R8 added a bit to this with gems, crystals, and spider parts, and it was quickly noticeable that the resource chest had been removed pushing characters out to harvest their own resources. In terms of resource distribution, cotton plants, hide bearing animals, and trees seem to work well. Ore deposits, however, need some work. Compared to earlier releases, ore deposits were made fewer and further between (particularly noticed in the Spider Pass scene). However, for those deposits that were found, the amount of resources contained were a bit too generous. While you only received a few pieces of ore, silver and gold ores were FAR more common than previous releases, and dropping 5+ gems of different types was more than a little odd. Finally, on the resource gathering end, the animations need a bit of work to look correct. Even though it adds a small amount of process time, seeing the character take two or three swings at a tree or ore deposit should be the ideal. Cotton plants and skinning animals seem to work fine.

As a tangent to resource gathering, because the resource chest has been removed, it would be logical to revisit an old request of mine from earlier Releases... Saving the Recipe book status. Since the Friends List is saved even though we have to remake our characters, and since we have a single character per account, saving the recipes the player has found between releases should be possible as well. This of course should remain through the Test Releases until the point the game is wiped a final time before it becomes truly persistent. At that point, wipe the books completely, tweak recipes as desired and start from new then. For testing purposes, having to relearn recipes is just tedium.

One more subject and this involves the scenes of Owl's Head and Kingsport. It has become somewhat of a tradition for me to try (and usually succeed) to find the Edge of the World™ and jump off. In R7, I was able to find this in Kingsport via swimming under the bridge. In R8, the barrier that holds players in the Kingsport area was completely gone. You could swim to the end of the ocean then run to the Edge, the river under the bridge still worked, and even in the entrances that send you back to the map, you could sidestep around the trigger area and continue onwards into the areas outside of where you were supposed to remain. Owl's Head area was a little more complicated as the trigger to switch to the overhead map was a bit more persistent. However, at the south road entrance, if you stopped when the scene started to fade in, you could break free into the open fields beyond. Before you could reach the mountains in the distance, the trigger seemed to catch up and boot you to the map. North of the city proper was a bit easier. Jumping off the wall and heading into the mountains you would soon reach the trigger area, but a quick sidestep before the scene faded would break the trigger and allow you to climb into the mountains to the windmills, the (fake) volcano, and the Edge. While this is enjoyable for testing, I don't think this is the plan for the final game, so this is posted in hopes to bring attention to those zones specifically (considering they are the oldest two zones in the game).

Overall, I had a lot of fun with R8, and while things are about to get very busy for me at work, I look forward to R9.