Shroud of the Avatar Comments from other Gaming Sites.

Those are some depressing reads. Hard to argue with a few of them.

 

Well it's half a game.

Putting the cash shop up made sense from a financial POV during development, with the downside that many players will be turned off by this in the long run. But that point is moot, since it is what it is now, and it's been going on for a while.

What needs to be done is: finish the content. Wrap it u for E1.
And then polish the HECK out of this.

Proper character models, customization. More than 1 pajama graphic for casters, for example and more gear models in general.
I saw a female char in a pretty dress from behind earlier today, then I saw the Mr. Ed face and hurried up to get out of the contagious zone.
The skills/spells need to be fleshed out, the combat needs to be made smooth, along with animations (right now players and mobs are sliding on the ground like it's ice - not yourself, but other chars do, they don't run, they skate).

Regions need to be made pretty. Ardoris for example looks like a Russian gulag, grey everywhere. The best looking place so far has been Wizard's Rest, due to the scenery, and due to me not walking into the player town.

And so on, and so on.

But this is Pre-Alpha, they're still building the raw content. You can tell from how Taming has been thrown in, or how the Chaos tree has spells that aren't in game yet. Or how all spells look the same in different colors. It's all placeholders.

Sure, it's playable, and for a Pre-Alpha, it's damn stable.
If you want to judge the game at this point of time, judge it by if you can walk 10m without falling through the ground.

And so far, it's very, very good and if the money will hold them over water, they will finish this with a great product.

And then, I won't care if the mainstream gamers jump on the train or not.
UO was fun even in 2000, with few players around.

 

The comments about it shifting to an mmo focus rather than single player seem to have people upset. Online multiplayeris the hardest part to make and balance, and it's easier to do that first so that things like combat and npc interaction remain consistant from multiplayer to singleplayer

 

Aye, looking at forums elsewhere it's not much good news from people that tried Sota at different points of development. What's equally as sad is you really have to look for anything about Shroud of the Avatar on forums, it's totally off the radar for most people. They either don't know about it, had bad first impressions of it, have heard not much good about it so far, or are just waiting to try it when it's when released. Hopefully, closer to beta the game will have taken better shape, and with it being more completely polished, will drive more interest for release.

I have in the past been opposed to free weekend trials or something of the sort for SOTA because it's Pre-Alpha, and I still do, as it is still a bit barebones in a lot of areas. Now I'm wondering if when the game goes into ALPHA transition it would be a good idea to get fresh eyes on the game, and get first impression feedback of it's problems that people have with it, and their likes as well in a survey form after their weekend trial is complete to get a better sense of the negatives/positives people will have. The game needs to be able to grab peoples attention and draw them in those few hours of play, or it won't be good for the longevity of SOTA. I think that feedback could be very valuable for tweaking many problematic areas with SOTA. We as backers have been playing the game for a while now, and have a bit of tunnel vision with the game, and not see many problems with it that someone new jumping into the game could bring to light.

 

Quite the opposite from my perspective...

I have zero interest in a single player game. Zero.

The whale vs. fish issue, SPO and small instanced zones are my biggest issues.

 

Same here, no interest in single player offline at all. The small zones are a big issue for many I've tried to get to play the game too, and I do agree with them. The adventure scenes and most of the towns/cities are too small and barely explorable since you can run from one side of the zone to the other very quickly. Small and boring scenes so far. If the adventure/city/towns scenes were as big as a metropolis player owned town they'd be perfect size for exploring. The overhead map is finally at a speed that's perfect for me though.

 

I still firmly believe that a true single player game cannot be built upon a MMO foundation.
The game is balanced to be an MMO which has a totally different balancing than a single player game. Essential elements like the combat or spell system are designed for MMO players and might not make sense or might not be fun in single player.
I think that it isn't enough to remove other players from a game and add quests for an MMO to become a single player RPG...

 

perhaps instead of a free weekend there could be a free quest but that inherits the same short coming as a 2 day pass in that it's not going to scratch any sort of pvp itch. I do feel that if you gave them a leveled up toon you could fix some of the problems associated with a free trial but are the devs going to commit time to something temporary? do we even want them to? i personally don't know the answers to those questions.