So how is the game shaping up?

Hi everyone,

Been a backer for a while now, but unfortunately I never have time to play releases thanks to real life so I've been desperately trying to keep up with development since the early days. I'm kind of curious how the various aspects of the game are coming together in terms of how grindy the crafting is, how the game keeps things fresh as time progresses, the pvp and if there are ways to avoid pvp (sneaking around player hot zones, etc).

Also, I know there are articles out that talk a bit about this, but I'm more interested in the experiences of people who are participating in the releases.

=)

 

Crafting is in the midst of a large overhaul, gathering is quite grindy but crafting itself not so bad. Each update seems to add large amounts of content now and some really fun stuff has popped up (like mini-bosses, pick pocketing, fishing and now agriculture and guild wars). PvP has quite low participation numbers and is extremely easy to avoid since it is by consent only, but lets see how guild wars goes next release. Personally i am enjoying myself and i play quite allot.

 

So far for me it has been great fun. Although things get muddled from time to time, they get sorted out. The Dev's are always busy as they can be . The creation of the dungeon's (what I always call them no matter if they are above ground or below lol) is my favorite thing at the moment and then fishing a close second. Wade back in and just have fun. There will always be snafu's and disagreements over this and that and it always goes along with the territory. Remember to form your own opinions , after all you bought into all this for your own reasons. Mine just so happen to be Sparkle, Glitz, and rumors of Spectacular houses in the near future.

 

Yeah I've been watching the game progress and after it's rough start (really early graphics, bad animations because they hadn't gotten to putting in good animations yet, etc) and it looks like Shroud of the Avatar is becoming something worth investing time in. It sounds like the game is heading in a good direction at the very least.

 

A pretty good indicator is also the player marketplace.

During good releases, more accounts are bought.

During bad releases, more accounts are sold.

Also looking at who is selling and moving/leaving/arriving can give you a feel overall, at least for me.

And if you don't like it, take a month off and come back and review.

 

This game is developing just fine... They're added quite a bit of content, populated the map with many new places and POTs... I'm starting to have a lot of fun with the combat system and new use base skills, I've learned how to master them... Took sometime, I'm old after all...

 

Don't look at the water.

 

I have to give them kudos for having a very stable game. In fact it's probably the only game I've ever played in Pre-Alpha/Alpha that was extremely stable, no downtime, no crashing, etc. Heck even better than some games I played on day one of release through months of problems. Sota patch days usually run pretty smoothly and on time as well.

As for the game itself, it still needs a lot of work, a lot. I'm sure they'll get there though.

• Scenes, dungeons, cities, are pretty small compared to what you'd see in other games. Though hopefully this will be fixed soon with the 5.3 Unity multi-scene editing http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/08/unity-5-3-all-new-features-and-more-platforms

Easier scene management
The editor’s scene-editing capabilities are also getting a significant upgrade with the introduction of multi-scene editing. Unity now allows you to split a level up into smaller scenes, which has some useful applications. For instance, if your game includes a very large level, you may want to split it up to support streaming scenes dynamically and loading/unloading them from memory on the fly. Overall, this should result in performance gains when working with larger levels, giving you more freedom to build bigger in-game environments.
Multi-scene editing allows you to manage multiple scenes and improves the workflow when collaborating on scene editing. You can separate up your work into individually-loadable chunks and create large streaming worlds.

• Gathering and combat are huge grinds with little reward for doing so. These are still work in progress though so hopefully they'll change for the better over the next year and we can all find a happy medium.
  
• New cities that come online don't really have much originality.
• The add-on store needs some reworking. Items are often overpriced and not unique to warrant the prices.
• Pvp, well there's hardly any to mention at this point. Hopefully, it will change for the better over the next year enough to draw more interest as new content for it unfolds.
• They added a hometown so that you can go and see houses and some items before you buy them. Big +1 for that.
• The community is still one of the best bunch of people you'll find for discussions. For the most part many of us can agree and disagree with one another without attacking one another.
• The developers communicate often on the forums and in their dev hangouts, and try to keep us informed as the game goes through changes and development.
• Npc's are starting to come online that have night and day cycles.
• Fishing is progressing. +1 for this as well.
• The new water looks so much better than before.
  
• Agriculture is suppose to come online next patch. +1 again.

The game is still rough around the edges, but a lot of good things are in the works. I look forward to seeing it evolve into what I hope becomes a really great game next year.

 

Hey IceQueen, yes I'm also very interested to hear if the Multi-Scene functionality will help SOTA achieve larger scenes with more detail / objects in them. I thought it could even be used to break up scenes like Ardoris so they load in stages depending on where you enter from so they load faster.

 

Aye, hopefully if we ask on the next Dev hangout post we'll get some good news.