SotA's Last Chance To Impress [VIDEO]

Found this quite interesting.
Also interesting feedback in the comments.

What do you think?

 

It's too long.

 

I hope the devs have time to check it ^^ I think he does a good job explaining why it is not appealing to him.

 

if OBS is is dropping the game stream because of scene loading problems - that's a really big deal

 

is Ardoris the city of love or the Isle of Eternal Dawn?

 

Interesting that we find most critics outside of the forums here. Especially those that criticize the SP/Offline part of the game like this guy:

"There is no offline mode work being done lately...there is no ultima 7 like story or anything. It's pretty awful right now and the UO fans are pushing it into a grind fest and trying to monetize the whole game. It's awful."

 

Can't see the grind fest here. The game is less of a grind than ESO was when it released!

 

Hahahaha , sorry too ridiculous , no no grind here , absolutely not , LOL

 

If playing the game is grind for you.. maybe you should watch a movie instead or read a book. Great stories btw

 

Vallo, i really like most of your posts... but this one

 

GMing blades or anything else can be done by the mentoring system in a day or less.
How much faster should it go?!?!

ESO Veteran levels were way more harder and you had to grind quests to level it.. Unless you exploited a certain area of the game
Lineage was a grindfest and some ppl liked it. SotA has mechanics to ease your levelling by a lot.

 

Played ESO and Lineage as well, i know
Btw. "Everquest I" was even worse (but i still loved that game).

Well, true with GMing just any main weapon skill, plus a lot of other skills that only eat up 1.2 mil XP.
Also true with the "mechanics" you just mentioned.

But SotA is still heavenly grindy, also when it comes to crafting (Producer XP).
Kill mobs, farm bosses and farm ressource nodes over and over again is all you currently can do in a zone (and in the endgame).
There are no sidequest, long-term-epic quests, long-term just anything.
Most zones are irrelevant, unique stuff is needed for a lot of zones to give players a reason to go, farm, explore, do stuff here and there.
Some quests for crafters would be also nice.
And a lot more...
The World still feels empty, it is a grind game currently and i hope this will change at some point :/

 

Yes I do, or I just don't grind

No offense although we are different I have no anger about you vallo, but we sure weren't made for the same guild

But honestly, this game is grindy as hell , that said yes the ones you mentioned was too, although i didn't play much ESO , was to much Themenpark and I didn't like!E the restrictions from phasing, but that's another topic.

Going to revisit the Repopulation , full PvP , had a plan for rouge nation once

 

I agree the world feels empty. Just as I just posted in the U7 Sota meh Thread.. I think both the U7 people and UO people are demanding a more breathing and alive world. NPCs feel copy pasted, players actions have no consequences and player cannot control the world they live in. Besides those who paid for it.

Resources and zones need a rebalancing! I still hope for regional economies controlled by players... but I guess ep1 we will be happy to see a functioning virtue anti virtue system.

 

Works fine for me in Windows and Linux

 

yeah, I've never had a problem with it either (win 10)
I wonder if the guy that made the video would respond to a question about - could be he has some insight, could be he has no clue

 

Basically he likes the concept, hates the combat (because it's slow-paced and uneventful) and assumes he can't experience the non-existant single-player narrative because he's a trial player.

I can stream using OBS (Mac) with no issues what-so-ever.

Well, you could say that those who are interested have either moved on or got silenced. Personally, I don't see anything that these "outside critics" have said that wasn't already said ad nauseum. The fact that they're getting attention baffles me.

 

Very Interesting.
Interesting to watch a new player repeatedly try and talk with Edvard as the screen is telling him in big letters to pick up the bow first lol. I see the challenge of helping players learn the game and follow the quests without literally holding their hand. I see why modern players need an "!" on the next person's head. Also interesting to watch, he skipped reading or taking of letters, and general exploration. I can imagine new players doing things like this, and then being frustrated when they are lost.

Interesting comments on his impression of combat, especially the missing. He wants to try out his skills and "miss" "miss" lol.
It's good feedback, I felt much the same too. No "missing" in the very low starter areas would go a long way to help combat, it really gets alot more fun than that!

 

Ya, it was weird he never tried out Air's Embrace, which would help him hit more. He moused over the skill, but never used. Even if you didn't already know that Dexterity effects hit rate from other games, it is in the tooltip on your character sheet.

 

I thought that was a good/fair review of the game, from a new player point of view.

He had three major problems with the game:

• He didn't like the animations.
• He didn't like the combat.
• He didn't like the business model.

He did a good job expressing those themes throughout the video.

From my perspective his take on the animations is purely personal preference. He didn't really give specific examples of what he didn't like, just that they didn't work for him. They work for me just fine, so I chalk that up to personal preference and not something the devs can really do much about.

The combat system seemed to be frustrating to him because he kept missing with his bow. For anyone that's played the game for any extended length of time, this becomes less and less a problem as your character becomes more skilled and you learn what to fight and what not to fight. But I can see where the developers could look to lower the frustration of new players by taking out some of the more challenging monsters near the early stages of the game.

As far as the business model goes, he flat out thought everything was over priced. Which is completely understandable if you're looking at this game as having "11 million dollars" and "Other MMO's give you this stuff for free!" The problem here is that new gamers don't understand that Portalarium is not "making a profit" off of any of this, as all funds collected during development of EP1 go directly to EP1 development. There are no "profits", yet. Unlike other MMO's that never publicly announce how much money was required to develop the game, our crowd funded game does this to be more transparent - and unfortunately that also makes us an easy target. If someone played ESO in Alpha/Beta and knew that it cost them 200 million (made up number) to advance the development that far, they may have similar observations. (not to mention the fact that Portarlium has a staff of about 30 developers and not 100's) But this too is something the devs should focus time on explaining to new players. Maybe through a welcome video that shows similar items being available in-game or the option to buy the same items from players via trade.

Outside of these themes I think the video shows an honest attempt to try the game out and why the person didn't get hooked. There's a disconnect between SOTA and Joe Average MMO player looking for a casual entry into a new world. This has a lot to do with the new player experience and how there's currently very little, I'll call them "roots", that take hold of a new player and get them excited about playing more. Backers often have large assets like housing, towns and community (guilds, friends), where as new players have nothing of substance. This is where I think the development team should focus the new player experience on...developing a way to integrate new players to our world so that when they leave, they feel a connection that they want to reconnect to in the future.