Suggestions v1.0

So after putting in many hours of play time with my friend, we retired this evening very satisfied with our experience. The many things we love about this game so far greatly over-shadows the few little missing components we felt were worth mentioning, but I think they would definitely enhance the player experience in the future. Of course, I realize some of these things may already be in the works, but I'd rather be safe than sorry. I'm going to list them in my own personal order of importance (for the most part).
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1. The journal: It gets cluttered fast. Could there be a better way of prioritizing it and maybe fading out completed quests to a light grey or even doing a light strike-through as though your Avatar simply crossed that task off his completed list? Or even an individual section for completed quests if nothing else.

2. List the Cool Down time for spells and abilities in their tooltips!

3. Double-click items to loot them from corpses instead of having to drag and drop individual items. This would be especially useful for Encumbered players who don't want to use the Take All function and just enhance efficiency all together. It would likewise be nice if you could also equip weapons and armor from your inventory by double-clicking instead of being forced to slowly drag and drop everything. Of course, drag and drop would still be available but this would provide a less tedious method of performing a mundane task. This could also apply to crafting in the future instead of having to drag all the items over the table. again..unnecessarily tedious.

4. Some way to find your party members. I turn around for a few seconds to skin a wolf and I've lost my boyfriend. By the time I find him, his clothy rear is being ganged by skeletons. Color coded nameplates for party members that correspond with a dot on the compass could fix this. Or something of that nature.

5. Party loot options. Gold is split but items are not. Turn-based or round robin looting would solve this. We're constantly asking ourselves who's turn it is..because we like to be fair.

6. An option to hide your helmet and cloak. This is purely cosmetic but something I feel all RPers are entitled to. Sometimes you just want to show off those luscious Avatar locks, you know?

7. Smaller spell/ability quickbar icons.

8. Ability to read books without having to pick them up. Hearkening to the days of Ultima VI-VII, one of my favorite things to do was read the books. Hubert's Hair-Raising Adventure, anyone? I would like to read the books in this game but realized you can't do so without putting them in your inventory and when you're done you can only destroy them otherwise they turn to clutter. It makes bothering to read them overly tedious. And hey, most people can read a book where it sits. I don't think it would take away from realism. Let's face it, the Avatar has done sillier things than read a book sitting on the floor.

9. Equipment preview. I'm sure something like this will be available, but I just wanted to throw it out there in case.

10. More character creation options such as skin tone, hair colors and styles and body type. Again, I realize it's pre-alpha and content will be added but it seemed worth mentioning.

11. Unable to chat in party while harvesting.

12. Option to remove the border from the chat window and making the default font when you type 14. Even though the entered text changes when you change font size, what you're typing in the chat bar is still 18.
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That's all for now and these are nitpicks really but I hope the devs take a moment to consider some of these items if they haven't already. Thanks!

 

Could not agree more, nice post.

 

Welcome Soulicide to Shrouds. I agree, very nicely written ,and I pretty much agree with your observations also.

 

Some great suggestions there! I really do agree to most of these...

1. I surely haven't done all of the quests currently in game, but for those I still need to look into my journal for, it already can take some time to find the entry, especially when you do things in a non-linear way (like doing quests in Braemar, heading to OH, then later finding another quest in Braemar). An option to cross out old entries (deciding for yourself which are crossed out) would be handy.

2. Does make sense, yet I haven't missed the lack of that indicator yet.

3. Agreed. If you can loot everything with one click, why do you have to drag individual items. A double-click would make sense IMO.

4. Here, I disagree. I like the lack of pointers and markers right now. Of course, it's easy to get used to them, but I happen to think that, if you wanna stick together closely, it would make sense to look around and see whether the other one is following. Or, if you have to go AFK or wanna mine/gather or something, you say so. If the friend gets ganked, he could simply try to move back to you, and if you have moved apart far enough to not even find each other anymore, I would think that that took longer than skinning a wolf. So a marker showing you when you just could have communicated like saying in advance "Ill skin wolves we kill, so if we kill one, hang back" or "Hey, wait, skinning" feels a bit more immersive than having a big marker showing me where my buddy is. Just my opinion though, guess it's an immersion-thing for me.

5. Not having done much group content, I have no opinion on this yet.

6. Another disagree. Maybe a macro to REMOVE the helmet and cloak so they aren't displayed. It's again an immersion-thing. If I wear a heavy helmet to protect myself, it should be visible. If I don't want it to obstruct the view of my head, I shouldn't wear it even if it means I lose protection. I know it's always weird to talk about immersion or realism in a fantasy-computer-game, but I never liked this feature much in other MMOs. In this case, if I were asked, I'd vote "No"...again, just my opinion.

7. Personally, haven't thought about this, but a slider to resize them sure would add to user-friendliness or the freedom to redesign your UI. I have used "button size sliders" in other games and in some cases, I was quite glad they were there.

8. Agreed!

9. You mean graphically previewing what an item looks on you like before you equip it? Personally, since right now the things I wear are used for stats, I haven't thought about this being a possible option, but I of course see the merits of this.

10. I take your word for it, so I agree. Frankly, I don't remember mucgh of the character creation as I did it rather quickly just to get into the game asap, but I usually like a wide variety of options!

11. Agreed. And dunno if this is related, but when gathering/skinning, there are a lot of windows one can't open. It's not a biggie as the skinning doesnt take THAT long, but then again, it always throws me off and feels buggy when I cant open a certain window while skinning or gathering

12. Again, never thought about it or looked too much into it, but it does sound like a good idea!

 

4
Already in but a bit difficult.
If you face the direction they are in you can see their green nameplate even if they are far or behind objects.
So you need to 'look around' until you spot them.

6
I make an extra "deck" with the equip I want to have in social settings. Then I switch to that when RP and switch back to combat deck for adventuring.

6

 

I stand by my #6. Several reasons. A simple toggle on or off in the game options would appease both sides. If you didn't wanna use it, you wouldn't have to. Those that find it convenient and like to resemble a more classic Avatar, can simply have the option. Think back to previous Ultima games...specifically 7. The Avatar never had a helmet showing on his model even though he was equipped with one. It's just about aesthetics...especially if you get say a helm with awesome stats but happens to be totally fugly.

I do like the idea of having another deck for quickly swapping out an entire though, Spoon.

 

Lots of good ideas in the post. For me improving the Journal is a big one.

 

Now that I'm further into the game I am realizing that of all my nitpicks, the Journal HAS to be fixed. I can't find anything in it anymore with all the duplicate entries of quests and lack of organization. Aside from completed quests being marked off somehow or put in a 'Completed' area of the journal, some sort of indication as to whether a party member is on that quest as well would be nice. Even something as simple as a number in parenthesis next to the quest entry to determine how many members of your party are on it. The ability to actually write your own notes in the journal somewhere would also be fantastic.