The most important feedback you'll ever read. Please read/answer.

Time Lord, thank you but I've been playing for a few months now... not really "new" I will forgive the assumption... however what I cannot forgive is your complete disregard for responding in any way shape or form to the issue I raised regarding the Deck random skill combat system... you sound a lot like Barrack Obama with that post... so much so that I got as bored after the first few lines as I did when I heard Obama's first few words.

"It is time for Change!" ahem... yeah ok get to the point, what are you selling... in detail, we are not as stupid as you seem to think we are.

ADDRESS the issue or you are just wasting internetink...

What happens when I NEED to cast a heal spell in the next couple seconds or die... yet despite being maximum level possible with ALL Life spells yet I have to wait for it to come up into the random selection of limited spells I have the choice to use during combat... lets say I keep getting attack spells and then I just die because I cannot heal myself... or what happens when all I get are healing spells and never get a spell to attack with... talk about "grinding" lol... two hours healing myself before I get a single attack spell to swat the bunny rabbit with and then collect the 2 experience points, a chunk of bunny meat and some fur covered in blood.

Anyways... please save your breath and address issues with solutions or just stop breathing... thank you very much. Because frankly your post just mocked my request for addressing my specific points by merely spewing a bunch of cut and pasted crapola (no offense just irrelevant to the issue) it really sounded like standing at a rally for some Democrat running for office.

Please. Stay with the OP's original post topics and address them and stop spamming the thread.

(Please ignore the overblown sarcasm) I've had a few beers and fireballs... (not the spell kind)

(((hugs and kisses)))
Sabe!

 

Samlee, I am very patient and completely understand the stage at which the game is at and how many things will not function as intended and will not even work at all yet.

My question is on specifics about the concept intended for the deck system. I am trying to stay within the OP's topic of the combat system and from my perspective even if working perfectly... it is still not a viable system for any game that you would expect to be able to use skills or spells that your character understands and knows how to use... what is the point in having it in my characters skill tree if it is not going to be available to me when it is needed the most... such as healing me when I'm about to die or my friend is on the verge of death... what point is knowing the fireball spell if I cannot cast it when needed (assuming regeants and spell power are available to me)

 

Great observation. No offense Time Lord.

Sent from my Galaxy S5 using Tapatalk.

 

I'm fine with the 'scenes' so long as the overland map is really well done. If we get more time spent creating interesting scenes rather than one giant open world, and lots of time spent creating an immersive overland map, then that will be great.

 

I've always wondered how an open world where you can walk between cities in like 7 minutes is more realistic for immersion.

 

Personally I like the dual scale map. I cannot stand walking through the same areas over and over again just to get from town to town. Taking a flying bird from one side of the world to the other side of the world is annoying too especially if it is a half hour of you do nothing but fly around in the same flight path every time.

That sort of thing works great if you need to take an intermission and make a few phone calls, but if you intend to play the game it is sort of a bad to wait a half hour while your guy is caught up in a flight pattern to another land. WoW needed instant transmission badly. I think Dalaran was a nice place when I finally made it up there, and it had teleporters to all the important locations.

Dual scale maps allow for additions to be made quickly (new towns, new points of interest). It also allows us to travel faster across the land. There still may be a need for instant transportation but not nearly as much. Maybe a moongate to the other side of the world then walk to where you need to go. It is much more efficient travel. I'm still hoping that there is a spell that can create a rift to teleport a party to you, or to some other place, but still the dual scale map is what we all expected back in Kickstarter when we pledged back then. That's the game we all knew we were supporting, it quite frankly is the only way this game will be made. They do not have the resources to build a completely contiguous world as big as this one will be.

 

Wait, before shooting the messenger he does have a point, the endless zone loading is destroying immersion. I had assumed that zone loading would be gone by retail; however, I am told that zone loading will always be with us which is frankly unbelievable in a modern game when you realise that the likes of Watchdogs and GTA 5 are fluidly running huge open worlds on game consoles!

This is the problem with some Kickstarter models, rather than polished, finished products some IP gets released without any of the checks and balances that usually would prevent a game like SoTA ever seeing the light of day. don't get me wrong, I am and always have been a real Ultima fan but when I first saw SoTA I thought I had been teleported back to 1990 and was playing Ultima IX the graphics were so poor and worse required constant loading to any other area. The graphic quality has yet to be improved substantially, what we really need are more dedicated graphic artists that can fundamentally improve what we have been given and structural programmers applying their expertise in getting rid of these endless loading zones.

The Building Blocks of Sandbox and Open World Games

 

Hi tomsback, glad you could stop by. I completely understand your desire for a Skyrim-style open world. I really enjoyed wandering all over the place for the first hour that I played that game.
Then, once I had visited a few places, you know what I did?
With each new quest I used instant travel to take me to the closest known location. Every time. No more trudging long distances for me. So did almost every other person who played that game.
A bit like zone loading, really.

 

I live in Burbank. I can walk to Glendale in 7 minutes. I can also walk to North Hollywood in 12 minutes.

What's the point?

if you are trying to make one about the areas of breaking immersion, how about full cycle days that only take 35 minutes? or the fact no one ages? or anything gets broken, or rusts, or chips, or erodes?

there are far more breaking immersion ideas than just seamless hexes to complain about. If that is your thing of course, is not mine.

 

Yep, time runs faster in the game so it makes sense that walking the distance goes faster. The problems though isn't the walk time exactly, but the world sometimes feels tiny and even in game time the travel distances are too short. It should take from between half a game day, to several, to walk somewhere, which is more than a couple of minutes.

I'm sure you can walk from Burbank to NH, or from Burbank to Glendale in a couple of seconds if you're in the right location.. not sure how that's a good analogy. :/

 

LoL on a side note physics are a little different in New Britannia. Time appears to unfold at the same speed for a person inside a zone, as it does for somebody walking from one city to another on the overland map. I guess time is relative in New Britannia too.

This isn't a serious comment, but it might be cool stuff for one of the books that we write in game. Somebody could talk about space-time physics in New Britannia. lol

 

I remember all sorts of jokes about the game mechanics in some of the single player Ultimas. For instance, I recall one book stating why doors would be placed on certain sides of the buildings, while, no doubt, it was really because it was the most visible location in an isometric game.

 

I'm sry that people like this guy get given the privilege of early play - or posting in the forum for that matter. He REALY doesn't seem to get the fact that what we're playing in these releases is PRE-ALPHA, and what that means is that we are only seeing a very small window of a game that's not yet complete at all.

Those of us who have put our money where our mouth is get to have this little bit of fun for a game we're (mostly) patiently waiting for with great, great anticipation.

I don't know why he would feel the need to go on some page-long rant about how disappointed he is (when he hasn't shelled out a penny for it anyway) and then label it as important information, omg - not!

As for zoning.... holy smokes! I do NOT, repeat NOT want to spend a hundred yrs running from one spot to another! Zoning is fine by me (as long as the 'my game crashes more than half the time when zoning' problem is fixed by actual release, lol).

omg i just had an idea.... you know you can type /zone [player name] to go somewhere fast..... maybe we could do that for towns? so like /zone [town name] ??
you guys probably already thought of that....

anyhoo -- had a really fun time in R9 and looking forward to R10!! AND i'll be upping my pledge so to peeps like the one who started this thread.

-- and thank you devs for all the hard work you're putting in, keep up the good work!!

 

Actually, I was pleasantly surprised about how in Skyrim; although the world was pretty small in real terms, they designed it to feel like it was really huge.. and I enjoyed that. I would like to take that concept and push the boundaries of it a bit and make an even larger world. Me, as a player personally, I enjoy travelling huge distances and also having things do do while travelling, like camping.

But others don't, and would demand fast travel from the devs, ie as it existed in Skyrim.. and that ruins the idea entirely, by making travel optional. And making a world that huge is a not just about money, its a project in itself. Plus, I don't think the devs want to put in survival requirements like food and sleep, which I think is necessary to make travelling long distances feel right and occupy the player's time.

I think dual-scale is a good compromise, anyway.

 

That was a pointed remark to the person I quoted.

He seemed to say that a 7 minute walk, from one city to the next, is an immersion breaking event, not akin to real life.

I was just pointing out there are many more "immersion breaking" events than something that is actually more like real life than most other things =p

Unless I misunderstood his intent? entirely possible.

 

Not to mention the dual scale gives more freedom to the devs to create new content, and actually use less resources to keep this game up and running in the first place. This isn't a $100M budget game, and having one contiguous world seems like it would be more expensive. So I like it for travel, and it is very functional too.

 

Yes, it has a lot of multiplayer advantages. Like I've said before, one of the big problems with UO was housing basically eating up the wilderness.

And you got to instance one way or another, to reduce player count in some areas and make encounters with individual players less routine, and make the world feel less crowded.

 

Nothing like zone loading one load for the fast travel then a full world to explore on your way to do the quest, gathering, MvP.
With this setup you visit an instance every time you want to do something, so you will agree once you've been in one a couple of time's it will become a grind to keep going back to the same little box to gather ore/lumber with the added scene loading, even in Skyrim a SPRPG with an open world much better to set off travelling gathering as you go finding new dungeon's NPC's needing help, MvP.
Surely PvP even if consensual offers a lot more when you can meet another PvP'er on your travels, or are all PvP players mainly campers looking for Noob kills.

 

OP:

I read your first post and honestly I feel like you are making one HUGE mistake in that you do not recognize that this is a PRE ALPHA. I have never played a pre alpha game before, this game has gone from chat sim to chat sim with houses and furniture to chat sim with houses furniture decorative armor to chat sim with houses furniture and armor/combat. This game is constantly evolving and growing into what it will be on release and I really don't feel like we are anywhere close to developed enough to make informed decisions like the ones you are trying to make with your opening post. Release 9 is probably the first time (I didn't play 8) where I could say "oh ok, it's a game now it has game things to do!" and even here it's very bare bones.

You simply cannot complain about things like tutorials or UI design or roughness of the world with a PRE ALPHA it just comes off as silly. That said, I too am not a fan of super heavy instancing in an MMORPG and after playing in the Arche Age beta I can safely say that I really do prefer that huge open world feeling! What I think is going on here however is allot of people have not realized that SoTA is not an MMORPG, this is not the Ultima Online 2 that all of us old UO vets have been chasing since leaving the original - this is just another "ULTIMA" game but with an "mmo-esque" multiplayer component. I think if you can remember that it will start to make more sense, though it's hard to admit as I really did want it to be Ultima Online 2.

As for your complaints on the combat system and desire for it to be more like wow. I could not disagree more, allot of the complaints you brought up or the situations you created were kind of.. well exaggerated. Being in combat and needing a heal but not having a heal could happen in any game, maybe your heal is on cooldown, or maybe you are out of potions etc etc. In the 3 or 4 hours I played around in PVP my deck served me pretty well, I never really ran into any of the situations you described. The system as it stands now demands more than 1234 1234 1234, you cannot design a rotation here and stick to it you have to take a long hard look at the deck you are creating and the gear you are wearing and the passives you equip and try your best to make something with balance. But in debating this now.. well again it could all be 200% different in 3 months time.

Let's just take a breather and see where this game goes eh? Clearly they have a vision for it and CLEARLY we are in such a very early state it is hard to make any informed decision.

 

In UO I often just went and took a walk, and thats how I met the most amazing people and player run town/establishements ever...

I really have NO idea what you guys are talking about... I get horribly irritated when I take one step and the screen just loads...

If you want the game to be EFFISCIENT for collecting stuff and making money... maybe you have an argument. But this is supposed to be a game, can't we just have fun please ?

I like walking, taming animals, hunting treasure... using chance to establish my contacts, not some algorythm.

I don't mind server boundaries and some slowing down... but being cut off and sent to a map, nope. I just don't get it, even knowing about the limitations, its just unreal.