Things I Like/Dislike

After playing the game now for 3 days straight and many hours a day, I feel I am now in a position to give feedback properly on the game. I regret not getting a chance to get into testing sooner!

I'll start on a positive note. Things I like.
1) The game already feels very much like I am playing an Ultima game. I'll give an example of this. I learned that Owl's Nest could be a bandit hideout, so I went to explore, expecting to beat down on some bandits, get some red sashes and turn them in for a bounty. What I did not expect was learning of the Bandit's internal politics and the presence of an ominous new leader! Even though I came to do battle, and wound up doing battle after exploring and talking to these bandits, I got to know something about their group in the process. This gave me a sense that the people I was fighting really were bad people, and I felt as if I were rescuing a damsel in distress in the process. This is just one example of dozens I have found thus far and hopefully of hundreds to come in the future!
2) Combat! Even in it's current unfinished state, I thoroughly enjoy the Glyph/Deck system. I think it's a great system with great potential; Obviously since it's pre-alpha, it still needs some work, but the core of the system is very fun.

3) The in-game world is stunningly beautiful. I have literally spent hours just wandering around looking at the sights that the Hidden Vale and Novia have to offer. It's oddly liberating to know that I could spend hours upon hours in this game just exploring and seeing everything there is to see.

4) The dual-map system is well executed. I have a few small nitpicky issues with it that would improve quality of life, but the system itself is great - exiting a scene and being able to explore the world at large gives me a sense that I am legitimately travelling from place to place and lets me really see the world we're playing in.

5) The system for decorating houses is incredible. I was not disappointed whatsoever in the freedom I will have with decorating my home, once I acquire a permanent residence when the game goes live.

6) Resources spawn in the random encounter maps! When I get pulled in to one, I do at least have an opportunity to harvest something of value (besides animal hides).

Now moving on to issues I have. There are a lot of things that are a direct result of the game being in alpha and needing optimization (city lag, getting stuck in the map, etc) so I will try my best to skip those. There are a few things however that I do legitimately dislike.

1) I don't have a way to avoid random encounters. I enjoy the concept, and I am excited to see them evolve into the "Moral Dilemmas" that the dev team has planned for them, but I would also like a way to avoid the encounter altogether if I so choose. Loading in to the zone makes travel take far longer in some cases, for example if I am moving home decor from point A to B and looking to travel as quickly as possible.

2) Some of the dungeon scenes are a little on the boring side. For example, Obsidian Keep. With a name that ominous I expected it to be quite exciting, then I realized that the only enemies to be found are bears, skeletal archers, and a lich fighter. I am hoping there will be a pass through some dungeon scenes to populate them with more interesting entities.

3) Ghosts are very unbalanced vs. your reward for bringing one down. At early levels I could (with some difficulty) take on large skeletons and wolves in Blackblade Pass using plate armor and a sword/shield, however any time I attempted to take on a ghost I was obliterated. When I wound up going mage, I managed to take a ghost down, only to find that they reward no loot and very little XP. Even as pure mage I still have trouble taking down ghosts, sometimes they just prove an impassable barrier in exploration.

4) I do find myself spending an awful lot of time staring down at my action bar. I enjoy the glyph system, I enjoy stacking and making combo's, but I would also like to not have to be looking at 3 different parts of the screen (Top left for focus, center for positioning/checking enemy health bar, bottom center for glyph manipulation). I will propose a solution to this below that I feel is rather elegant.

5) Having to drag my glyphs to stack them is a little tedious. I would prefer if I could hold down the hotkey for the glyph then press another hotkey to stack or combo them.

6) The amount of areas on the overworld map that force slowed movement and block movement is staggering and frustrating. I can understand deep forest, mires, swamps etc. slowing movement, but the clearly marked road going through them? Mountain passes? Some areas of completely flat open plains? This is definitely something that needs tweaking. This is especially frustrating when attempting to reach Solaria - it took me 20 minutes to finally locate the right path to the area, and to my chagrin when I found the path I realized it was on the opposite side of a river, so I had to run all the way back to the coast, through Ardoris, then back up to where the swamp started, which then slowed my movement speed literally up to the entrance of the town.

7) Crafting - it needs some love. Starting recipes need to be re-balanced as it is incredibly difficult to figure out how to make some things (Example: I start out knowing the recipe for hard leather, which requires leather, but I don't start out knowing the recipe for leather). There should be more ways to discover new crafting recipes as well. I do like that the system is intricate and complex (I played EVE Online for years) but I have thus far had immense difficulty crafting anything without first referring to the Wiki (which breaks immersion even though it is incredibly useful). In addition, crafting things takes entirely too much resource in a lot of cases - A single leather chest with leather straps takes 10 yards of leather? 10 whole yards? That's pretty steep. Also, why am I having to turn my tanned leather into yards of leather? I completely understand hardening or softening worked leather (WHICH btw should be a 1-leather-1-hardened ratio, etc) but crafting it specifically into yards seems like an arbitrary step.

8) Crafting resources are a little on the rare side considering how many of them you need to craft things, with the exception being animal hides. I have been playing the game for 3 days straight and I still haven't found enough iron to make a single suit of plate or cloth armor. Harvesting a tree grants a single piece of wood, it requires 4 trees to make 3 pieces of timber and 2 boards, meaning it takes 8 fully grown trees to get enough wood to craft a single bedframe. That's unreasonable. On top of that, making the mattress requires a grand total of 80 pieces of raw cotton, which seems reasonable and realistic, except that you only get a single piece per plant. Ore veins are satisfyingly challenging to find, but only getting a single piece of ore per vein makes it difficult to gather any meaningful amount. On a side note, I still haven't located a single harvestable mandrake root node. I am starting to doubt they exist contrary to what others have told me.

9) Reagents are currently difficult to stockpile without spending copious amounts of gold. Typically in PVE situations I just ignore reagents altogether and deal with a ~50% fizzle chance, but in PVP you need your skills to go off when you cast them, every time.

Now that that list is out of the way, I'll create a wishlist of sorts. Things I'd like to see:

1) Dynamic NPC conversations! Lines and responses that change based off of various environmental factors (Time of day, current NPC location within the scene, etc).

2) More Monster variety and more interesting Monster AI! (Both very much on the way, I know )

3) Easier harvesting of raw materials! This 1-piece-per-node malarchy is, well, malarchy!

4) More interesting Adventure scenes! Notes/journals/etc hinting at the history of the Obsidian Keep would be excellent! If I found my way into some sort of archive room, I'd sit there reading through every book I found for ages.

5) More books! Crowdsource them! I'd be glad to volunteer to review and edit book submissions from players and fans so we can start filling up bookshelves. (Hint! This would be a GREAT way to distribute Crafting recipes in a very sneaky manner!)

6) More Skill trees! I'd love to see Bard skills, Animal Taming (Which according to the last hangout might make it in for release 19!?), and some exploration-related skills (The ability to avoid random encounters on the world map, passive bonuses to jump height, faster swimming speed, things like that).

7) Re-Vamped Summons! I know this is planned, I am impatient lol. I really like the idea of having a summon as my capstone, something to come assist me in my adventures. Even in my plate-wearing spec, I'd take a summon and lock it on my bar/stockpile reagents.

8) When you get around to making it more difficult to train skills, I'd love to see a system for being able to swap them out quickly, tied in with some sort of in-game quest, item, or event. Also, it'd be interesting to be able to "Study" a skill while offline to increase the rate that it trains at - if you have an appropriate book on the subject of your skill, you can plop down in a chair and start reading before you log out. It'd give me something to do at the end of my play session besides just vendoring my loot and heading home.

All in all, the game shows a lot of promise. With what the dev team has already discussed in the hangouts as well as the passion of the community thus far, I really think that I'll be playing this game for many years. It's got a ways to go before it's ready for launch, but even with what's already there I've managed to lose myself in the game world for hours and hours. It's a great feeling and sadly one I have not had in an online game that I can recall, and is even more sadly becoming rarer and rarer in the single player RPG world as well. I look forward to contributing more to the development of the game, fingers crossed on being able to upgrade my pledge to Developer level before June!

 

First off, welcome!

Secondly, well done on providing some great feedback. I agree with every observation but two.

That's really the point of reagents. I would argue that all spells should require reagents, because they're powerful ranged spells that generally stack the deck (no pun intended) in your favor. I'd also point out that the whole point of stacking (though I agree tedious at times) is so you can't have an "easy" way to fight in PVE or PVP. If we created a macroed version of combat that would make the glyph system meaningless. That's why it works that way, so you have to think about where your glyphs are and you can't just hot key the same combination of stuff over and over again.

 

@Rasmenar,
Welcome.
If you have any questions or need assistance in the game please feel free to
/friend Spoon

"5) More books! Crowdsource them! "
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?forums/the-scholars-of-novia.171/
http://thecaverns.net/roundtable/
If you feel like it then please contact the scholars of Novia or the Roundtable.
I have two books in the game.

Also check out the Magical Printing press pledge award. We will be able to print books in the game.

 

Welcome, excellent post.

You can press "R" by default, and then you have the option of using your number keys to stack two glyphs (combos are highlighted, duplicates are not).

 

You just changed my life.

 

Did you distribute all your crafting points? So far you can only use gathering skills to add points too... But, once you've maxed out the higher tiers, you will be able to gather the same node multiple times... also if you goto the higher level areas, the nodes are more plentiful...

 

I did, that should be another thing on the "Issues" list - harvesting a copper node in a low-level area works fine, but copper in areas with tougher monsters does not. How does the background setting affect my ability to recognize and harvest copper, or cut down a maple tree that I've done 50 times in other areas? I'd love to see some sort of difficulty scaling - copper is easier to mine than iron, etc, and perhaps nodes in higher level areas have a higher chance at dropping "rare" things (gems from mining for example).

As for the harvesting multiple times per node, that's pretty cool except that it's a percent chance. I've had some trees I could harvest 4 or 5 times (max'd out forestry) then sometimes I just get one still. I suppose that could be reflected in the fact that perhaps I botched the harvest and ruined the wood so only a certain amount is usable? The same could be said for ore and animal skins (more scraps with lower skill, less with higher).

I am eagerly anticipating agriculture though

 

Welcome Rasmenar!