Thoughts on R11

My wife and I were able to get a 3-5 hour session in this Sunday. I played heavy armor sword and board, she ran a heal build. We racked up about 10-levels each and completed the tour. We both made extensive use of the deck system to get a feel for it.
Scenes

I really enjoyed the caves and dungeons. We poked around Dragon’s Cave and a few of the caves/caverns off of some of the outdoor scenes.

The outdoor scenes, particularly those not in forests are a bit rough. On the road from Bremmer to Owl’s Den you pass through several scenes, I think we stopped and ran about a bit in each of them. Other than the first one immediately north of Bremmer, I found the outdoor scenes sparse and narrow.

The lack of a zone wall in these outdoor scenes gives the impression of openness, but it feels like a step or two brings you to the zone line. This is most pronounced in the scene just south of Owl’s Head.

I realize there isn’t (and won’t) be an in-game map and I’m okay with that. But, these outdoor scenes need something a bit better to communicate the scene edge than the fade-to-black zone transition animation. When you just want to explore a scene and continually find the screen fading out it gets frustrating. If something visual cued you in that the zone line was nearby, you could shift directions.
Decks

I genuinely want to like the deck system. It’s an interesting idea and I think it has potential.

But, I’m not feeling it.

I was running better than a 3:2 card to slug build (but not 2:1), heavy armor makes it hard to have a slug-free build. There were a number of times I had four slugs up in my hand. I suspect that’s tied to abilities on internal cool-downs. None the less, it’s a frustrating experience which makes you just want to switch over to a locked deck.

This is exacerbated because I don’t really feel like I gained anything playing with an open-deck. The handful of combos I executed (same for my wife) felt pretty minimal. Maybe we were doing better with focus than if we had played locked decks, but it seemed we were in focus problems with quite a bit of regularity.

Overall, as a heavy armor player, I felt like I was playing whack-a-mole with the ability bar. Basically hit whatever was up and wait off the slugs. There were a few abilities I had learned to wait out, but otherwise it was anything promising gets played the second it’s available. That’s more or less the same thing that would happen in a locked deck with cooldowns.

Next build I’m going to work in a hybrid deck. There is zero value in having taunt in an open deck. It’s never there when you need it and always there when you don’t. Indeed, I’ll probably start running the shield slam and taunt abilities fixed and let the other abilities float.

But, I fear that’s just one step towards going with a locked deck.
Combat

It felt like the UI got a polish this go-round. Glyphs seemed reasonably larger and far more interpretable than I remembered them being. After a bit of play, I had a pretty reasonable recognition of the various abilities popping up onto my bar.

Movement is a bit sluggish. In particular, fighting skeleton archers is a real pain. They kite you, that’s actually really cool. But, sword attacks have a very small hit radius which, coupled with latency and client predictions (I’m guessing), had me frequently unable to attack a moving skeleton that appeared in range on my client. I’m thinking that a bit more tolerance on the hit-box for attacking moving targets is in order.

There are some other odd little things with movement. Stepping backwards (“S”) while in combat would sometimes result in a back-step and sometimes result in a turn around. Positioning at the start of a pull often felt like a series of over and under movements until settling into more of a standing fight. This is likely the same problem I described with archer fights, but only experienced once when fighting a melee monster.
Leveling

I know this was a first pass at character advancement, so my thoughts here are more of a musing nature.

Leveling was very fast this weekend. That makes sense over a narrow testing window, especially given that the Grand Tour was designed to get us to level a bit to accomplish a few of the goals. I would expect that actual game advancement would be slower.

Except.

I wonder if a slow leveling pace will prove to be probabilistic for open-deck play. I swapped to an open-deck immediately. It was quite painful early on, I was often running far more slugs than abilities (since I had few to use) and most of my fights were auto-attacks and waiting for slugs to get replaced with more slugs.

The faster leveling pace at least made it so that I could push off the low-deck slug count somewhat fast and get some passive abilities to reduce gear-based slugs.

I suspect that the ratio of slugs to deck can not be fixed. It’s got to move more relatively to the level of the character and the gear-level (if that’s actually computed) of the character. A low level character in lower gear is likely only going to have a handful of abilities. In open deck that’s going to be a lot of slug play. This will result in a fairly uninspiring early character experience.

Alternately, the first point for abilities should be set at “1.” This would allow a person to build deeper into the trees earlier, getting some cards in deck and setting up some variety. Subsequent glyphs could be rebalanced to more expensive levels. I’m less certain that this is a good idea though, it seems like it might wind up promoting locked decks.

I’m really not sure how this works for 1st level players, especially if you want to setup locked decks as the starter experience. Eidetic memory is fairly deep in focus, easily enough to use up the 8 points per level that was used in this release. Maybe shuffling the order of the focus tree would let people lock their deck at a low level and still have a few points to build some basic skills?
Conclusion

Overall a nice release. I enjoyed the gameplay and it really looks like it’s coming along nicely.

I particularly enjoyed the unstructured game play. It’s nice to advance without having to run from quest hub to quest hub. It’s nice to poke around a scene and see what’s out there.

The gear looks good and the zones are looking nice.

I’m looking forward to R12.

 

A very good evaluation.
I particularly agree with the deck system. I keep giving it a chance but find myself wanting more and more going to a locked deck. The random nature of the deck ruins any kind of strategy I might try.

The zones were cool but I feel the same way you do on the outside scenes.

 

There's an option to discard cards in your deck. I think it's left control and the number. It makes slugs pretty much just pop up long enough to make combat feel even more like a card matching game/whack a mole hybrid.

 

I did cancel out my slugs. I only had 1 slug in my deck (I'm OPs wife, fyi), but it did seem to pop a lot. My biggest issue was it didn't seem like there was much of a benefit for stacking up cards, and increasing their value. It was difficult to do while moving or fighting, the click and hold mechanic was very cumbersome. This is doubly true considering the effect seemed minimal. I sometimes stacked my attacks upto 4/5, yet it wasn't as powerful as if I had triggered the attack 4 times. I know some abilities granted reduced focus cost, however the effect just seemed weak for the trouble it took to actually do the stacking. Additionally, my focus was always out, this was even with specing up my focus tree fairly high. I had a lot of bonus focus, and reduced cost points spent (as was as points giving me extra Int). Additionally, the focus seemed to regen faster if I dropped out of combat, so I was needing to do that all the time, removing my ability to stack skills between fights that way.

 

I had a very similar experience with a bludgeon/life/death build. The slugs are a cool idea, as is the deck system, but it's current implementation isn't very smooth and takes away from combat instead of adding to it.

 

I have found that a locked hand actually works better with heavy armor - at least so far.

 

Currently there are two ways to get slugs in your hand. First you get slugs form armor. I the next release there shouldn't be ant slugs. Armor slugs are being replaced by armor encuburance. The kind of armor you're wearing will impact what happens.

Second type of slug relates to the minimum deck size. If you don't meet the minimum deck size slugs are used to meet the minimum. There currently aren't any plans that I'm aware of to remove these slugs.

All slugs can be removed by discarding the slug using the control key with the hot key, so control-1 together. Any card in the random deck can be discarded in this way.

 

I may be in the minority but I don't mind the slugs, they keep the combat a little fresher and more interesting. As a hybrid fighter/mage with armor on, I get plenty of slugs. In my experience they'll only slow me down slightly, on occasion.

Also thinking that the possibility of slugs effectively requires you to add new skills to your deck in order to minimize the number of slugs. In this way they're forcing players to try out a more diverse set of skills. Theorizing on my part.

 

There are two problems I see with continuously growing the minimum deck size. First, it requires you to keep adding skills to the deck. This dilutes the chance that a card will be drawn, especially the one you want or need. At this point the locked deck becomes a enticing possibility. The more that the locked deck becomes enticing, the less there is a need for using a randomly built deck.

Second, by growing the minimum deck size you aren't able to create a other decks. To keep slugs from appearing you need to keep building out one deck.

 

I actually think all of those reasons makes the combat system a bit less horrible.

I'm not happy about having slugs on cloth though. I have no idea what that's about. The alternative to cloth is being naked and so it encourages the opposite response than what we would want.

 

I think slugs on cloth is a content error. I noticed early on the merchant cloth had slugs and fizzle. But after one of the patches it no longer had either. It was probably pointed out by someone and changed. I've seen that in our releases as well, where a cloth might have slugs and fizzle and then it doesn't.

 

Locked glyphs for me. Random pop ups make me feel like a blithering idiot who has no clue what he is going to do next.

 

I think I would much rather see some type of option that is a mixture of both the locked and unlocked glyph system. Something where you could lock abilities in your bar, and randomly they would "deal" stacks to them, similar to the way the unlocked system works. You would have to choose when to use, or not use, an ability with the chance it might become stronger as you wait. But doing it this way would remove the "I have to scroll around and click on the buttons and drag them to something else" hassle, as well as the "I really need to tank/interrupt/heal/etc RIGHT NOW, and I can't because the ability isn't there" issue.

 

I'm not sure how to create a Thread, so I will add this here. If there is a Global Chat I was unable to find it. With a Global Chat the Community could globally mention issues and a designated few could send in official Reports, reducing the number of reports for Dev's to wade through. Moreover, the Community in a Global Chat could assist one another in reducing the learning curve. I personally am 59 years young but I suffer from a genetic condition that limits my short-term memory. The immersive content overwhelms many, some like myself, so many choices of where to place a skill point, then decks & glyphs [oh my] and then deck locking and more. Finding out how to make damage greater, or how to balance weapon combat with spells, when to up str or dex or int and why, while important become lost in a sea of game mechanic math. I could not even find how to exit combat when no enemies were anywhere nearby. Targets often would not remain targeted and needed re-targeted repeatedly.

This was my first entry into a pre-release. I had a blast in spite of the frustration, not from latency or lag, but from sheer complexity. I never played the Ultima's but I have played Ultima Online for 17 uninterrupted years and I love what Garriott & Company wrought. I hope the ease of resetting skill points with no cost for so doing will not exist in the final launch. Limiting the number of characters per account forces social interaction [which is good.] Allowing no cost skill point re-allocation would allow each account to be warrior, mage, tamer, and crafting mule which destroys community and makes a stable virtual economy all but impossible. Shroud of the Avatar needs to be designed for massive numbers of folks to play together. "Solo" play may be a player's choice but that choice must not be seen as equal to that of those willing and wanting social, rather than solo, play.

Lastly for my feedback on my first "in-game" exposure to SOTA, I add this personal note. We really are not well served by Character names such as "YourUgly Sister" and the like. Players ought to be strongly encouraged, if not required, to choose names that not only avoid obscene content, but that avoid inappropriate content, including absurdity. It isn't asking much, let alone too much, of our Players to choose names with at least a semblance of reality, even in a virtual world. Also, even in this first exposure I encountered folks deliberately ganging up on others prey in attempts to hijack looting rights. I hope this will be discouraged and coded for minimization if not prevention.

I hope these comments will be seen and find their way to Developer Eyes. All comments and responses are welcomed.

 

And i still cannot stand how potions are implemented. As i've stated in a previous thread they should not be part of a random skills bar

 

I doubt respecs will be free, but I hope it's not overly burdensome. I have a feeling I'll be struggling for a long time to figure out an optimal build for my playstyle, and if it costs a fortune to respec, it means I'll be grinding easy mobs to make money so I can afford more respecs. I am betting the loot drops will get scaled way back too. Right now skeletons drop the same weapon every time, as do skeleton footman, kobolds, etc.

I'm completely lost on how the combat works for the most part. Not too worried about it. I figure I'll "get it" sooner or later. I am with you when it comes to stupid names. Maybe they'll enforce naming rules. Sorry, but if someone like lame names, I hope SotA proves to not be the game for them.

I don't know how the looting works. I had assumed he who hits it first gets the loot, but it sounds like that may not be the case. It needs to be. Too much potential for abuse otherwise.

 

Update.

I used the bonus time yesterday to run a hybrid deck. I locked taunt and shield bash and then floated a three card, open deck. I even tossed in an extra taunt and a pair of shield bashes to the open deck.

It is a very different game experience and really plays much better that the open deck.

 

For combat I mostly played locked but I had 2 decks, one locked, one float, and marking one as alternate, you get a handy button to switch between them quickly (x on keyboard i think?). I was mostly doing it for experimentation, but I could see having the lock deck as the "must have" like taunt and potion, some buffs, and the float deck with general combat in mind. Having said that, I ended up with the tank deck locked and my mage deck / gear as alt for quick change to a healer role (typically self healing).

Some more experimentation is needed.

I hope folks give everything a try and realize there are many options to choose from. I like it that way.

 

I really need to force myself to get used to a floating deck, the cooldown for locked glyphs is really getting to me -- so i'm going to try a mixed locked/floating deck and see if i can get the hang of it. i was glad to read your comments, they've really reinforced this for me.

 

I like the floating deck, I didnt like it at first but after this release and the last one I have gotten used to it. I wear leather except for cloth gloves and shoes, so I only have 2 slugs in my deck, I can live with two slugs. I have two locked glyphs and five random ones popping up. Left hand on the 1 thru 5 keys and right hand driving with the mouse. I think I heard there will be no more slugs though.