Took another stab at the game, combat stuff is still holding it back.

I think that the FPS format meshes really well with roleplaying games, for example the Elderscrolls series and second wave of Fallout games are top notch RPGs that control much like a first person shooter. System Shock and Bioshock are as well.

Melee centric third person RPGs like Dark Souls, Gothic/Risen, THe Witcher and so on also have a very popular gameplay format that holds up through title after title. The giant problem those games have is that they don't translate to an online format well because timing is so critical to their combat system that they don't play nice with latency.

I really love how Mass Effect plays, third person cover based shooters are a lot of fun to me. Tabula Rasa was a lot like that, which is why I really enjoyed that game and was sad to see it go.

Overall I think that RPGs have been becoming more compelling by borrowing combat systems from their action game cousins. The thing where RPGs are lacking serious advancement in my opinion is the intricacies of dealing with NPCs. In fact, ever since voiceover has become practically requires for a AAA title the amount of interaction you get with NPCs has become much more limited. We're still using the same old system of picking from a limited number of dialogue options which have various effects as the conversation progresses through a dialogue tree. SotA is no different, except you type keywords instead of clicking lines on the screen. To me having a complex multi-dimensional reputation system that changes how you interact with the world would be a much bigger advancement to a roleplaying game than trying to invent a new combat system.

Likewise in MMOs I find that the biggest thing that needs innovation is not the combat, but the social element. I find the idea of guilds to be one of the lamest and most limiting factors of MMOs for example. It's one of those things that people have internalized so much as a standard feature that it absolutely defines how people interact in games. The amount of social interaction taking place between players is often severely limited because once people are in a guild that has critical mass they have no need to reach beyond it. Guilds tend to foster groups of players that are self contained and self sufficient, so players never associate by role or location or background or any other ingame characteristic. That's something I find extremely limiting to what an MMO can be, and ultimately is really an entirely arbitrary system. There is of course nothing generally wrong with giving players the ability to organize in a game, afterall the whole concept of a guild or clan is just ingame support for something people were doing all along, but MMO developers have simply given up on developing other social catalysts than just guilds and friend lists. I want to see more systems that get people talking to each other, that manage connections you make through your ingame deeds, that put you together with people and give you common goals to strive for. The absolute core of the MMO experience is the social aspect, and that's something that's just not being developed in an interesting way that relates to the game and the world at all.

 

Actually in some ways I feel rpg's have become worse in the fact they borrow a bit to much from the action games. Some of the best RPG's I have ever played are turn based, which makes the rpg more of a thinking mans game instead of a twitch fest. Look at the original fallouts, divine divinity and others to see what I mean. That's not to say I don't enjoy skyrim and games with combat like that. Dark souls was barely an rpg, but it had a good combat system but wasn't as good a game to me.

I also find that today's gamer is different then when I grew up...it's more of give me now instead of strategic build up. I'm seeing a huge divide in the MMO crowd/single player rpg fan...which comes down to what one feels is important to an rpg. I think that people that come from exclusively the UO side don't get what people from the ultima side feel was important and vise versa.

 

There were good things and bad things about combat in Skyrim, IMO. Overall, it was a joke that you can have 30 healing potions, go to your inventory to pause the game, and drink them all when the game is paused. Level-scaling I think felt ridiculous also. Dungeons that are structured like video game levels with a boss at the end and an exit to the beginning. Save/reload a hundred times until you beat a boss. Swinging mindlessly.

The best things were those that felt closer to the traditional RPG model, with improvisational game-play. Tactic-based combat like stealth and archery. Figuring out how to hide without being detected. Being able to kill an enemy dead in one arrow strike. Being able to steal a weapon off of an enemy. Luring enemies away from each other.

All in all, I enjoyed it, though I had a lot more fun recently with Shadowrun's turn-based system.

ESO combat was horrible, though.

 

Skyrim definitely had a lot of problems, but the core combat I thought was thuroughly enjoyable with every type of weapon. Bethesda games usually have the problem of being able to cheese your way through them very easily if you don't play by a set of self imposed rules, like not drinking potions with the game paused. In Morrowind it was even worse, since the game had nothing even stopping you enchanting a set of gear with 100% damage immunity, or permanent invisibility. The only thing stopping you from breaking the game like that was simply not doing it. I can mostly forgive flaws like that in their games, since you can mod them to anything you want anyways. I play Morrowind with a regenerate mana mod, which is essentially cheating, but I don't use potions, which I think makes the game more challenging.

One of my favourite games for the raw combat is Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, which is a first person RPG, but the combat is all physics based. You can defeat enemies by leading them up stairs, then kicking them to make them fall down and crash into all their friends for example. The game becomes a little cheesy at times with an overabundance of spiked walls that instantly kill any enemy you kick into them, but overall it's a really solid experience. The game is flawed in a lot of other ways, and way too short, but at $10 on steam it's a solid weekend of physics based mayhem.

I enjoyed the recent shadowrun games a lot more for the story than for their combat system, which I found to be overly simplistic and didn't allow for any really satisfying character advancement. (If you play the P&P versions of shadowrun you find that one of its biggest strengths is that you can meaningfully progress a character for years and you'd still be able to play right alongside a newly created character with no massive problem) I liked the story in them, and they definitely pulled off a turn based system that was fun to play with and didn't bog down the game.

If you like turn based RPGs I would really recommend Divinity: Original Sin, their system is equally fast and easy to learn, but the complexity of characters and interactions between powers is orders of magnitude greater than Shadowrun Returns. It also has a highly complex storyline and a cool system where different party members under your control can make different moral decisions and then argue out who gets to make the story decision, which allows you to play the game from multiple angles at the same time without having to compromise on your character's values. It's also not only measuring actions based on good and evil, but also scales like pragmatic vs. romantic and so on.

I think ESO combat is pretty well done overall. I'd take it over the standard WoW type combat any day. I like getting to aim my abilities, and I like not having to deal with 30 hotkeys. At times it felt a bit repetitive, because the same type of enemy is usually best defeated with the exact same sequence of moves, once you've figured out how you can most quickly bring them down, but especially when you go into dungeons or PvP where things become less predictable than just facing down one encounter at a time it actually becomes pretty fun.

Personally I always thought that Ultima Online combat was pretty bad, because it so heavily relied on self healing to keep alive. I don't like healing heavy systems because if healing is the basis of survival in a game it creates a threshold to how much DPS you have to muster to have any chance of killing the opponent. It tends to make high DPS builds disproportionately powerful, because of the distortion in kill speed the healing causes. In a game where everyone heals for 10 point every second a character with 12 DPS kills twice as fast as a character with 11 DPS, and a 10 DPS character is completely unable to kill someone. That kind of massive distortion in effectiveness from what is only a 10% difference in actual stats tends to really crush character diversity in games and force ideal builds.


I'm not sure what the traditional RPG model is, but I do like games where caution and cleverness are rewarded. Personally I don't like it at all when you can pull enemies away from a group, since that's one of the things in RPGs that is most immersion breaking. I want enemies to be relentless and get help from their friends whenever they can. I want them to bring down an unholy shitstorm of reinforcements on me if I'm seen, because I like games where the consequences to what you do are believable. That's another reason why I love Mount and Blade games so much, If you attack an army of 200 guys by yourself they don't come at you one at a time, you will get rushed by the entire army, surrounded and stomped on.

Personally I think combat in MMOs should above all else be more role focused. Especially many recent MMOs have tried to completely erase character identity and just let you learn all the skills and then limit you to a build that represents a selection of them. I don't like that sort of thing, because it takes the role out of roleplaying. I want games that focus more on who your character actually is, not less. Characters should have a strong mechanical identity, in a game that is supposed to be about a lot of people playing the same game. If everyone can do everything it just reinforces that whole self-contained "guild & friend list" microcosm that carries MMOs away from being truly social games. I constantly hear people say "I like MMOs, I just wish I could play with only my friends and nobody else" and that just makes me think that that MMO totally missed the damn mark on building systems where the M that stands for "massively" generates value for the game. The best combat system in the world can't fix that problem if it doesn't revolve around playing with others. I would much rather see a simple combat system that scales well and really encourages players to team up and play out elaborate strategies than a complex one where everyone just kind of does their own thing. and the dynamics of the game start to fold when too many people get engaged in the same fight. (Like focus fire insta-melting targets, so in PvP how tough your character is becomes irrelevant as combat scales up, and all PvE encounters designed for big groups have to contain monsters with millions of hitpoints) I would also really like to see a system where your environment matters more. Where hiding is only possible if you have a tree or some tall grass nearby, and running uphill is slower than running downhill, and wearing leather soled boots gives you good footing on roads, but not on earth, and wearing hobnailed boots works the other way around.

In short, I want the tactics in the game to come from external factors. Other players and environment should determine how best to fight, not just a score of mechanics that are internal to your character. Your character is going to be the most prominent constant in your play experience, so if your character is the main factor to how you play you probably won't get a lot of variety.

 

I'm a huge fan of the Shadowrun: Dragonfall, but I have to admit that combat is one of the game's weaker aspects. It's like it wants to have the tight squad based action of XCom, but it isn't willing to let anyone die too easily so the both the player and AI can use their durability to undermine the tactical aspects of the game. SOTA has a similar problem in that it wants to have action RPG combat, but latency has forced them to compromise to the point that silly things like "all attacks started while in range, will connect" exist, which undermines the "action" aspect of combat.

Personally, I'm a dabbler when it comes to MMOs, I play until I hit a point where seeing further content is gated by grinding. I think the social aspect is overplayed because in my experience most folks hardcore into MMOs aren't very sociable. A hardcore player doesn't so much see you as another player as they see you as a pile of numbers that can help or hurt their progress to their next objective. The only multiplayer title I've played recently that does a good job of playing up the social aspects of a shared environment is Space Station 13, and I'm fairly certain that that works only because it resets every hour and is heavily moderated.

 

Yea, that's because the hardcore established players tend to very quickly fall into only socializing with their guild and friend list. They simply have no reason to reach beyond it because the games don't reward it. Sometimes you get cool moment in MMOs, like in Rift, when a Rift invasion happens and you just happen to be in a zone that has enough people who give a **** to spontaneously form a militia and defend the towns. That's cool as hell, but the game is just too afraid to be inconvenient to actually make the invasions so dangerous to the players that everyone has to step up, and as per usual, the power difference between various level players is so huge that veterans neither want to participate, nor could without taking the challenge out of it when it happens in a lower level zone.

Games are IMO often too afraid to be inconvenient. The reason why you never get a huge orc army taking over a whole city unless hundreds of players stand against them is because the devs expect players to leave when things get tough. In reality I think people leave because they get bored if the orcs only ever take over an insignificant outpost, can be pushed out by a hand full of veterans if they can be assed to do so, and then attack again an hour later - and that's if the game has invasion content at all, in most games monsters are just a resource you gather with a sword.

 

Read through posts in this forum, people don't like inconvenience.

see:

-Map walking speeds.
-no fast travel.
-encumbrance.
-regeants.
etc.

It's becoming a mantra now, but I have been saying the devs have to decide what is good for the game not what the players think is good for the game.

 

Inconvenience without challenge isn't a good thing though.

Being inconvenienced by orcs raiding your town creates a huge ripple effect of stuff to do. You have to raise an army, fight them and rebuild. A whole epic tale spanning days and weeks that sucks you into the world and leaves you begging for more could develop from that if apathy isn't being encouraged.

Arbitrarily running out of inventory space or reagents and having to go back to town while plodding along a world map very slowly despite the world map having no mechanics where speed would give you an advantage doesn't create a challenge though, it's just inconvenient with little real benefit to the game.

 

yes and.

take the ai from Darkness II and Deux ex Machine,
take the combat from Die by the Sword and Gothic 3,
mix in System Shock 2 inventory system,
take the spellcasting from Arx Fatalis,
add physX,
plus a Rocket Jockey mini game,

THAT would be a AWESOME game. It would make the hotbar and skills make more sense.

Sota has indeed de-evolved games by re-using UNFUN and unoriginal concepts instead of unoriginal but AWESOME concepts.
They copied off the stupid kids paper.
and still graduated to get a high paying job. (*sigh*)

The Hendoman

I STILL have hope for this game! There is something fun about it still. also, post #69 8/

 

Ahh but if you look at those inconveniences as increasing your threat by making you have to go back when you are halfway through a dungeon, or choosing between taking the long route on a road instead of a short jaunt across a dangerous swamp. They create choices that the player has to chose. You gave an example of a combat example that is overall world changing decision making, but I think the smaller choices also matter.

In the end inconvenience if done right should make people have to chose, and that's what I feel gaming is about.

 

It sounds like most of the things you are asking for or complaining about are things that are only issues because they aren't done yet. Big examples of course being combat is still far from finished, especially enemies. They have plans on fixing most of what you are talking about. Combat is still very far from complete. NPC interactions already have consequences built in. You'll see it more and more though. Currently when you visit the Oracle she'll tell you what your virtue levels are.

There will be changes to ammo/durability but I expect we'll always have those.

Many of your complaints are seeking things that are more convenient or easier to be like other games that had easy ways to do things. And I'm sure by release many things will be easier/more convenient.

I've been playing since before release 1. Things are coming a long nicely and they've been delivering well on what they said things will be. But you really have to know what their long term plans and goals are and can't judge it based on the current design.

This was once the overworld map:


where you simply moved an icon around on a map.

This is a screenshot from before there was even combat or other players in the game.



If they haven't been making huge changes based on feedback and delivering on what they have said in a reasonable way. I'd be worried. But everything so far is moving along nicely and they are making changes based on feedback.

 

I don't think many people have a problem accepting it's pre-alpha and that content still needs to be added or changed or balanced.

What many people are voicing concern over is that the core mechanics of the game are not popular, and we're not far off from being "feature complete". The devs have X amount of money and Y amount of time to add all of the skills, balance them, complete world content, quests, NPC behaviors, weapons/armor/clothes, finish crafting, and still the fundamental game mechanics aren't getting revamped. That's what's causing worry.

 

Tackling a dungeon with limited resources does add to the game, yes. However, sending the player back to town over arbitrary numbers is just an absolutely awful way to do it. If you do a classic dungeon crawl in D&D you're going to have more fun fortifying a room and setting a watch rotation to get your spells per day back than you'll ever have in SotA plodding back to town to refill your magic ammo.

All systems like that do is make you feel like the game is crapping on your agency as a player, because hey, why can't I just bring a cart with a mule to haul my loot home after burying it somewhere? Why can't I put the retainers of my lordly manor in charge of procuring arrows for me instead of having to buy every single one myself? Those are the rewarding ways to deal with problems like having to carry to much stuff or running out of ammo constantly. Instead we're simply expected to hoof it back and forth from town because our characters are all idiots who can't figure out how to do things the smart way.

If someone is going down the wrong path you don't wait for them to get to the end of it before telling them to turn around.

 

The worry is that fundamental game mechanics aren't getting revamped? I think that's because the majority of backers are happy with the fundamental mechanics of the game.

Archery and ammo will be revamped. There have been numerous discussions on the pros and cons of reagents, which is why they opted for the way it works now, which I think is great. Most of the time I don't even use reagents.

 

I highly disagree with this sentiment. The daily threads and hourly posts by those vocal enough to say they aren't happy echo similar threads that have cropped up in previous months. There are fundamental systems that have people extremely torn. Is the majority satisfied? If you mean 60% of backers will play and 40% will not, maybe. I'd rather the numbers be skewed more in favor of a better business model.

 

Yea, I'm not talking about doing it in an artificial way; enemies should of course call for help when necessary. But for the reference to Skyrim, sometimes you have to figure out how to deal with enemies individually, or else you'll easily have them gang up on you and end up dead. That wasn't necessarily about completely isolating an enemy, but getting enough of a safe distance from one while you were dealing with another, or dragging your enemies down a narrow corridor so they could only attack you one at a time, and using the bends in corridors to your advantage. It shouldn't ever be so stupid to be immersion breaking; but the point is its a part of combat that requires tactics, just not swinging at an enemy.

This is going to be a necessary part of SotA, too, if you're playing Solo or in a small group. I've argued ways that enemies should have intelligent behavior and call for help. But even going around that kind of intelligent behavior, there are going to have to ways to apply tactics to fighting. Otherwise, it really is just swinging at an enemy.

Though, no, 200 guys attacking you at the same time isn't any more realistic as individual enemies never getting help when they need it. After the first 3 guys I'd think they'd figure you're pretty much taken care of and that the guys attacking you don't need any more help to kill you.

I've also suggested an active blocking mode btw, where you could switch between an attack and defense mode if you have a shield, which would add another tactical element to battle.

 

Speed will give you an advantage, I'm not sure why you say it won't. People will sometimes be chasing you -- the devs have talked about things like bounties and contraband missions -- and going slowly will lead to more encounters. It'll matter in PvP scenarios where you need to go to help someone for defense. Time will also sometimes matter in the game. And benefits of food will be limited.

Travel will matter. We're in an early stage of the game development.

Now you're just being silly.

Why can't you just use retainers from your lordly manner to do dungeon runs for you while you stay at the tavern, go kill and farm elves for you, go travel to different towns and talk to NPCs for you, go to a town across the continent and buy things for you? That way you never have to do anything.

We will be able to get a pack animal later on, but pack animals cost money. We'll also probably be able to get hirelings at some point, who carry junk for you, but they also cost money. But paying for the extra convenience would be a trade-off and a choice.

Btw, you don't have to carry around too much or run out of ammo constantly. Those are choices you're making.

 

Because if you could do that you would be playing a roleplaying game, not a game where all you do is fight, sell, buy, repeat.

The fact that you find the notion of wanting to play the role of a general rather than a foot soldier silly to me just shows why RPGs are so one sided and shallow. Influencing the world from behind a desk with the stroke of a pen is a much more real difference in role than some minor mechanical changes between swords and maces, or fire and lightning magic.

 

Well, that's the plan isn't it? If you have a enough capital, you will be able to post quests to go gather resources for you, then commission a crafter to make some finished good, and then hire a vendor to sell the goods to other adventurers. If you want that life, well EVE might be a better choice to satisfy your inner capitalist, SOTA should be able to pull it off.

 

in a sense, you can do that here already, get you some footsoldiers and a ventrilo account and start leading a couple few men to battle ghosts or those flesh flayers more effectively : stand on a hill; post back with a good strategy. https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-to-character-builds-and-deck-assembly.22293/ Thank you

i wouldn't be surprised to hear this topic of 'where we are and what we are going to release: an update' soon in a web chat. this month alone is showing the crowd could use some real DEV answers or someone influential/knowledgeable or every thread is going to degenerate into a grumblefest.

and they can so SO afford to break off someone to do this. wouldn't take long at all. 10 hours total? so what is that.... 500 bucks @ 50 an hour?

The Hendoman