Town sieges right at the beginning are way too hard

Keep in mind, that you arent immediately eviscerated when you enter the game world. You interact with an opening scene, design your character, are introduced to the fundamental of the plot, etc. Then you do a guided solo quest, where you aquire weapons, armor, gold, potions, in-game experience, and experience as the player with a world you have to interact with a little bit (keys, move objects, puzzles, etc). Then you leave that quest, and only then is there a (significant) chance that you encounter a siege. Even then, there is an NPC to tell you not to tackle the siege head on. You literally have to choose to engage the sieges and die, and only after a rather lengthy intro.

Yes, all the above steps need more work - its an iterative process, and Ill return to the "early access" rhetoric here. Yes, the NPC who teaches you how to avoid the siege needs more UX polish, along with the sieges as a whole. Even with this fundamental framework in place, its nothing close to dying immediately upon entry. Its rather avoidable.

 

Agree - no theme parks please. Honestly, SotA will make a horrible theme-park RPG. ESO is 100x better at it, and I guarantee you those guys that did EQ1 that are redoing another MMO - they will likely make the best theme-park MMO yet. But most of us chose to back SotA as were bored with theme-park games.

The expectation that the dragon leaves you half-dead is likely due to a decade of theme-park games teaching you the same repetitive structure. Its like a TV person encountering internet media for the first time, and being upset that there arent commercials every 15 minutes. Trust me, the commercials suck, thats why we ditched TV. Trust me, theme-park is boring and will leave you wanting in like a year when the pretty colors arent so new and refreshing anymore. Try a game that challenges you - where a level 1 player who encounters a dragon gets 1 shotted and has to figure out how the heck to get out of the scene to avoid the dragon and warn the town. No half-dead. Shouldnt you be excited that all you need to do is walk to a rez shrine? And like poof, youre friggin immortal. Anyway...

I dont want a game that holds my hand and blows up my ego. Hooray, you clicked the button many times! LEVEL 52!!!! I want a game that, no matter how high "level" I am, I must always be focused and aware outside the safety of a town - turning your back on a pack of low level anything is a sure way to be their lunch. I dont want a game that intentionally tries to shatter and humiliate my ego either, thats called real life . I want a game thats neither, its challenging, its not going to just let me win and give me stickers and candy and gold stars for spelling my name right, but its also not going to purposely create broken scenarios to lulz at me. Yanno, like Ultima... My 7xGM mage on one of my UO freeshards got pwned by some lizardmen the other day - cuz I wasnt paying attention and I was typing on here. UO isnt humiliating, but its no theme park. Its challenging.

Ive said this before - I want EQ1 mechanics for mob difficulty, in that a very large scene mostly intended for low level characters can, under certain conditions, spawn very powerful creates that roam the scene killing everyone they find (untill a high level player comes through and kills it, or the conditions causing its spawn go away). While EQ1 is very theme parky, I loved this aspect of the challenge - The road is not always safe, young adventurer!

Also, ill resort to the "why do you want to back SotA for it to be like every other game youve played before?" rhetoric here.

 

Then how will SotA achieve the single-player narrative?

 

Hey @Lord_Darkmoon ,

In Ultima VI, all of the shrines were protected by groups of gargoyles, which would have been hard to defeat in the beginning of the game (unless you knew some tricks). The Shrine of Compassion was however between Britain and Cove, and going in that direction was the first things you would have done in the game. So you would have had to find a way to sneak past the gargoyles.

Ultima VII had an early quest which took you in Destard, where you would have been attacked by dragons and other things you wouldn't be quite ready for (this was the point -- it was a trap).

In Ultima V, towns could be taken over by Shadowlords. If you went into a town under those conditions, the Shadowlord would have attacked and killed you. NPCs wouldn't talk to you. Just like in SotA, this happened according to astronomical occurrences. (If the astronomy in offline is currently sync'd to the astronomy in online that might explain the coincidence you found).



You definitely have a point if all of this is presented to the player in a confusing manner, leaving the player with no idea on what to do, or with nothing real to do until the siege is lifted. But Ultima games were never linear story-wise, so I don't completely share your emphasis on "flow." What the game is doing in this case is exactly what Ultima V did. Sieges, it should be emphasized, are part of the story.

When I get some more time to play on QA, I'll try the story from the beginning again though just to see how things play out.

 

Those were different times. People back then loved to fight 333 barbarians in The Bard's Tale and had fun doing so. I wouldn't play this today anymore. Some things change for the better.

 

@Lord_Darkmoon

I disagree, though... I think the fact that Ultimas were non-linear were part of made them great games. They were more about the adventuring than the story, and the story is just something you encountered through your adventuring If an RPG presents a story in a way that puts it on kind of auto-drive I kind of think I might as well be playing an adventure game.

 

Maybe some of the fans of Ultima and SotA will be delighted by this. Maybe some old-time gamers will think it is fun. But will this reach the "new generation" of gamers as well? Those who grew up with a different kind of storytelling?
I know that most here try to defend SotA with their life They are dedicated to this game and love it even the way it is now. But let's face it. Those are just a handful of hardcore-fans with rose-colored glasses. The legion outside of this community will ultimately decided if SotA will be a success. And those gamers rate games very high that play very differently...

 

@Lord_Darkmoon,

It depends how well its done It was good back in the day for a reason, if they manage to pull it off well it will be good this time. That's why detail, presentation, and everything else matters.

 

I agree 100% that non-linearity is a boon in RPGs. However, that needs to be balanced with content. Sure, old RPGs like Ultima had "grinding", to an extent. But it was not anywhere close to today's standard of grinding - reloading the same scenes again and again to kill the same monsters over and over and farm the same resources over and over.

Back in the day, when you couldn't enter X area without dying because the monsters were too strong, getting stronger meant finding other unexplored areas with stuff to do and find. A new dungeon you haven't been in yet. A forest that hasn't yet been cleared. Rarely did one find areas with monsters to kill "just because". In ultima 5, random monsters would be encountered on the overworld, but they were rare enough that you could never really "grind" them to get stronger... instead, you completed quests for NPCs and entered other dungeons. In Ultima 7, I don't remember every really having to grind. Just following the story and/or exploring would yield enough benefits to keep progressing.

Content is king! (To quote the Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter Stretch goal)

 

@Bubonic,

Actually, I don't think old Ultimas were really about "grinding" in the same way MMOs are, and that's part of the problem.

Sure, you would often want to seek out monsters to fight. But they didn't instantly respawn for you. Healing had a cost. You had to go back to town if you ran out of reagents, or to pay for a healer, or camp at night. Monsters would come to you when you didn't want them to. The "flow" of the game was to go out and explore and adventure.

But SotA is so far following a common MMO model where its about endless respawns, and mindlessly farming them. A lot of players expect this and are backing this model, and I don't think its good for the game in the long run, and doesn't work as well with the story aspects.

For example, I agree with @Lord_Darkmoon, that giving players nothing to do but grind is a problem... but its a different issue than the Ultima games, because they weren't really grindy in the same way.

 

@Bubonic, I guess we're saying the same thing though

 

Time a technology shouldn't be a factor when considering how fun something is. It's either fun or it wasn't that fun in the first place. What made Super Mario Bros. such a success is that, even today, the original is still solid. What was mostly holding the Ultima series back were the UI and controls... something that Portalarium still struggles with yet valiantly tries to rectify.

What they also need to work on is preventing sensory whiplash by properly giving players needed information. The NPC shouldn't only be talking to you about the catapults, for sure... he needs to mention the secondary path and he needs to acknowledge how strong you are but the game shouldn't be setup so that everything presented to you should be possible. That's simply not interesting.

You most likely pledged SotA to get some of the Ultima feeling back; most of your posts on the forums are about Ultima 7, its story and what-not... so I'm kind of shocked to read that you're shrugging it all off with statements like "those were different times". If not for how the series approached story-telling, what else does the Ultima series has to offer?

Why do you neglect (or shrug off) every argument using the same games you point as examples?

How they approach story and the world you play in is exactly why I pledged for SotA. This isn't about "defending it with our lives"... If I wanted to play Mass Effect, Skyrim, Witcher or any other "cinematic experiences", I'd go play those.

You're judging an entire system based on the premise that the game currently doesn't have enough content to support it?

The conversation is about, being at A PARTICULAR LEVEL (aka: low-level), siege content breaks story flow by preventing the player from progressing... which isn't true at all.

P.S. Ultima 4 was about grinding reputation scores...

 

@Bubonic,

Sorry, I read what you said but am a little tired so it didn't quite sink in the first time. Then, I read it a second time...

Yea, but this is why I've been pushing for the game to be less grindy. I don't think the way they're doing the story matters. It's the rest of the gameplay. If you want the game to be fun even after you finish the story, you don't want the game to be grindy, either; its not just a story concern. I would say that issues like the sieges (which you can get around, or go somewhere else for a while) matter a lot less than directing players to do quests they can't do until they grind a lot.

 

I used to grind the bridge trolls to get stronger.

 

Please point me to any words where I judged anything.

 

@Bubonic

...or should I explain to you what the word "judge" means?

 

Unprovoked condescension aside, yes... please explain. I see nothing in any of the quote above that judged anything.

 

Judging something means you made an opinion on a given subject.

Suggesting that modern games (like SotA) has players grinding the same content over and over again and stating that "back in the day, rarely did one find areas with monsters to kill just 'because'" are judgements in themselves.

Now I came to the conclusion that, considering the thread is about how low-level players may interpret the Sieges and how it can affect story flow, and the fact that you said:

... to suggest that SotA is a mindless grind and non-linearity is only good when you have content and that sieges are problem because the player feels "blocked" with nothing else to do.

Assuming I got that part right, you're saying "content is king" because you deemed the sieges as "content blockers" to which one has to grind to pass as there's not enough content in the game to level up naturally... instead of, you know, looking at the merits of the system and comment on how low-level players could appreciate and safely navigate through it.

 

Yes, it does. But you are implying that I was giving negative opinions on SotA. I was comparing today's MMOs to games of yesteryear, no where did I make any comments on any specific games or systems.

Suggesting that players are grinding the same content over and over again is a fact, not an opinion.
Stating that older CRPGS had less roving monsters with which to grind is a bit more of an opinion and a bit less of a fact (the original Bard's Tale was a pure grind fest), but it is still true in a large amount of cases.

I am far from the first person to suggest that SotA, as a game, is very heavy on the grinding aspect. It is.

This may be an opinion, but I am sticking by it. Non linear games require content, or else you have to grind. Not many other choices there.

I never said anything about this. It has already been established that players can side-step the sieges.

So... yeah. You didn't get that part right.

 

But they're not commenting on sieges, are they?

This is a conversation about sieges and how low-level players interpret them. What are you doing here if not to talk about that?

Facts can be proven.