Play by play updates

mangar

OK, I guess this is more of a me for me type thing that I can look at and say "hey, look how wordy I can be" but I wanted to put together a log of my play time of this game and track it through the time it goes live or until I ball up my fists, stop my feet, and take my ball and go home.

Little bit about me: dude in late 30's played the crap out of RPG's on the NES on up and started my MMORPG habit with EQ.

So here we go.

Hours 0-9

Play style: A few hours here and there between drinks and march madness games over about a week.

Summary of the text blob that follows: Obviously pre alpha, dated UI with a nice twist, dated look and feel, crafting is not up, if they add map maker as a class they will make be rich players within a week of launch, and a pretty innovative combat system. 

 

Text blob:

First impressions: Quick to get up and running the pre alpha state is pretty obvious at this point but lets see.   You enter the game in an empty hold that is on fire and apparently recently raided by an army of undead! Exciting stuff!  first thing to do is to talk to an NPC to figure out what is going on.  Pretty standard here right click then interact with the NPC. This is the first moment of "huh, that's neat" that this game offers.  It goes for the old school NPC interaction where in you need to type in text to the NPC, hit a few key terms, and then the NPC pukes back some canned text.  Those of us that remember the frustration of games like EQ where you had to get the phrase dead on for the NPC to trigger can relax the interface is pretty forgiving so if you want to "talk" to the NPC's they are fairly good at understanding what you are asking them but they are spelling Nazis.  But wait there is more!  If you can hear the cries of the 1990's calling for their game play back you can let them have it because there are links within the dialog that you can simply click on to trigger the NPC text.  This is a huge upside, i still prefer my NPC that actually talk but considering that this is a throwback game I think that this is a great way of giving nostalgia without the frustration... kind of makes the nostalgia seem ever better if you do not need to recall the countless "sword", "where is the sword?", "sword?", "can I have a sword?", "how do I make a sword?", "what sword?", "give me a sword" DING! a rusty sword was added to your inventory... but I asked for a sword not a rusty sword. 

Speaking of swords, the next heroic feat is to obtain a sword.  It is right there in a weapons rack, your mouse turns green when you mouse over it, you click on it, you double click on it, you click on it till your fingers hurt but nothing happens... you eventually realize that you need to drag and drop in into your inventory.  Once you do this you are good to go.  go and open a gate that is!  thankfully you can double click on the switch and it will open so there is no need to stand on one leg, rub your tummy and sing marry had a little lamb while clicking on the switch to make it open.  There are things like this inconsistent mouse usage that makes you think that the dev team changed interface setting and still have a few lose ends to type up so being pre alpha this is not a big deal. 

COMBAT!  fight fool fight!  there you are, on a bridge, with a sword, and a shield that you apparently had this whole time and you are looking an undead baddie square in the sockets of his eyes.  You draw your sword, literally you press Z and draw your sword and charge headlong into COMBAT.  Then you hit your hot bar icons, wait for them to refresh and do it all over again until you kill your foe.  The combat was slow, limited, and flat out bad.  This was not a throw back it was throw up.  

 

After you clear the bridge you meet up with the NPC and depart from the area via a portal.  You arrive within the main game world inside of a player village and it looks like Vanguard SoH with a few NPC guards and merchants roaming around so you head on out into the surrounding are to do battle with elk and rabbits.   After wandering into a crypt and getting killed by a wolf I decide to enter the world map and see what else is out there.  What was out there was dated, NES style RPG mapping... just without actual maps nor any real direction or even a little thing that says NEW GUY GO HERE YOU NO DIE MUCH NOW After getting one shotted everywhere I went I decided to turn to google to find out where I need to go to find starter zones.  I do this and get my self some good plate gear and then begin to explore the more dangerous parts of the world. In this process I pretty much find out that the crafting system is not really up and running most areas do not have maps, most areas that I explored are on very small maps and that the weight carry limits coupled with the excessive instancing makes the first leg of the beginner trial of this game really hard to play through.  If you want a throw back game you get it but I am starting to feel that the antiquated UI, graphics, audio, play style, world layout, and combat systems are more of a lack of programmer and developer vision rather than an effort to capture old school gaming in a new era game.

Then I decided to play around with skills and after a little frustration I found that there are actually two combat systems in the game.  Pretty cool stuff.  One has the static hot bar with refresh timers that is as dull as can be but the other is a card game style combat system.  It is actually a really cool idea, you get to load your skills into your deck then when you start combat skills will randomly be placed into your hand and you can trigger them, if you get and trigger the correct cards you can activate a combo.  This is something that I played with for maybe a half hour but will be spending a lot of time on during future play sessions.  It is the first real new feeling idea in the game at the moment and I think that is shows a great deal of promise.    

  

mangar

Combat: hours 9-17

 

OK, we got combos but how on earth do they work?

Is it simotanious button press?

Do you press them in rapid sequence?

 

Nope, you either hold R and press the corresponding hot key or drag one icon from the hot bar on top of the other. These action create a new icon that allows you to trigger your new power.

 

The combo system is in development as such the options are quite limited. For this play test I opted to drop the heavy armor and go with a leather dual wield build. Heavy armor while providing great protection increases your fizzle chance (yup the fizz is back in this game and it is live and well... so is getting trained but more on that in a later post). My first set up is dual polearms, the combos are limited because based on the weapon line I can only use the Water magic skill line to create combos that seem to focus on stun, root, and gap close. Considering this and the fact that as a leather armor build I was taking more damage I found myself with two option. I could add life magic into my rotation but that would limit my ability to trigger combos or I could find a build that provided both healing and damage. After reviewing the skill sets and combo options I went with a Blades, Fire, Death build. Blades can combo off of blades and fire, and fire can combo off of death for HOT DOT's (life tap over time... freaking cool). This set up should give me a solid build that will let me explore at will with minimal down time for healing and allow me to use AOE attacks to take on more than one mob at a time. You can also add fixed cards to your hot bar, these are skills that are allways available to you but will cost you more focus to cast them. You can lock in buff skills like one that gives you flaming swords at the cost of reagents, you heard that right you need to have consumables in your inventory to be able to cast certain spells, another cool feature much like how archers need to buy arrows.

 

One last thought on this, I noticed that when I leveled up that the size of my hand (skill cards) increased by five slots. If this is something that happens every level it is going to get difficult to manage quickly. You will end up either having to dump skill points into a limited number of trees or add a lot of low cost basic skill cards that can not be used in a combo. Anyway it is a really sharp idea and makes button mashing a combat interactive and dare I say it, fun... not to mention that it kills macros dead and should make PvP a little more interesting.

 

Up next QUESTS!

 

mangar

First quest:

I am in Owl's Head Peddler's Row and encounter a farmer named Myra. Apparently her brother is locked up in a jail named the Clink. After a short conversation she gives me a key and asks me to free her brother. So off I go, reading in my quest log the entrance to the Clink is in the SW corner of the main keep... it was not it is just to the right when you enter the main gates to the keep, distinctly East in the keep. So in I go, draw my swords and start to creep my way into the heart of the Clink. First I encounter a guard and a dead desk clerk, all non agro, then I find the warden, also non agro, then I come across some dead guards and prisoners... all non agro. After wandering around for a bit I exit in error but when I return all of the dead NPCs are now alive and well... still non agro. I am guessing that I wandered into a partially completed instance. After solving a lever “puzzle” and opening the gates to the lower levels I encounter my first agro NPC... a kobold why is there a kobold in the prison, I have no idea so I killed the little bastard. A few rooms later I find a room that has a prisoner in a cage two large bears roaming the walking plank and another one in the pit below the prisoner. After acquiring some new bear skin rugs I talk to the prisoner, turns out that this is the dude I am looking for and all I need to do is give him the key that his sister gave me... flash back to when I started the game and could not figure out how to pick up the sword... yeah I can not figure out how to give this dude the key. Half an hour later I give up and take to google... turns out that people have been successful in giving the prisoner the key so this must be a me-thing underscoring how I am really crappy at game mechanics like guseeing chat key words. … so that thing I said about NPC's having a better understanding of the text that you exchange with them in an earlier post, forget about it. This quest has some specific things you must say to complete it and it is pretty irritating. In the end you do get a good amount of EXP and an NPC that will never talk to you again, SCORE!

Still in Owl's Head you can head over to the Town Hall and chit chat with Lord Enmar about a whole bunch of things to receive a coveted go (kill or gather) X number of Y quest line so I head on over that way to try it out, hopefully it will send me to some new areas that have level appropriate NPC's to hunt. Not that you can tell what level NPC's are until they punch you in the face but meeeehh. Lord Who? This place is just full of guards, I see no lords?!?!!? Found out that you need to chat up the guards in the area and also at the tavern down the road to get a description of the NPC you are looking for and once you do their name plate changes from “Guard” to “Lord Enmar”. This was a pretty cool but a little frustrating game mechanic. I like how you need to discover who is who but if I ask a guard where person X is and that guard just so happens to be person X that I found by dumb luck they should probably say “hey, that's me!” just a thought. I pick up a few more quests and start on my way around the world map to find some herbs to help heal up a guard that was beat down by some undead. I have successfully returned with the herbs but after half an hour of trying to come up with the magic phrase that will allow my avatar to give the herbs to the NPC I have given up and have opted to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

I think that at this point in game development it is unfair to judge or comment on broken systems like spending half an hour shouting HREBS! at a NPC to try and complete a quest but it is a good point in time to discuss the underlying mechanics being used. To do this you need to first open up for discussion on the various schools of thought as to what an immersive experience is.

Up next: A geek fight over immersive experience theory, better pack a clean pair of Spider Man Underoos this could be a lengthy post.   

mangar

Immersive gaming experience, what is it? (as if this is needed on a MMORPG forum, right?)

 

In the most extreme case it is the ability for a person playing a game to feel as thou they are in the game or at the least an active part of the world. Do I understand it? Yep. Can I relate? Nope, not even remotely, last time I fantasized about being in another world I was running around my parents yard smacking things with sticks way too many years ago to count, I do remember having a dog named Sparky that was allergic to fleas... great little dog but he smelt horribly bad. So who am I to comment on such a thing that a good number of gamers feel so passionately about? Well, being a certified know it all with a sarcastic attitude and a pretty solid analytical mind I think I am the perfect person to ramble on about it!

 

On a more serious note this notion of immersive game play is, from what I can tell, a big selling point of SoTA. It is, after all, the basis of the game. Your avatar is, well you, there are plenty of NPC's that refer to you as an off worlder, and there is even a prophecy that an off worlder or avatar will play a pivotal role in the future events of this world that we are adventuring in. You can probably with little embellishment state that an immersive gaming experience is the primary game mechanic of SoTA. This said I feel that the methods used to interact with NPC's is a massive backfire and unfortunately is the single greatest immersion breaker in the game. Bold statement, I know, but follow along with me for a moment. I fully get that the action of typing to interact with NPC's should be a solid immersion tool but the poorly executed and quite frankly antiquated methods used to pull this feature off changes the experience from talking to NPC's to trying to figure out the hidden word puzzle that the developers have put together to get the results that you want out of the game. Granted in some cases they have added the equivalent of click to progress dialog but there is still a good deal of hidden and not so well hidden dialog, lore, key words (quest update triggers), and just funny stuff that remains wrapped within the developer word puzzles.

 

A system like this can work well in a single player RPG. It actually would work well with the premise for this game in a single player non MMO build. If you found yourself transported to a magical land where you do not speak the native language there would be a learning curve and it would take you time and repetition to learn how to effectively communicate with the natives. Now in a MMORPG, where the native population not only recognizes you as an avatar but acknowledges that there are a lot of avatars running around coupled with the fact that in every major city there are more avatars running around than natives, that avatars are running the economy, and most all natives that are in need of help actively seek out avatars for assistance this system does not work. It should be taken into consideration that the presence of avatars has had a profound effect on the culture and interaction of the natives and as such the relationship between natives and avatars should be one of the natives seeking out avatars not the other way around (think ESO where NPC's run up to you, knowing who you are and ask for help).

 

This act of solving the word puzzles of the developers actually creates a barrier for the player and puts the player in the mindset of interacting with the programers expectations rather than the world itself. If this is a solid game play mechanic or just a solid excuse for lazy scripting that is for you to decide but before you do please take a moment to think about how well things like Google can magically provide you with the information that you are looking for regardless of how screwed up your spelling is or obscure your reference may be... and no I am not saying that SoTA should perform close to same level as a high end browser but it should be better than what it is if you want to preserve and/or promote an immersing gaming experience using the model for NPC interaction.

Up next: /LFG

mangar

Points of noob ignorance:

 

I have found a map maker in game that sells, of all things, MAPS! Great element, glad it is in game.

 

Crafting is in the game but it is not fully fleshed out, I am planning a later post on this but for the moment it seems like buying gear is a better option to crafting gear due to equipment durability decay.