This is what people are asking for - NDA lifted

daveospice

A lot of people are going to be instantly critical of anything and everything in RV.  That it's not up to standard, but the thing is it had a lot less money invested into it, cost way less at launch and doesn't have a monthly fee.  This alone makes any and every complaint that compairs it to other games practically invalid.

Still, with it costing money and not being totally free you still need to be somewhat skeptical.  Luckly i am one of the biggest skeptics. 

The game itself is designed with a low budget feel to it.  Actions don't have many animational frames, the graphics themselves scream low budget from the beginning.   However, if you look closely at facial features they're some of the best out there.  Actions tend to deliver more text than animation (if any animation at all) and thus everything is designed cheaply.

That's the best thing I can say to sum it all up for you in a quick but easy critic of what I thought of RV during the test.

So go in with an open mind.

daveospice

Oops.  Sorry I am really drunk tonight.  Haha... 

Okay to continue my post about Roma-victor.  I beta'd it about 2 months ago.  There were certain things that really kept me from playing it that I think the majority of the player base should know before they invest in this.

For one investing in the game isn't a bad thing, since it's like supporting the underdog store compaired to going to wal-mart... but at the same time, the underdog didn't do the greatest job ever either.

I've played ATITD (A Tale in the Desert) pretty thoroughly, and found ATITD to be much better in quality.  Roma-victor was so lacking in the...  interactivity of activities, and I thought ATITD was bad (the hit harvest tree for lumber button was just boring and you had to do it a ton).  Most the time during the test all you did was type a command or hit a button and got no visual response back.  The making of "Piles" or things like wood piles or mud piles were gruesome at BEST.  You'd literally spend an hour to three hours developing a wood pile to start a fire so you could do certain things.  Of course you don't have to be a crafter, but considering my card didn't support pixel shading (without it I couldn't see the road or terrain distinctions) I could hardly walk anywhere without getting lost, let alone find the roman village as a barbarian when it's an hour and a half walk if you know the way to it.

Also to create some objects you need the object to which you're creating in order to create it... which isn't really how it worked back then now is it?  If it worked that way, then how the hell did they ever create the object in the first place?

I felt that there was a clear distinction  between ok this is realistic, but fuck it'd be a lot more fun actually doing the activity than doing it in a video game... because the way RV would do things were so darn boring!

Like getting logs was basically text based (which at the time I played was 2-3 months ago in beta which a lot can change since then) and I'd get so bored that I literally would stop playing because I felt for a test... making us spend an hour collecting logs when it's all text based isn't really testing anything and just wasting our time since there was going to be a wipe anyway.  The game seemed so watered down and uninteractive... yet if you're a pen and paper role player this game could easily be the best game you've ever played, but I'm the type of person that needs visual and game feedback/rewards for the activities I do.  If the game just isn't keeping my interest after a couple of hours, I just won't keep playing it.

I've also played just about every MMORPG so maybe my taste is a little high standard now after all the games I've played... but I went into this with a very open mind.

The developers and the people working on the game are by far light years ahead of any other development team I've ever seen in terms of how to deal with the community and listen to the community, but the one thing that held them back and kept this game from being better than every other game atm is their budget.  If only this team was given the opportunities of some of the bigger development teams (like larger staff and paychecks) this team could have easily turned what they have now into the best darn thing ever made.  Unfortunately This is not the case and so it will only be a niche game for those that like a lot of hard work (and I mean a lot) without much pay off for your activities. 

Of course if you're going to the game just on the social aspects of the game, then by all means this is the game for you.  Just in the beta people would always know your name and say  hi whenever you logged in... it was a really really great community.  So, hopefully at launch everything is smoother than what it was in beta, and that the social aspects are still there.

I for one am going to be going to be buying this game just to support the underdog.  The game only cost like 29 or whatever dollars ( if you were in beta it was less, or if you preordered it was less) and has no monthly fee, which if you don't like it you can simply just shelf it and it's not like you're out a lot of money.  The game itself also has a lot of potential (just adding visual distinctions for activities would make it a 100 times more enjoyable for me) and so I figure if I buy it now I can always check back later and see how the games doing at any time, and the extra money will go towards that goal of productive programming and graphic design.

So I say, invest your money in this because there's nothing else out there atm worth it anything more, and that the team is a great team and they worked  hard on the game.  Just going to the boards you will find your questions answered (very quickly) by an actual developer or team member.  It's great, give it a shot and don't just listen to my rant but go over and see for yourself... 

There is a niche for this game, and if you read the boards you will find what that niche is very quickly, just by reading what the people who like the game say in their posts.  So go read!