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[Column] Shroud of the Avatar: Player Towns, Pet Taming, and Story Time
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Custom placements in Player-Owned Towns and over a hundred new towns in the game gives Release 20 more new places to explore than any release to date for Shroud of the Avatar. Though, that’s hardly all they’ve done over the last month of work on this game that’s rapidly approaching its more persistent state.
Read more of Red Thomas's Shroud of the Avatar: Release Player Towns, Pet Taming, and Story Time.
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Town owners can now design their own layout through the new tool for player-owned towns.
Comments
Yep, instanced housing is a major dud. Always has been and probably always will be.
Garriot should save his money for his space missions, his design skills are long gone.
That’s exactly how it works, what people don’t realise is the scale of a PoT land mass, they are absolutely massive in size and each town can have many residents who all interact with each other in the same instance it’s not like you go into the instance and are alone and standing in you’re house.
The PoT editor tool is monumental for the game, being able to plan out your town layout raises the bar as far as I’m concerned.
Can’t wait for this release, looks great!
"I'm looking at the game and thinking that day isn't too far off, though. This next release demonstrates in may ways just how far they've come, and is a great example of how small teaks of major systems produce big results."
I'm not sure I'm looking at the same Shroud of the Avatar as you are. There are many major systems that haven't been put into the game yet, and they just now started to look at fixing the boring combat deck system after months and months of bad feedback on it. I have to give them that though, at least they FINALLY started listening tobackers and steam reviews about how horrible it is. The whole world is instance after instance after instance no sense of atmosphere and no way to get immersed in the game. Their hunting places or whatever they call them are small with tree barriers everywhere and they're are dull and borin. There's not much exploring in this game, you're hit with loading screens constantly because it's not seamless. I'm not feeling any UO vibe at all with Shroud. At this point I feel regret for plunkin down any money for this game.
I couldn't agree more with Mitara.
The mechanics of this game, the way it's played, the way you explore the world is just horrible. It combines an over the head RPG of old with 3rd person game play. Imagine running down a road with the camera two miles above your head looking down. You run and run, then you are "sucked" into an instanced encounter with ten wolves, kill them, skin them, look for any other meager resources and run for the hills, literally. Once almost to the hills you are brought back to the above the head shot. Do this a couple dozen times trying to get to a town.
The quests if you call it that are monotonous, hard to follow and leaves you chasing your tail for hours until you find what you need. This game is like Ultima Online meets Ultima with a time sink resource grab.
My question? why?! Why, WHY? Could they not just give us an immersive 3rd or 1st person Shroud of the Avatar. The way the game takes you out of that perspective to run to towns or explore the wild just sucks. It takes you away from that immersive element, when that happens you realize your playing a niche game that is doomed for failure.
You see the red and green highlight around the npc's,that is the kind of stuff that really turns me off,that is immersion ruining 101.It is right up there with see a thousand name plates over players heads,i hate stuff like that.
None the less what it comes down to with this game and any is depth of combat/class systems.
Combat is pretty much 90% of these games,if it is done boring like ,players don't make any decisions,everything feels automated, then it gets too boring to play.It really is that important,at least to me,they can build tons of features great graphics but if combat is bland i won't play it.Perfect example is FFXIV,i love almost everything about the game but combat was so bad i had to quit.Of course combat is not just dmg/def there are a lot of systems that should go into combat.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Please explain the escalating costs, I don't understand, thnx
Here's a sample of what I'm talking about:
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?page_id=19#faq_52
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I am a Founder/Royal Founder, why do I have to pay Benefactor prices to upgrade? — Did I lose my discount? — Why don’t Knight Marshal and Lord Marshal have discounted Founder Prices?
April 7th, 2014 marked the end of promotional early Founder pricing. All new pledges and upgrades after April 7th, 2014 are at Benefactor prices, regardless of Benefactor/Founder/Royal Founder status. The two new tiers, Knight Marshal and Lord Marshal, were created after the early Founder pricing cut off and thus only have one price. The cost for Knight Marshal and Lord Marshal is the same for all backers, $1,200 and $2,200 respectively. All backers now pay the same price for pledges/upgrades.
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For further examples, just look at their pledge prices and what "perks" your money can buy you here, https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?page_id=29385
and then there's all the add-ons that you will pretty much need just to be competitive, from the prosperity packs of tools to pets to multi-level basements, it just keeps on adding up. Whatever happened to everyone on the same level playing field and having to earn this stuff through game play??
Same here mate
They have been watching the escapades of the SC team too much and have adapted the view of soaking the supporters for all they can. This is not really a game anymore because everything seems to cost real money. More like a gambling casino.
Did you notice that nowhere in the above article did it mention that Player Owned Towns are A Cash Store Only Item?
You won't be doing any of that unless you spend at least $900 on top of the base game cost.
PoTs and all the features are gameplay the normal player will never, ever see
Also notice from the link above that unless you bought a town before they realised the map wasn't going to be big enough for all the Mega Whales and people purchasing hoping to sell on for profit later, you now don't get your town to appear on the map; you will be instanced to someone else's location instead... except needless to say, the price hasn't come down from what it was, so the cost to utility ratio for this feature alone has indeed "escalated".
Taming at least will be part of the basic game though. Owning unique pets has been removed from higher pledges however, because that makes people who spend on demand feel more special. Don't expect to upgrade your pledge and get equal rewards for equal spending in the near future.
It's not so much crowd funding that is the issue as the people in charge of operating the games. Personally, I think RSI will turn out okay. The issue people are facing right now is that they are looking at Star Citizen as if it is the product Chris is focusing on, but reality is that he is working on Squadron 42 which is a single player focused experience. All this SC multiplayer stuff is something else.
Shroud of the Avatar I funded a while back and have been playing a sit and watch stance. Lots of work needs to be done on that game in particular.
Well, guess the writing has been on the wall for quite a while now. Ultima 7 was their last good single-player game, Ultima Online pre-Trammel their last good 'online' game. Everything since has been mediocre at best. Ultima 8, Ultima 9, Tabula Rasa, ...
Wanted this game to succeed so hard. My last good MMO experience had been WoW Vanilla and LotRO pre-Rohan (allthough the Lotro dev team is doing a great job I must admit! I'm once again enjoying my time in LotRO) and no other MMO feels or looks 'familiar". It's always Guild Wars 2, which seems to blend asian looks with western gameplay, so crappy western wow-ripoff (SWtOR, Wildstar, ...) or some cheap and childish eastern import (FFXIV, ArcheAge, Black Desert, ...) or some top-down game (Das Tal, ...).
Of all the games recently released or to be released, this was the only one I had high hopes for, but I guess Long/Garriott haven't learnt a thing.
There is no way anyone can purchase a player owned town that is on the map because they capped the number of towns that show on the map. A person would be paying hundreds of dollars for an instanced community because the towns in the overland map are sold out.
In order to get to an instanced player owned town, you would have to get there through a player owned town that is on the map. Town owners can ban anyone from their town. So if they ban you, good luck getting to your town.
Maybe this will be worked out in the future. But there are so many problems and drawbacks to this feature that are not yet addressed, I would save my money until finding out how this will play out.
They have wasted a good bit of time on this game feature that was not promised in the Kickstarter campaign. In fact, guild and community castles were what was offered as an original KS stretch goal. Instead of designing that stretch goal, they morphed it into this system instead, something that is completely different, and unfair, to those that invested.
They are designing new features into an unreleased game that weren't promised, in order to satisfy and get more money from the whales in the game.
There is a lot more that could be said about the problems in this game, but the main thought I want to leave people with: save your money until you see if the game issues are resolved when it actually launches. They will hold out a carrot to get people to invest, like a player owned town, without telling you all the problems that have not yet been resolved.
SotA is trying to be a full fledged MMO on a tiny (comparatively) budget. Corners will have to be cut. You will not get your perfect fantasy game.
But then, you will never get your perfect fantasy game.....
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
It shows that they have cut corners a lot. Sad
For potential to be realized, it takes money. In the MMO space, a lot of money.
I'm still amazed that they manage to get an update out each month.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.