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'A Good Chance Our [April] Steam Release Date Will Slip' According to Brinkmann - Legends of Aria -
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
'A Good Chance Our [April] Steam Release Date Will Slip' According to Brinkmann - Legends of Aria - MMORPG.com
Legends of Aria News - Derek Brinkmann took to Reddit earlier today for an Ask Me Anything session with fans of Legends of Aria. The first question out of the bag asked if he believed that LoA would make its projected April Steam release date. Brinkmann wrote that, while a lot of great feedback had been taken from CBT1, the team realized that more work needs to be done on optimization, fleshing out professions and on a new player experience.
Comments
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Playing the game for the past few months, has been a sad disappointment because it's nothing like UO which it claims to be inspired by. Which is sad because I played UO from '98 onwards and UO is literally 20+ years old and LoA can't even hold a candle to it yet in terms of gameplay, complexity, and overall game design. Which goes to show you how ahead of it's time UO was ...or for that matter how much LoA is lacking.
Citadel needs to cowboy up, buckle up them pants and put in a whole lot more elbow grease to get LoA/Shards Online to be a descent niche game, let a lone a UO inspired mmorpg.
You reap what you sow.
1) There was NO tutorial. That came much, much later. You had to figure out EVERYTHING on your own. No quests, no guides, nothing. You know how long it took me to figure out how to get kindling for a campfire back then? An unreasonable amount of time for something so simple.
2) Character creation was always lackluster, and still is. Minimal appearance options for customization, and they didn't even have RACES until the 4th or 5th expansion. Armor and clothing appearance was even more limited - You had plate, chain, leather, cloth, and a basic dye tub that only worked on cloth. Everything looked the same.
3) UO has always had a clunky UI. To be fair, the ability to place icons anywhere for spells was nice, but I don't miss it enough to take notice of it. Right click or double click instead of ctrl click? Nit-picky at best. Let's not even get into the fact you had to buy a third-party program, UOAssist, for a lot of the things in modern UI's players take for granted.
4) Your location on the map? You still need an add-on to the UO classic client for that, or use the new client. At least they're not making you chart moon patterns with a sextant. You had to learn your way around the world, and by and large, still do.
If anything, they've committed the cardinal sin of being VERY similar to what UO was at launch, with a new engine and only a few small improvements (The prestige abilities, weapon abilities, and hotbars were not things in UO initially in any form - Click to attack, move, chug potion, cast spell - That was the WHOLE combat loop). That style just doesn't appeal to most players in this day and age. The emphasis isn't on the appearance or UI as much as it is the gameplay, and modern gamers simply won't accept anything that doesn't have both.
If it's not to your modern tastes, that's unfortunate, because the core feels VERY UO to me, my personal issues with scarcity of resources and crafting aside. And I had been playing UO since 1997. I have no doubt they will adapt and grow, just as UO did, with the added benefit of having user run shards that can add their own twist. And keep in mind, this team is much, much smaller than UO's original team. Sure, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of most modern games, but I'll tell you this - They've done more to make a modern UO than UO has.. By a long shot.
Not universally well received, thats for sure.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
A shame the game outlasted all of their publications.. Pretty damn good coaster
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I recall CGW or PCG giving the same to SWG in the coming years.
Definitely enjoying Legends of Ultima though, excited for it to come back up in the next few days. Currently can't try these new "optimizations" on the main server because it is impossible to actually create a new character or log in with any existing ones.
1. Game performance. Even with a pretty heavy rig (i7 8770K, 1070), my GPU is burning like I'm mining coins ... for a game with graphics feeling like it's 2000 and creepy random lags. Or is that they are having us download a debug version of the exe?
2. Reds players (PKers, griefers, however you want to call them) camping, chasing and killing people when least expected (e.g. while trying to kill monsters, skill upgrade, in dungeons, etc) making it difficult to improve your own skills since higher levels areas (incl. outposts) become pretty much no-go zones (and no or little in-game system to protect friendly players)
3. Major changes during beta. Not even mentioning the unbalanced characters (which Red players are taking advantage of), the whole crafting system was modified recently and not even complete (felling more like a rush release for PAX). The game has been in dev for years, and doesn't seem to improve much where it matters.
4. Pretty much no story lines and plots. A few have just been introduced recently. (this explains why Reds are popping up ... what do you do once you've done full circle on what the game can offer?)
I'm not sure how they are able to maintain funding from investors.
Plus, not sure keeping a beta running that long for players to play is the best strategy, with a full reset planned at release ... this will turn down many of us having spent money and time to get this game up to speed and better and get some chars to a playable level, esp. if things don't get much better by then.
Anyhow ... it's a shame .. I really expected much of it, esp. the creation tool which I was missing since NWN (and still haven't been able to try since it's not released in beta yet).
As the popularity or MMOs increased they started feature them more, but the big change in coverage occurred as MMOs became made more for people like them...solo gamers.