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It's a bad game
sdbaynham
Member UncommonPosts: 18
My first positive experience with The Repopulation was during character select. It asks you to deisgn your starting armor, and it gives you access to basically every armor piece in the game in order to do so. You design a character who has the cool sci-fi armor you want. You're not done with gear, though: as the game explains, most of a piece of gear's stats come from fittings you slot into it, which are crafted by players. You can also manage your crafting materials carefully to add a few stats to the armor itself, and of course dyes are available to manage your look even further. But I took it as a sign of good faith that the game was willing to start my life as a cool-looking badass.
The perfect metaphor for my time with The Repopulation came about 6 hours of game time later, when I died several times in a row and realized that it was time to upgrade my fittings to improve my combat capabilities. After buying 4 pricy new fittings off the auction house, I realized my gear couldn't handle them. I was perplexed: do I need to upgrade my gear? No, it turned out, I could use my gear forever, just as promised. The problem were my gear skills- I'd apparently broken an unspoken rule during character select and mixed heavy and medium armor types, which have different combat skills associated with them. That meant that I was splitting my skill-ups between them and my armor skill was half what it should have been, ensuring that I couldn't use appropriately-leveled armor fittings. By taking The Repopulation's invitation to experiment with my look seriously, I'd gimped my character.
Whoops.
The Repopulation is an early access sandbox MMO written in the Hero Engine. Its developers, Above and Beyond Technologies, are gunning for a full F2P release at the end of 2015 or early 2016. The game has raised over $225,000 over two rounds of kickstarter funding, and who knows how much cash for early access. And why not? It's been a bit of an MMO community cliché that the genre has lost its way and should spend more time experimenting in the sandbox space, which has been revitalized by distinctly unmassive games like Minecraft and Rust. Maybe what the genre needs is just one solid-if-janky sandbox game to get successful and bring the genre back into alignment.
The Repopulation is pushing hard to position itself as the new Indie Sandbox Sweetheart. Heck, the game might as well call itself Star Conflicts Universes for how hard it's trying, on the surface, to ape Star Wars Galaxies. And on some level, I agree that if a solid SWG clone were to get made and come out, it could be rather popular, if niche. So what's the problem?
The problem is that The Repopulation is not that game. The Repopulation is not a SWG clone. The Repopulation is more like a distant teenage memory of SWG committed to binary. The Repopulation is more like a cargo cult ritual of SWG, where all the motions are gone through, and none of them understood. The Repopulation doesn't understand what made SWG great, but even worse, it doesn't understand what could potentially make itself great. And that's, to be honest, the worst part of all. It's fine to make an "homage" that exists only through the lens of your own experience, even if I disagree with it. It's not fine to make a game that doesn't have a clear understanding of its own design.
Perfect example: let's go back to armor. The developers at A&B clearly understood that items breaking and having to be replaced is a key component of the game economy. But, they asked, what if I want to keep my awesome looking armor? What if the replacement armor when it breaks doesn't come in my look? What if the stats I want are on something that looks like crap? If Bob's Best Helmets clearly have the best helmets and bob doesn't have a fashion sense, everyone will be running around in the same crappy helmet!
So, solution: let's separate stats, and item breakage, from cosmetics. That way, you can have whatever cosmetics you want. This is smart, this is good. This is a clear improvement on star wars galaxies. But then, what do they do? They tie the cosmetics to in-game function, just like they *just got done not doing*. You have to pick one of three armor classes, and your armor class has an in-game purpose, and changing armor classes is expensive. This is twice as dumb for an indie company that can't afford to give armor the wide breadth of cosmetics they truly need in the first place!
And they gameplay is filled with weird backtracks and reversions like these. Armor doesn't have stats, except for when it does. You can do anything you want, except that the world is filled with level 40 monsters who will end you unless you grind up combat. There's no grinding, except that you have to grind to make a-rank equipment which is so ubiquitous from more experienced players that the only thing to do in the game is grind up skills so you can make a-rank equipment.
The economy is downright bizarre. A handful of low-level quests will give you enough scratch to buy up the best mount on the auction house. You can buy top-level fittings on the auction house, but there's also the ability to own a shop in game. It serves no purpose to be able to do so, though- anything you can put in your shop, I can buy instantly from the auction house, receive, and equip, without ever going into town. You can sell on the auction house or place buy orders without having to go into town.
This is one of the most bizarre parts of The Repopulation- there's this bizarrely hardcore attitude when it comes to the crafting system, or not getting murdered while picking flowers, but when it comes to the entire basis of how the Star Wars Galaxies economy worked, they don't want you to have to even use your 0s cooldown teleport to get back into town.
Or how about one of the staples of Star Wars Galaxies: town ownership. Can you build your own town? Yes, but you shouldn't. Unlike Star Wars Galaxies, where there was a few small theme park areas, and then the big wide world where you'd spend most of your time, in The Repopulation, there's a big wide theme park(-ish) area, and then a small, empty expanse to which there is no reason to go. Guess which of these towns go in? The towns are literally in the middle of nowhere. There's a nation-siege system to allow you to destroy or capture towns, but there's no reason to do so, as town ownership does not give you access to any resources or offer any advantage whatsoever. There's not automated crafting tables, helper droids, harvesters, or anything. Actually, scratch that, harvesters do exist, but you cannot place them in the world. Rather, there are special types of gathering nodes that you place a harvester inside for a little while instead of mining by hand.
It's kind of bizarre, because the entire town-ownership system is first gimped and then given this half-hearted territory control mechanism that serves no apparent purpose, and nobody ever wanted. The worst part is that it ruins town ownership by once again backtracking on its own design: towns are a massive investment, and most of that investment is cosmetic in nature (since there's nothing else to do with the damn thing), but you can't make the town actually look good, because you have to build for defensibility or someone might steal your town. Also the main town-placing area is an endless gray expanse with a single texture for miles. Hard to make that look good.
How about PVP? Well, there are no apparent benefits to engaging in it, first of all, and no detriment to dying in it. Even if someone tries to camp you, you can respawn back at your nearest safe zone (either your city, or your faction's city). Not that that sort of camping protection is a bad thing, but the most you can do is distract someone. SWG gave you a number of benefits to going active-PVP, but the repopulation just kind of shrugs and says, "well, there's PVP.."
So what about PVE? Well, there's only two reasons to engage in it: to farm drops for crafting, and to clear enemies away from a resource node. The problem with this: SWG had a low amount of vertical scaling for player abilities (outside of buffs you received from other players), and a high amount of horizontal scaling (more players necessary) for enemies needed to grab high-level mats. Since large-scale fights would require buffing, medics, and a whole rigamarole, this encouraged players to work together. The Repopulation has the opposite situation: there are no ingredients which I am aware of that require you to fight anything as a group. Oh, there are enemies that need to be fought as a group, called out by an almost-invisible icon next to their title bar, which only appears when you're within range of it and have it selected. But you don't need to fight them. Everything they drop can be obtained by soloable opponents. On the other end of things, the vertical power scaling is outrageous, ensuring that you will absolutely get insta-murdered by even mid-level opponents unless you take some hours to grind up your combat abilities to an appropriate level. Even fittings are level-gated, ensuring that you don't get over-geared for your level.
I think everyone recognizes that the crafting system is the core of The Repopulation. I think it's bad, and misses the point- but I've already written, so, so much and I could write about the same length again about just the crafting system. I do want to take a moment to point out that without randomized, obsolescing stat inputs into the crafting system, like SWG had, people are going to work out what the best gear/fittings are, how to make them, and then just make the entire economy about critical pathing that, making this entire dog and pony show pointless.
But what I wanted to do is get back to the point I was making at the beginning. SWG was more than just an economy with a graphical interface. It was a game! And more than that, it was a game that specifically went out of its way to appeal to many different types of players. In fact, I was reading just recently Raph Koster talking about how they intentionally tried to build out content for all 4 of Bartle's player types.
The Repopulation does not. It is made to appeal to Killers and Achievers, and that's it. There are no POI's, no way of interacting with the world, the cosmetic system is miniscule, there's no downtime system, there's no concept of needing to interact with other players except through combat and the same AH interface I do with wow. What's more, the band of achievement has been narrowed to exactly one thing: Craft Stuff. Without a full ecosystem of players all trying to play different ways, without even a full ecosystem of achievers trying achieve different things, the game is paltry, it's a shadow of a great thing, it's a cargo cult ceremony. Even the economy doesn't work, because in an environment where people aren't really trying to get things, pricing makes no sense.
People have this weird opinion that sandbox games are this magic cure for what ails MMO's. What ails MMOs is a lack of attraction for different types of players. You can see it in wow: in the beginning, there were people hanging out on guild chat, PVPing, doing raids, grinding, whatever. A lot of different activities, appealing to different types of players. Today, wow is log in to raid. Or log in to arena. An appeal to a very narrow band of a few types of players. It's not wow's fault: wow was like that from the beginning, people just didn't understand it very well, so they didn't know.
But if you're going to make a game today, you can't just make a weird crafting system and hope that nobody notices that there's nothing behind it. That's not going to work, people are savvier than that now. You have to actually make an MMO that appeals to more than just killers and achievers. It's almost happened a few times, but it can happen now, if you just approach your game with clear eyes.
Comments
Yet another that wants things to happen fast and furious like!!!
Repopulation has a huge amount of attraction like swg did, just watch it grow or not, no need to be an ass about it because you only played 6 hours on a potato pc, and got stressed about it.
Also, two posts? what made you wish to post about the lack of instant craft and stat level here in the first place?
While the title of the thread seems a bit careless, I read the long original post and found it to be a very intelligent critique of the problems that exist in the foundational level of Repopulation. I was recently puzzled when a friend of mine reported that he didn't like Repop after playing it, and besides bugs, described the same disconnect that you detailed.
I think that Repop has enough surface resemblance to SWG to make it engaging for someone looking for a sandbox, but the outer framework suffers from too many wrong turns in trying to make the game have its own identity.
One of the first things I noticed in early testing was the defensive attitude of the people involved when comparisons to SWG are made and a deficit reported. When it comes to positive comparisons the relationship is welcomed, but if you voice anything to the contrary, groupthink and the excuse: "wrong game," will emerge. I don't believe they can have their cake and eat it too.
-The auction house thing needs to go. With such huge possibilities for a player run economy they need to remove the next minute air option. Goods to Market needs to be part of the equation, as well as having different markets.
-The Plot Housing thing was ill-conceived. Once again MMO devs have fallen into the trap of preserving their story by stifling yours. I don't give a fuck if the aliens spawn close by, open world housing needs to be in there or it's just a slightly more immersive version of instanced housing. Put decay and inhabitation in there if you don't want clutter. It's a simple matter to make abandoned structures pack up and to not let maintenance be paid for 5 years in advance. What they have done has essentially made the world smaller by sectioning it off into large unusable bits.
-The UI is just plain shitty. Design, Implementation, symbology, customization. The UI actually takes me out of the game because it seems to fight the other visuals, and often wins. Where target indicator/con is concerned the look is gaudy, too colorful, and not helpful.
I think that there is a lot of potential in the game, and I think that once it launches it will be something I play regularly. The main thing with Repop is that it is not a casual game nor do I think it will be. It's a game that will require large investments of time and because of that I can forgive the things like the hard leveling of the armor skills and the attachments. A good amount of tutorial should be spent explaining those things to new players though so they don't feel unduly attacked by the system.
I also think that the team should put in things like backpacks, true open world housing, and harvesters that don't just go on a node. I guess once you have that control you want to make the thing that you envision, but some of those choices could be remade for the betterment of the player experience.
Your evaluation of the game is all over the place. Some of the points that you bring up are, by your own admission, actually good, others were deemed bad by your own player error, and yet others are due to a matter of preference. Try condensing your post to include only those features that you feel make it a bad game, because that is after all the title of your thread. If you categorize the features or do so in bullet point format it will make it a lot clearer to the reader while allowing the reader to question or debate each point individually, if feedback is indeed what you seek.
I don't think choosing a mix of medium and heavy armors at character select when the armor weight isn't even indicated anywhere and the significance hasn't been made clear is user error. I also was making a larger point that designing a system for cosmetics and then going in after the fact and adding a ~~~hardcore~~~ system that destroys the entire original design intent is a really bad idea.
EDIT: And I don't think it's "all over the place" to admit that there were good things in there, I actually think it makes the game kind of tragic and also shows that things are being added to the game at random without a clear understanding by the designer of why they were good in SWG, so everything good about the game is tainted.
I really stopped at reading after some columns.. but i ahve played Repopulation, and i personally still believe in this one.
It seems that someone forgot that Repopulation is still in ALPHA! Man C'mon!
It's not even in beta... UI? Optimization?
Wait... )))
Regarding the mix of armor, If this is in fact the case (which I find hard to believe), it would simply be a matter of a lack of mention in character select and certainly something that will be fixed before the game is released. I am pretty sure their intention is not to fool players into selecting the wrong armor at character select.
Regarding armor cosmetics, the significance that you give to the look of armor as it relates to "hardcore" stats is not clear to me. I see nothing wrong with it as you explain it.
Its a long post. Would it be too much for you to clearly list these features that make it a bad game in bullet form?
What do you mean you find it hard to believe? Go make a character, see it for yourself.
I actually really believe in Repop, but I don't understand why the game cannot be looked at with a critical eye. If you are a proponent of the game the last thing you want to do is bait and switch people who are looking to play it. Every game has warts, and every game changes throughout its life cycle.
Potential players should know that maybe its not a good idea to mix armor types in the current iteration of that system. It's tempting to do what OP said and tailor your character based on the look of the armor piece. The armor system is a bit strange in its implementation of classification even when the guts are what give the values. Maybe taking a look at that is not such a bad thing.
Not much to say here except that I intentionally avoided topics other than game design and I agree with you about the UI, and also that I probably wont' be playing it again, but it did make me want to start up A Tale in the Desert again. There's a lot of things here that make me skeptical that the designer understands design all that well, and when the problem is that foundational, I doubt it'll get better.
The OP listed some things as facts that can easily be checked - at least whether it is like the OP said or not. Is it too much to actually go and see for yourself if you don't believe him? Why would you believe him even he writes it in a different way?
I also didn't find the post difficult to understand. I did neither play SWG nor (so far) The Repopulation, but i can imagine how a lot of stuff works and whether i would like it myself or not. And while he doesn't use bullet points, it's structured nicely with paragraphs. I'd go as far as to name it an example of how posts like this should look. Sure, it could be better, but most posts are worse - both structure and content.
The actual opinion is obviously a matter of taste and subjective, but it's not like he did randomly hate things, he clearly pointed out what felt wrong *to him*.
Again, i do not play The Repopulation, so i can offer no opinion on whether any of his points is "valid" (which is, again, subjective anyways), but there is absolute nothing wrong with the post or how he presents his opinion.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
You have your opinion, I have mine. I responded directly to the OP in detail regarding questions I had about the game as described in his post. His post is not about me and my intention was not to derail it as such. He opted not to respond to my concerns and I responded. Merely that, and nothing more. If you enjoyed the OPs post let him know, I am sure he will appreciate it.
TLDR
I think that many of the ideas, features, etc. in the game are high-concept and it sounds like you see that too. Soooooo, we're going to prove again that the MMORPG community talks out both sides of our mouth (on asking for innovation and the other bashing anything that tries anything high-concept). Cool man, thanks.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Possibly but some of the things you list I think are pluses.
Your armor/cosmetic example Good for them.
This way those crafters who do have a "fashion sense" will be able to make the items that others want to see while those who don't will have to either learn or charge a little less.
If I was to make a game this is exactly how I would do it. Otherwise crafters are only "stat adders" and there isn't any artistry to it.
I also disagree that cosmetics should freely be used for any type of armor set. If I'm reading your criticism correctly.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Looks like if they are adding something similar to WoW vanilla and Everquest vanilla where every weapons needs to level up to your current level to get maximum benefit.
I remember in those days when you did not use you wand as a mage for 2 or 3 level and then started to use it, it was making very week damage and you needed to level it up to gain maximum potential out of it. I think it was like 3 or 5 level you could level it up per character level. And the higher level it was the more hit you needed to do with it to get it to level up.
I self identify as a monkey.
Repop has been in development for many years, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least if there have been a few changes of direction along the way. Sometimes a concept looks really cool in a design document. Not so much when implemented. So it is changed, but that change may require a rework of a whole bunch of systems. A mountain of work for a small team, so it is fudged a bit in certain areas to make the rework easier.
The "semi-cosmetic" armour system sounds suspiciously like something that was reworked after a great deal of development had already been done. Perhaps it was just too big a task to refactor the armour shells as 100% cosmetic items. It is relatively easy to prevent the player making mistakes, just add a few popup warnings to alert the player to the consequences of their armour mixing.
However, the core "magic" of SWG's crafting system was the resources system. There were loads of stats on the dozens of resource types and subtypes. The fact that those stats changed every 14-21 days is what made the crafting system unique in MMO history AFAIK. Not only did the stats change, but the spawn locations moved randomly. There were no resource nodes to camp, every time a certain spawn was exhausted, you had to manually criss-cross the map to track down the high-concentrations of the newly spawned resource.
These changing stats made it vitally important to get as much of a certain material as possible, as fast as possible, before it vanished, quite possibly NEVER to be seen again in that exact stat combination. That system is a fantastic driver of conflict, because you compete for truly unique items.
If Repop only has static resources, then the crafting itself will become formulaic very quickly. Requiring 50 parts and 20 sub-assemblies to make a pistol is just tedious if every pistol comes out the same.
Well, how about they drop random coupons for discount purchases of raw materials from the cash store?!!!!
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https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Calling it a bad game is premature, but so is the dev announcement that the game will launch in 2015.
A year and a three months ago, after several delays, we were being told a Beta announcement was just around the corner. After getting in the Alpha, I understood why the Beta announcement was so elusive. The game wasn't playable, so how could it leave Alpha? I'm afraid the devs have a history of being wildly optimistic on dates ... on the plus side, they still haven't gone into Beta 15 months later, so its quite possible they will delay launch "if necessary" as they state they will. On the down side, they shouldn't be pushing a public launch date there's no way they'll meet.
This is a hero engine game, it's dead already it just does not know it yet. The engine is badly optimized and very outdated in all aspects. Why anyone would chose it is beyond my understanding but there are always some that try.
I have backed the original idea and since been disappointed by bad design decisions, boring and tedious crafting, horrible graphical design choices, bad animations, ridiculously bad combat and to top it all off an inconsistent and completely mad game design.
"It's pretty simple, really. If your only intention in posting about a particular game or topic is to be negative, then yes, you should probably move on. Voicing a negative opinion is fine, continually doing so on the same game is basically just trolling."
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