For the curious on how many are playing, check out: https://steamcharts.com/app/326160 Of course, there are also people who log in through the launcher directly, however, hands up if you can remember worse Steam stats for any other game?!?
In fairness, LoD is in the process of changing engines and they're not even selling it on Steam for now, persumably 'til it's moved to the new platform. You can only buy LoD:Tactics which is a different game.
Not that it would necessarily do any better otherwise, but there is an actual bona-fide reason for LoD's player numbers flat-lining.
It's kinda funny when it's considered bad that a game early in development has no one playing it, outside the devs/internal testers. We used to call that "normal", back in the days before "Early Access".
Regarding SoTA: On paper, it's everything I would want in a MMO. In practice, every time I play it, it feels like a game that doesn't know what it's trying to be. It's like they kept changing direction througout development, but just left stuff in place instead of replacing it.
Difficulty level is all over the place. I can encounter one Bandit encounter that's moderately challenging, and then 20 seconds later encounter one - in the same area - that destroys me in seconds. Very early quests want to send you to/through much higher level areas where you have 0 chance of survival, immediately after completing extremely simple/easy quests.
It provides no indication of its more complex systems; I didn't know
"decks" existed before someone mentioned them to me. They're a neat gimmick, but I don't really see why they're necessary.
It wants to be Single Player *and* Massively Multiplayer... but can't really handle the "Massively" part well at all.
Graphics and art design is all over the place. Some parts look beautiful, other places - often within the same zone - look rushed and cobbled together.
Performance and optimization is horrible, even after improvements. And saying "because Unity3D" is not good enough. I've played numerous other Unity3D games with *far* more demanding specs that yet run *far* better on the same hardware.
It's just a very very poorly designed game, IMO. I think that's why it's not doing well. I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of the money they get is from the stupidly expensive houses, etc.
Comments
In fairness, LoD is in the process of changing engines and they're not even selling it on Steam for now, persumably 'til it's moved to the new platform. You can only buy LoD:Tactics which is a different game.
Not that it would necessarily do any better otherwise, but there is an actual bona-fide reason for LoD's player numbers flat-lining.
It's kinda funny when it's considered bad that a game early in development has no one playing it, outside the devs/internal testers. We used to call that "normal", back in the days before "Early Access".
Regarding SoTA:
On paper, it's everything I would want in a MMO. In practice, every time I play it, it feels like a game that doesn't know what it's trying to be. It's like they kept changing direction througout development, but just left stuff in place instead of replacing it.
Difficulty level is all over the place. I can encounter one Bandit encounter that's moderately challenging, and then 20 seconds later encounter one - in the same area - that destroys me in seconds. Very early quests want to send you to/through much higher level areas where you have 0 chance of survival, immediately after completing extremely simple/easy quests.
It provides no indication of its more complex systems; I didn't know "decks" existed before someone mentioned them to me. They're a neat gimmick, but I don't really see why they're necessary.
It wants to be Single Player *and* Massively Multiplayer... but can't really handle the "Massively" part well at all.
Graphics and art design is all over the place. Some parts look beautiful, other places - often within the same zone - look rushed and cobbled together.
Performance and optimization is horrible, even after improvements. And saying "because Unity3D" is not good enough. I've played numerous other Unity3D games with *far* more demanding specs that yet run *far* better on the same hardware.
It's just a very very poorly designed game, IMO. I think that's why it's not doing well. I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of the money they get is from the stupidly expensive houses, etc.