Shroud of the Avatar - Richard Garriott - Goals, Milestones, and Expectations - MMORPG.com

Vaultarn · July 2017

I backed this game. I have not logged into it in quite some time. While I agree with a lot of the comments here the thing that has really turned me off this game is the fact that I am unable to compete with others because my pockets aren't as deep.

I'm not saying they shouldn't be allowed to do what they want with their money, I just mean that I think I wont be able to enjoy some of the cool aspects of the game because it will be all bought already by those that are much better off financially, that's a big turn off for me.

ste2000 · July 2017

Rawyn said:

43:00 – Richard mentions they took their art almost exclusively from the Unity Asset Store and wrote a bare minimum of code.

You know, Chris Spear can say what he likes, that we are Trolls or a bunch of arrogant people, or whatever.

But one thing is sure, we aren't stupid.
I've been playing MMORPGs for over 13 years and even though I am not a developer I can tell, by just playing the game, that Portalarium wrote the bare minimun of code.
When I said that the game feels like a collection of Featuers badly stiched together, that's the result of poor coding, they just relied on Unity built in features with very little modifications.
Also when I said that Portalarium spent 80% of their time creating Houses, Castles, Decoration and silly props I wasn't joking.

They really didn't do fuck all regarding the core of the game, that's why the game doesn't feel like a game.
That's the hard truth unfortunately.

Rawyn · July 2017

ste2000 said:

Rawyn said:

43:00 – Richard mentions they took their art almost exclusively from the Unity Asset Store and wrote a bare minimum of code.

You know, Chris Spear can say what he likes, that we are Trolls or a bunch of arrogant people, or whatever.

But one thing is sure, we aren't stupid.
I've been playing MMORPGs for over 13 years and even though I am not a developer I can tell, by just playing the game, that Portalarium wrote the bare minimun of code.
When I said that the game feels like a collection of Featuers badly stiched together, that's the result of poor coding, they just relied on Unity built in features with very little modifications.
Also when I said that Portalarium spent 80% of their time creating Houses, Castles, Decoration and silly props I wasn't joking.

They really didn't do fuck all regarding the core of the game, that's why the game doesn't feel like a game.
That's the hard truth unfortunately.

You're right, they bought a bunch of cheap assets, stitched them together and did and still do the bare minimum coding they have to to keep making a pay check. Don't forget they also sell some of those cheap assets back to you in the add-on store. I see a lot of the houses on their add-on store from the same asset package that had the price of $55 on unity years ago is still being used to create houses like the Inns and sell to peeps. These are the laziest and most clueless devs. This is is not a game, it's a mix and match of cheap assets that anyone could have thrown together.

Does this look familiar? It should this environment package is free and looks to be used for a lot of their gameworld it seems. Owls Head, Aeirie, other scenes too. Heck from this vid they almost straight copied the layout in the video for thier town Aerie ROFL. Jeez so lazy they don't even have any originality even using free assets.

Elsabolts · July 2017

Loved his Ultima games back in the 80's and 90's but I'm not gonna fund anymore trips into outter Space. Now if he did another Ultima single player game I would try it out for a reasonable fee.

erponxaos · July 2017

psiic said:

Like an idiot I backed this pile of crap game, I should have known better after the Tabla Rasa fiasco, but I was an old fan from the Ultima days and figured maybe Tabla Rasa was not his fault ultimately maybe this dream of space just got the better of him. That being said once again his reputation exceeds his talent. It is almost painful to watch. Time has moved on and he has hung on to his glory days like one of these 90 year old rock stars that do not realize its 30 years past time for them to retire.

Going with poster although i wouldnt call him or my self idiots but romantic or with hopes of a second UO from RG although i was aware of the Tabula Rasa incident and that the last successful title he did was more or less 20 years back.
Luckily i have sold the account a little while after the game went permanent and got my 100% of my money spent back.
I post in reddit and steam also cause the only thing that keeps me following this game is cause i hate seeing people fall in for this scam and cause also since iam an old school gamer (back then when gaming community was a hobby and gamers played for the love of the sport ) i dont like honest tries from not so famous developers getting wasted cause scammers like RG made the community treating everyone that KS something like a possible crook.
Maybe scamming will be considered by some people (probably whales or people that dont have the full image of Garriott,Spears and Starr) as an extreme word to use but considering the history of the 3 people mentioned plus https://sotasucks.wordpress.com/2014/05/ only the word scam comes to my mind since the video clearly shows people with a pre determined strategy which is lets take fast their money to save our company and we will see in the future if we can give them a portion if nothing of what we advertised.
In earlier times which would be called by some medieval or hard times ,the posters of these 3 people would be in all cities squares like common criminals and if they were caught they would be positioned in a square and public would throw stones to them.

joezhudarak · July 2017

the game is getting better each release, framerate after r43 is playable, about 20/25 fps in big cities, but if you look at Black Desert and other news MMOs, SOTA really need to improve it. Combat animations now are more fluid and the new VFX are awesome..... i have hope for this game and i enjoy playing it

Mitara · July 2017

The graphics in this game is ok, dated but ok. The combat is ok too, but seen better.

The really really big problem, is the engine. The extreme amount of loading that is needed to move around the world was what broke the experience and immersiveness for me.

nynniva · July 2017

A lot of the stuff said here is completely true. But the game is extremely playable and can be extremely fun, even without investing money. It's not nearly as bad as reading this makes it seem.

The biggest problem as I see it is the developers are trying to make a niche, old-school hard-core game which punishes its players relentlessly with cash sinks, xp sinks, level loss on death, few convenience features like quicktravel outside a single bind point or "teleport to friend" both of which require consumables you must craft or buy - in essence, it has been said on their forums again and again that a game where a player must spend most of their playtime grinding against all the sinks is not sustainable in today's market. Not when players have so very many options. There is one way to get ahead in Shroud - kill things. Repeatedly for months. The deco system and the crafting system and everything are great, but the game and particularly Chris Spears has an obsession with making players pay to do everything (in-game gold). I personally feel he is the main problem with the development of this game. Everything must yield less, be more difficult, and take longer, and the state of the game now compared to a year ago is completely different and much less enjoyable as a result. That being said, its still a solid game in its own right, particularly if you want something that is more time consuming and more "old school". I fear however that population numbers will never be high because of it.

Scolioz · July 2017

Richard Garriott is a loser who hasn't made a successful game since UO but yet for some strange reason still thinks he's some kind of game developing god.

I don't know how people like this manage to become so rich and successful... yet can't even build a good fuking game if their lives depended on it... its not that hard to do....... all you need is basic common sense.

This game is a bad joke,, the graphics are old outdated shit.. which is strange considering they surely must have had the money to license a high end engine and hire some good artists.. is that really hard to do?

And the game itself is just your generic run of the mill RPG / D&D wannabe from 20 years ago.

That fucking clown Garriott just milked a bunch of fools on kickstarter relying on his name and past accomplishments of which there were very very few.

Slapshot1188 · July 2017

joezhudarak said:

the game is getting better each release, framerate after r43 is playable

So if I am reading this correctly... we should be happy because by the 43rd release... after years of testing and months of no-wipe launch... the framerate is playable?

Wow.. what an accomplishment! Maybe they should try to raise more money through SeedInvest... oh wait...

LeFantome · July 2017

joezhudarak said:

the game is getting better each release, framerate after r43 is playable, about 20/25 fps in big cities, but if you look at Black Desert and other news MMOs, SOTA really need to improve it. Combat animations now are more fluid and the new VFX are awesome..... i have hope for this game and i enjoy playing it

Be honnest. Who paid you to say that? Starr Long or Richard ?

ste2000 · July 2017

Rawyn said:

ste2000 said:

Yep, they didn't even change the Default Banners.
Check at 1:10 in your video and 5:36 in the next video.

I never thought about it before, but I start to believe that this is possibly the biggest con ever in the MMORPG history.
The abuse of Unity Features and Assets in SotA is quite shocking actually.
How did they spent $13 Millions? On what exactly?

Aron_Swordmaster · July 2017

ste2000 said:

Rawyn said:

ste2000 said:

Yep, they didn't even change the Default Banners.
Check at 1:10 in your video and 5:36 in the next video.

I never thought about it before, but I start to believe that this is possibly the biggest con ever in the MMORPG history.
The abuse of Unity Features and Assets in SotA is quite shocking actually.
How did they spent $13 Millions? On what exactly?

$18 million actually; with the SeedInvest they've had to be more honest with incoming-outgoing, and we know they raised another $7m in funding on top of the (at the time) $11m they'd had from the public.

Also LB has taken to the SeedInvest comments today to try and counter-spin the narrative, but also confirmed that they have 65,000 paying accounts. Even our worst estimates were massively over the amount of sales they'd actually made.

It's the sheer disgusting dishonesty that depresses the most; especially from someone whose earlier games were such a formative lesson in Honesty for me.

Aron_Swordmaster · July 2017

Slapshot1188 said:

joezhudarak said:

the game is getting better each release, framerate after r43 is playable

So if I am reading this correctly... we should be happy because by the 43rd release... after years of testing and months of no-wipe launch... the framerate is playable?

Wow.. what an accomplishment! Maybe they should try to raise more money through SeedInvest... oh wait...

Frame rate is the current obsession because the last Release was addressed to it. Monkey Patch, Monkey Praise.

The idea that people can have a wider perspective, and that even "improvements" don't make up for wider bad or outright immoral design decisions that remain doesn't occur to them; they're being sold the dream, and more often than not, because their wider life is so disappointing they'll cling to that dream no matter what.

As Terry Pratchett put it, promise someone jam tomorrow, and as long as they have that hope, they'll ignore having no jam today... or even tomorrow, just promise them jam tomorrow again.

And I wouldn't even trust them to tell the truth about the improvements; again the community is so inherently dishonest, people on Steam were trying to claim that past issues with performance were fixed by better hardware... when I had the actual figures because I recorded hardware and timed the loading times on the two different machines. Even a 2 generation leap of tech, and moving to an SSD only shaved 18 seconds or so off 1:30 loading times, so you were still waiting over a minute for each scene.

Has anyone outside the bubble actually checked for improved performance?

Aron_Swordmaster · July 2017

nynniva said:

The deco system and the crafting system and everything are great, but the game and particularly Chris Spears has an obsession with making players pay to do everything (in-game gold). I personally feel he is the main problem with the development of this game. Everything must yield less, be more difficult, and take longer, and the state of the game now compared to a year ago is completely different and much less enjoyable as a result.

This.

Everything I've heard, including privately from some of the people who've worked with Portalarium closely behind the scenes, and publicly in his posting and interactions with people like Markee Dragon, points to the problems all stemming from Chris Spear's obsession with RMT, libertarian style economic development, and focus upon putting these first and foremost within the game. Questing, UI etc, they all come second to creating the kind of game you can make money in, which is why housing and the marketplace have all been so much of the focus of development.

The reason everything must yield less is because that means the real power and stability in game is the Premium Currency. Spears has openly admitted they're pegging the exchange rate to the price of Crowns of the Obsidian.

I'm told he's primarily responsible for combat design too, so the terrible ideas there are his too.

The problem for critics is not that individuals like you, who enjoy the game but are decent people and also rational and can see the faults... the problem is that as you say the game is ALWAYS going to be much less enjoyable for most because these decisions aren't mistakes; Chris Spears genuinely wants to build this kind of game.

Whether the rest of the team agree, or like it often seems with Lord British himself, they have wider ideas but don't seem to understand what ever is happening and being built in the actual office we'll only know when this whole mess is over and people start telling tales.

It's not helped by the fact the only audience left for Shroud is dominated by people with no lives who can only gain a sense of value by Grinding (not skill) or using it as a source of income; check the few positive Steam reviews, and at least two reviews show that they're doing nothing but grind the game for 11-17 hours a day. I wish I was making those figures up.

Here's a great video about how games designers don't have to listen to such players, and indeed morally shouldn't;

savedr · July 2017

CaptFabulous said:

ste2000 said:

Golelorn said:

Wow.... I thought this looked cool until I read the comments. What is wrong with devs nowadays.

They suffer from acute "Head up their arse syndrome".
And that's not only confined to SotA Developers, it's a very aggressive type of virus which apparetly spreads quite fast particularly within the MMORPG Industry.
Those affected have very little chance to recover.

Yup. This. The market is so saturated they are all fighting each other for money in the F2P arena. The problem is there isn't enough money to go around so pretty much all games have gone down the slipperly slope of catering to the whales. I said it at least 5 or 6 years ago that F2P, while on its surface looks like a good system, over time will become an epic failure because you'll wind up having the same issues as subscriptions -- too many choices and not enough money.

And if you think it's bad on the PC it's 10x worse in the mobile market. P2W is running rampant, and I see game after game that is literally designed to extract huge sums of money from people, else be virtually unplayable.

This F2P whale model is not sustainable and I think we're going to see a hard crash within the next 3-5 years, if not sooner. What's going to come after that I have no idea.

This. This is killing me now that most of my time for gaming is relegated to a phone. The most innovative MMO I've seen come out on mobile platforms lately was Order and Chaos 2, because it had a rudimentary public quest system like Guild Wars 2 ('s first draft cousin) and had auto pathing but not auto attack.. and it came out in 2015.

If I want to play games on my phone, I either need to play the old Final Fantasies that cost me $12 apiece or choose an ad-ridden slot machine. Why doesn't mobile gaming look more like early console gaming? The tech is more than there, just no one is interested in making a mobile game with a story.

Rawyn · July 2017

ste2000 said:

Rawyn said:

ste2000 said:

Yep, they didn't even change the Default Banners.
Check at 1:10 in your video and 5:36 in the next video.

I never thought about it before, but I start to believe that this is possibly the biggest con ever in the MMORPG history.
The abuse of Unity Features and Assets in SotA is quite shocking actually.
How did they spent $13 Millions? On what exactly?

Haha, good catch. These devs just have no imagination and are just plain lazy. Couldn't even be bothered to design a layout with free assets without copy and pasting.

Scorchien · July 2017

klash2001 said:

[mod edit]

hmm i dunno man , i ordered and played Alkabeth RG very first game , i played all 10 Ultimas and have 20 years in UO now , I had very high hopes for SOTA and have tried it twice now , there are some good bits in there , but overall i was hugley dissapointed , SOTA is no UO , that being said i will still watch and hope the RG and co. can turn it around a bit , i do think that there is some good in this game but it is hampered and handicapped by so many other bad systems and decisions around it ...

Slapshot1188 · July 2017

klash2001 said:

[mod edit]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and state that i thin this is actually someone faking being a fan to make them look bad.

Aeander · July 2017

klash2001 said:

The combat system is the most advanced, dynamic and player skilled based I ever experienced in a MMO IF you know how it works and THIS goes for everything else in that jewel that is SotA.

Ha..... haaa.... pffthahahahahhaha!

I have no words. There are no words for this.

postlarval · July 2017

Slapshot1188 said:

klash2001 said:

[mod edit]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and state that i thin this is actually someone faking being a fan to make them look bad.

No, the fans REALLY are that bad.

klash2001 · July 2017

Scorchien said:

klash2001 said:

[mod edit]

hmm i dunno man , i ordered and played Alkabeth RG very first game , i played all 10 Ultimas and have 20 years in UO now , I had very high hopes for SOTA and have tried it twice now , there are some good bits in there , but overall i was hugley dissapointed , SOTA is no UO , that being said i will still watch and hope the RG and co. can turn it around a bit , i do think that there is some good in this game but it is hampered and handicapped by so many other bad systems and decisions around it ...

Bad system decisions as in?

klash2001 · July 2017

Aeander said:

klash2001 said:

The combat system is the most advanced, dynamic and player skilled based I ever experienced in a MMO IF you know how it works and THIS goes for everything else in that jewel that is SotA.

Ha..... haaa.... pffthahahahahhaha!

I have no words. There are no words for this.

This is the kind of reaction of someone that has no points to make againts what I said about the combat system. You're probably a button smashing freak who clearly doesn't know how to handles a multi-dimensional combat system....yeah keep pressing your [1]-[10] keys like a noob....you wouldn't last long in SotA.

klash2001 · July 2017

SedrynTyros said:

klash2001 said:

[mod edit]

Okay, you convinced me. The next time they hold a free trial, my balls and I will give it a go.

Would have done much in your first month in UO? That's the same man...I do encourage you to try it for a month, at least you'll see how's the community: just as in the old UO days and this alone bro...feels like home. The other parts of the game, I mean core mechanics such as "combat system", "crafting system" and "items" (apart from the loot that needs to get worked on) are for me, top notch man.

klash2001 · July 2017

postlarval said:

Slapshot1188 said:

klash2001 said:

[mod edit]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and state that i thin this is actually someone faking being a fan to make them look bad.

No, the fans REALLY are that bad.

I've been waiting 16 years for a game that could make me felt anything near what I've felt in UO and this game absolutely delivers. Speaking with a friend that was playing SWG who told me couple of years ago to stop thinking about such a game because I could never feel like I did with my first MMORP which was UO...this feeling belongs to the past he said to me, but hey...got some news for you, he was wrong. SotA feels like UO and I do believe that at some point, it will become better, it's already so deeply thought and well executed and it's not even released.

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