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A New Hope - Shroud of the Avatar Columns
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
A New Hope - Shroud of the Avatar Columns
Six months after their final wipe, Red Thomas wraps up his hiatus and heads to Austin to find out what’s in store for Shroud of the Avatar, and to review what’s changed over the last few months.
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Welcome back to SOTA coverage, been missing your articles on it!
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"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
They should have spent more time on the actual game and less time creating houses.
As it stand today, this game is half baked.
On top of that I really don't like how the armor looks in this game, it seems like the characters are wearing plastic Halloween costumes.
Very disappointed as I supported this game.
As a backer , I can tell you, this is NOT the game that I got.
They spent so much time on their cash shop that everything else is.. trash.
I do regret my purchase , for sure.
And I do own a house.
At this point I'm pretty sure this game is going to be a big ol' failure.
Updates have been coming out for the game a lot recently and I think they "get it" when it comes to all the player complaints and concerns.
I got this game for $19.99 on the Steam sale and thought it was well worth it until I got to the point where I realized I couldn't own property without dishing out hundreds of dollars which I feel is the #1 thing that hurts this game. Seeing as housing and the stuff that comes along with it is a major part of the game the $19.99 I paid was kind of like for a demo version. People who bought up the deeds I'm sure expected to turn a profit because the hype around this game was pretty big but now are just landlords of a bunch of vacant plots with no players to sell them to. The abandoned properties and player towns also make the world feel like a dead zone and is kind of a thing Portalarium needs to work out cause people don't like being in dead worlds.
The parts I do enjoy about the game are the combat, skill leveling, crafting. I hope they can make everything work out in the end.
Baffling design choices, a poor engine, and their inability to not constantly beg for money coupled with their general incompetence has ensured this game's languish to irrelevance.
Stay away, absolutely nothing will save this game, and even if 10x the amount of players they have now came into the game and stayed, it'd still feel dead.
Launch will not help, the game's fundamentals suck and people have moved on seeing zero potential for things to be fixed on the horizon. Also, this game has already launched.
Hopefully this game and the epic backlash from the investors will accomplish something - because make no mistake, we're looking at a lot of money invested in the Ultima diehards that forked over THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS to juggle fire, design a house nobody sees, and pretend to be important. This'll all start when the developers can't e-beg anymore - leading them to shut it down and in tandem hopefully help usher out the crowdfunded, forever-beta era of garbage endeavors like Shroud of the Avatar have brought us.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
AMEN
God bless you.
OMG that looks amazing, I must play it! Mounted combat, right??
I backed this too years ago, check it every once in a while but haven't committed to playing it yet. I'll wait when it's ready.
People wanting a game appealing to the biggest democraphics possible shouldn't buy this game.
(I'm sure the marketting department for Shroud of Avatar would love to use this slogan, don't you agree?)
That's what I meant when I said that Armor looks weird in this game.
But that's not the only example.
2006 Graphics
2016 Graphics
For a list on things they promise in their kickstarter: VR, Mod-tools, castle and keep PvP, apprentice system, contested resources, shipping lanes, taming system, seasonal weather, combat pets and that's only the stretch goals. Its also a game that can be played both single- and multiplayer mode.
Those features have nothing to do with being a really niche game.
This game has been in development since March 2003, 6 years!
Even by Indie standards that's a long time considering that the game is still in Alpha state.
Indie games that started development years after SotA are in better shape than this game.
Even though it has been in EA for 6 months, it showed no evident sign of improvement. all they do is keep adding Cash Shop items, mostly ridiculous cosmetic gear, and some more houses.
By now the game should have some kind of substance.
Instead Portalarium shows a lacks of vision, throwing to the arena a game which looks dated already, with half of its features missing, lots of bugs, and frankly giving the impression that they don't know what they are doing.
So an unfinished game then? Proving my point that you can rarely find that the negative naysayers understand the fundamentals of game development.
Edit: Here's a good video for you explaining it.
I would say GW2, FFXIV, and ESO are passable. That doesn't mean they are great MMOs, they just happen to be the least smelly part of the garbage heap. As for their futures, ESO is getting better and I can't comment further on GW2 or FFXIV, since I don't play them any more.
What I can comment on is SotA since I put up with their endless alpha bullshit with a Knight Founder pledge for three years until I realized what a scam it turned out to be and sold off everything but that damn $45 tied to Steam.
You have to wonder how bad it is when there are websites specifically dedicated to hating on the game, like Shroud Unlimited. I have never seen that in any game, even the MMO player's favorite punching bag: WoW.
~~ postlarval ~~