I played again and am planning to play some more. In fact, if I get a few skills to 50 (limit for free accounts) and I want to keep playing I might actually pay $45 to buy the full game. I am also interested to interact with the player economy, like buying from player merchants, which is something else the free account can not do.
But there are other ways to spend my free time. I like ESO, although it still feels too much on rails, a lovely vision of a theme-park. I put a lot of time into Albion Online, which is very open but not very deep. I haven’t tried BDO yet, which looks maybe “too Korean”? There are other MMOs that I could play.
So, why am I playing SotA? I am trying to figure it out:
- I like the openness. I can go anywhere at anytime. However, that doesn’t make it easy to get there, which leads me to
- I like the size of the world and the slow travel. After 10-15 hours I have barely left the small area around where I started. There seems to be many many places to go, and it would take a long time and be hard to get there.
- I like the depth of the skill and combat system. The manual is 33,000 words long (link ). The skill tree is large, but different skills seem accessible. The combat log has a lot going on in it, I don’t understand most of it (yet?). Other posts online talk about a lot of synergies and complexities that are not obvious to me yet.
- I like the danger. I don’t know much tough mobs are, and some of the “intro quest” fights have been very tough. (Too tough, they are apparently toning the intro areas down next patch.) I can wander right into a zone that is way over my head and the game will punish me for it. This is somewhat tempered by them labeling adventure zones with 1 - 5 skulls, so its not a surprise that 5 skulls would be fatal. Maybe I really do want a Piranha Bytes MMO!
- I like the player economy. Even if buying equipment from a player versus an NPC doesn’t really impact my personal experience that much at the moment, knowing it is out there means different players are encouraged to do different things.
- I will admit, I like the obtuseness. :-)
- Its in active development. The monthly patch notes are enormous, for example release 50 ( link ). They are making progress.
- I can play with anyone in the game at any time, unlike some MMOs with level-based zone or quest restrictions.
The downsides of SotA seem pretty obvious:
- The graphics and performance … suck. I just went from one starter zone that ran at 60 FPS to another one that ran at 25 FPS. I submitted a bug report about any shadows moving the load from my GPU to my CPU, which seems like Unity Programming 101. This is going to turn a lot of players off.
- Its been in development for a very long time and still has some major holes. Some supporters have been deluding themselves that “80% of the polish takes place in the last 20% of development” but the clock is ticking until their release date of late March.
- The original vision was enormous, and they are still creating what they designed in 2013 based on the inspiration from the 1980s. Its not a focused game, its sprawling.
- Loading 20 seconds into a world map to walk around and then load 20 seconds into a zone map, to then zone 20 seconds to go back to a world map is silly in 2018. Wurm Unlimited does this better, and its got a fraction of the budget.
- It seems like the attempt to build an offline single player game with the same codebase as the online MMO is causing some balance issues, for example you want solo characters to be skilled in everything (no skill caps) in the SP game but maybe have to work together (hard caps) in the MMO.
I want to keep getting to know this game.
However, if anyone else has any other suggestions of another well-designed, open-world, skill-based, tough MMO I am all ears. :-) Has anyone successfully remade UO or SWG yet? :-) :-)