Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues

Games
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I played another 2 hours. I had a good time.

Negative stuff first, the graphics don’t run well. Its a specific problem with shadows. Enable them and lose 10-15 FPS (I have a GTX 980 and an i5 7600), which drops indoor scenes down to 20 FPS and outdoor scenes to 40 FPS. Disable shadows and the outdoors runs at 60 FPS, but without shadows everything looks fake. I chose to keep them on and take the hit. None of the other graphics options have a noticeable penalty.

I went back and finished the bugged quest from above, and made sure to collect only 3 of the quest items. That worked fine and I was able to continue. I completed another 3-4 quests in that chain, some minor run and talk errands and some minor kill stuff requests. There is a story around all of it, it was OK not great.

One cool moment was exploring an old church tower where the floors kept crumbling underneath me, and I had to keep track of where I was in the ruins. Climbing up and down ladders and occasionally falling through floors (and taking damage) was disorienting but fun. There were mobs to kill and some minor stuff to find and collect along the way.

One part of it felt like a giant environmental puzzle. I managed to get on the side of the rocky outcropping next to the towers and climbed down until I got to a lower level that was not directly connected. It must have been designed that way, but it felt cool like I was discovering something.

After those quests I wandered around a bit in the same zone. I found a lake with a magic boat that took me on a little tour. I noticed a path with some rope bridges high overhead. I managed to find my way up, connected back to a backdoor to the main quest area I had not noticed, then wandered into an unmarked mine.

The mine was filled with mine-like creatures, and some ore nodes, and some ore nodes that were really monsters. There were a few environmental hazards like falling stalactites or rooms that were too cold. It was fun to slowly explore and clear. Luckily I had made room in my inventory before I went exploring!

After that I continued to the far side of the mountain path and found myself on the opposite side of the village that was under constant attack. It was night-time so the dangerous creatures were out. I had some quests related to them, so I waited until the guards killed a few (and were killed themselves) and ran to loot the quest items before I took too much damage.

The skills and combat system continue to have a lot of depth. Its not pretty combat, it maybe looks equivalent to EQ2, but there is a lot going on in the background like glancing blows due to armor and an “overheating” system that allows you to skip past cool-downs for a large mana penalty.

So far for a free MMO its feels OK. Its not modern. Sometimes that is annoying, but it also makes some parts fun because its hard, completely unknown and I have to think and experiment and pay attention.

I still think it deserves all of the unkind comments it gets on Steam and Reddit. I can see why people bounce off it hard. However, I plan to explore it a bit more!

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Thanks for your feedback and thoughts, @milspec. You have done a good job of summarizing my experiences with the game also.

I plan to play again sometime at or near release and try the Path quests. I haven’t touched those yet so that I can experience them as they are intended when they are completed.

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I played a fair amount of Shroud on Sunday, and my take matches pretty closely to what @milspec said.

I will say that this is one of the most poorly optimized and unpolished games I’ve played in years. I cannot understate how janky the movement and animations are or how rough the client-side prediction is. This very much feels like a work in progress, where even a lot of the UI has a very placeholder feel to it. It is rough.

All that being said, I actually ended up enjoying my time with it. It has a very distinct feel (aside from being distinctly clunky, I mean ;)) and I quite like the combat system, although the game gives you absolutely zero indication there’s anything interesting there at first.

Here’s an example of how poor the new user experience is. I decided to start out as a Mage, so I began my journey in Blood River. My hotbar was equipped with spell that would shoot a beam of sunlight at a target which has a cooldown, a heal spell, and a spell to summon a globe of light. I wandered around the first area just using the sun beam attack, the heal when needed, and other than that I just auto-attacked. The combat felt like a throwback to the starting levels of the original Everquest: Tab-target, hit hotbar buttons. Zzzzzz.

It took me quite some time to realize that I actually started out with a bunch of other spells, which the game A) didn’t put on my hotbar for some reason and B) didn’t notify me about. The game didn’t even let me know about the Skills menu, where I could see what I had in my repertoire as well as other skills I could work towards. So it took me a couple hours to realize that I had the ability to light my weapon on fire, shoot fire arrows at people, have flaming fists of fury, etc. Not to mention all the goodies I could unlock once I got to a skill trainer. I have no idea why it hid all this from me, but combat instantly went from “Oh my god, all I do is hit the 1 key and watch as my mage ineffectually auto attacks with a sword” to “Okay, now I have some skills to juggle and I’m engaged”.

And all that is before you get into the real interesting stuff, which is enabling Free Attack mode and Deck building. Free Attack switches you from standard MMO fare of push hotbar buttons and auto attack to using LMB to swing your weapon. You can also hold down the button to charge up a heavy attack, and this also works for spells. Hold down Fire Arrow longer and you can see it charge up several “notches”, with each notch increasing in effectiveness. I found this most effect for Archery, as it allowed me to get much more out of each arrow.

Deck building I haven’ messed around with, but looks significantly more interesting than the standard hotbar-with-cooldowns option, from what I’ve seen in videos. It seems like you build a deck of abilities, and those abilites are drawn from the deck and are made available to you until you “play your card”. There’s also an ability that will discard the deck for a new one, swap between decks, etc.

Anyway, I quite like the game despite its best efforts to make me hate it. I’m looking forward to getting home and firing it back up, which is something I haven’t felt in a MMO for a long, long time. You really have to push through the lack of polish and the clunk and jank, but there is a pretty interesting game underneath all that.

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How do you get this for free? It’s $40 on Steam.

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They have a free trial, but the full game is not free.

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You can grab the free trial from the website, although there are obviously restrictions.

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Ha ha, well said!

@Balasarius on their forums there are some reports of issues with Steam doing a full multi-GB update each patch. Their own patcher does an incremental update. Also, as said their own client allows for a free trial.

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Jesus H. They’ve been at this for how many years now and they haven’t coded the game to be able to simply delete 3 items from a stack of 5 to complete a quest? That’s a pretty basic function found in nearly every game, especially MMOs. You either code it that way or code it so that you can no longer pick up quest items once you’re reached the required number, or they no longer appear as loot…etc…

If they can’t even be bothered to fix something so simple I think I may have to delete this one off my watch list.

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But Slainte, you have the Ultima IV dragon as your avatar!

#KeepHopeAlive

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A sad day indeed!
I will reserve my hope for UW:A, even though it has no LB involvement. Or maybe because it has no LB involvement…sigh.

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Underworld: Ascendant?

Looks like a single-player game, right?

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Yep, thankfully.

I really appreciate the insight into SotA @milspec, @KevinC, and others – helps affirm that maybe I’m not so crazy and that there is actually something interesting happening here, even if it tries very hard to turn me away.

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Day 2 and I’m still enjoying the game. I think I’m becoming slightly accustomed to the clunky animations and movement, as it’s not bothering me nearly as much as it did the first day.

With the jank bothering me less and having got the basics out of the way, I’ve been able to dig a little deeper in the game systems and I like what I see. I played around with Free Attack mode on Day 1, but for Day 2 I dived into deck building, which I’ve been enjoying.

So here’s how it works, and how they mix up the standard push-a-button-on-a-hotbar MMO combat. By default, you certainly can play in the typical MMO manner. You drag skills onto your hotbar and they start out Locked (more on that in a second). What that means is that you use your ability, and it goes on cooldown. Some abilities it seems like you can use again immediately, but if you do so the Focus (read: Mana) cost increases. This is the standard MMO gameplay and what the game starts you off with by default.

Once you locate a skill trainer in a city, you can unlock Deck building, and I think this is a much more interesting approach. You can still choose to Lock abilities to specific hotbar slots (like putting your heal on the 5 key, for instance). That way the ability is always available and follows all the rules above.

Consider each ability a card in a deck. As your character progresses, your deck can hold more cards. As you get more skilled in a particular ability, you can assign more cards for that ability to your deck. For instance, if I just barely know Stone Fist, I might be able to add one card of it to my deck. If I’m much more skilled in Fire Arrow, I might be able to add 4 cards of it to my deck. Consumables also work in this way, with healing potions, explosives, etc also being cards you add to your Deck.

Now that your deck is built, you enter combat. Any Locked hotbar slots are already available but there’s a catch: Locked abilities cost double the Focus to use and are restricted by cooldowns. Meanwhile, any empty “Unlocked” slots you have on your hotbar draws cards from your Deck. These cards are available for a period of time, but eventually decay and are replaced with other cards. So if you have multiple Fire Arrow cards, you might fire one off and immediately draw another one from your deck which allows you to cast it again immediately (ignoring cooldown) and for significantly less Focus.

There are other skills you can learn to interact with Decks as well. One skill allows you to completely discard your hand, drawing a fresh one. This costs you 10% of your maximum focus, so it’s not something you can spam. It’s saved my butt on a few occasions, though, when my hand wasn’t suited for what I needed (i.e. I desperately needed access to my Heal spell or a healing potion, and my current hand didn’t have any).

Another ability allows you to swap your Deck with another one (sorry, I forgot to mention that you can create multiple decks). This can be useful for a number of reasons, but one major one is that not only do you assign skills and consumables to a deck, you assign equipment to a deck. This means that I might be playing an archer with light armor and a lot of ranged abilities, but if I get cornered I might swap to a more close-range oriented deck with a sword and shield. In theory, anyway, I haven’t tried Deck swapping yet, but that’s what the description reads. :)

Anyway, I’m quite liking this deck mechanic thus far. I have no idea why the developers have worked so hard to hide and obfuscate all of the interesting aspects of the game. Until you find all this stuff, the game just seems like a really janky generic MMO in the worst way. It’s baffling to me, because if I wasn’t a masochist I would have never pushed through all the garbage to get to the good stuff underneath.

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That deck system sounds super interesting. I had thought about building something like that after playing Guild Wars 1 years ago but I ended up not making that game. Now I want to get in there if for no other reason than to see if it really works.

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I like it, myself. It makes combat feel much more dynamic, because I’m analyzing the situation while simultaneously looking through my hand and figuring out what to play and when. That’s much more interesting than following a “rotation” or something of the like, and I love the planning aspect of it. How many slots do I tie up with Locked abilities vs rely on drawing from my deck? My mage right now always has Root locked, because I like to open a fight with locking an enemy down. I’ve gone back and forth on whether I want Heal to be locked or just add enough cards to my deck that I reliably get it (and can cast it for much less Focus!).

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You can also stack multiples of the same abilities by dragging one onto the other (and stack up to the number you have in your deck) and then fire them off in a more powerful version. Another thing is you can combine two different abilities by stacking them in real time (if they show up) to create a hybrid combo that usually adds an extra effect when fired off (if there is a combo created for it by design).

It has been a year for me since I played, but the deck stuff is indeed pretty cool and I am pretty sure this stuff is still in there.

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I didn’t know that, that’s cool! Thanks for the info.

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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? :-) :-)

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Nope. This is the closest in feel, even if it is very different. It’s why I’m enjoying it as much as I am, despite it being downright awful in some areas… hey, that was my take on UO and SWG at the time too! :)

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I got your pm, @milspec. I will try to log in tonight and confirm my character name and see where I am.