I'd love a proper Dofus review from you. The game looks a bit childish sure, but I guarantee you, the class design in this game has more depth than you can imagine. You'd probably start bashing your skull against a wall whilst trying to learn how the Eliotrope portals mechanic works.
The Steam numbers were unreliable back when the game released to early access in 2014, because most players (i.e. backers) used the launcher provided by the developer. Steam numbers were always lower than the actual player count. No idea if that is still the case, but I suspect players who backed the game, and thus are using the non-steam launcher, are likely still in the majority.
there launcher patch's the game faster then steam does ,least it does for me i wasn't a ea backer but i picked up the game in 2020 and still play off and on
This review is well made. I'm an active player for many years. There's another launcher other than Steam. The game world is instanced to reduce player population lag. You can select three multiplayer options on how you may encounter other players in combat zones; "Open", "Party", or "Private". The nice thing about Shroud of the Avatar is they do monthly release updates, the game is on release 124 right now. The game world is huge; overland and underground. It takes time to absorb all the content.
All the times you said "Hmm that's actually sort of cool" or "Ok so this is interesting" is why quite a few people backed the project, played it for a good while, and probably spent money on it. Unfortunately it was run into the ground, mismanaged, and is currently a sad husk of a good MMO that, while was never going to be "popular", could have been a cool little niche game that had enough players and on-going development to be worthwhile. That didn't happen.
imagine if this game had even 50-25% the playerbase of other larger mmorpg's , it would be an amazingly vibrant world full of interesting ppl and dynamic interactions ; its truly sad
It's designed to support thousands of concurrent players without being broken up into "servers" (so you can never end up on the wrong one!), but it's sufficiently big inside that it looks much emptier than it actually is.
Nice review thank you for taking the time to make it. Loved the updates of your impression of the game as you continued your play. The inventory UI is something that is brought up consistently as an issue, but when taking the time to utilize its extensive features you will find it is very flexible. Tabs for different item types, column sorting, quick filter dropdown, and ultimately a text search if you can't find something the other ways. Is it perfect? Absolutely not but for the hundreds of different types of things you can have in your inventory, I think it would be difficult to come up with an inventory UI to handle it all gracefully and am perfectly happy with what is there. SotA may not have the population of the cool kids, but it does have a great community. We are larger than Steam graphs say, especially since many players don’t use the Steam launcher as it is not a Steam exclusive game. Combine this with the Open/Party/Private instancing system and it segregates players even further, sometimes to a detriment. Keep the universe chat open as there are usually folks always chatting there. It’s a great place to get assistance too especially when you are first starting out. As for a more accurate population count, you can utilize the PvE Leaderboard to get a better indicator. It still is not going to be exact as there are many players that choose to not participate in stats, a certain amount that do not do PvE, and of course folks with multiple accounts/chars. Still, it is the best indicator we have available. No question the dev team is not large, but they are involved and have been releasing updates every month without fail along with a post-release live stream on twitch. I don’t always agree with the dev’s priorities but that doesn’t mean they aren’t working hard and continuing to move things forward. SotA is most certainly not for everyone. It does not hold your hand and is not forgiving. There are many things it could do better but that same thing could be said about an endless amount of games. If players give it a shot and still don't like it, great. It’s free to play and you can move on to another game. It does take time though. A few hours is simply not enough to get a grasp of the depth of this game. For the folks that are not aware, here are just some of the things SotA offers: - Unique combat deck system. Use it like traditional RPGs or take advantage of the dynamic deck system for greater flexibility and power. - Classless character progression. Use any skills from any tree however you see fit. Just like pretty much every RPG out there, you can say there are a few builds that are most popular but it doesn't mean you can't be successful with outside-the-box characters. - Main story quest, side quests, daily quests, buff quests. Players who say there is nothing to do haven’t taken the time to realize just how many quests there are in SotA. - Deep crafting tree. Multi-tiered recipes. Masterworking. Enchanting. Cooking. - Loot system that includes items sold by players to NPC vendors - Mining, woodchopping, foraging, field dressing - Fishing, Trophy Fish, Tank Fish - Agriculture, Trophy Pumpkins, Jack O'Lanterns, Decorative Plants - Artifacts, Artifact Combining, Jem/Jewel artifact power harvesting for use in crafting - Dungeon building with adventure spawns and fishing spots. - Extensive deco system. Construction system. - Player owned towns - Player vendor system and player economy - Taming with 147 different creatures to tame. Pet equipment. - Mounts - Housing, Basements - Seasonal Bosses - Lua for building addons - PvP, controversial on how it is implemented yes but it is there - Extensive music system including composing and group play of music - Book writing Not an all-inclusive list but hopefully gives players an idea of what SotA offers. Again, it’s free to play so there is no loss in seeing what it might offer.
@@tmm4461 As always opinions will vary on this. I haven't played the offline single-player mode but did finish the Episode 1 story online. It took me over a year, though that was not full-time playing the story as I sidetracked to do many of the other things in-game. The Ep1 story is big and very much resembles play in older Ultima games. Lot's of talking to NPCs and travelling to various towns with many fights and puzzles along the way. You definitely need to talk to random NPCs in this game to get the most of of questing just like Ultima's of old. You never know when one will have an adventure for you :) I think where some people go wrong is they utilize the available walkthroughs a bit too much. If you do that you can of course burn through Ep1 fairly quickly.
@@garrittg I have owned it for years and it'd be great to give it an another go. Thanks! It sounds like it could be something I'd enjoy tremendously, lots of potential surrounded by satellites of trash talk and, understandably, questionable reputation.
Nice to see you cover this one. I no longer play, but I have 5K hours in the game. You covered the basics very well but there is much more under the hood. There are player made dungeons. I also enjoy the combat system but I use a dynamic deck. You were using what is called a static or locked deck. Using a dynamic deck allows for some cool customization and that is were theory crafting comes into play. I dropped 500 dollars in the kick starter and played 5000 hours so I got my money's worth. They are providing updates almost every month unfortunately the player base is not there not so much because of the game but more so due to miss management. The best gear is pretty much only craftable. When I say miss management I felt the developers while trying to please everyone constantly changed design on a whim and you can never please everyone and when you try too you please no one.
I am curious what kind of improvements would bring you back because I played Vanguard Saga of Heroes back in the day and kind has a similar vibe ? So far only FF online was actually successfully in reviving a dying game.
As soon as you died and turned into a ghost I had flash backs of that happening to me in UO and running around trying to find out how to be resurrected.
I have been playing this non stop for the last 7 years. The steam numbers are way low over 90% of players use stand alone client. So many changes in the last 3 years with new content and scenes and we have been getting new stuff and bug fixes every month all along.
I ran through Steam on Mac. There's a bug where your char floats whilst sitting, rather than not floating and standing... I was told to log back in , restart etc but that didn't fix it. Wonder if the bug is fixed through playing without Steam? You had this issue?
Honestly this game is pretty neat, clearly not super ambitious but seemed like it knew it was going to be for a small player base and tried to make it fun for those specific people, was cool to take a look at !
This definitely feels like it had great potential. It looks fairly fleshed out, has player housing, and doesn't hold your hand. Kickstarter probably put a lot of people off of it because of so many poorly run and failed kickstarter projects. Thanks for the update!
Thanks for the revisit. I even forgot this game is still alive. If they had a more... "unique" game world instead some kind of a of standard fantasy setting, this could've been great.
DAMN i dont know this mmo but seeing ur review we can see that it was at some point alive with people building memories and stories !! and now its deserted i felt kinda sadge for no reason but it was a beautiful feeling !
Nah, Just got me to stop giving Lord British money. But i also don't Pre-order AAA games either. Happy to give Indie devs money though if its something I like the look of
I log in most days to collect my stipend. On the rare occasion that I actually go and do something it's rather fun not being quite so squishy any more!
To be fair to the game, most players do use Shroud's own launcher. Thus, your Steam numbers are unreliable. It also is still working on a chapter 2 story line, but it has been months since I have poked my head in. It still receives regular, but smaller updates/bug fixes on a monthly cadence. It's got its charms and annoyances and some very supportive developers and player turned developers keeping it alive.
Let's get real, if the server population was so much bigger than Steam Charts numbers, the devs would be sharing player count in real time. Hard evidence is this guy's experience where he wholeheartedly cheered every time he met a real (AFK) player.
@@fb1767 Its still a 10-year-old game at this point and an indie. Populations for most games that fall in that category are never going to be Wow level; so why would you advertise those numbers? It's still a nice smaller game for what it lets you do.
Yeah, Steam (and thus SteamCharts) is mostly irrelevant to this game. Adding Steam access was almost an afterthought. At no time were Steam players more than 25% of the population, and it's surely less now. It doesn't help that the way that Steam does patches can cause even a small patch on the native updater to balloon to a gigabyte on Steam. And supposedly part of the agreement with steam was that they can't outright say how many players are on. If it had been 7+ years since you last played, that might have been before "locked glyphs" (as opposed to dynamic glyphs, which are like a deck-buliding card game) were made usable. Originally there was a ~30 second warmup upon drawing your weapon before locked glyphs were enabled. When it was pointed out that the reason everybody used dynamic glyphs was because locked glyphs sucked, Chris (lead dev) not only fixed that, but added "charging" glyphs (hold them down for a while to make them more powerful). This was important because it was a game mechanic that a new player could understand. It took me three months to learn dynamic glyphs even with the motivation of locked glyphs being barely usable. As for the graphics quality, a lot of it was determined by the choice to go with Unity in 2013 or so. (In hindsight, Unreal might have been a better system to go with, but it's way past too late now.) A lot of old scenes are really small, and a lot of the models came from the Unity asset store. There was no tech for enormous "streaming" scenes. (Just look at how far you can go in LOTRO without ever crossing a zone line! That's what streaming means.) Fortunately the "overworld" trope was already established in older Ultima games. It also meant that they could add scenes without having to tear down a bunch of trees to make room for a new town or something. They ended up selling a couple hundred player-owned towns during the kickstarter years, and in the end it accidentally solved a potential housing problem. But that also brings up the biggest problem. It really looks empty, and that's not just because of few players. It looks so empty because there are hundreds of places you can go, and most people rarely want to go to the same place. The game uses layering tech based on all the individual scenes, which means it could possibly support thousands of concurrent players, all on the same single "server"! It also had the tech to allow you to play in a private instance of public towns, but they disabled that because it made the game look even more empty. Player housing in NPC towns is something that sounded cool at the time, but they've decided to stop doing that in future expansions. It reduces performance and makes it hard for the level designers to make the town look good when they don't know what tat players might set up. And there's that little problem where you couldn't find NPC vendors selling arrows because you couldn't find the "downtown" part of Soltown. Most of the lots in NPC towns ended up occupied by either speculators, or by players who didn't have the time to furnish them. Sometimes it's because a player has extra houses and lots to set up. Again, it makes the place look more empty. (are you seeing a pattern yet?) You had so much trouble buying arrows because all you found were player vendors. But arrows just aren't economical to craft, so players won't be selling them. Sad that you had to go to an "outskirts" zone just to find an NPC vendor, but at least now they understand the downside of player housing in NPC towns. If you want to see how deep the horror of player housing can get, take a stroll through the housing of Ardoris, not far from where you went in the video. People discovered "loopholes" in the deco placement system that allowed them to place objects in the sky above houses, and Ardoris is where it got abused the most. One thing that you didn't interact with that adds to the appearance of emptiness is the public vendors. They made one public vendor per town, made them expensive to use, and they DELETE your item if it doesn't sell after a week! That makes them almost universally empty, yet another way that the world can look empty. Just connecting them as one common sales space might be enough to fix this.
Thank you very much for this informative comment. I hung all my hopes on this game back in 2014 or 2015. I followed the development and even kicked in for early access. I was hoping for something to replace Vanguard which had recently shut down. Unfortunately, SoA could fit in the smallest of Vanguard's 16 racial starter cities with room to spare. I do like how games you thought died long ago can still be chugging along with a small group of dedicated fans.
I love playing these games but I'm always thinking ahead like, what's my goal? Is there any type of end game challenges? I just can't play a game that's purpose is to just gain levels and gear until you cap then stop playing. A basic story arc at least is needed.
I loved UO, was waiting for this game to be released, but somehow missed the release and forgot about it. I am shocked to learn it's been out for 7 years! lol. Il have to give it a go.
Part of the reason you might want to loot random stuff is that you can place it in your house: you get a basic house at the end of the "prologue" questline and there's plenty of room for all kinds of things. I have a table with crockery on it just no the off-chance I ever get to sit down and eat something ;-) Also, you can recycle quite a lot of stuff at the crafting stations, recovering raw materials that can be used later: that consolidates a fair bit although your complaint about the Inventory window brings up old wounds o.O *ETA* : yes, you can open almost every door and there's no loading screens, which means that my poor old machine is brought nearly to its knees every time I load SOTA up: everything else just pauses while it's running 🤦♂ maybe at some point the devs might consider a bit of optimisation but they don't seem to have much incentive right now 😞
Make sure you have at least 12GB of RAM and an SSD. Yes, seriously, that is the real minimum, though more RAM is even better. With reduced graphics settings you can run it on a Sandy Bridge with GT1030 graphics if you don't mind 30fps, but you really want to have 16GB of RAM and an SSD. (Spinny drives are just too slow.)
It's really nice that you took the time to review this game. I played the early Ultima games - starting with Akalabeth - on the Apple ][ and have fond memories. Your tour of SotA shows some innovative and interesting features.
I'm a loot goblin to any game that had Inventory system but I hate it whenever they use the Bethesda scrolling Inventory style, I love looting but I appreciate it more if there is a inventory management like separated Tabs for each loot types.
@@theForgottenMelodiesRecords but they still using Bethesda style inventory system which getting annoying spending your time scrolling and scrolling later on.
I backed this for $80, and supposed to get all 3, yes three, games. After taking my money, they slowly changed this to a player driven mmo, which was not what I bought. Never crowdfunded again
This is a good game. Not as great game but a good one. However, it is an oldschool game; very old school. There are still about 2k players. Unfortunately many play offline to avoid competition for resources. Those resources are still sold in online mode. The player economy is still very active so we know there is at least a critical mass of player base. Don't go into this game unless you like the idea of self motivated exploration, complete freedom with character development, and little hand holding.
Leave it to LazyPeon to have an updated video of a MMO despite it being still pretty obscure of a game, despite many years being out. I was surprised it still exists as well. Just shows games never really die.
As someone that just played this game for the first time this weekend I think you missed out on a lot of things that make this game amazing, I socialized and was taken around the game and given tips and had things explained to me, this game is actually incredible and this review gives the wrong impression of it. Still love your content though.
@@Ninja40K what? project gorgon has no pvp whatsoever and the community is very supportive of newer players, you must be mixing it up with something else.
Wonder if you'd consider revisiting Project: Gorgon. It's still going, and it's definitely one of the more unique MMOs (at least to me, since it manages to capture that sense of wonder, not only in exploration, but even in discovering new skills and mechanics, if you avoid just scouring the wiki).
The AI thing is currently 100% possible, the only issue is the operational costs for the massive amount of work it would have to deal with in case of a big userbase. This is honestly one of the very few AI use cases that I like and can't wait for, instead of trying to dismantle the entire world's economy as we know it and steal everyone's jobs.
Tried this a year or two ago. Remember checkin steam charts and was around 50 people on there. I liked alot of the ideas. Would love a reworked, updated version honestly. Could've been a cool game.
This game is just two titles down my list, straight after my 2nd play of Ultima 9 (with Dialogue Patch, of course). I will play the offline mode first. Thanks for the video, I will try and populate Shroud of the Avatar as much as I can.
This was supposed to be the spiritual successor to Ultima Online....needless to say it fell far short on that. It wound up turning into a house decorating and character fashion SIMULATOR. It has pvp but you wouldn't know it. Also, the over world map traversing is horrible, and last time I played the optimization needed work..shame
@provisionalhypothesis ohhhh really so SotA is doing competitive PvP?? I say ur full of SotA poop. Id love to be wrong so if you can link me a video GOD id love to see it.
there was a few cool ideas for this game but they were not all seen through so well. I did play it for a bit and liked their sort of deck building combat idea. But it was sort of lonely and those types of games and dungeons are just better with others.
This game looks so good but then some garbage breaks immersion and ruins it. The foundation of the game is immersion and then all the stuff around that breaks it like the inventory being annoying the weird shit the NPCs do, and the strange star wars cosmetics or items.
this is a game i had on my last few desktops n check in on every now n then(usually 2 times/year)1st time i found it i really liked it n played a bit,but during the years i got into more AAA games w times i am looking for oldschool and games that are pretty unknown in these days(games before 2000 usually+emulated games from ps1+2+3 era w nes8bit and other stuff all in the spirit of gaming n fun with ity) Thanks 4 video of a game i havent got especially long in gameplayed hours,but probably the game i have had longest on my pc/pcs..still kind of like it
I first heard of this game on a sci-fi/horror podcast back in 2014 or 2015. I placed all of my hopes of a new MMORPG home to rival Vanguard. This was the first of many shattered dreams. I’m currently hanging my hopes on AoC and Pantheon. The later is looking bad after 10 years of hard development.
Nice job on the video, a fair account of the current game. I would add that the game still has a non-steam log in option. Not sure how many folks use it but the low steam numbers are not all the players in the game. Thanks for the video. If you opt to give it another look try interacting with other players. They tend to be very helpful!
This game was actually peak, the combat and skill system was incredible. What lost my interest was there is no universal auctionhouse and you had to labourously hunt down crafters and beg them to make you armor, because dropped loot was trash.
This reminds me SO much of "Dungeon Lords." can you PLEASE download that game and give it an honest try & review on here?? would be good new content for you & i promise there's depth you wouldn't expect for such a simple looking game like the multi class system & upgrading classes to an advanced version and all the fun spells & mechanics & interesting in game environments. Give it a shot, i think it'd make a solid video for your channel
I’m always amazed at how some people can keep playing extremely mediocre games, sometimes borderline scams for SO much time while they could be playing similar games that would satisfy them so much more.
Now that's you've 100% heard of Dofus, I'd be curious to know your opinion about the game While it is very popular in french speaking countries, I'm pretty sure it's the very first time I see someone mention it in english, imo it's a very underrated MMO that could easily be "that game you play when you're bored of Runescape"
I saw a Video about Ultima and that Richard Garriott also made htis game. Good that you made this year a Video about it. :D 5:38 Wow! That is cool! now Imagine that with AI! :O ... lol said it himself. xD Ultima had connection to SciFi in Fantasy. So I don't wonder about the robot. If the typing doesn't make the NPCs react differently and you only get an reaction out of it by specific words I kinda think it isn't that worth typing it anyway... But in older games it kinda is cool... I remember there where games weh you type any stupid think the program just kjnows it doesn't know that and could even attack or ignore you for that. 13:40 Okay that is kinda cool. Actually I'm kinda interested now to try it myself! It has things I kinda miss in WoW. That Idea with those Player towns really can only work with such an overworld map and it is really cool! Even cooler that those Areas of the players still exist! Yeah the Housings break immersion but I hope when I play online and want to switch to offline I have all what I had in online. :D I think they should 1. Support Mods even in the Online version (if possible) and sell on GoG a DRM Free version People can official Use (but not sell) on P-Servers.
I think there's more in that barrel you've left to swim in. You could visit populated games and set a goal for yourself, and make a series about achieving that goal. One example would be starting fresh on a Everquest P99 server and getting your class's epic weapon. Or Starting fresh on a WoW classic server and killing Deathwing. The Everquest idea, in particular, would be a number of videos, and I daresay you might inadvertently fall for the game. Of course, these would take time... but then, there's not much else going on in MMO's heh heh /sad
i believe nobody but early pledgers play this. i know somebody from uo, he gave around 6k usd for special housing or something. im sure he will never leave unless it shutsdown for good. i mean he is still keeping his 50 uo accounts alive.
Interesting to see Dofus Touch as a sponsor. I’d love for you to cover Dofus or Dofus Touch. They are great games in their own turn based MMO genre. They are true MMO’s
I've been playing for five years. The game has many refugees from UO on. Most people use the non steam client - I average about 20-25 friends online at any time but there are still many times that that are not friended. Still not a hugh player base.
@@Shadowthevampire -- Brother you are delusional ... You should try launching those two games in 2024 and compare it to this ... Sure they clearly show their age but it's still miles better than this.
@@Chakabaka There is a limit to that tho. If graphics are like GW2 then hell yeah, i'll eat it up as long as the gameplay is good. But a game with Metin2 graphics or some other 20yo+ game? We're visual creatures after all. We judge things based on how they look for a reason. Do you HONESTLY believe that a game that put so little effort into its graphics as gameplay out of this world that beats every other game out there? Do you know a game with horrible horrible graphics that's actually amazing? (And i dont mean games from 20 years ago, because those games looked good for their time, i mean something released in the last 5 years or so). I bet not, because there's no such thing as horrible graphics and great gameplay. There's only mediocre graphics and great gameplay. But to be fair this game looks like the limit for me, I like the colors and vibrance, were it even 1% worse it would've been an instant pass
