Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues [Steam, Official Site] is looking to officially leave Early Access next month, which is a little surprising. According to a recently posted schedule, they plan to release on March 27th.
Originally funded on Kickstarter way back in April 2013 and then entering Early Access back in November 2014, it's been in development for quite a while. I've kept checking back on it through various release, but I've never come off too impressed with it.
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First of all, I know it's not finished, but with the release closing in I would have thought performance would have been a bit better by now. Even on the most basic settings, it often dips down to 30FPS and it really doesn't feel all that smooth, not to mention it looks pretty awful by today's standards.
The problem is, any higher than the basic setting really does bring the performance down quite hard. I tried sticking with "Good", the middle tier, but I was often seeing sluggish gameplay below 30FPS. There's also a healthy dose of stuttering while running around and during battle. I'm on a 980ti with a reasonably good i7 processor, I'm not expecting miracles, but after this long in development I would have expected much better performance by now.
See the below shot as an example, tiny room with the lowest possible settings and yet the performance is struggling to hit 30FPS:
Also, the dialogue due to my choice of character name is a little hilarious…
I re-tested the same area on the very latest build, with no difference. Same awful performance, stuttering and so on.
The in-game map system accessible by pressing M, is still not supported on Linux. They said this would be finally implemented on February 22 with patch 51, and so I delayed this article hoping to finally see it. Sadly, it still did not make it into the game for us, again. For now, Linux users can see the main map online here.
The actual gameplay, seems to be extremely standard RPG stuff here. You speak to someone, they tell you a tale, you get a quest. You find the person they asked you to see, you get another part of a quest and you're just bouncing around people. The problem is, the quests just don't really seem all that interesting.
It could end up being interesting much later in the game, but when you're dealing with such poor performance it seriously detracts from any possible good experience you might eventually get to see.
Now let's talk about player numbers, while true that the game can be played offline, the experience there is pretty dull. The game has been designed as an MMO with a single-player component essentially stuck on. The issue here, is that the all-time peak, as recording by Steam is only "624" which is tiny for such a game. Even Wurm Unlimited (a horrible game, in my opinion) has a bigger player-base.
On top of all that, the NPCs are really damn annoying. When you're in a conversation, trying to work out a quest, all you end up hearing in the background is a mixture of random sounds like "mmmm"-"ahhh"-"grrr"-"mmhah" and it just repeats. It becomes like sharp nails down a chalkboard, so incredibly irritating.
I'n trying to not be overly negative about it (seriously, I am), but it's quite difficult to find any redeeming features to make it worthwhile. This is a £30.99 game after all, at that price I would expect a decent amount of fun. I will continue to play through it up to and after release, to see if they can improve some of it. This close to release though, I'm not expecting a lot.
If I haven't put you off, there's a free trial on the official site.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
View video on youtube.com
While I have played Ultima IV, VI, VII, VIII and IX, I was never a die hard fan of the series but back in those days the pickings of crpgs were much slimmer and I played whatever I could get my hands on.
Last edited by burzmali on 26 February 2018 at 3:43 am UTC
Feb 26, 2018
Last edited by cprn on 26 February 2018 at 1:23 pm UTC
Quoting: nateI still plan on buying this game, but I'm going to wait a year or so after release to do so to let them fix all the problems with it.Given their userbase, a year is on the high side of how long many folks are estimating this game will last.
Quoting: DrMcCoyThis was the game that was heavily dependant on real money purchases, right? You need to plop down real actual money for a lot, for a house, and then regularily to keep that house, the items you put in, on and around your house, etc pp
Yeah, pretty much. They liked the money model from original OSI and decided to multiply it by about... idk, 5x? ;)
Quoting: GuestThe vast majority of people with houses in game paid for them with real money. Deeds, required for placing a house, can not be purchased for in game gold unless another player decides to sell for gold. Houses can be crafted, but the skill needed for that crafting is quite high, houses on vendors are quite expensive and all of the crafted houses are less impressive versions of the ones for sale for real money.Quoting: DrMcCoyThis was the game that was heavily dependant on real money purchases, right? You need to plop down real actual money for a lot, for a house, and then regularily to keep that house, the items you put in, on and around your house, etc pp
No, the real money for plots/houses is entirely voluntarily, although the incentive was/is the tax free portion of it. Taxes are in game gold, although there is an option to pay probably through COTO's. People have property without spending any real money, indeed with row houses etc and player towns if you want a place someone is likely to have a spot for you whilst you save to get a lot deed and then a house.
Houses can be crafted in game too...
There is/was a deed lottery, but ~90% of deeds were won by long term players with a pile of deeds already.
When I stopped playing, I had hundreds of hours logged since persistence and even if I liquidated everything I had collected since persistence, I'd only be able to scrape together around 40% of the selling price of the cheapest lot deed I had seen offered for sale for in game for in game currency.
If you don't mind the mobile game feeling of the developer pawing at you wallet the whole time you are playing, SOTA might be for you, otherwise give it a wide berth.
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