Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues [Steam, Official Site] made big promises, but sadly it has failed to deliver overall. The official release is now here. With the release, the in-game map still doesn't work on Linux and the performance of the Linux version is quite terrible.
Considering Shroud comes from Richard “Lord British” Garriott and Starr “Darkstarr” Long, you would expect some level of quality and direction in what they're doing, but it's a painful experience.
I do like the fact that you can choose to play it either online or offline and that some of the quests can be somewhat interesting to do, but it doesn't make up for all the other issues present in the game.
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Even on the most basic graphical setting, the game struggles to hit 30FPS, often dipping below and it makes it a pretty awful experience honestly. It's stuttering, it actually feels sluggish to control and to play as well.
It's not just the fact that performance is shocking, there's also the issue of the real-money shop, which for a pay to play game that isn't cheap to buy at £30.99 and one that recieved Kickstarter funding of $1.9 million that rubs me the wrong way a bit. I mean come on, they're selling a single sword for $15 (currently reduced from $30!).
The conversation system with you being able to type your questions or just click the shortcuts is interesting, but it feels so watered down it becomes nothing more than a gimmick. Can't find someone? Try asking "where is *name*" and get a gibberish response. With such a conversation system, you would think something so simple as asking the location of someone they should know, would actually do something. The Quest system is also a bit of a nuisance, some quests have bugs where the indicator doesn't update back to the NPC once you've finished it. I'm on a quest right now, where not only has the indicator not updated once I've done the required tasks (checked many times to be sure), the NPC has literally vanished that I'm supposed to talk to as well—not a good state to be in at release.
I could get interested in it in future, if they fix the glaring performance problems, test their quests and get the in-game map working for Linux users. It's incredibly difficult to enjoy something, when it's as sluggish as this and when such a basic feature doesn't work it feels like we've been left out in the cold.
I know the die-hard Shroud fans will argue against my thoughts on this, but the experience really just isn't good right now.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: 14Nice to see an MMO on Linux. Also, their website still functions with NoScript turned on. Kinda cool. Still, now is not the right season for me to play a subscription game.
This is not subscription based. It also has single player mode. Also, single player mode still needs to be connected because it pulls stuff from online mode, but the single player and multiplayer character are completely separate.
Quoting: GuestQuoteConsidering Shroud comes from Richard “Lord British” Garriott and Starr “Darkstarr” Long, you would expect some level of quality and direction in what they're doing, but it's a painful experience.
Ha, no, sadly for those of us who know Richard's history at least, he's been one failure after another for a long time now. Ultima had some great things about it back in the day, but since then he's been making money off his name recognition while churning out garbage. Clearly it was either the advise of other developers around him who helped to make some of the Ultima games pretty good in certain ways, or Richard has just lost his touch or never had it or only had part of it and needed help, much like George Lucas.
Tabula Rasa was a good game that ended up rushed out the door and by then it was too late.
As for SotA, a lot has changed since the original kickstarter pitch, for better or worse. It also has a lot more hand holding now then it used to at the beginning, you can see NPCs with quests sparkling and compass waypoints a la skyrim. Despite all it's flaws I'm having a surprisingly good time in single player mode, which I now started playing since it was officially released.
slaapliedje Mar 29, 2018
Quoting: GuestQuoteConsidering Shroud comes from Richard “Lord British” Garriott and Starr “Darkstarr” Long, you would expect some level of quality and direction in what they're doing, but it's a painful experience.
Ha, no, sadly for those of us who know Richard's history at least, he's been one failure after another for a long time now. Ultima had some great things about it back in the day, but since then he's been making money off his name recognition while churning out garbage. Clearly it was either the advise of other developers around him who helped to make some of the Ultima games pretty good in certain ways, or Richard has just lost his touch or never had it or only had part of it and needed help, much like George Lucas.
I think the comparison with George Lucas is somewhat fair. Though he had a longer run. I thought maybe he'd left Origin/EA after Ultima 7, but nope he was there until 2000, and Ultima 9 was released in 1999. Seems after the success of Ultima Online, and actually coining the term MMORPG all of his other efforts for one kind of died horribly. I never played Lineage, but I heard good / bad things about them.
This game I think suffers from too much hype/buildout, without fixing the things that broke UO. Namely player created housing that overloaded the servers and got to the point where you couldn't freaking move around the map without some jerk's house being in the way.
Edit: I re-installed it, since as a previous comment said, there were too many annoying updates. But is that the voice of the Guardian at the beginning?
Last edited by slaapliedje on 29 March 2018 at 4:14 am UTC
The final release took so long that the game felt empty when I logged in as it's lost most of the hype and momentum. Unfortunatly another failed MMO in Linux.
Joeyboots80 Mar 29, 2018
KrootShaper Mar 29, 2018
As for the performance part, yes it is sub par at the moment, but i quite enjoyed the game.
Quoting: Joeyboots80I invested in this game 4 years ago, I own property and everything in this game so there is no turning back for me. Sadly I begrudgingly agree with Liam's assessment, the performance is terrible compared to the windows version. I was hoping they'd sew up this issue before release. The release patch claims they did optimizations, but something tells me it was probably only optimized for the windows version. I will continue to bother the devs about the Linux port, that I can promise. Portalarium must address this issue and stop treating Linux players like second-class citizens.
I've tried it on my Win10 install with the following setting:
i7 930
GTX 1080
16 GB RAM
Lowest graphics settings, the highest FPS I got was 35 which was while looking on the ground. This does not really suggest it's been optimized at all, not even in Windows.
It's Unity which is not exactly known to have the best performance (even though, it came a long way the past few years), but I've seen more complex scenes in Unity rendering between 60 and 80 FPS on that setup (Unity 5.6). Even though, the Vulkan renderer does not really give better performance, it uses a lot less CPU, I didn't look if the game may be limited by CPU usage.
Last edited by STiAT on 29 March 2018 at 8:37 am UTC
View video on youtube.com
Last edited by Shmerl on 29 March 2018 at 11:30 am UTC
Quoting: Joeyboots80I invested in this game 4 years ago, I own property and everything in this game so there is no turning back for me. Sadly I begrudgingly agree with Liam's assessment, the performance is terrible compared to the windows version. I was hoping they'd sew up this issue before release. The release patch claims they did optimizations, but something tells me it was probably only optimized for the windows version. I will continue to bother the devs about the Linux port, that I can promise. Portalarium must address this issue and stop treating Linux players like second-class citizens.
You are not wrong, they didn't optimize for linux because they couldn't upgrade to the latest version of Unity for linux. I blame Unity here, despite all it has accomplished, it's performance has been mostly crap in linux compared to windows versions of Unity games, with very few exceptions. I wish they had gone with Unreal instead, or just went with less detailed isometric perspective.
Quoting: ShmerlI didn't back it, but reports of poor quality are upsetting. Meanwhile, another Ultima related game - Underworld Ascendant by OtherSide is supposedly progressing well: https://otherside-e.com/wp/update-aelita-the-abyss-and-more/
View video on youtube.com
That trailer doesn't seem any better then SotA quality though...
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