Post by Caliya on Jun 19, 2016 14:33:03 GMT
You all have probably seen it on Steam, but posting here in case not. This is the top most helpful review. All of the top ones are negative.
No one sets out to make a bad game, just the same as no one sets out to write a bad novel or make a bad movie. But artistic projects, that involve tons of decisions, take on lives of their own and, in the end, either deliver or they don't. I'm mightily disappointed that, as we approach the date when SotA will stop being wiped and the game world is "live" (although, fair warning, if you do choose to use that word, a small hit squad of fanboys armed with wet celery will try and attack you, claiming you're wrong), I have to conclude that the game doesn't deliver. It feels old-fashioned, and not in a good way. It feels limited, and not in a "less is more" clever kind of way. For years of SotA's development, just like in other MMOs, people have said, "Don't worry, it will get better..." except it hasn't. A last-minute change of the combat system (yes, as bizarre as that might seem, three years into the project and right before the server wipes stop), hasn't made any real improvement. The character models, which looked terrible all along, have apparantly been updated but I see no real improvement. They still walk along like they've just dropped something nasty in their underpants. The whole clicking on random NPCs and having "conversations" with them to try and find quests (and "conversations" is a real stretch given how dumb the AI and scripting is), is meant to evoke "old school" gaming, yet just evokes the kind of technological limitations that we fought to overcome back in the day -- not revere. I'm not even going to tread into the area of finances and people paying HUGE amounts of money for the virtual real estate, or the fact the game wanted a million at Kickstarter, got two million, and currently sits around 9 million... yet it's made no real difference to, well, anything really. Even now, again, so close to when the game stops being wiped and is, to all intents and purposes, "live", can I point to any aspect of the game and be truly satisfied or say, "Yep, that's finished..."? Nope. That's a HUGE worry to me. The project management on this game has also come across as rather worrying at times and, having waited all this time to leave a review, I still can't leave a good one because the game just isn't very good. And again, I stress my opening remark(s). No one sets out to make a bad game but, for me, in this situation, this team really has. What a huge missed opportunity.
