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phaylen

Rethink the Road Map

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Its instanced.  I hate MMO's that do this.  I love my large persistent world where everyone sees the same damn thing.

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It's hard to get motivated about sailing in Atlas where after a few hours/days of farming materials to build your ship and several hours of sailing you cross a zone border only to find once it loads you appeared between two seperate fleets of the damned and were sunk/killed before you could even try escaping or fighting back.

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I actually sat down and watched the whole Roadmap livestream beginning to end.  I had seen it before and I knew the gist of it, but I wasn't really engage with the game at the time.  After watching it again, they seem to have the whole seems off.  Like the didn't really think the phases through AT ALL!  The phases are...

1.  Bug Fix, QoL improvements, Performance Improvements

2.  Sailing, Ships and Sea

3.  Combat.

4.  Content, World built, Tames, etc.

(Now cynical me looks at Phase 1 as all stuff the can do while most of the dev team was off working on Ark DLC).

To keep people engage, in logging into the game you need to give them something.  You need to give them the Phase 4 stuff while they are waiting for Phase 2 & 3.  Because lets be honest, they talked about wanting/making players spend more time at sea BEFORE actually giving people a reason.  (And they aren't adding new ships in Phase 2).  One of the things they could be giving people and it worked keeping people interested in Ark is more tames.  Or at least more diverse creatures.  But they emphasized how they want to scale tames back.

What do people do at sea?  I know what I do.  I travel.  To get tames, get materials and treasure hunt to maintain my crew.  I also explore some, but as much as I loved explore Ark maps, Atlas has killed my joy in exploring.  The island are repetitive.  They are often difficult to get around.  There's no rhyme or reason to where materials spawn.  The animals are repetitive (and often stupid, like the "Arctic" Cobras).  "Discoveries" seem to be arbitrary.  

There are other things, like pick up sea crates, do the whole SotD fight grind, fishing (which is unrewarding), salvage shipwrecks.  There are also the under water trenches, but you need the sub to do that.  And I've never really felt like doing a Kraken fight.  But they've made it clear they don't think all of this stuff is enough to keep people on the oceans.  So...how are they going to get people to spend more time at sea?  Simply telling use "we want to make it more fun" isn't good enough.  It's not going to keep people longing it.

The part of all this is I don't think they're 50% through Phase 1 and no work on 2-4 has begun yet.

 

The TL/DR is that all that "unimportant stuff" they are putting off until Phase 4 should be Phase 1 and continue through Phases 2-4 to keep people around.  And no, don't deemphasize tames because if you WERE able to make spending time at sea more interesting, you would have figured out how to do it or at least TOLD use how you plan on doing it by now.

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13 hours ago, wildbill said:

I watched a video about buying a home in a city. I didn't quite understand it, but they talked about the home being "offline" when you are not logged in. That multiple people could buy the same home and all use it and never see the other people that use it or their furnishings and decorations. I've never played a game that does that, so I'll have to see it to understand how it works.

New World is like Atlas in one way. They pissed off a bunch of PvP players when they let them try the game and then based on seeing them play and other feedback, removed some of the PvP features. Now they will have the trolls in the forums bad mouthing the game even if they are not playing the game, same as Atlas has 😀

Yes it's like the homes in Elderscrolls Online I think, homes are already in the settlement and you goto a menu and buy which home you want. When you enter the home it has a loading screen and you are inside but nobody else can enter unless you are in group of course. The homes are always there but other people will have their own loading screen to get in to it.

I'd much prefer to build my own home and structures though but I don't think it will happen in New World. Yes they changed the game and got alot of people angry about the PvP, think it is now PvE with opt in PvP.

This video shows some recent changes on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqsLF0GWzUU

Edited by DannyUK

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3 hours ago, Slash78 said:

I actually sat down and watched the whole Roadmap livestream beginning to end.  I had seen it before and I knew the gist of it, but I wasn't really engage with the game at the time.  After watching it again, they seem to have the whole seems off.  Like the didn't really think the phases through AT ALL!  The phases are...

1.  Bug Fix, QoL improvements, Performance Improvements

2.  Sailing, Ships and Sea

3.  Combat.

4.  Content, World built, Tames, etc.

(Now cynical me looks at Phase 1 as all stuff the can do while most of the dev team was off working on Ark DLC).

To keep people engage, in logging into the game you need to give them something.  You need to give them the Phase 4 stuff while they are waiting for Phase 2 & 3.  Because lets be honest, they talked about wanting/making players spend more time at sea BEFORE actually giving people a reason.  (And they aren't adding new ships in Phase 2).  One of the things they could be giving people and it worked keeping people interested in Ark is more tames.  Or at least more diverse creatures.  But they emphasized how they want to scale tames back.

What do people do at sea?  I know what I do.  I travel.  To get tames, get materials and treasure hunt to maintain my crew.  I also explore some, but as much as I loved explore Ark maps, Atlas has killed my joy in exploring.  The island are repetitive.  They are often difficult to get around.  There's no rhyme or reason to where materials spawn.  The animals are repetitive (and often stupid, like the "Arctic" Cobras).  "Discoveries" seem to be arbitrary.  

There are other things, like pick up sea crates, do the whole SotD fight grind, fishing (which is unrewarding), salvage shipwrecks.  There are also the under water trenches, but you need the sub to do that.  And I've never really felt like doing a Kraken fight.  But they've made it clear they don't think all of this stuff is enough to keep people on the oceans.  So...how are they going to get people to spend more time at sea?  Simply telling use "we want to make it more fun" isn't good enough.  It's not going to keep people longing it.

The part of all this is I don't think they're 50% through Phase 1 and no work on 2-4 has begun yet.

 

The TL/DR is that all that "unimportant stuff" they are putting off until Phase 4 should be Phase 1 and continue through Phases 2-4 to keep people around.  And no, don't deemphasize tames because if you WERE able to make spending time at sea more interesting, you would have figured out how to do it or at least TOLD use how you plan on doing it by now.

I heard that the devs bought the camelophant, they gave money to a modder for the model, animations and concept. 

The devs ditched the seahorse presumably because they couldn't just buy it from someone, and it required effort.

Slash78, have you sat down and read the forums? I suggest this thread for a start:

 

Edited by eeeceee

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29 minutes ago, eeeceee said:

I heard that the devs bought the camelophant, they gave money to a modder for the model, animations and concept. 

The devs ditched the seahorse presumably because they couldn't just buy it from someone, and it required effort.

Slash78, have you sat down and read the forums? I suggest this thread for a start:

 

The only new info I saw in that was Wildcard was hiring back in September.  Though we now know they were hiring for Ark: Genesis and little effort has gone into Atlas.

 

Though I was thinking about it this morning and there is some irony about the whole "wanting people to spend more time at sea".  If this WAS just an Ark water world DLC, we would already be spending more time in the water, because we would have far more to do.  

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Well, if they bought the camelophant, what does that tell you?

There is irony there indeed, I believe Ark was always wanting to expand on the gameplay in the water, and we now have a 'roadmap', while we grind it out on land without roads.

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7 hours ago, eeeceee said:

Well, if they bought the camelophant, what does that tell you?

There is irony there indeed, I believe Ark was always wanting to expand on the gameplay in the water, and we now have a 'roadmap', while we grind it out on land without roads.

What does that tell me?  If true then it tells me that are unwilling to make additional content.  Which is 100% supported by the fact that "Phases" 1-3 of their roadmap are completely content devoid.  And as long as it would take them to due the big fixes, QoL improvements, performance improvements, then work on Sail and the Seas, then redo Combat, then we aren't looking at new content for at least a year to 18 months from now.  Probably longer as NPC ports, factions and all the other stuff they mentioned they were thinking about would take time to develop.

Ark: Genesis being a "season pass" means WildCard isn't going to be releasing devs back to Atlas any time soon.  

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I forgot to add that the camelephant was released a long time before the 'livestream' which announced those phases.

Now, what does that tell you?

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"We're spending too much time on land."

"We're not doing enough exploring. "

 

Starts to leave port...gets hit by cyclones.  Drop sails, sit and wait for the nonsense to stop.  Storm over....but wait.  Fog so thick no point in leaving yet.  Ok fog lifts.  Another player enters the region and guess what....another cyclone attack followed by more fog.  I am overwhelmed by the encouragement to leave port and go anywhere.   This is not an isolated sequence and happens quite frequently.  So I guess I am encouraged to keep on base building and taming. 

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It's been 7 months since the roadmap livestream (August 28th) and they don't even seem to be half way through "Phase 1".  Nor have they announced anything for Phase 2 or 3.  And no new content, features or gameplay loops are planned until "Phase 4".   Yet DAILY the "community team" for Atlas is talking about Ark: Genesis and have been for over a month.  But I'm not here to talk about that.

No.  I bought Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004 version) when it was on sale about two weeks ago and it holds up.  Also been playing a little Ark (exploring Valguero, NOT buying Genesis until they start taking their other, seemingly abandoned game serious).  Even watched one and a half Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

1) Gameplay should revolve around ports/towns.  This seems like a no brainer.  It's such a no brainer they showed a bustling port in their original trailer for the game.

2) I get though want to get people out to sea faster and want people to be able to spend more time doing it.  But there simply aren't the gameplay loops to A) Get people out to sea quicker, nor B) to keep them their.  They need those gameplay loops.  It doesn't matter how much you take away from the current game or if not take away, marginalize it to force people to spend more time at sea, because "they spend too much time on land, taming animals, etc".  Without those gameplay loops, there's no point.  And I hope the devs aren't dumb enough to think or hope by forcing more people out to sea, that those people will somehow be that "content" for others.

3) Pirates need something to pirate other than other Pirates.  

4)  While the greatest asset the game has is it's large, open world sandbox, that game world needs a lot of improvements.  Between hastily made islands, generic, repetitive, monolithic biomes that stretch on from zone to zone, seeing the same handful of animals over and over again, a lack of points of interest that are actually OF INTEREST!  It largely kills the fun of exploring.

5)  PvP is a mess and offline raiding will always be a shitshow.  Also, the goal of a pirate was to capture a ship, not sink it.  Yet it's a lot easier to sink-n-loot that it is to capture.  And even then most of that is done not at sea, but at anchor.  This chases off far more players than it attracts.  Then again, simply allowing offline raiding and at-anchor sink-n-loot are gameplay loops that require ZERO EFFORT on the part of the devs to allow and it would take far too much thought and effort to actually DEVELOP alternative gameplay loops.

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