NA vs UWO?

[Lizzard]

Been watching this game for a while as it develops. Now with the open world implemented, I was wondering if anyone knows something about where this game is heading.

I played Uncharted Waters Online for about 2 years from 2010 - 2012 (UWO) and it was one of the most interesting and immersive MMO experiences I had in a game. Battles weren't even my thing as I spent 90% of my time as a Spice Trader.

So I'm wondering how the end-result of this game will compare to that game.

I see people complaining about some features here and wonder if there will be ideas taken from that game, since it has pretty much pioneered the Age of Sail MMO genre.

1. World travel speed was increased by a large factor to allow for the map to remain the same size but the ability to reach a port in, say Europe to India in about 60-90 minutes of real-world time. Thing is, everyone travels at that speed, so there's no imbalance. And the time slows down once you enter battle.

2. A living economy, where prices rise and fall depending on the trade taking place.

3. Hundreds of player skills to pick up, learn and improve upon, including professions that create items like ships and cannons.

4. The most interesting feature from UWO, was the port unlocks. Each nation had to unlock the different regions of the world map and also buy favor with the individual ports in order to trade and get the best prices.

NA doesn't have to be identical, but are they planning some in-depth features like this, or is going to remain primarily a naval battle game?

[Pethy]

NA dont need hundreds of skills, the realy skills are, which you learn as player and not your character. For example: - you can angle your ship and bounce the impacting cannonballs
- you can set your sails manual, so can experienced player turn better,
or go backwards
- you can aim under the water line between two waves and sink a ship
by leaks, without to take down his whole life.
- etc...

[kirths]

1- Hope nnot, the sail time is a huge factor, if you attack somewhere far away from the capital you cant expect any reinforcements due to the distance, BUT you can teleport from any of your outposts to any other, without the ship.

2- Hope so, but i dont think this is near yet, really hard to balance.

3- Skill should be player based in my opinion, we already have officer-related skills that enable special, limited ammo or othere advantages.

4- I did not play UWo buy why would your own nation deny entry to the port?

[Lord Sluggo]

I have never heard of NWO, but it sounds like the kind of game the NA devs set out to make, but will probably not accomplish

[Jackrabbit_V6/ RSProduxx]

Originally posted by Lord_Sluggo:

I have never heard of NWO, but it sounds like the kind of game the NA devs set out to make, but will probably not accomplish

not really, UWO was more in the same category as games like "Pirates of the Burning Sea", "Bounty Bay Online" (r.i.p.) and the like... NA will not become an RPG in that sense, with tons of character based skills, chance-to-hit style combat, let alone magic and such...

there might be parallels, like the open world, trading goods between towns and crafting, but the differences may be more significant than the similarities, sice the latter purely exist due to the setting ...

[Jeheil]

Never played UWO (wish I had I think)

1. World travel speed was increased by a large factor to allow for the map to remain the same size but the ability to reach a port in, say Europe to India in about 60-90 minutes of real-world time. Thing is, everyone travels at that speed, so there's no imbalance. And the time slows down once you enter battle.

Accelerated OW travel is in game, to get from say the centre of the map to the outer fringe is about 90 mins. There is a limited 'teleport' ability that may or may not survive alpha between ports you have already established.

Typical sail times to a mission are 10-20 minutes, with a mission taking 30-60 minutes for a large fleet mission, half that for a single ship mission.

2. A living economy, where prices rise and fall depending on the trade taking place.

During Alpha we are moving to a very heavily slanted Player Based economy, so as dynamic as that provides. The AI economy was dynamic but buggy, it has recently been reverted to almost static (bar huge over supply). There is plenty of room to make good money trading and crafting...but it carries risk.

3. Hundreds of player skills to pick up, learn and improve upon, including professions that create items like ships and cannons.

There is no 'magic' in NA, it is very heavily slanted to player skill. Sailing a ship, best use of guns, knowing when to fire and when not to, chosing to sink, board, cripple your opponent in combat is the key. I believe they have a very good combat base, its a ship, so combat is slow (60-90 second reloads for broadsides), thus strategy and tactics play a big part. It would take 8-10 full broadsides to sink a static opponent. So fights are protracted. However, what I really like is, the fact they are still INTENSE.

The ships you craft can have a fair amount of variability in their build (more resilient, speed or set for boarding), You can then add a multitude of Permanent changes (perhaps make it a bit faster, stronger sails etc) as well as a set of changeable upgrades to ship setup (extra pumps on board, load marines etc).

In the latest patch they have begun to roll out officers that will allow you to further 'spec' your ship for various actions.

So your ship setup is relatively mod'able but it is still very much a 'Constitution' or whatever.

However it is very much skill of gear (bar the extremes)

4. The most interesting feature from UWO, was the port unlocks. Each nation had to unlock the different regions of the world map and also buy favor with the individual ports in order to trade and get the best prices.

Ports are a combination of untakeable capitals (currently 1 per nation) a series of scattered freeports (one every 30 minutes sailing max from anywhere) and player captured ports. The map is 'known' so no real exploring beyond learning port tradeables.

Players can instigate attacks to capture a port and make it part of their nation. These mechanics are changing considerably in the next 3 months, but it in essence the persistent state of war and capture is the 'game'.

For lots of videos (starter vids, in game battles, PvP weekly updates etc) have a looksee here :

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAyTtmB_y5mlj8YlUXQEX8vjql7XVjNSz

[Lizzard]

So it's pretty much going ot be like an open world battle arena I take it. Maybe with a splash of economy on the side?

The skills I was sort of referring to before were mostly skills in non "magic" things. Skills like shipwright. Personally, I know nothing about building ships and trying to do it in a game would be futile anbd frustrating :D I also don' speak Arabic, Spanish, Italian and German and don't imagine learning them for a game.

Although, if NA isn't really planning on having a crafting economy, then I guess having skills in those areas are moot. Which would now lead me to ask what the point in trading between prots in NA would be? Typically, it woudl be to make money. Typically, you make money to buy better stuff. In player-driven economies, that stuff is player-made.

[Jackrabbit_V6/ RSProduxx]

Originally posted by LizardSpock:

So it's pretty much going ot be like an open world battle arena I take it. Maybe with a splash of economy on the side?

most of what you read up there is related to the pvp servers...there is also a pve server, but pve is not very far developed yet... the devs pretty much did the combat and the crafting system so far, with slowly adding pve stuff here and there... mid-future plans include exploration, trade missions and quests (how ever they may look like) and so on... currently both types share the same mechanics, just that there is no pvp (arena style quick battles aside) on pve servers obviously

the dev team stated though, that they plan on showing pvp and pve equal attention, so we´ll see how the game will look like at the end of the year and further out.

i for my part enjoy the relaxing slow paced game play on the pve server every now and then, cruising around, assaulting a few ships, trade a bit and fish the hell out the ocean in hopes for one of those rare sealed bottles recently added :)

[Bozzo]

I have played UWO since its North American launch. I have several high level players and am currently a guild officer. The game is very different from NA. The game is a free to play game but if you want to play at a high level you better have deep pockets. All of the best ships are only available in the cash shops along with all the boosters you will require to do battle, trade and upgrade your ships. The graphics are very basic but game play is very good and immersive. Since it is FTP you can try it without cost. A nice feature of the game is that you can channel your character into 3 different specialties 1 Maritime ( battle, pvp) 2 Trader, 3 Adventure or a combo of all 3.

[Elysion]

Of all the age of sail games out there NA has by far the best combat, hands down, no contest.
Its lacking in pretty much every other regard though.

If age of sail is your thing you should buy this, i couldnt really reccomend otherwise because its combat is just beautiful. However lower your expectations.

If you are wanting a more gamey-game type thing then look up potbs, last i heard its devs bought the rights for it and are running it themselves. Its better at everything, except combat :^)

If someone ever manages to combine the two they have won this niche, there wont need to be another age of sail game for a ciouple decades.

[Venetti]

the current potbs is a mess. NA has the best age of sail combat ever on a computer game. unfortunately it has a huge empty map and you need to craft tons of things to make a ship...it takes a long time to find pvp....basically the open sea portion severely hampers the actual ACTION part.

[Venetti]

oh and their port conquest system is similar to potbs in that it gets boring quick, and random pvp is hard to find.....so they need to do something to fix it. too much focus on crafting and sailing not enough ACTION

[Elysion]

The problem is the open world part doesnt really have a purpose. Unless someone is looking for pvp they are going to dispers out to where there are likly no other people at all, which is not difficult given the map size and relativly low population. The entire teritory controll mechanism and factional system needs to have elements that really guide its players into more contested areas.

They tried to do something i think with the new wrecks, to create more hot spots, but its far too little. The overworld map should be channeling players into conflict for their factional alegiance, with rewards for doing so.

The game does not encourage and reward acting to expand and protect your factions teritory, and fails at making that the central objective of the game. Many playstyles can be accomidated in such a broad goal. They could have had a trading system where the efforts of traders dramatically effected the factions regional strength, they could have had a system where hunting traders, pc and npc, did more give you a little exp and cash but really noticably had an impact, that shipment of building material getting sunk crippling a region for a time.

If you look at other factional pvp games like planetside or daoc conflict happens naturally as a result of players fighting over stuff, that stuff has direct and immediate impact on something to those players. In these games players are almost totaly focused in and around the front lines vs the enemy factions.

Meanwhile in this game i just rolled a new character and spent an afternoon trading and capturing npc traders in very safe waters. I saw one living human player. Of course this was the best way for me to play because there is no provided alternative, theres no real way i can help the 'war effort'. And in the current climate even if i had a suitable ship if i didnt belong to a clan who was in on the national plans id probably never accomplish much anyway. These are fundamental problems.

A new character, or a new player for that matter, aught to be able to jump on, sail towards enemy teritory, and fight with allys against the enemy. With out tedious organization or planning, the fights should just be there, happening, perpetually, as the front gets pushed forward and back.

[Lizzard]

Originally posted by Elysion:

The problem is the open world part doesnt really have a purpose. Unless someone is looking for pvp they are going to dispers out to where there are likly no other people at all, which is not difficult given the map size and relativly low population. The entire teritory controll mechanism and factional system needs to have elements that really guide its players into more contested areas.

They tried to do something i think with the new wrecks, to create more hot spots, but its far too little. The overworld map should be channeling players into conflict for their factional alegiance, with rewards for doing so.

The game does not encourage and reward acting to expand and protect your factions teritory, and fails at making that the central objective of the game. Many playstyles can be accomidated in such a broad goal. They could have had a trading system where the efforts of traders dramatically effected the factions regional strength, they could have had a system where hunting traders, pc and npc, did more give you a little exp and cash but really noticably had an impact, that shipment of building material getting sunk crippling a region for a time.

If you look at other factional pvp games like planetside or daoc conflict happens naturally as a result of players fighting over stuff, that stuff has direct and immediate impact on something to those players. In these games players are almost totaly focused in and around the front lines vs the enemy factions.

Meanwhile in this game i just rolled a new character and spent an afternoon trading and capturing npc traders in very safe waters. I saw one living human player. Of course this was the best way for me to play because there is no provided alternative, theres no real way i can help the 'war effort'. And in the current climate even if i had a suitable ship if i didnt belong to a clan who was in on the national plans id probably never accomplish much anyway. These are fundamental problems.

A new character, or a new player for that matter, aught to be able to jump on, sail towards enemy teritory, and fight with allys against the enemy. With out tedious organization or planning, the fights should just be there, happening, perpetually, as the front gets pushed forward and back.

So it's basically an arean game with a reallllly big arena then.

Sounds like they need to work on some incetive for players to actually find eachother and enter combat. Not your WoW style rewards system, but an actual, historical, logical reason for players to want to find or avoid combat.

That's what UWO did wonderfully at the start. On the nation level, the explorers were there to open up the ports and scout out the various seas, the traders then financed the towns which would then allow for better trade deals, the better prices opened up areas for crafters to settle into and buy the resources they needed and the navy fought off pirates looking to make a quick buck on any of the above. All of that meant co-op play ocurred naturaly, as did PvP.

I've followed NA for over a year, maybe two. The one thing that's always turned me off has ben its focus on the arena style combat. We already have World of Tanks, World of Warships, Warthunder and Armored Warfare for all of that. I was hoping Naval Action would open up more of the world of the Age of Sail, then just be another one of those games.

I'll still hope and check back I suppose. Maybe in another year they'll have some more concrete plans implemented :)