Recent reviews by Dark Wombat

Thanks these developers who basically gave us Drustvar as a whole game!

So there are three categories of players, all the complainers are not only whiners but are part of a new recent breed the last couple of years of review bombers.

You have never played this before
Totally worth it for $40. You get the DLCs included and a 100+ hour experience. Many $60 games can't give you this value. So if I tell you to play a 100+ hour RPG for $40 and with a great open world, with a feeling of Fable and an MMO and great art direction you would balk at that?

You have played this before on Steam
The camera improvements, bug fixes and slightly improved graphics are worth it alone if you owned the original. It's 60% off the original price so whats the issue? $15,99!!

You have played this before on Origin
Tough luck, but that's what you get for using Origin anyway.

I am going to give this a positive review because I think it looks good and runs good and appreciate the effort and the timeline for future improvements.

I will say this however, the text issues should be number 1 on the devlopers list..Getting the text sizes figured out is a big deal right now. I have a feeling it is a bigger deal than the developers understand.

Currently the text sizes are either way too small or way too big and blurry. There needs to be in-between "1.5" setting or something. Most people out there have 1920 x 1080 resolution monitors. Playing at this resolution even with hi-res fonts if you leave the text setting at "1" the conversation is tiny and way up high in the upper left corner of the scrren. I feel weird playing a game on a large monitor and loking in this tiny corner. If you put the text at "2" it is huge, blurry and looks like a blown up smartphone game or a classic 640x480 DOS game on a giant monitor.

Please fix this as soon as possible. Everything else is very nice so far!!

I have been such a fan of Richard Garriot over the years. From reading his life story in the Complete Book of Ultima several times, to diving deep into all of his classic Ultima’s. Even following his recent outer space adventures. I am such a fan, that I am one of the few who will defend BOTH Ultima VIII AND Ultima IX. I am his white knight. I am a fulltime, Garriott apologist. I am also an Ultima collector and a longtime member of the Ultima Dragons.

So why not take a stand and tell people this game is great? Why not stand up and tell people that it has a nice learning curve and there is something under the surface that is great? Why not say, Shroud of the Avatar is a solid piece of work?

Because I would be lying...

This game should have either been made as an open-ended single player Ultima 7-like deep, Skyrim-like rich RPG, with lots of DLC, or been made as close to Ultima Online as you can get. But trying to split the difference and please everyone is a mistake. Things end up suffering. I cannot and will not believe that Starr and Garriott with all things (and money) being equal, that this is their true vision. I want to play a game that they want to make for themselves, not a game that they are making for the masses. Some of the best pieces of music, art, movies and entertainment have come from talented individuals who made something out of pure selfishness; they made something THEY wanted to see. Ultima IV was a great example of total creativity. But here we have a game that is single player offline, single player online, multiplayer online, and….deep breath, etc, etc.

With login music thats sounds like something you would hear at cheesy renaissance faire, to annoying overworld map music of the same woman moaning over and over again I can't believe I had to turn this music off completely. The landscapes are uninteresting, and feel plain. The towns feel completely uninspired and the NPCs are lifeless and have nothing interesting to say. The performance is abysmal, as with a high end machine you will get nothing better than 25 to 30fps if you are lucky in a large city., which is completely unacceptable. The choice for a Unity engine was most definitely a poor one here.

Shroud tries to stick to it roots, and sacrifices gameplay. Why inherit the Ultima typing/keyword style conversation system inside an MMO chat window? It feels..off. An NPC portrait with text would have been 100 times better. The combat is as clunky as I have ever seen. This combat feels like a game from 1998. I do think the "deck" system idea has some potential however. it was nice to see fresh ideas as far as that goes. I will admit the crafting system does have some depth but there are so many annoying things such as your character walking slowly and doing a circle before he gathers something, because you can only mine that ore from the right side insiead of the left side.

What I do not understand is how or why this game was not only a Kickstarter game, but also why from the outset, it relied on and more importantly has ENABLED whales. As in, good luck getting any type of nice sized in game home without shelling out a lot of real world cash. For those of you who don’t know the term, “whales” represent approximately 2% of a games population that spends a ridiculous amount of money (hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars) per month. I will not insult whales; after all, some of them keep some games afloat! What I will complain about here, is the nasty 5 letter word which all of this encompasses…”greed”. Garriott is one of the 10 wealthiest game designers in the world whose outer space vacation cost him a cool 30 million dollars. Does this strike you as someone who could use or even need a Kickstarter campaign to get the funds for his game off the ground? You see, he has already made money off of Shroud of the Avatar. There is less urgency now to deliver a good "Ultima worthy" product. Garriott is not working out of his closet anymore designing Ultima IV on an Apple computer. He is the last developer on the planet who needs a kickstarter campaign.

I am disapointed, and will go back to playing my classic Ultima games, and keep telling myself that these classic older Ultima games were created by a younger Garriott, who was on a brilliant path, before he lost his way...

I cannot remember the last time I have seen such strong opinions about a game. No doubt this stems from hype and from developers. Peter Molyneux comes to mind with some of his classic promises, notably Fable (which I liked). Or even the letdown of Spore (which I happen to like as well)

You see, I want developers to take chances. I want them to step out of the norm. Sometimes that gets affected by publishers putting timeline pressure on a developer. And sometimes it comes from a developer trying to oversell his product. Did that happen here? A little bit sure. Is this game worth the $60 I paid for it? That is debatable. But to me yes, and I can see why to others, no.

There are two types of gamers out there. There is the hardcore, who want to finish the game, and want progression fast and feel they have a purpose for everything they are doing 100% of the time. Then there are the casuals. These people enjoy the journey, and could care less when the destination arrives. I myself am the casual. I work all day and want to come home, relax, and enjoy a journey. If this is who you are, you will like this game.

For anyone who has had performance issues, I feel bad for you. For anyone who has returned the game, I hope you give the game, in the future a second chance. There is something here that is on a massive scale. Give credit to Sean Murray and Hello Games for not playing it safe and actually shooting for the stars. Though some may not enjoy the game, I feel there are a lot of people like me, who appreciate No Man's Sky for everything it offers.

82/100

Great story, open world, classic turn based combat.