I came, I saw, I found an article that might convey your thoughts. Especially the second half.

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week” — George Patton

Posted By Idioticmaddog at 7:51 PM - Sun Mar 01 2020

I came, I saw, I found an article that might convey your thoughts. Especially the second half.

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week” — George Patton

Problem is you have to have a good plan first lol

The thing about a game this early in development is it is very nebulous.

This means whoever looks at CoE at this point is going to see whatever features they like and the game is going to be perfect for whatever reasons. Then everyone who is vested believes the Devs should listen to whatever design idea they have and ends up taking it personally when it doesn’t happen.

Then when for lack of money, time design abilities they drop certain features or they don’t end up being exactly what folks want the game sucks...

Bottom line other than a bundle of ideas and hopes CoE doesn’t really exist right now. There is no point in hoping for or getting upset over any particular anything.

@Barleyman,

I believe that you've put too much wishfulness into your expectations right from the start. For example, a pure survival game hasn't been in the works since the notion of a wandering trader was floated. Wandering traders rely on highly-survivable travel, and highly risky travel would require them to be more warrior and survivalist than trader.

For another example, I'm not sure what you mean exactly by rogue-like. (I'm using the spelling of the word that seems most appropriate, because rouge means red). There seems to be plenty of opportunity in the mechanics still for roguery. Perhaps what is relevant is that roguery won't automatically be the centerpoint of most players' experiences, because it needs to happen in a strong context of economics and politics that are understandably critical to making an emergent game. Establishing the political context happens to be the focus of the current efforts that prospective players know about, but that focus will shift to other topics eventually.

rogue-like is a genre of game, named after the game Rogue. procedural generated dungeon crawler with permadeath.

Thanks for the clarifying posts, Sylvae and Kyleran.

Based upon those clarifications, I never got the impression that the game would be as hardcore as Rogue has been described.

tbh i think OP is getting that idea because Snipehunter used the word "rogue-like" when describing certain elements of either his past work or current work, on certain elements of dungeons in CoE (procedural generated dungeons + permadeath (kiinda) equals rougue-like, or some such piecemeal quotes taken out of context. heh.

It isn't just you Barley...

Nobody actually knows what this game is anymore...

It would seem that that would be the purpose of the annual State of Elyria announcement.

That was supposed to be sometime in the beginning of 2020?

It's March now.

And nobody from SBS is talking...

Why?

They aren't saying that either...

So what is left for us to do but bide the time till they decide to do anything else?

It's not too surprising to me that people are now starting to just walk away.

Ghosting your community...no matter how upset they might be...isn't a good business strategy in my opinion.

Especially if you later want to hit them up for money.

I don't know about ye olde IRC chatlogs, but I've been following CoE since 2016 and I've never thought of it as having rogue-like elements.

Sure, if you die, you can choose to spawn in a random NPC like a new "seed", and of course a lot of the world will be procedurally generated at least initially, but that's about where the comparison ends.

One of the major concepts that's been pushed from the start is how you can start your own dynasty and have some of your progress carry over into your subsequent characters. That has always been a "thing" pushed since Kickstarter. You can inherit the possessions and (some) skills of the previous life, but there are also unique benefits to the "random seed" method of spawning into an NPC, so it's not like they've taken that part away.

The world persists when you log out and your impact on the world can be permanent. My understanding of most rogue-likes is that each playthrough is its own instance and if you screw up badly with your build on one run you can die and start over. In CoE, you can die, but the fields you razed will still be ashes when you spawn into a new body and the farmers still need to find out how they'll grow enough crops.

While I agree that they've changed their vision several times during development, and I've been a bit wary of some changes myself (their current vision of the EP store being my major gripe) I'm going to wait until we've got our hands on something playable before I can judge it for certain. But imo it's inaccurate to say "it used to be semi rogue-like but now it's not" because it was never advertised as rogue-like (except maybe an offhanded comment from a developer taken out of context?)

Posted By Scuttle at 8:04 PM - Tue Mar 03 2020

>.... But imo it's inaccurate to say "it used to be semi rogue-like but now it's not" because it was never advertised as rogue-like (except maybe an offhanded comment from a developer taken out of context?)

Therein lies my biggest gripe about discord at this stage of a games development.

When you have devs especially the studio head just pop by in discord and start laying out his ideas for the game people naturally take it as OMG that feature is totally going to be in!!!! And run off and start posting on mmorpg or other game sites forcing the very same dev to either let the miscommunication proliferate or be seen to walk back his earlier comments.

Sure sbs said everything on discord is unofficial and all that but 1) it’s very naive to believe it wouldn’t be quoted when the head of the studio says something and 2) when they get lazy and make official announcements on discord before their “official platform” aka the forums naturally the unofficial disclaimer on discord will be disregarded.

Right now we know nothing more than the names and general outline of the tribes, a rough outline of how they envision the soul system to work and that’s about it. Everything else is nebulous and with random devs making random comments it’s easy to see how certain untruths can be spread around and taken as hard coded gospel.

Just my two cents. :-)

@ Barleyman,

Wish I could reply earlier, but I am too busy these days.

I gotta admit, I am pretty surprised to hear this from you, given you have contributed to the “Ashland Tactical Challenges” previously. You always come across as someone very passionate about CoE. Your worries goes much deeper than the normal complains we see, and I appreciate it that you bring it up.

Instead of focusing on the term “rogue-like”, let's move on to the more concrete points:

1) Hardcore survival & death mechanics

2) Realistic construction & destruction

3) Player built/run nations & cities

4) Ancient warfare with unmatched scale/realism

I would like to begin by saying that I am a huge fan of warfare myself. I have played more strategy games than MMO. Since OP is that passionate about warfare, I think it is better to approach the above 4 features by examining how the #1, 2) and 3) impact 4). I am hoping OP is willing to appraoch the above features from various angles and drill deeper to everyone's thought on the issue. (Hopefully, not in the manner we saw from the warfare post mentioned in the OP :P)

I would agree Survival for individuals is less harsh than I originally envisioned. After learning that crafters would need to travel all over the worlds to learn various techniques / skills, my expectation is lowered. I would now only expect harsh survival condition in areas far from the roads. Yet, I would withhold judgement on its impact on army movement. That's because we were told it would take master-level survival skills to support group of people surviving in the wild. I am expecting size of travelers/goods will increase survival difficulties expotentially.

For 2), my expectation is consistent with what I learn from the kickstarter back then. No construction will poof into existence. Materials will have to be carried over to the location of construction. Cost of destruction will be comparable to cost of construction etc. Granted that the architecture tool was never released, we do not have any info on how materials / physics impact a building. Not much big changes.

For 3), didn't see any changes too.

For 4), realistic warfare need to always be considered together with balancing. For scale, it is always a matter of tech/networking. There is also implementaion challenges for tactical formations, e.g. how should the effectiveness of a shield wall be changed if a player in the formation suddenl;y D/C etc. On the other side of the equation, there are logistic consideration for warfare which were overlooked in most games. Yet, in CoE, with finite resources, limited inventories space, survival challenges, and the sheer size of the world, I still see this side of warfare being portrayed realistically. Not at all close to generic MMOs.

Regarding your statement of “warfare will be as dangerous or as impactful or potentially world history altering as it well and truly should be”, would you mind elaborating more? I came to CoE expecting combat will play a much smaller role than in other MMOs. Economics, productions, technologies, politics will have much stronger impact on the world. I have yet to see any other MMOs embrace these aspects of the world. To me, the outcome of warfare is the accumulation of all those factors (and many others that I omitted). And it is just one of the ways to express the impact. There would/should also be ways other than warfare. I am curious what set your expectation of how impactful warfare should be vs will be, both from SBS or other sources.

I do not have time to reply to the rest of the post. All I can say, is that I would argue the dev team is too small to develop at the expected speed. Some of the community memebrs have their expectation raised due to the original “Expected release date”. SBS is also learning on the way how big of a challenge they have set themselves up for. Hopes the next “State of Elyria” will give us a more realistic outlook at the larger picture.

Can we, pretty please, stop referring to a game that's been in "full speed development" (SBS words, not mine) for the last 4 years as "early stages"? This joke stopped being funny about 2 years back.

As far as I remember, and I was here before KS, the harshness and possibility of permadeath were some of the cornerstone parts of COE. Want to take a risky trip and explore the unexplored? You are taking a serious risk, and if you screw up, you will lose a substantial amount of your spark, possibly even all of it (guaranteed to permadeath if killed at sea).

The travel was also supposed to be very troubling, which is very much a cornerstone for... everything else in CoE. Otherwise, if I can get around fast, I am not restricted to local markets. Centralization goes up, impact of lesser makers/towns goes out of the window. And yet it was supposed to be needed, as that's the only way to get the precious resources/services not available locally.

See how this ties all together with the harshness of death? Yep, travel takes time and is risky, but yields profit. Same deal with exploration. But so far everything points towards CoE dropping more and more of that risk in exchange to be more streamlined and like every single MMO out there.

I don't want every single MMO out there, I didn't play one in... by god, 8 years, and I don't miss it. I did want to play CoE, as it was going back to the old school roots, but now enabled by modern tech. And that... That just I don't think will happen.