First of all, this post is for the devlopers and not the current users. My intent here is to provide some feedback to the developers about this great game from a brand new player's perspective, with an eye to getting many more players to try it, and not to be a forum troll or simply complain. So please don't discount my comments off-hand, bother telling me to just play longer, or read the forums. The whole point behind this is that I haven't ever played before and I can tell you what it's like from an experienced gamer's perspective who has never read about or seen Ryzom before.
Secondly, yes I read the most current PDF manual, twice.
Third, I am activating my account after the 7-days. I am a player and I'm only offering comments to help other new users in the future. Since I am soon to be a regular user, I feel like I should make these comments before I know too much.
Please pardon me if my view is informed by my background as an english-speaking American. I can only assume that the developers are eager to penetrate this market, so I hope my comments are valuable and not to be seen as idle criticism. See my first point: I love this game.
I am 34 years old, and I have been playing games since 1979 when I got my first computer. RPG games have been my hobby my whole life, from pen-and-paper RPGs to these awesome modern computer-based games. Professionally, I work in marketing and design as an interactive developer, which I believe gives me a sound perspective on what it takes to make software invisible to the user and easy to use.
Ok here goes.
I love this game. The Stanza system, the science fiction setting, the BEAUTIFUL world, the unobtrusive interface, and the great story really set it apart from the competition.
FIRST: This game is great. The entire MMO industry needs a fresh Science Fiction game and this is it for me.
Here are some of the features that really set Ryzom apart:
The world is beautiful in a way that SWG, Planetfall, and AO never were. EVE Online is also beautiful, but your avatar is a ship. Need I say more? I really don't have to go on here. It only takes 15 minutes on Atys to see how different and great this game looks from other MMOs.
The stanza system is ingenious! I haven't even begun to explore this.
The races are interesting (even if the starting areas are basically carbon copies of each other, this is something that can be addressed). The lore is well crafted and deep enough for any explorer.
The interface is simple, unadorned, powerful, and totally out of the users' way. I can't stress enough how nice this is in the current gaming client where I believe sometimes that some games are all interface and no game.
The GMs are always on and have answered a million questions I have as a new user. This is very very nice for a noob.
1. Technical stuff
I don't have the space or time to detail all the small technical details that keep this game from achieving what has always been my goal as a developerl: to make the technical stuff invisible and get the user into the game as fast as possible.
I realize this game has a long history and had a rough launch, and I can see plainly that you developers have worked hard to get it where it is, and I say good job. It performs very well on decent hardware and this is no small feat!
The overall suggestion I have is: work on your failure modes. If there's a problem, get the user back to the login screen at the least, as fast as possible. Problems take too long to recover, and since the solution is usually just restarting the client I believe that making that process as fast as possible would go a long way towards keeping users that aren't able to troubleshoot.
I have a very nice PC that no other game has any significant problem with. So why does the game take an ETERNITY to load? Why do I have to click on the end-user license every single time? Why can't I go back to the password screen from anywhere in the launcher without quitting it and reloading it? Why on earth do you make me click to accept the only server my characters are on each and every time I log in? Surely you could simply remember that. You can't even press enter at the character selection screen to go into the game. Huh? Why is the game so susceptible to slight network problems?
After that, all the while my computer is completely tied up on the loading screen. I would be happier if the game loaded more slowly but let me happily switch to other programs. As it is, it dominates the computer. Basically the launch fails 50% of the time normallly, and 90% of the time if it's not the front-most process, forcing me to wait for a long time while I hope the game loads. This is not the best way to retain users.
Quitting takes forever. I use the task manager to kill the process most of the time and it's 10x faster, with nearly no consequences. Every network problem brings the game to a halt and I have to force quit it, just to go through the 10-minute loading process again.
The list goes on. I expect to enter my name and password, go the character selection screen, and click once to get into the game. If there's an unrecoverable problem, I expect that the client will find out fast and send me back to the login screen quickly.
2. Learning how to play.
I will take the gloves off here and just say that you must do a better job with the English translation. This is my number one suggestion overall for the whole game. I am sorry in advance to whomever did the translations - I am well aware of how difficult and tedious that job is and I mean no disrespect. But the process of learning how to play this game is one of the most confusing and incomprehensible experiences I've ever had in a game.
I had three, count 'em, THREE (3) different GMs tell me that much of the game is trial and error and you just have to sort of play and figure things out. This is definitely a reason why there aren't more people playing. Definitely.
The primary problem is that many many things in the game are named or described in two or three different ways, with run-on sentences and strange clauses. And there is not a sufficient cohesive or consistent introduction to it. This is 100% a translation problem, and so it's even more frustrating considering that one top-level look at the vocabulary and some simple patch planning could fix 75% of this problem.
"Exchange" should be "trade," "Level" means Skill Points in one of your skills. "Action Cost" could mean several different things. 'Action Progression' as a phrase makes no sense in English as far as understanding the game goes. "Skills" is the word. The idea of Sap and Health loads in weapons is great, but the 4-step process of actually charging your weapon is totally unusable unless you have asked someone, and even then you have to wonder why you have to click each time to get the crystals you've created. Can't they just automatically go into the inventory? And why do I need Sap to cast weapon enchantments that I've used Sap already to enchant? huh?
Don't forget I read the manual.
These are just a few things off the top of my head, but the best example I can think of that illustrates this point is on the loading screen: "Conquering the Nexuses." It took me 2 readings of the manual and 4 days of seeing that over and over (see: technical) to understand what those 2 paragraphs were saying at all. You really have to be a native English speaker to understand how poor the translations are in the game.
Please forgive me if these suggestions sound like random criticism or if you've already heard this before. It's just my input for a fantastic game that I believe has yet more potential.
See you in Atys!
Best regards,
Axeal
I find starting the game Fullscreen prevents me from switching applications for about a minute after character selection, no more, but if I start the game in windowed mode I can do anything else I like with my pc. Quitting the game has always been rapid, unless I had a client crash.
