Arcane Odyssey Criticism Thread

Game Discussion
1

No. Flipping. Way. Did this guy seriously make a thread just to criticise arcane odyssey? Is he a stupid friggin doomposter?

Yes, you’re right. I HATE AO.
/s for you underground neurodivergents.

After thinking about this for a good few minutes, I’ve decided that there isn’t really a centralized place to properly and respectfully criticize Arcane Odyssey without it snowballing into an insult fest between patreon members and the plebians of the AO community, casual players.

So, here are a few goals for this thread:

  1. Regain Vetex’s trust in his community (impossible I know)
  2. Promote issues with the game that could use changing
  3. Not devolve into chaos

If successful, this thread shouldn’t end up locked in 24 hours! Yippee!

What I DON’T want happening is forumers pointing out parts of the game that they think are a problem and other forumers deciding to take it as a personal offense. Keep that in vetcord please.

Now, here are my personal criticisms (will update as I remember, because there’s a ridiculous amount of them; I’ve played this game far too long)

  1. Arcane Odyssey’s Story (one of the pillars of the player experience) isn’t all that good at the current point of the game.
Commentary

I’ve played through AO more than a dozen times, and the few times I’ve decided to actually read and not skip through the story, I was completely unimpressed. I personally believe this issue comes from two main points, being

  • Lack of Side Character Development (be it downtime or flashbacks)
  • Integral side content not being tied to the story at all

I’ll start with the lack of side character development, since that seems to be the easiest to explain. We have three “buddy” characters, being Iris, Neviro, and Morden. We never once see the player actually hang out with these people we’re meant to feel close to, save for the slight break in the story at windrow island. If we see them, we’re going off to fight in a minimum of five minutes. These people came to break us out of jail, and the majority of the information we have on them comes from exposition dumps and literally reading their diary (kinda weird icl).

As for integral side content not being tied to the story, the best examples of this are the dark sea and dodge reflexes.

If you don’t already know about dodge reflexes, there’s almost zero way you’ll get them at the level the quest is given at. What sense does it make to put Rill Hendrix on whitesummit, an island in the corner of the map? Having them pre-calvus would entirely trivialize the fight, which in all honesty makes a lot more sense than us barely squeezing through. You want to dodge the massive yellow balls and array at the speed of light? Have us use supernatural dodging abilities. Even unlocking them mid-fight would be sick as well, like we’ve just learned how to use them in the heat of battle. Take notes, vetex.

  1. Not beating bandits, but definitely beating something.
Commentary

I’m going to have to walk a thin line between blatant, opinionated hate and actual criticism for this one, but does anyone else feel like a lot of the side features don’t actually tie together? I will concede, AO has a plethora of different activities to do, which can all be fun at times. The real issue arises when the activities last for longer than 30 minutes, usually due to needing a specific item (sunken armor/lost knowledge/lost diploy/hecate essence). I’m not even completely sure how to explain this right now, so I’ll come back sometime after the thread is actually posted to elaborate. If you do understand, feel free to give me your take on it.

  1. To PvP or not to PvP, that is the question.
Commentary

I don’t really understand why we haven’t reached a point where vetex just treats PvP as an actual part of the content instead of ignoring it entirely. Yes, we’re getting ranked in the next update. However, we needed a second scripter to add it, even though it’s been requested for ages and plenty of unrequested features were added before it. (looking at you, insert immersion feature nobody actually likes). PvP provides an enormous amount of replayability, so I don’t see any logical reasons why it shouldn’t be updated as such.

  1. Performance
Commentary

We all know it’s true, AO runs—for lack of a better word—like ass. No matter how enjoyable the game is, if I can’t run it on my decent low-end gaming PC with above 40fps PRE bloxstrap, the game will never crack 20k CCU again.

I’m honestly starting to suspect that the ridiculous number of parts involved in each island is part of the issue; if you look at how the islands are built, it seems to be a part of the lag equation.

Ok, I’m done yapping; your turn now.

2

I HATE AO

fs

3

I LOVE AO.
But it’s bad.

~~The performance is likely due to the fact most islands are still rendered with their full detail at virtually any distance. ~~

Arcane Odyssey does not utilize StreamingEnabled, and hence no LoD[1] are generated, wrapping back to the problem I stated.

I’m going to write a bigger response, but at the moment I’m on phone, so I answered the easiest one I could.

Look below.

Proper Response

The Story

Fully agreed as we’ve seen with the main cast; Iris is a side-kick for the sake of being a side-kick despite her story technically being over, as has been said before; she requires a new story to be interesting.

The fact we defeat King Octavious Caeser, the previous king of Ravenna, should be plenty enough to show that side-content is significantly greater of importance than a glorified boss rush, despite the story already being that.

The Dark Sea is canonically un-explorable, it’s so hard for any kingdom to reliably enter and leave without major issues, even Wotan, someone who has a LOT of power, especially to build boats and such, only has an “interest”

Dodge reflexes can legitimately be forgotten as you say in the next paragraph, but they are also the most crucial part of a person’s move set, you are guaranteed to be hit in virtually every case you aren’t on the ground, there’s never a reason to get it in the first place.

The “Unbandit” Beating

Wraping back to what I mentioned earlier[2], it’s genuinely the case, if you take out the story, you realize that it’s a glorified bandit beater with a walking simulator loosely welded into it, especially in Skyhall.

Yes, and that’s intentionally made due to Vetex’s feature creep taking effect.
There’s virtually no new feature that is linked with another new or old feature, the only exception would be armor repairing in the Dragon Update, as it utilizes the blacksmith, but even so, that’s something obvious without a pre-existing alternative.

Gems are for themselves, Enchants are for themselves, Lost Knowledge, Blood Disease and Grease are for themselves, do you see the pattern?

Not only are all of those independent, but most[3] of them are irrelevant with the abhorrent PvP balancing, leading to a net loss, as you lose more than gain.

The PvP Disinterest

He has openly stated many times over he dislikes PvP, even to such a point he’d remove it if it didn’t kill Arcane Odyssey, I just lose Patreon privileges so I cannot bring the message up, but there are some sources on the forums.

The Awful Performance

It’s unfortunately the truth, the game virtually can not achieve a higher CCU if performance is degrading in such an ironic accelerated speed.

The game utilizes a custom unloader, which in practice - as many have seen - is not better than Roblox’s native StreamingEnabled approach, there are pros and cons of StreamingEnabled as seen below;

Pros

  • Higher performance, as parts are dynamically streamed out.
  • Utilizing the new SLIM models, higher-quality yet very performant LoDs[4] are generated on Roblox’s cloud servers, allowing far greater render distances with far less parts.
  • If written in mind, can be utilized to localize scripts, in the sense that they stop doing work once Streamed Out[5], leading to overall better performance.

Cons

  • Higher ping based on the amount of parts in Workspace
    • Is this really a con when the ping is already awful, to where StreamingEnabled would solve?
  • Having to rewrite code to respect StreamingEnabled.
    • This is the worst issue with enabling StreamingEnabled, as you have to fundamentally change how you code, but this can be semi-put on hold as you can select individual crucial models and put them to Persistent[6]

I do hope this response is better than the previous one.

  1. Level of Detail, a lower detailed variant of the original model ↩︎

  2. The story being a glorified boss-rush, just as side-content ↩︎

  3. Lost Knowledge, Blood Disease and Grease ↩︎

  4. Level of Detail; generally tiers of lower-resolution variants of the original ↩︎

  5. Once it leaves render distance ↩︎

  6. Never Streaming Out, always in highest detail with no LoDs. ↩︎

4

Arcane odyssey was never a pvp game in anyway not even pvpve. Arcane odyssey is a pve first and for most pvp was only added for the sake of having it it seems.

5

Vetex definitely should fix his update schedule, I remember having a discussion about this with Scandin and some others. Releasing features as they are finished and tested would result in far more frequent content updates and keep the game relatively fresh

My game runs fine because I have pretty much the best pc money can buy, but admittedly I shouldnt need the best pc money can buy to run it, pls bring back partcline and LISTEN to what he has to say I beg :sob:

Nerf thermo fist more

Realistically the majority of the games problems can be fixed with a larger dev team that covers a large range of skills, and people have been saying that since the WOM days. Of course devs cost money, and by god they arent cheap either, but vetex should start an only fans to get some (I would subscribe)

6

ao started as a pvp game wdym it had the leaderboard and u needed renown 300M to get legendary deckhands

then vetex changed it and we needed to wait 1 year for pvp toggle

now we have ranked

7

That is indeed true, the only reason Arcane Odyssey has PvP is due to Vetex’s fear of it dying without it.

Yet he hates it with a passion.

8

tbh ao will die without pvp

isnt like fishing for 6 hours straight is funny

9

I am curious how many people who play ao frequently actually pvp, because I am not 100% sure it would die without it

10

Like 5%-40% of total playerbase but 50-80% of active playerbase aka the ones which actively play the game

11

It’s mostly kids who do PvP, so it’d by then be the older audience who stays.

12

bro leadeboard is full of grow ass men

13

I said mostly, but that wouldn’t mean they’d be on the leaderboard.

The lesser percentage would be unemployed not in education bums who can and will play 24 hours a day.

14

Towers are pretty much a hassle to go up and the floors are not helping. Big V should’ve just used stairs all the way instead of wierd ladders.

15

thats even worse :sob:

16

Underground? Man this is a Roblox forum, I’d be surprised if anyone on here was neurotypical

17

I’m taking everything here personally, devolving into chaos and blaming vetex for it

18

I hate how he dangles cool stuff in front of us like jingling keys only for them to take years to be addressed.
Arcanium weapons shouldn’t have taken this long. Relics shouldn’t have either especially knowing that good spirit content is gonna require a much higher level (so 2 years minim) like relics that actually inflict statuses and blessed weapons for knights.
And levels, them F-reaking levels man. Took so long to get from 125 to 175. 50 LEVELS.
Like the game came a long way since release but it’s not really changed that much to warrant to be called a full release. Progress is so painfully slow anyone who played ao as a child will end up in college by the time we get to lost magics.
Attacking, blocking, dodging, tool switching, boat commanding all feels so sluggish and unresponsive.
I stuck to this game since release but i don’t feel my patience is being rewarded.
I just really REALLY want this game to improve, to have faith in it but i’m tired of lowering my expectations to avoid dissappointment.

Damn i wrote a lot

19

I am!!

20

Good we need a straightman for this clown show