???
Unsquish the Nimbus Sea map
It makes islands look ugly and makes treasure charts more annoying.
copy of the rant i went on in another topic
i talk about how many features of the game are either really grindy(fleets/professions) or rely on chain events of rng to function(hecate essence) and the unfairness in classes(biggest example skill and rite notes: oracles and warriors can just unequip their lost knowledge skills while mages and berserkers have to yk lose hours of progress and also rare skills too they also lose those 
)
holy rant
the reason why i quit ao is because of the lack of qol and ‘limitations’ that come with each feature added to the game(im not even gona get into performance)
every content update vetex adds comes with is own set of limitations, take dragons the newest one:
at first it seems fun or exciting to fight these beasts see how you fare against them but through the entire process these ‘limitations’ serve to frustrate you, first off you have to sail into the dark sea which means waiting 30+ minutes and doing nothing all the while invisible tornadoes and acid waves destroy your ship, after all that you now have to waste even more time trying to find the cliffs while dealing with horrible dark sea island generation as the game spams volcanoes, siren islands, and sunken forests instead of spawning the actual ‘useful stuff’ and then after spending maybe over and hour you get your dragon cliff, you are ready you grab your shield(like straight up impossible to kill them without a weapon build) and engage with the dragon, it starts spamming blasts and your warding armor breaks so you repair it then the same piece breaks again but guess what since this game is a horrible buggy mess you cant repair it and you die to insanity damage and eat shit. time: wasted
what about replayability?
like trying out new stat builds, spoiler it sucks
when you make a new file there are millons of factors working to keep you away
professions are a required part of buildmaking but they need you to gather thousands of items just to progress while some are a massive time sink like fishing, bounty hunting and charting they take tens of hours just to complete.
on top of those are fleets they are a must have in today’s ao without fleets you cant interact with the marketplace(the only non rng way to obtain items) because everything is just so overpriced for the non fleet haver.
now with making new files out of the way you turn to your main file
instead of starting over you will now change the build of your main file
but that also has ‘limitations’ holding you back and they are as bad as the ones you get from starting fresh lets start from the easiest option changing stat build:
in order to change your stat build you need a prometheus acrimony an item with a 1/6000 drop chance from chests or 100% drop chance from an even rarer legendary chest.
but what if you wanted to change your magic?
for that you need hecate essence and to get hecate essence you have to go through the same pain as finding dragon cliffs but 100x worse, you have to spend over 20 hours(if your lucky) just staring at a virtual ship for the chance to find one since hecate essence is luck based it has a 1/12 chance every island and while that does not sound really bad you have to realize that in order for that 1/12 chance to work you need like 3 other luck based conditions to work
you need dark sea to generate you an island(10 mins)
you need that island to be a normal island(really fucking rare)
you need that island to be easy to explore(really fucking rare)
you need your ship to stay alive to find the islands(cant because of acid waves, invisible tornadoes and atlantean ships)
you need to sail back to i3(30 mins)
you need to go through all these steps just for that 1/12 chance to work
but it gets worse if i wanted to change my build on my main file i would lose 50+ hours of work.
because of this:
as a mage if i were to reset my build i would lose 6 dragon-slaying rare spells
while weapon classes get to just unequip those moves and not lose them
this inequality makes resetting builds for magic and strength classes much more costly than weapon or spirit.
so i am just stuck here unable to do anything new
cant make new file because
profession
fleet
build
ship
deckhands
dark sea
dragonblood
and i cant change my build because of
lost knowledge
hecate essence
rare spells
lost spells
rare techniques
lost techniques
interchange
there are so many things about ao that limit my gameplay
its like every feature in this game adds a way to ruin my day or take away from my freedom
like when ao was in early access i didnt ask for:
clan building
towers
professions
fleet
difficult to obtain but required items(acrimony, hecate essence)
raidable forts
talents
dragons
dirt
tanning
armor breaking
i asked for none of those
all i ever wanted from vetex was dark sea and story content
and i honestly think that if all we got was story and dark sea ao would be more successful because
those were things that everybody looked fowards to not some gimicky shit nobody interacts with or a required aspect of the game that takes AGES to complete
in conclusion wom would be better than ao if it had dashing and re-enchanting because
unlike ao wom had true freedom not bounded by some bs feature
You weren’t alone on that.
Ship based bounties are just down right annoying. If you aren’t aware of the spawn locations for the specific bounty you’re looking, it becomes a massive chore to just attempt to get a specific item drop or continue a quest. The only remedy for this currently is the bounty compass, but if you’re close enough to see the arrow pointing to your current bounty, you’re probably close enough to see the ship their on in the first place. You’d think who ever is writing down these bounties would at least give what part of the sea they were last seen (North, North East, East, etc of X Sea)
Performance.
That’s it.
I can’t focus on anything else when the general experience is subpar.
Shields shouldn’t grant defence to non warrior classes. Make it so it only grants it when you can use the first skill of the shield (like how blocking power is currently).
Reason: Although it adds weight and limits mobility I don’t think non-weapon classes should benefit from a weapon. And the meta of people using dragons great shield is ugly.
Make hecate easier oh my fucking god literally no one cares if it’s rare in the lore just make it spawn in i2 or something for crying out loud
Also make things like professions, titles, fleet progress, and guild/clan structures transfer between files to encourage swapping across varied builds
add kingdom alignment
Game is very laggy and you can cut off some of that lag by separating the dark sea from the regular sea. Most no-brainer solution ever.
or just have it actually not render until youre in it
Make PvP it’s own thing please, entirely seperate from base game, it takes a lot of time and careful balancing just to have the PvE players co-exist with PvP players, PLEASE tie it to something else limit it to Elysium or something.
Also rework renown while we are it
-Sincerely, former Cardinal
This game is broken to the core and it would be too expensive to fix it now.
Also it’s made on Roblox.
It’d continue to have a performance hit on the server as the logic for NPCs, islands, ships and weather remain, not only that; the server too remains overburdened by other sources – e.g. misuse of networking.
Understandable albeit unreasonable grievance.
Arcane Odyssey – or any Arcane game – wouldn’t have reached the point they are today if not for Roblox, if it was built in Unity/Unreal; it’d require Vetex to learn a programming language and engine structure from scratch, let alone the server costs.
it wouldnt be as extreme as it currently is though, i just dont think dark sea would really work as like an instanced dungeon without some big changes to it
just do whatever deepwoken does for the void sea
For the server; it would be the same, it does not matter if an object is rendered or not on the client – it’d remain the same on the server.
That’s the point.
Why convert the Dark Sea in its current state to be instanced? why not go the extra mile to achieve a significantly better result?
I have not personally seen the Void Sea, however if it works near-identically to Arcane Odyssey’s; It could be it checks in spatial chunks for players in proximity to decide if it should spawn/do an action on the server, hence to why it may run better.
That’s why it should be a single player game. Also that 10+ of dev experience isn’t going anywhere, learning a new engine or a new programming language isn’t as hard as some people think. Especially if you’re already a coder.
I think roblox is just shite in general, to me it seems like a noob trap designed for younger game devs to make games for a company who wants to take advantage of their labor for profit.
I understand, I am a coder myself and have learned other coding languages[1]
However, that does not mean it is worth switching engine and coding language, as it does not matter if you have extensive knowledge within one coding language; not everything would transfer leading to development going significantly slower as you do not have a deeper understanding on the engine nor specifics, Vetex barely knows the current of Luau; the (likely) only coding language he knows.
And;
C, C++, C#, Python, slight Java. ↩︎
As a coder I also am looking at a roadmap of taking years to learn a new coding language, because I have no idea how to start using this goddamn engine, it has no entry level things.
If the game platform (Which Vetex complains about yet still uses) is actively shooting it and its user’s heads with a shotgun I say that’s worth switching.
There are premade physics engines. It doesn’t need to be a 3D game either.
Learning a new coding language doesn’t take years.
AO doesn’t have to be an MMO so there doesn’t have to a way to “somehow get money to buy your own servers”.
Not every game has to rival GTA 6 and have like 20 bajillion concurrent players to be successful, and even then you have to market to the right people to get your game out there (Asking youtubers to play your game and providing press kits, already established goodwill, making friends with other game devs, etc)
Not everything has to transfer over, just the experience. Even if it’s something new, programming as a craft requires you to be good at solving problems and new situations so it primes you for this kinda stuff, which is why the hardest part is usually at the start in my experience. Game development will also just take long regardless, as that is the nature of the craft. You’re never gonna be good at coding, just shit and slightly less shit at it.
If Vetex doesn’t understand luau despite using it for who knows how long then that’s a skill issue on his part. Seems more like an excuse to me tbh to stick with a shitty platform, and Vetex still thinks he can make an MMO skyrim despite being out of his league for it. It’s better if he just reduces the scope. If he’s somehow incapable of reducing it to a realistic goal without compromising his vision then skill issue I guess.
A lot of these kinds of things are stuff I see small youtubers (or indies in general) complain about within their respective field and it frustrates me to see foolish excuses such as these. Shitting on indies seem like an asshole thing, yes I am aware.