It has been about a week since the latest phase of SBEMU’s Closed Beta launched so I wanted to capture some initial thoughts with respect to the progress that has been made by the team.
First and foremost, PvP works very well. I was concerned that PvP would be beyond repair given the number of issues (e.g. melee sync) that were prevalent when the game was live and kicking. Outside of some random glitches, I can report that I have gotten exactly what I wanted out of single player fights through 20 on 20 open field battles. The only true issue I saw was a significant spike in latency during one of the large fights that made my toon unplayable. This seemed to impact random players as the fight went on (all I could do was listen in Ventrillo).
Secondly, the world itself is, for the most part, back to normal. The zones all are in the right spots and mob camps have been re-populated. I have noticed that there is a decent number of bugged mobs in some camps, but no more so then we used to see in the live version of SB. I think this is just a “feature” of the game we have to live with. Given that SB players hate PvE, I think it is fair to say that the current state of the world is sufficient for a “live” release of the game.
The above aspects of the game are probably 2 of the 4 most important when we think of a finished/polished release. The other 2 are, obviously, banes/mines and cities/gear. Starting with the latter, gear is working in that anything you buy or find while farming, you can wear and it calculates the right stats relative to your character, etc etc. What does not appear to be working is gear rolling. Currently all gear is manually generated and placed on vendors for sale in cities. City assets are in-game (the development team has used them to create a mock city known as Ravensburg), but city management – including gear rolling assets – are not yet functional. This is a huge hurdle to overcome as any release of SB will need to have functional cities to convince guilds to stay active for longer than a few weeks.
Lastly, banes and mines have not been fully implemented into the game. Nothing really needs to be said about this topic – if they can’t get this to work, SBEMU is a failure. It is that simple. As players, we played SB for banes and quality mine fights. The population of this server will not survive more than a few weeks if we are only able to participate in random PvP. My conclusion? Definitely a work in progress at this point. The team has moved far past any point I thought they would be able to get to which only makes me want them to finish it all off. It’s just a question of how long that ends up taking.
@Teamxgaming @chimpytt
