Legends of Aria: Released on Steam
Citadel Studios have been celebrating this month: Legends of Aria, a new MMORPG crafted by a number of Ultima Online veterans, has been released on Valve’s Steam digital storefront.
It’s been a long time coming, but we’re thrilled to announce that Legends of Aria is now available on Steam!
This release brings with it a host of new features, including an updated Ruleset that expands the protected areas in the game, a guided Professions system, weapon and armor enchanting, the Bard skill-line, a brand new Awakening in Oasis, and so much more. We’re also launching with a new US server, Amber Moon. You can read all of the changes in our patch notes, right here.
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We wanted to make sure we weren’t only giving a benefit to new players, so we’ve decided to gift all of our existing players – those of you who joined us on our journey prior to launching on Steam – a one month premium subscription free of charge.
The premium subscription includes several perks, including an additional housing plot, an additional character slot, free taxes, and 100 weekly gems to use on an assortment of cosmetic and quality of life items in our in-game store (which will be available when the store is online).
We’re thrilled to share this new stage in our journey with new and existing players alike, and are excited to see you all in Celador!
Here’s hoping Legends of Aria enjoys a sizeable surge of players; Citadel Studios have crafted a fine-looking game that, I’m told, captures a lot of the magic of Ultima Online.
Two questions:
Is this game any good?
Is this game better than SotA?
Personally, I can’t say. I’ve not played it.
Others have spoken here, in comments on other articles, quite favourably about the game.
Well, it was better than SotA. Granted the last time I played LoA was almost 6 months ago, so that could have changed. It felt very much like a smaller UO or Runescape. From what I’ve read, the devs are…well…probably in over their heads. A lot of planned features have been scrapped, and their relying on the modding community and private servers to make it viable. Granted, I’ve heard good things about a server called “Legends of Ultima” which promises to recreate the game we all really want to play, but I haven’t tried it yet (downloading the game now)
Just to point out how poor a job the devs are doing, I was a Kickstarter backer, and I only found out about the Steam release right now. From this article. And started the download. If any other attempt to notify backers was made, it must have not been much of one. We’ll see how this goes I guess.
Oh, I will mention that PvP has been almost totally yanked from official servers, so for all the PK sociopaths out there, you might as well look elsewhere, or find a private server where only you and your kind will be.
Legends of Aria is vastly superior to Shroud of the Avatar in it’s basic foundation concepts and general approach. This is mostly because it actually is designed in the basic spirt of UO, where SOTA was really never anything more than about cashing in on the potential of enthusiastic players who loved that old, hoary game. SOTA has truly awful concepts at it’s core, which are quite anti-rpg friendly.
Shroud is terrible from it’s premise foundation design work. It takes some of the worst features of modern games- stuff that makes life for designers easy, but is absolutely awful for creative play- in UO, monsters could follow you out of dungeons and felt real. In Shroud, they are ridiculously fake, despite the more modern tech. The combat system in Shroud was designed as a card game for a tablet or phone- something no amount of polish will ever “fix”. It uses a map to travel around the “world”. The team totally ignored all pleas for changes to make the game more RPG friendly, even in the early days. The result is a mess. Supporters left in hordes before the game was released.
Legends of Arias problems are of another sort- at least the foundation work is sound. It feels like UO. Monsters can chase you about. Housing is pretty open for creative solutions, and there’s endless little items and stuff to stock your yard and house with. The basic skill system is elegant in design. Very much feels like UO.
That said, the team is too small and overwhelmed. The basic combat classes are still very much a mess and incomplete and unblanced. Mages are really the only viable class at present, as far as I can tell. Archers are handled particularly terrible at present which is distressing for my archer. There is way too much work to do, and it seems like the team is unsure what the hell to do next.
Unlike SOTA, Aria has great potential, because the basic building blocks are quite strong. It has a very similar and elegant tree of skills one can mix and match like UO. You can theoretically proceed however you wish with combat or crafting or a mix. Someone got the all important foundation ideas just right. It will be a real pity if the game founders on the rocks of incompleteness forever, because one can have a lot of fun in this world.
Graphically, it is a very old school world. It is very pretty, elegant looking even- but don’t expect some modern look. This is UO, but enhanced into a more modern feel.
At the moment, the game is frustratingly unbalanced and unfinished in respect to classes. I gave Shroud a huge thumbs down for it’s complete untruthfulness about what it was claiming to be, and for it’s horrific combat system. Aria has a solid, honest foundation- a heart.
While it needs a lot of work, it gets a THUMBS UP from me. To reach it’s full potential, which is considerable, It just needs a lot more loving care, and, no doubt, support to bring it to proper fruitation.
Not the worlds most encouraging review, I guess, but I do think that it will eventually work out it’s kinks- which is something impossible for Shroud, since it was designed by boobs to begin with.
If you don’t have the patience, wait a bit. If you want to support a game that really does feel like UO, take the plunge!