Quoting: GuestOn topic of Zoria every time I try to try the demo I get a "There was a problem adding this product to your account - try again later."

Hey, sorry for the delay in response, this is a strange issue. Could you please specify the platform you're trying to get Zoria from (Steam or GOG)?

Regarding bugs in general - as far as there is a way to reproduce the bug, we should generally be able to fix it. We had a massive headache with a seemingly random combat lock that happens in the new demo, fortunately one of our players was able to record it and we got an idea where to look for it from that point.

Despite being a small team we take pride in our game and do everything possible to eliminate bugs that alter the experience of players.

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Thank you so much for your thorough response and details Pangaea, they are of great help.

Regarding DRM - we'll find a way. Would be awesome to be on GoG, thank you for your support, but no matter the outcome, we will find a way for everyone who want to play the game, to be able to do so on their terms.

Regarding the skeletons encounter - well, judging from your description, apparently you did all things right. And we are surely not supposed to be the judges of how well a player does in combat - we did these encounters so many times, any encounter should be easy for us, but we don't want a game with only one good approach. So yeah, we'll take a good critical look a the difficulty of some encounters. We like a good challenge, but not to the point where only one or two solutions are available - that's making the player do what you want, exclusively, and we're not fans of that.

Regarding combat in general - we're trying to strike a balance - we feel some absolutely great titles suffer from sluggish combat, just as you mentioned, for even the most simple encounters. But we're not great fans of RTwP either, so we're going for a middle ground, Turn Based but faster, more fluid, sacrificing some complexity in favor of faster encounters. The combat as it is we feel it's in between JRPG simplicity and DnD super-complexity, allowing it to feel snappy, fluid but not boring. We're exploring some more abilities that take advantage of available mechanics: line of sight with destroyable elements in the environment,and even abilities that pop-up temporary barriers, positional bonuses (100% critical chance for attacks from behind), and some other ideas, but won't go too far with combos and such.

More than 2AP ... hmmm ... interesting idea ... yeah, sure, but it will cost. Keep in mind the game has a base, and base management. I'm quite sure it will involve some building upgrades at some point to be able to unlock all the goodies :) This DEMO is technically a mission - you set up your party (choose your followers from the available - not wounded and recovering) and go on a mission. The party changes with each mission (or not, depending on choice and availability). So upgrading the characters will be a matter of XP gained, but also facilities that provide upgrades to players.

Pre-combat positioning is being considered for a while now - we just haven't reached a final design - whether it will be generally available or available as a passive on certain classes - or an upgrade to the commander (the only character always on the mission).

Thank you again for your awesome feedback,
Stefan

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Hey everyone,

Thank you all for your comments and feedback. To answer a few issues discussed here:

At times the camera would also zoom in very near (probably due to ridges in the land), which made it a bit hard to see, and it was a little awkward to use the mouse right button to re-orientate the camera. But maybe there are more keys for that which I didn't happen to press.

Camera is still a work in progress, we're always looking for ways to make it better, so there will be improvements as the game progresses.

Does the "King's AoE defence" or some such named skill not do anything in the demo btw? I picked it, but it was always greyed out during combat, despite the other chap being inside the dotted down AoE.

Every class has a unique resource, that builds up as you perform actions during combat and some abilities require that resource to be used. This mechanic replaces the "cooldown" and insures players don't limit to 1-2 strongest abilities and use their resources wisely. So, some abilities, for all classes, become available after some time, after performing a few attacks. In this case I think you're talking about King's Resolve, that costs 25 Loyalty. Loyalty is generated by "Attack" (+20 Loyalty) and "Vanquish thy foe"(+30 Loyalty). So, after 1 "Vanquish thy foe" or 2 "Attack" you should have built up enough resources to use ""King's Resolve". This may seem tedious and slow at first, but as the encounters become more complexit helps balance the combat and push a tactical approach to each move.

I hope you plan to release it on GOG, though, because if it's another Steam/Humble bundle release, I won't be able/willing to buy it. That thing will not be allowed on my computer.

As a developer I can tell you one universal truth - we would release it on everything including a smart fridge if we could. More markets = more sales, and for an indie developer sales are almost never "good enough" :). Exclusive releases only happen because of money involved, and as bad as it may be in some cases (I'm certainly not a fan), some small developers actually rely on that money to make the game. Big developers have no excuse whatsoever, but that's another discussion.

With that said, we will release on all platforms we can, including consoles, and any store that will have us - keep in mind GOG selects its releases, and many developers are being turned down by them, so it's not a matter of whether we want to, but whether they will accept us. What can keep us from releasing at the same time, or at all, on certain platforms / stores is the amount of work involved, since we're a very small team, or their process of accepting releases - GOG (as a store) and PlayStation (as a platform) are the hardest, Nintendo Switch is the hardest to port to because of the limitations.

Short answer - we'll do our best, we want to make the game available everywhere we can, when it's finally complete.

Regarding difficulty, we made some improvements to AI in the latest patch and still analyzing whether this inadvertently pushed the difficulty level higher that we would want it. In this case there probably will be a small patch to fix this specific issue. The packs that gave you trouble are harder than the rest, but should have been defeated within 1-2 saves, max, as long as all points are spent and all abilities are unlocked to about level 5 - that should be easily achieved by that time. We'll look into this issue.

Thank you all again for your feedback,
Stefan

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Hey everyone,

This is one of the developers of Zoria: Age of Shattering. First, a thank you to Liam for the post, we're quite a small team so it's rather hard to be everywhere at once.

To answer the raised issues:

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Quite possible I missed something because it seemed kinda brief, but after a few combats I wasn't able to open some doors they had around the place.

Well, the demo is about 2 hours long so probably something went wrong. We would love to know where exactly did you get stuck, maybe it's a bug or maybe a design flaw if it was not obvious enough what the next step is.

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But the Prologue wasn't, so I added that instead.

There will be surprises for people that played the demo, that's for sure, it's not just a repack of this demo, we're adding some interesting (we say) stuff to it.

Any other questions or issues, we'll check the forum out as much as possible, or you can try directly on our Discord channel. If you encounter any issues, would be great to hear about it, the sooner we know, the sooner we can fix them. We try to cover the time-zones as best as possible, but since there's only 3 of us, there may be some delay in answers sometimes.

Thank you,
Stefan

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Hey everyone,

Thank you all for your interest in the game, I'm one of the developers. It's great for us to see the game sparked your interest. The game has been in development for 2 years+ now but working more on the systems than on the looks there wasn't much to show until recently.

A few notes on what's been said so far:

Unfortunately the November launch date is an error and we're sorry about it. We made a press release stating clearly it's coming out spring 2020 when we launched the page. It was a mistake in setting up the page that we are correcting as we speak, it only takes some time for Steam to reply. But it was all in good faith as there is a DEMO that's being released around 15-20th of November and give everyone a chance to play - hence the error.

Regarding the combat, yeah, the combat happens in situ. We tried the pre-staged arena style but gave up on that concept a long time ago. The player moves in real time around the map and enters a combat phase when encountering an enemy or group. Patrolling enemies can enter the combat if they wander around any of your followers making what seems an easy combat more difficult or surprising.

Regarding the world we're putting a lot of work into making sure it's rich and interesting both story-wise and scenery.

Zoria: Age of Shattering is inspired by a number of games (old and new) with an important one being the XCOM series (very old and new) - so setting up your party, choosing the followers you take with you on each mission as well as the management of the outpost (buildings, upgrades, follower health) is as important as what you do on the map - 2 players can have very different experiences playing the same game. Also, each class has different abilities than can be used on the map making party composition very important in what areas a player is able to explore or the path it uses.

Thank you again for your interest, I will do my best to stick around as much as possible and answer any questions. If you want to talk to us directly, we've just set up the Discord server - https://discord.gg/k3fPxX8 [External Link]

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