[POLL] What is your *overall* rating for this Pre-Alpha Release 4? [UNOFFICIAL]

Performance Optimizations: Worked fine for me, but honestly I had no issues with the previous iterations. I guess in the case of mass player gathering (such at the graviats RG commands when he drops in) it seemed to hold up better.

Overworld Map System: We are discussing this (to excess) in other threads but the summary of my view is that it is nothing more than a pull-down menu with isolated play areas. It completely fails to mask the fact that there is no cohesive world under it.

10 Scenes: We got a look at what some wilderness and dungeons will look like. Dungeons were WAY to cramped. Some areas of the hills were blinding for the tree density.

Combat: Honestly dont know why they put the resources into implementing it at this level. Didn't give us a single clue as to what the combat system is/will be.

Quests: You mean like the ones which couldnt be completed?

Loot: Seems reasonable

Crafting: See notes below

Player Housing: No interest whatsoever.

Parties: We REALLY need to be able to click on someone who is standing in front of us to chat, add them to party etc. Some peoples' names are too convoluted to type.

Mac / Linux Patching: NA

Swimming: Neat, other than I can swim faster than I can run.

One thing that I dont think has been mentioned but really needs to, is the concept of having a fighting weapon ready, SEPARATE from a crafting tool. It is REALLY REALLY REALLY anoying, time consuming, and carpel tunnel inducing to constantly have to swap a sword with a pickaxe while adventuring. Ditto for animal resources: If I have a skinning and/or butchering knife on me, just give me the skin/meat. DONT make be (again) swap out the sword and then back again.

 

Performance Optimizations - Moderate improvement, I could at least walk around in the main city, but it gave me motion sickness due to low FPS, so I had to avoid the city. Other areas were totally fine, as they were in previous release. 2.5/5

Overworld Map System - I wasn't as upset about it as a lot of other people, though it's not as nice as what they showed in the demos. It's hard for me to say how much this will affect play experience. 3/5

10 Scenes - I liked a lot of them, though I was surprised how small the dungeons were. 4/5

Combat - It was basic auto-attack as advertised. It was pretty buggy (party members becoming ignored by mobs, attacking with impunity through doorways, randomly attacking through walls with the staff if you double-clicked anything). Things also took a long time to die, but I hope that will change once we get skills. Two other complaints that I have to put in this category: 1) It was way too hard to find a weapon. We should just start with one. 2) The UI for combat was awkward. It was hard to double click your target a lot of the time, and it seemed like combat broke off if you moved out of range and you had to double click again, which was bizarre and made it difficult to actually move during combat. 2.5/5

Quests - All of them seemed to start at the guard's house, which I could not for the life of me find. Half of the city is player housing, there is no mini map, I couldn't find a thing. The parts of the quest I could get to were very clearly unfinished (as, apparently, were all of the quests). Poor showing on this, 2/5

Loot - The loot tables are, I hope, a placeholder. The "everyone gets loot" from a corpse is also a placeholder. So... I don't know what I'm rating here. The only thing I can rate is how hard it was to get to the corpse loot - it seemed you have to click very specifically at the feet of the dead creature to open the corpse container, making it really hard and awkward to get at the loot. 2/5

Crafting/Gathering - I didn't do much of this, but it was about what I expected. I liked how the trees fell over after being chopped. 4/5

Player Housing - No problems.

Parties - I didn't have any problems, though the UI needs to be friendlier obviously, and there is the issue of the monsters only attacking one member of the party. 4/5

Swimming - Worked fine.

Overall I'm going to say a 3/5. Combat, quests and performance were the big items, and they were pretty underwhelming, but obviously a lot of content went into this release.

 

Performance Optimization - seems to run fine on my high-end machine .. a little sluggish on my older machine. So no complaints

Overland Map - As a map geek from the old RPG days .. I like the concept ..I want and like to see the map. It just seems clunky and slow and I wish you could zoom out a bit.

Combat - awful .. but that was to be expected I guess. You have no indication of how much damage you are doing to an enemy.

Quests - Hard to find them .. hard to find the right people to interact with (is it just a guard . .is it a merchant . .is it an actual important NPC) .. and just unclear to interact. (Took me longest time to know just to say "yes" when Morton asks you if he can have your beer.
Honestly .. the worst part to me is the fact that the towns are like 80% player housing. Just a lot of wasted space/wandering.

Crafting ... still clunky. Just don't like it as a system. Way too tedious.

Player Housing - not interested .. I think that way too much time/effort is being put into it .. especially this early. Why is it important there are dozens of different housing models when the game mechanics themselves aren't fully functional?

Parties - didn't try

Swimming - didn't try .. but overall the movement is better.

Overall .. eh. It's early .. I like the concepts and looking forward to seeing it grow every release.

 

I rated a 3. Overall, I'm really happy with the progress of the game thus far. R4 was about what I expected and I think they delivered on a basic level what was promised. The 3 isn't meant to be negative at all. More a 'satisfactory' rating. R4 didn't exceed my expectations, it met them, and I do appreciate that. Job well done by the team. I'm excited for R5.

 

This is the first alpha release that I found to be very disappointing. The first glimpse at soundless combat was atrocious (for more reasons than one), the overland map was poor, the conversation system continues to be bad with little to no improvement, and the release was more glitchy for me than the earlier releases. I couldn't even alt/tab out of game without it logging me out altogether. I attempted to play this release twice for about 15 minutes each and gave up, in hopes that R5 will boost my confidence going forward.

R4 gets a solid "2" from me in this poll as it was easily the worst release thus far.

I very much agree with you!

 

My ramblings.


Graphics
I really rather like the graphics of the world in the game. The little added bits of the sea mist and dust trails make the world feel alive and as another said vibrant. The character animations and emotes I think have been done well. The character model needs a bit of work but im very happy with the overall effects. Just something to adhere your character to the world with less of a plasticity feel is needed. I liked the Forest scene in particular, and the lighting in the game overall is great.
Also seeing little folk running about around corners and in and out of buildings from what I think is a large distance gives the world some depth and life to me and I look forward to seating on my porch and seeing the world with movement.

Combat
We were given enough to know combat is in the game. I don’t think they have much more as of yet. I think they had got the fundamentals of combat sorted like the basic AI and animations working and damage being done and taken and as any proud parent wanted to show it off. To people thinking there should be all these combat mechanisms already in the game for their enjoyment at this very early stage need to learn some patience

Stability/Performance
I have a couple of machines I play on.
An old 6 year pc…core 2 quad 2.6 from memory…and a old GTX 275 graphics card and a newish AMD based laptop. The old pc actually ran the game better in R3, quite a lot so. I was thus happy to see the optimizations actually helped me personally a lot. I had to remind myself occasionally in multiplayer that I wasn’t in the offline version as it was running so smooth. It did get a bit stuttery at times in the towns if many people around but it was a lot better than before and if it remains as such I will be happy.

Conversation
I play a lot in the dark also im a lazy speller. I don’t think me and the conversation system are going to get along great. Also non English speaking people are going to be seriously stuffed. I can see what they are trying to do and I applaud them for it. But I feel they are causing themselves a mountain of headaches, and us.
I can see that if we just run up and get given a quest from a list or respond in a set number of ways, a lot of players won't take any notice of the story. They will rush through the game not reading or conversing with the lore. Having to have dialogue with the NPC helps I see to encourage immersion in the world but to be honest I don’t think I got much sense out of any I talked to. I was probably doing it wrong but I did try, I'm sure one even threatened to kill me.

Overland Map
I personally would prefer something with life and movement over a basic map. But if it was a very well-drawn old worldly map I think my preference would change again. We need some form of accelerated travel. The people talking about an interconnected set of hex's have to think about if they wanted to travel to say hex whatever, they would have to traverse all those hex's scenes. By the time you got where you were intending it would be time for bed and your backpack would be full to overflowing. A overland map system is needed but for the amount of time we will actually stay in this view the development costs shouldn’t be great I understand. But I feel it really needs some sort of love and im sure it will be given.

Housing
Basements I loved. I saw what I think was all of the ones you had out. I didn’t see the town large one storey one though. I see the floors are divided in differing ways. Is it going to be possible to put our own partitions up and make rooms within the basement to our liking? If so then this could make a great renting housing ability. Rent or give access to rooms in basements to others. This would make housing a more valuable commodity and give others a place to call home. Everyone wins. A lease agreement could be made and any termination of it by the landlord could cause all the occupants items to be boxed and stored in the bank. A box only take able from and not further accessible storage.

Overall
Im happy that they are getting out the aims of each of their release dates. If they carry on doing what they say they are going to do then they will get to where they are going. So im optimistic we will get a game we might moan about to begin with as it might be different to what we have been fed over recent years but in the end we will all be pleased.
4/5

 

I thought it was Great, Fantastic, I enjoyed myself immensely, Crafting, Making 10k gold, adventuring around with no cares in the World, auto rezing, Killing things...

Part of being a "Tester" is experimenting and being observant, not being critical about everything, as it is just a "test bench" model, not even finished yet...

If you would have brought the "names" out, you would have noticed a "dot" next to them that indicated how far gone you & your opponent was.

If you used the "features" given to you, you would have noticed that you didn't need to swap out your weapon for a tool, but the game does that for you, when you use the shortcut bar, so fighting/harvesting can go hand and hand. I found it to be a very cool feature.

The Forests are supposed to be dense, they are forests, you can walk through most of the tree's anyways, the ones you can't walk through are the ones you can harvest. As long as they have straight trunks, red leaves, and lighter bark, try chopping it. Spin your camera around to see if you get a better view.

Try using the mouse to move around, it takes a little practice, but it's very smooth.

Try "walking" through the dungeons instead of running, and use the mouse to move, the experience is a lot better.

Just my thoughts...

 

Thanks everyone for your votes and special thanks to those who left more detailed feedback! Keep the votes coming, as your feedback is vital to the Devs!

And for those keeping score of Poll result trends:
R1 - 3.84 average, 282 votes
R2 - 3.67 average, 123 votes
R3 - 3.67 average, 150 votes
R4 - 3.37 average, 95 votes (so far)

So while not a big change, it's still a downward trend with each subsequent release. Very interesting....but it's still early, right?

 

It's not so strange that the average go now during development. No matter what decisions devs makes there will always be some that don't like it and therefore will votes like this get lower averages the more decisions that are made.

 

Sadly I was one of the people that suffered from login issues with R4. That meant instead of 20-30 hours over the 3 days, I was able to log roughly 2 over several sessions. For me, it was the worst by far. R2 and R3 were much more stable and testable. I cannot rate it particularly high (or low) as I simply could not log in enough or reliably to test much of anything. (As a dedicated beta test who loves to find bugs, this one only allowed me to confirm two bugs that others found. Very disappointing.)

Performance Optimizations
I am glad this is being addressed and pleased so many people got better results. For those of us who had login issues, the optimization was very counter productive.

Overworld Map System
I will fly against the wind here, I liked it. I think it needs some work, but I like the idea. While I often crashed trying to enter or exit a hex, that was completely independent of the map idea. Further having played in games that took forever to wander from one area to the next only to be hampered by nuisance low level MoBs, the overland travel is much nicer.

10 Scenes
Only got to see a handful, but the big dungeon was nice. Spiderwebs, dusts, vapor, all made a nice setting. I liked it.

Combat
Not bad. Don't like the 30 hits to kill anything, needs sound etc. etc. BUT this is MMO combat, not twitch gaming. I thought it was just fine for a rough intro.

Quests
Did not test. Dialog interaction is still a bit glitchy IMO. And I am a sandbox fan, not a mission runner.

Loot
I liked the loot for the most part. I never killed a spider and got platemail armor. I like the take all loot option. I expect this to expand in the future.

Crafting
The crafting is coming along and I noticed improvements from R3. The harvesting was better than I initially expected. I would like to see more harvesting at each node and fewer nodes. Getting 2 logs from a tree is as silly as getting 1 ore from a vein. But, the harvesting was easy. Almost too easy. (Remind me I said that later, because as a crafter I wouldn't mind mats falling from the sky like rain.) After getting the hang of harvesting, I found the switch very easy. I like not having to equip a pick or axe, but rather just hit the hotkey and the character went through the animation. I am very pleased with this for this stage of development. In fact, had the harvesting not been so nice nor the crafting coming along, I would have dropped my rating a full point.

Player Housing
Same as before, fine.

Parties
Did not have the chance to test this.

Mac / Linux Patching
N/A

Swimming
A nice added feature. I come from a game were swimming was common. The animation for treading water is nearly identical. So, I am not impressed. For me this is as natural as walking in a game (or jumping). So, great to see it in, but kind of a "duh" for me.

Overall, 3 Not that it was terrible, but much was untested. Obviously if issues are not resolved, it would be a deal breaker to not be able to log in but for 1 in 50 times. Equally obvious, the devs will work on this issue; many people are already having more stability. I am still pleased with the direction, but want to see more than R4 allowed me to see.

 

I think the overall game is great, a 5 all day long. It is pre alpha and has a long way to go. If I did not believe in the game and what is being done, then I simply would not be here. The future is not written, even the Devs cannot see into the future, but what they are doing now will be part of our future for a long time.