15 first minutes feedback (R40)

Hi.

I tried the game for the first time today. I’ll try to list everything from the start.

- On the free trial download page it’s not clear that you have to click on "tgz" to download the archive for the Linux launcher; it looks like it says the file is a tgz file, but when I downloaded I saw that it was a deb instead. I actually saw a post from someone asking how to install a .deb on his distro because they thought the launcher was only available as a .deb.
- The tgz has a generic name that does not contain the name of the game, same for the directory in the archive.
- (On the positive side, the launcher worked perfectly on my Gentoo Linux 64 bit system. The game ran well too.)

- The video that plays when you launch the game for the first time has no subtitles. When I pressed ESC to see if there were options, it stopped the video instead of showing a menu. (To be honest I didn’t mind as the video made no sense to me.)

- I wish the character creation tool had "random" buttons (one on each page?) and more choices of predetermined face types and hair styles.

- The text size is a bit too small in general. I found by accident how to increase it in the chat box in the bottom-left, after looking in the main options and in the chat box options.
- When you play in first person it’s impossible to take the book in the tutorial since it’s impossible to drag and drop it on your character.
- Instead of having to press a key to switch the camera mode, it would be nice to be able to use the mouse wheel to go in and out of first person mode, like in WoW.
- When in first person mode, pressing the right mouse button to rotate often makes the view suddenly jump to a different position.

- The framerate is too low. It’s good at the very beginning of the game (seemed like 60 FPS on "good" settings) but then in the tutorial scene with the fire ("bow" route) even going down to "fastest" it was still stuttering. I have a Core i5 4690K @ 3.9GHz, a GTX 1060 6GB with the proprietary nvidia drivers and 16 GB of RAM so I expect better (and won’t play a stuttering game at less than 60 FPS for hours).
- The graphics are decent, but the running animation of the avatar is too stiff and unrealistic.
- The music volume is too high by default.
- I couldn’t hear footsteps when running (even after lowering the music volume). The game was very quiet with almost no sound.

- I entered the burning house, talked to the girl and agreed to help her, then she went down the stairs in a strange stuttering slow motion. I double clicked on the bed to see if it somehow could be interacted with, and the game made my character go to the other side of the bed and I died in the fire. I went to the ankh, went back to the house, when I got on the first floor the game told me the girl was now following me, but the girl was nowhere to be found.

- The game tells you to use wasd to move even when the key bindings have been changed to something else.
- The game ignores my "é" key when I try to bind it to an action.

- The character on the bridge starts running towards the skeletons before you have the time to read what he said.
- I crossed the bridge without shooting at any enemy and when I reached the end the game told me great, now talk to the guy again, but he was still busy fighting on the other side.

Then I stopped playing.

Edit: added the "é" key binding issue.

 

I really like the idea of them doing proper passes on the New player experiances.. but i honestly feel they need to actually have someone they know, run through it with no assistance, or while they watch. Instead of going through it themselves thinking its all easy and working fine.

Keep at it guys.

 

That sucks! I wonder if that's a "server first" death. Seems pretty unique.

Achievement:
Died in first scene while trying to sleep in the burning house of strangers.

 

Good (but unfortunate) feedback.

 

Agree... an excellent point by point walk through.

I really don't know why pathing works the way in Unity that it does for certain interactable objects, but this certainly hilights a big downside of how it works.

Is there any hopes for improvement or is that all based on the Unity side of the engine?

 

This is not necessarily a Unity engine issue, pathfinding can be coded and tweaked.

 

Fantastic feedback @Gargooyle. I loved it, sorry I had to laugh though because it is such a perfect situation showing worst case scenario that should not happen and also that there is much work to do in development. But never fear your feedback was amazing and will help so much. *cheers* and if you come back please friend me any time and I will show you some things that are really fantastic and not quite so broken. I am Majoria in game.

 

Thanks everyone, I’m glad you think it was good feedback even though it was mostly negative (and I didn’t sugarcoat it). I’m not giving up on the game just yet; I’m planning to play more during this free weekend. I will avoid the first person view and try to follow the game’s instructions more closely this time.

 

Indeed. The Character Creation should have a randomization feature. And the players should be able to choose what to randomize, from the Avatar's face details to hair and skin tone and eye color.

I reported it as a bug.

 

Great feedback. Welcome to SOTA, Gargooyle!

 

This is very good advice. Frankly sometimes I have read dev responses on starting quests that sounded a little too dismissive as if the issue was with the player and not the quest.

But this is make-or-break stuff. I 've been a PC gamer for 30 years. I often quit games that are broken or don't speak to me in a half hour. The new player experience is critical for player retention.

I'm really glad to see new players like Gargooyle providing critical feedback on that experience.

 

I played some more:
- Good news: by disabling the shadows and camera effects the game becomes smooth. This makes it much more pleasant.
- Bad news: the jumpy camera issue is still present in third person view. Sometimes when I right click it suddenly looks down. I don’t know when/why it happens. It is very annoying when it happens often.
- Charlotte reappeared in the burning house, but apparently behaved as if I had told her that I wouldn’t help her and I couldn’t make her follow me.
- I took the boat to the camp and the sound effects there were quite strange, as I could hear the children sobbing and almost nothing else even though there was a big wind. (Also one sobbing kid told me he was bored… not afraid or sad.)
- I met Emily and tried to tell her that Quincy was dead but she wouldn’t understand and kept telling me to bring news back from the bridge. I also tried to drag and drop the letter that she had written to Quincy on her but it didn’t work.
- I talked with the other woman at the camp who is IIRC Charlotte’s mother but she didn’t understand what I was saying and kept repeating the same thing which was a bit disappointing. Looks like the NPCs don’t understand anything that is not one of the clickable words?
- After a while I got to some town with plenty of player-owned vendors that I couldn’t interact with, which was annoying. I would have liked to find a normal vendor to sell my junk and make some money.

Something I liked is that when you go above the weight limit in your inventory, your character is slowed a little but not immensely like in Skyrim.

 

Yes!

 

Keep going!

Also FYI you won't go straight to Soltown in another release or two, there's going to be an area in between where you will have vendors that can take your wares. It would be nice if you can give another solid write up when that happens. Please.

 

This is a long standing issue with the Linux client, sorry. @Undone was looking into a fix which is why the previous work-around for the issue was removed but it seems that work has fallen by the wayside so we still have the bug but no longer have the work-around.

From this and the other things you mention it sounds like you've bugged out all the quests by quitting and restarting within the Battle of Solace Bridge scene. If you do feel like giving it another go and want to complete these quests it may be worth deleting the character and starting over.

Martin the Merchant is here. We've been promised the Linux client will get the integrated Sotamap that Windows and Mac users now have in the next release.

 

I see. I’ve read about the "Toggle cursor" feature in this forum and started using it. It’s more pleasant to move like in most games without having to keep the RMB pressed, and minimizes the number of times the camera rotation bug happens, so that takes care of this issue for me. (Playing with the cursor "toggled" introduces new issues, but nothing critical so far.)

I *think* that only Charlotte got bugged… I’ve since learned how to give things to people and I need to retry giving the letter to Emily. I hadn’t seen that there was a portion of the inventory window dedicated to giving objects.

BTW it’s not possible to create several avatars? At least in the trial it doesn’t seem possible.

Thanks. I don’t like that sotamap requires Google javascript… But I was able to find the entrance of the town and find a couple merchants today so it’s good now.

 

At present, no. It may never be a generally available feature, and when it does become available (it was a pledge reward) the devs have said that your virtue will be tied to your account rather than your character (so bad things you do on what character will affect how your other character is treated by NPCs etc.). I think this is a bad idea, because why bother creating several avatars all the same, but this is what we've been told. Change is always possible in this game, however.

In the meantime many people have just bought multiple accounts, I got my alts in Steam sales.

 

Urgh, that’s terrible indeed. Thanks for your answer.

 

The reality is its a currently capless system, so think skyrim without the level cap. You can literally do what you want up to how ever much you want with your main character. Personally i dont see the reasoning behind multiple characters other then role playing, with the current way they went about skills, as you can simply run multiple decks/sets and play literally any class at will.

Sorry to hear your still having issues, but the feedback is good for the dev's. ( although a lot of this stuff has been repeated already )