New Player Feedback (Highvale Track)

P.S. My friends & me don't PVP and avoid it like a plague.
But honestly, PVP hasn't affected us at all in the online game.
The online community is great and many random players will stop and help with info if you ask

 

Okay, looking at one of the other threads just reminded me of this: Solace Bridge and Edvard! WTF? We just rescue this little girl, and then the game immediately wants us to hand this child over to some strange man we've never met before, who has a boat that could take the child to safety, but instead he's telling us to take the boat to safety and leave the child alone with him. WTF, devs?!? It is any surprise that when we do get to Soltown, the child is still missing?

Why not take her with us to the Outskirts? It might not be as good as Soltown, but she's obviously not going there anyway and there are already children there, and the bivouac is still safer than Solace Bridge itself.

Why not have her in Soltown with her mother when the new player gets there? Especially since by then, Edvard has gone back to Solace Bridge.

Why not simply give Charlotte some dialogue to establish that this guy is not some random pedo but someone she already knows and trusts? Still not a guarantee that he's not a pedo, but at least it would make leaving her alone with him into a sensible option.

Instead, the game forces us into doing something that most of us would never actually do in real life. Although, actually... it clearly wants us to do that, but now I'm wondering if it actually forces it. Since Charlotte is treated as a companion at that point, I wonder what would happen if we just ignored Edvard and tried to take her with us out the main gate instead of using the boat?

(Yeah, yeah, this thread has become my own personal monologue of commentary on the game. You should probably be glad I'm limited to here and can't weigh in everywhere else on the forums.)

 

The cats can climb shrubberies! At first I thought it was an adorable glitch that the cat was sitting on top of the flowering shrub, but while I was scrambling to remember the shortcut for a screenshot, the cat calmly stood up, stretched, then gently climbed down the shrubbery the same way I would a hill. That more than makes up for all the other problems.

(Though I still can't figure out how to tame a cat.)

 

you cannot. unfortunately, you can't tame anything you can't kill, and a previous dev decided to keep people from killing cats.

 

Wow. This game really doen't like Linux, does it?

The news about shared experience, which will bork my offline game even further, drove me to make one more attempt at playing online. I was hoping that if the population is as low as everyone complains it is, maybe I wouldn't have to deal with any live people. (I come to games to get AWAY from live people.)

So I went to back my first character, the online one I'd abandoned on the Isle of Storms when I found out there was no longer a real single-player mode. I figured, now that I know which settings to tweak to get the best performance out of my system, if I can make it playable even on release 64, then it should be playable enough in better future releases.

It wasn't remotely playable. Not so bad in the starting scene or tiny abandoned POTs, but unusable anywhere there were players or decorations. Took me three tries just to get in the front gate at Resolute, because the lag was so bad I couldn't get through the gate before it shut again.

But I'm enough of a stubborn masochist that I just couldn't give up. So I gave one last thing a try: shut down the Linux, and rebooted to Windows for only the second time in the months I've had this computer. I figured there would be a small improvement, perhaps enough to make it barely playable. I was never expecting more than that.

The difference on Windows is HUGE!!!

Sure, I still see other people running past me inhumanly fast -- I begin to understand why people were talking about crossing the whole continent in two minutes. (If anyone can do that, I consider it a failure of worldbuilding design rather than a benefit.) But I can still move myself at what seems a perfectly reasonable speed. Barely even had any lag when getting through the front gate at Resolute, or when nearing a devotional, things that would have slowed me to a crawl before, even offline.

Exact same non-gaming hardware. Exact same flaky Internet connection. I knew there were some issues with the Linux version, but this much difference is insane. I wonder how many new casual players (i.e., those without gaming computers) using Linux have given it a try and abandoned it because they weren't as stubborn or masochistic as me and didn't consider a game they're weren't yet emotionally invested in to be worth the hassle of switching back to an OS they don't like? I feel like there should be a warning in neon next to the Linux download: DON'T BOTHER. JUST USE THE WINDOWS VERSION INSTEAD.

 

*sigh* Just as I start to think it's possible to play properly, I get shut down again. I thought the forced-multiplayer only affected towns and the overland map, but that adventure areas were still supposed to be private when you were in private mode? Just got out of Highvale Outskirts with the online character, in private mode -- or what was supposed to be private mode -- and I could still see people running around and using the practice dummies. Couldn't see them while they did it, but could hear the sound effects. Watched another invisible person break open some crates that I'd hoped to get on the way out. I can't believe this wouldn't have been reported and fixed already if it were a "normal" bug, so I can only assume it's either (a) the way it's supposed to be, or (b) a malfunction due to my non-gaming computer that doesn't count as a bug.

Does anyone know if it's possible to migrate an offline Linux saved-game to the Windows version? Yes, I've read the migration instructions, but it doesn't say anything about cross-platform migration. If I have to go back to the offline version, with all its missing content, I'd at least like to keep the time I've already invested into it. [But really, I just want the online private mode to WORK. *whimper* Saw a post from a few months ago where someone mentioned how incongruous (a polite term) it was to be promoting autism awareness while simultaneously forcing players on the spectrum into multiplayer mode, and I just wanted to cheer the poster. Don't they understand it's also better for OTHER PLAYERS, neurotypical people with faster computers, not to have laggy antisocial me in their scenes?]

 

Nice game, i played it and it's awesome.