Release 6 impressions

Spells! Skills! Quests that actually complete! While I had a little trouble working out how to fight the bandits and that "on the road to Kingsport" actually meant "in a cave in the hills, same as last time", once I hit my stride, I was entirely chuffed by the world's new interactivity. (My last proper play was R4.)

Oh hey, maybe it's the colour change, but the female avatar's leggings under her chaps no longer seem to be stuck in uber-wedgie mode. That's good.


The journal's useful. I play perched on a bed, rather than at a desk, so making notes by hand is fiddly. I'd really like to be able to bring it up on the map screen though.

Dungeons. Initially, when fighting at close quarters in passageways, I kept accidentally clicking anywhere but on the target. The camera just seems a bot too close to the action, and moving it's damnably hard while trying to use the left mouse button to fight. This seems worst in the kobold caves - the bandit caves gave me enough room to move.

I also found myself running backwards through dungeons a fair bit due to similar camera/movement/facing direction awkwardness.

I had a lot of fun with the bandits, but I couldn't always loot bodies - am I right that you have to click on their feet?

Combat's really growing on me, and I love the spell and skill animations. Casting light seems to trigger an attack at the moment, as well as summoning my light ball.
I've got the conversation window neatly pinned to the bottom right, as it should be in accordance with tradition. I'm using tabs to separate out NPC chat when I'm trying to pay attention to it, but I really hate the way blocks of text are divided up. I presume this is a per-line character limit?

Area loading seems a bit slow compared to previous releases I've played, particularly in Owl's Head.


Owl's Head in particular still feels too big and as though there's too much player housing to trudge through between areas where I can actually do something. I'm getting lost a fair bit in towns, too. I don't mind mapping dungeons, but maybe some kind of self-filling town plan would be handy. Or a purchasable one.

The massive memory leak suffered by my i7-4770S system with 16GB of RAM and an Nvidia 750M graphics chipset seems to have stopped! It's plagued every other release I've run so far, so this is a Good Thing. The fans thrash when I'm running the game, but that's fairly routine with this graphics chipset. (All-in-one PC with dual graphics. I have to manually patch together graphics drivers due to lack of OEM support.)

I ran into Violation's very helpful Q&A session in Owl's Head. Very helpful, and both the plug for Avatar Radio and the view from the Tesla Moon Tower were great. Social aspects are still very strong, even for someone like me, who feels a little shy about starting to socialise. Because of that, I welcome the opportunities presented by people coming into popular areas to teach and start group interaction.

I'll update/comment on this if I have more to add later.

 

Yes, I found the "Tab" key, which automatically selected an opponent, to be very useful in those circumstances.

Would be nice to have some additional command choices as well : Such as "Target Nearest Opponent", or "Target Only Live Opponents".

 

Thanks for the tip!

I got to do some proper party adventuring, which was fantastic. Hopefully tab will resolve the targeting issues I had in group combat.

 

mine are 50/50 what they have accomplished is very good but it's a bit unclear as to how far they want to continue design everything so that everything is spectacular.. certainly some parts of it will be.

combat 1/10
crafting 6/10
lighting 10/10
lost vale PvE content 6/10
house selection 9/10
village lots 5/10
emotes 7/10
party interface 1/10
chatting and communication 5/10
movement system 7/10
performance 8/10
GUI interface 8/10
sound 8/10
journal 1/10
animation 2/10
animals/creatures 2/10
monsters 2/10
creature pathing/ai 2/10

What I think they need to work on:

Them continuing to re-thinking the whole zone instance thing and how they are combining POI hex and Property hex and general hex to make this world a living place. How are they going to make the zones feel right and large enough so that we don't feel like the content is too compartmentalized. I think some people want to see some areas comprised of multiple smaller zones, somehow.

Animations are still really really bad IMO, but at least there is very little spastic behavior. I think they need to just get some people outsourced that can do this faster or something - I thought there was lots of professional stuff in the unity store with people selling this kind of thing??

What they have is really nice, I can't wait to see more diversity that time and development will bring.