Season Wonderland Feedback Thread

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Season Wonderland Feedback Thread

Please place feedback for Wonderland here.

[King V]

I'll start with the positives first, then move on to the negatives.

Plot - This was one of the most well-done parts of the game, and being a plot focused game, it was expected to be. There were very few actual plot documents, but you could get a sense of the story from talking to NPCs, searching through bedrooms and examining things like paintings, statues, etc. The story was there, and you had to put it together. The atmosphere was also very appropriate, although I question the reason behind putting the castle in the middle of the desert. Overall, good job on this aspect.

NPCs - There were a lot of NPCs in Wonderland. I felt this was mostly a good thing, since different NPCs gave different plot information, and you could get a significant amount of plot by talking to them. NPCs could help you or hinder you based on what you were trying to do, and it felt nice having the NPCs there when you couldn't find any players to interact with. The only thing I didn't really like about this was that having so many NPCs around makes it a bit more difficult to murder, like near the end when there were guards in almost every room, but this game wasn't murder-heavy to begin with, so it wasn't a big deal.

Leveling/Magic - Not sure how to feel about this one, so I'll put it in the middle. I feel magic wasn't explained well enough from just the introductory rules. The whole mind actions = charging magic should have been explained better, and the spell rules seemed a bit iffy because of how flexible you could be with them. The system itself looks fine, but needed a lot more explanation, since I had a lot of complaints when my spells weren't doing enough in the battles before the rules were fully explained. And speaking of battles...

Fighting - I didn't have any real problems with the system, just how the fights were organized. In the card dungeon you have to go through to get your character weapon, you have to fight 3 guards at a time. All wearing armor. With weapons. And able to use magic. And you need to fight through this 3 times in a row with the fights continuously getting harder. This took me 2 whole days to get through, playing almost 10 hours a day. Getting through 1 combat area should NEVER take this long. The final boss battles were paced significantly better, but long and tedious combat areas requiring multiple days to get through should not have existed. These also drag down the response times for other players since turn-based fighting requires a lot of calculation.

Map - I feel like this was intentional, but the map was enormous, and rather difficult to navigate as well. The room links, while entertaining, didn't really specify locations, and this led to some awkward situations where I couldn't find the front gate, and it turns out it was just a link I had missed because I thought it was part of the room description. Some links also led to places that weren't really specifically discussed in the room description, making navigating the map even more difficult. There were multiple shortcuts and different paths to various places as well, which just made the map larger and even more convoluted. The central areas were often hidden behind a lot of hidden passages, and each of them led to many different plot areas, making movement a little tedious. This also had the downside of making it so that it was very difficult to meet other players, and player interaction was quite limited. Overall the map had a lot of quirks, but not very good organization.

Shrinking/Growing - I like the concept, shrinking so you can explore small rooms, growing so you could reach higher places. It's just combined with the huge and difficult to navigate map, and limiting the number of shrinking potions and growing cakes, this system felt a bit tedious every time I had to go find growth cake to go back to original size. It also created even more map issues since you could only use some shortcuts when small, and you couldn't use certain paths when big. I think this is a good system, but it'd be better on a different kind of map.

Keys - I didn't feel like these were a good idea. As the player who ended up with almost all the keys, I could essentially lock and unlock doors at will, which both made it a bit unfair to the rest of the players, since there was a time I locked all the ways into the castle, and made it more difficult on myself due to having to carry all of the keys around. I couldn't just drop them or hide them either, because some new areas required old keys in order to open the locked doors there. I think a more creative way of getting doors open would have been better, but seeing how many keys existed and how many rooms were locked, it would be fairly difficult implementing this for all locked doors. Combined with the strange map organization and how old keys remained relevant, these were a real pain all the way up until the end.

Murder/Trials - While murdering was allowed in the game, the whole gather blood for the Vorpal Sword motive felt extremely weak, since you could just as easily wound players, or even ask nicely for their blood, instead of killing them. NPCs made it more difficult to conduct murder in their presence, and the motive came very late into the game where most people had already gotten wrapped up in plot and could much more easily win via plot than murder. Difficult to judge this category since a murder never happened, but I feel like a lot of things were created that made murder very difficult in this game.

Overall, this was a nice game. Good plot content, and lots of exploring and quests that could be done. Combined with how many different endings you could get, I really liked Wonderland. There were a lot of minor issues that added up, but overall the game was solid.