Season Re: Feedback Thread

[The City [EclipseZwolf]]

Season Re: Feedback Thread

Post your feedback regarding the season here!

[Daiwa Scarlet]

Bleh... this still bothers me so I'll give feedback to get it off my chest. I'll try to keep this feedback constructive. For a first game, this was... perhaps better than some others... but I still can't say it was very enjoyable... This game promised a lot, but it did not deliver. It was a frustrating experience for me as well as a few others. Since I always go for the story, I'll start from that.

Sadly, the plot was quite sparse. What little there was, had been locked behind miniboss fights, role play, and puzzles.
The coin puzzle was interesting, if a little vague. However, the way you handled what happened prior to the puzzle was fairly unpleasant. If a player unknowingly does something that sequence breaks the puzzle, penalizing them is not the solution. You should simply explain that searching area x would ruin something for you and ask them to stop, not shove a 40 minute timer on the action without any explanation of why. It was a perfectly reasonable action on the player's part, even if the host did not expect it.
The role play was not handled so well. The main npc we had for communication was a jerk. We ask a question and he either breaks down and refuses to answer or laughs at us for not having the knowledge that a developer does. Apparently he is supposed to be a nice person... on paper... but he really wasn't. This then extended to a majority of the other major npcs, except that there was plot reasons for them all being depressed and moping around. However, plot reasons still do not make them pleasant to interact with from a player perspective. We had just spent about three days searching the map and gotten through a puzzle to find the rumored npc that could help us... except he ends up being a racist jackass that wont actually do his job. Racism is a questionable component in these games even if it is fantasy racism. With all the npcs requiring an arbitrary friendship meter and being unpleasant otherwise, most players just did not feel like interacting with them despite them being necessary for the game. This ended up with sova being the only player with any relevance at the end of the game.
This brings me to the next point of minibosses. They could use some refinement because most of them felt overpowered. Invincibility is just not a fun mechanic to deal with (personally I would avoid it for both players and enemies). If you need something to be strong, sticking 50% resistance, an armor pool, or a larger health pool on them should be fine. A certain player gave up on the game after realizing that they were essentially an “ornament” that could not actually do anything in the fight while the npcs walked in and one shot the dragon they couldn't even hurt by shooting in the eye. The action system needed some work and the host should stop assuming/twisting the actions of the players. If something is unclear, then ask and clear it up. Enemies need to stop making their actions based on player action. That makes them impossible to fight against because they essentially all have mind reading and will just avoid any mistakes. Being “AI” controlled means that they should make the occasional mistake so players can actually act on them. One shot attacks also feel horrible to play against. Sure one punch man can one shot everything in lore, but he really shouldn't in a game. This could be avoided in various ways like not targeting fatal points (like the head).

The main impression of the game is that it was inconsistent and inflexible. One second we are told that we can do anything and the next we are denied everything. We spent days talking about potential classes that we would like in a place where you could read it, but then you deny everything we had planned when we actually start picking classes because your idea of the class differs from our own. After spending an hour getting denied every class, you just delete the kusarigama I want to play with on the basis of it being so unique that the enemies had not been programmed to deal with it. Meanwhile sova had just gotten a fisherman class and was using a fishing rod as a weapon (which should really just be a numbers tweak for chain weight compared to fishing line if you really wanted a programming argument). We are roleplaying a game world, why is programming restrictions even an argument. This was also supposedly beta testing so why would they remove unique weapons that they should really be testing? I was also just trying to have fun with a unique weapon that anyone else could also get. What real reason was there to deny that? You really shouldn't give random reasons that you made up on the spot. At that point, they felt like an insult because of how unreasonable the reasons were. Frankly, if you had been more flexible and allowed multiple starting weapons, that would have saved hours of frustration. Not all classes have one weapon that defines them. You said that we were assuming a lot about classes, but they were all quite reasonable for us (until we got somewhat desperate trying to get a class/weapon combination that we wanted). The reason we have to “assume” anything in the first place is because we do not have the information provided otherwise like a normal game would. There is no manual in game for what is possible or not, so making fun of players for not knowing is quite questionable. Making fun of players in general will just demotivate them and might have contributed to the lack of participation by the end. We are playing this for fun and that had been denied quite a few times.

There were quite a few times when Lucius had to inform the players about things they needed to know because it was not available in game otherwise. This is not... good game design... Throw a document in with the necessary information if needed be, but having it all revealed on the whim of the mocking npc is questionable. Basically all the minibosses had a gimmick... or so I would hope... because they felt mostly impossible otherwise... but players needed to know what that even was so they can plan.