Hey All,
I’ve got about 65 hours in the game and figured I’d give some feedback on the week before release.
Pros:
- Soundtrack
- Visuals
- Sound design
- Class Identify/Feeling
- Lore adherence
- Mission design makes you feel like you’re actually apart of a war. Landing and walking past garrison troops holding the line is a really nice touch.
Cons:
- A bit grindy at max level/lack of feeling of rewards for playing at level 30
- Difficulty often doesn’t feel worth it
- The scavenger hunt aspect still needs tuning
- Lack of player guidance on different roles in the game and how their class fits into them
- Could use some more cosmetics. Like all those cool cosmetics you see in the art, loading screen, this very forum page. For example the veteran on the forum background. Would love those goggles or gasmask or chest. I know some form of that chest armor is in the game as I’ve seen that neck medallion on NPCs in the crafting cinematic. You also see garrison troops wearing some of this gear.
Overall I give it a 8/10 game. My main advice is that I would like to see some refinement on the “exploration” aspect of finding things. Mainly because people like to go off their own and do this and end up dying. While others want to rush through the map or don’t care about it. So it creates some friction inside of pug games. For scriptures and grimores, I think it would be interesting to see an item that takes the spot of a curios that tracks psychic energy. It works similar to the plague scanner. It has its own stats but it doesn’t have a primary stat as its primary stat is the ability to track psychic energy and point the way towards scriptures and grimores. The other suggestion I have is that I think you should put something in the tactical menu (tab) that tells you how much of the maps crafting materials you have found. To help prevent people from just aimlessly wandering without feeling rewarded. I’d also like to suggest you either increase the amount of materials you find in a map or split up the current amounts more. People will be going around exploring, you know that for certain. Its better to make sure they’re consistently finding things while exploring. Rather than having 3-4 drops each through the entire map and the players spend a majority of their time wandering around and not feeling rewarded. Also makes it feel way less grindy.
Next thing I’d suggest is help players understand how to play the game better. I had this same issue in the Vt2 series. But when I see other people play, people don’t seem to understand the concepts and how to be “good” at the game. Your games a hard, everybody knows this. You can see people get tilted and filtered a lot. That mainly stems from players not understand the “deeper” concepts of the game. Like how important dodging really is when fighting in melee. How important controller hordes are. How important it is to make sure that your team has a spread of the right roles in the game. How to work together. You do tutorials on HOW to do these things (basic and advance tutorials). But you don’t make it clear on how important they are in game. So players find themselves dying because they don’t realize what they’re doing is bad.
Last thing is I wonder if “advance” levels would be a good thing to add here. Where ok once you reach level 30, yeah you’ve reached maximum level. But you can still level up with exp. You don’t get any better gear or anything like that. Your character is at their “maximum” performance level. But as you get these advance levels, you can unlock cosmetics are certain points. Like ok level 50 you get a new frame. Level 100 you get legs. Level 150 you get chest. Things like that. That way exp is still somewhat meaningful at the end.
Future Suggestions
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Events Designs - I know you have some events planned. I have no idea what they are since they’re still in development. But some ideas for events. Each event is a timed thing and they have their own unique rewards in the way of cosmetic stuff. This can be done via a currency or drop mechanic. Careful with relying just on drops. Fo76 is an amazing game that you all need to look at to determine how to do events. One of their events was based around gathering in game “loot boxes” that when opened, have a chance of dropping unique cosmetic rewards. Well people didn’t like it because they couldn’t get what they wanted easily. So the developers put in a way to craft those loot boxes on a time interval (1 of each once a day) that was only available to be crafted during the event. You all may need to look into something similar.
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Event Suggestions - Some event suggestions. A “Pox Scavenger”. It looks just like the pox bomber. However it is holding a bunch of boxes/loot around itself. It still beeps and everything, but it will run away instead of running towards enemies. Killing it gives you an end of round special rewards during the event. Next suggestion for an event is “search and rescue”. You have the option of saving captured prisoners during the event that are found throughout the event. Give you special unique rewards (unique to that event) at the end of the match based on some kind of RNG. Use the same concept of rescuing captured players here and apply them to NPCs. After this, another event is a “Morningstar Defense” event where heretics are boarding the morning star and you need to defend it. You can change the playerhub a bit to help represent this danger. Like there’s a part of the morning star that has a hole blown into it and fire coming out of it. Guards are standing at it pointing their guns into the hole. Players can queue up for the event there or at the mission table. The other idea for an event I was curious about is perhaps some kind of “large scale” event. Where there’s a mission where its a big battle where instead of just 4 people, its 12 people playing together. Taking on maybe a huge horde or something like that. The final idea i had was similar to that one, but the players are doing the boarding. There’s some derelict/unresponsive ship that appeared in orbit. Players need to go board it and clear it out.
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Class suggestions
3a) Tech Priest - Blitz ability is some kind of deploayble. What that deployable does is determined by feats. Like the feats = you’re adding parts to it/configuring the deployable differently. Maybe it can be a deployable shield for cover. Some kind of healing/toughness regeneration aspect. Perhaps ammo or damage bonuses related. Active ability perhaps can be something damaged related where activating it the tech priest “speaks to the machine spirit” of the guns/weapons of the players around them, increasing their damage by x%. Main idea is the tech priest is more support focused.
3b)Veteran Scout - Unlike its sharpshooter counterpart, its more focused on CQC covert combat. Akin to the stealth class from VT2. You’ve got some choices here I think with regiments like Tanith First and Only.
3c) Votann Warrior - Or something like that. Would be interesting to see the Votann make an appearance. Looks like fist weapons could be an interesting unique weapon for them.