My Testing Experience (Feb 6th onwards w/end)
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I am not a supporter in the financial sense but i had been looking forwards to an opportunity such as this, eagerly. since Jul 23, 2017 so, although unable to provide financial support i will be instead pointing my survival, sandbox, mmo-ey friends towards this review. I have thoroughly enjoyed my whole weekend and played extensively. Thank-you to everyone who made this opportunity available. This also to paying supporters, for the reasons that ought be too obvious to mention!
Anyone TL;DR can skip this bit, it is but a humorous anecdote. On first joining the game i had no idea what to expect - i have a pathological disability regards spoilers; but seriously. I diligently learned very quickly how to gather branches, pick up stones, make axe and hammer, chop trees and mine stone. The rest followed on smoothly from there, or so i thought. After approximately 30 mins of building my house was complete, imagine my surprise when i could place nothing in it? Bwaahahah! At this point i decided i would have to put on my glasses and consult chat, i was having so much fun i did not want to waste any time figuring out something when i'd been doing just great. As if by magic, one extremely and particularly helpful player by the name of Gay Kiwi (who incidentally deserves some form of recognition for their entirely polite, patient and constructive input on chat the whole of Friday as far as i could tell; top marks Wiki!) had posted the answer and i immediately realised my mistake - i'd just built someone else's house. Ahhha hahahah. It was so funny. I had that much fun i was happy to carry on in the hope that someone awoke the next morning to find their house magically built for them.
It is at this point i should return to the more documentary - some pros and cons here i'd like to discuss.
I find it a) understandable and b) less problematic for test purposes than some seemed to, that there was no expiry timer on claimed plots creating a grey sea of plots with barely any branches or stone, just abandoned lots and abandoned carts. I did try to point out politely a few times on my 2nd night playing that this would not be the case in release as that would be preposterous and that this unfortunate predicament was not a fair estimation of the test. However, this was time consuming - where were you Gay Kiwi? Lol. People, generally, were helpful pointing people in the right direction of unclaimed yellow plots.
DEVS: In the middle of Heartwoods (i think i got that right?) was a glitched unclaimed plot. There was the plot on the minimap but no rubble there. This seemed to not crop up in chat so much after the massively helpful turn-your-cart-around patch and so it is possible you snagged it? Whilst i have you, is it possible to have the cardinal directions (4 of them) instead of turn around on your cart? I saw one person, rare i know i am sure there were others, who managed to drop cart between two closely spaced resources and got it stuck both ways. I know right? Anyhoo, just observations. Great job on the patch.
The Unity Engine. Well, its a marmite issue and you ain't never gonna find someone who hates marmite ANYWHERE near it without bad things to be said about it. There was plenty of that. I like Unity and i've not seen it used quite like this before. There was HEAVY screen tear. The game seemed to communicate well with Radeon Software so i ran it through that and this also helped i think. I wish i had taken a screen shot of my graphics settings. I have included my Radeon Settings. My PCs are all budget, they have muscle but are put together by me on a shoestring. I am by no means a rich man and i maintain 3 rigs in my home for our family. Please, respect my specs ha ha ha, i managed to overclock this punchy beast enough to play Anthem smoothly on lowest settings. I had it processing stable at 4.1ghz.
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To cap that off i thought the world was beautiful. I especially liked the accurate nature of the herbs (see what i did there). Then i came across the brain fungus and had a take-my-money-now moment. Next time around i'm rolling a mage and imbue my spidersilk with brain fungus. Hahahahah.
Anyway, i'm a full time Dad and i'm exhausted so, as long as i haven't broken any rules (its been a good 15 years since i used a forum other than this one) and some people find my post helpful and/or entertaining (there are more exploits, i went on an 8 hr hike for Saturday), survival tips, what to build to sustain your adventure time-ing etc; i'll be back with another post tomorrow!
P.S. Forum, loving this old school but progressive BB-esque board
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I agree, Gay Kiwi did a awesome ingame-wiki job
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i see what you did there
