Fifi's Feedback: Alpha 2
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Will be edited with time or in response to feedback
Possible Bugs & Alpha-ness
- It doesn't seem to be consistent whether running out of life / hard HP actually kills you or not.
- Trees do not appear to respawn as quickly as stone, if they respawn at all.
- Furniture placed inside of houses is not elevated to match the floor.
- Some enemies occasionally freeze and become unresponsive. This appears to be tied to spawning in the wrong location, as they often run to a more suitable-looking spawn point when they "unfreeze".
- Moving the inventory window over an unfinished building, then mousing over that building, then mousing over an inventory item while that building's tooltip is still active, breaks all tooltips until any construction (finished or not) is moused over.
Interface & QoL
- There should be a mouse input to immediately move an item from a container to another container. Shift+LClick is what I am most familiar with
- You should be able to type in a number to craft multiple of an item in sequence, or click "ALL" to craft as many as is possible.
- Holding down Left Click should cancel / ignore all interactables except for mobs (as left-clicking them currently causes the character to path to them and attack.)
- Empty corpses should no longer be interactable. As it is, even a single corpse makes it impossible to interact with heavy items (wood log, stone block) or handcarts in close vicinity.
Game Mechanics - General
- It should be possible to change your character's stats. At a Resting Spot, allow players to lower any one stat one point, but spend 1,000 Knowledge points for every stat point gained by doing so (e.g. a human needs 4,000 KP to lower STR from 18 to 17, giving 4 stat points. A wolfkin only needs 3,000 KP because that same change only gives 3 stat points.) You can spend those stat points while resting the same as during character creation.
- The above system would necessitate that all character stats are strictly formulaic from base stats, if this is not already the case.
- Hold-type status effects (snare, stun, etc.) do not seem to actually check a save roll; they land every single time. Also, the enemies who have these abilities use them constantly. This can and frequently does result in GER loops where your character gets up from one KO and is instantly stunned and killed again, wasting several minutes of time for no good reason.
Game Mechanics - Building
- Add Access Rights to Fireplace
- There should be a stockpile furniture item attached to all claimed plots. You can put heavy items (wood log, stone block) in there. The plot owner can consume items directly from the stockpile to build stuff on the plot, without having to drag them over individually. Any player can donate items to the stockpile.
- Allow Fireplaces to be put on raw ground.
- Allow furniture to be placed inside of a house as soon as the floor is done. (Currently, the house must be "complete" before furniture can be put on its floors and before a Fireplace can be placed at all.)
- Allow Fences to touch the walls of a house before it is finished. (Currently, a house must be "complete" before any cell its walls border can hold a Fence.)
Skills
- Word of Power: Recall: Allows the player to warp back to their home on the current planet, or to a starter town if they don't have one. This has a lengthy cast time and is interrupted by any spike damage (but not DoT like poison.)
Enemies
- Wisps are much too powerful for how common they are. There should be a second variation of Wisp that is much bigger and rarer, and is about as strong as the regular Wisp currently is. The normal Wisp should be substantially weaker (with adjusted drops if need be.) Compare Sproutling to Treant for a parallel.
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The wisps are incredibly easy, once you learn their trick.
They have an absorb shield. Put a fire totem out. Once the shields are gone and you stop seeing (+90 mana), unload with magic missile, fireball, magic missile... dead.I've 100% them. ^_^ Last ability is incredibly useful short range teleport.
They have 1150 evasion... so don't even bother swinging a melee/ranged/magic staff weapon at them.
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@Fibulator I'm not playing a mage and should not be required to invest heavily in magic for common overworld enemies. That's what makes it this character and not a different character.
I say this while acknowledging that the game is surprisingly playable for an alpha state (even "alpha 2") and that the game's actual content is likely cobbled together as placeholders to gauge whether the game mechanics work on a basic level (i.e. that damage, status effects, and enemy AI work at all, fairly or otherwise.)
This is why my suggestion is to make regular Wisps much easier (especially for non-magic characters) and add an elite Wisp variant that is either equal to or stronger than the current Wisp. The other Elite enemies are also easy with particular tricks - even my melee character is able to cheese Treants by running around them in circles with a magic staff.
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I'm personally fine with some critters being easier for a caster (or fighter... or tank or archer subtype) to kill and some being impossible w/o certain magical powers or melee proficiency. As long as it makes sense within the context of the game universe. Could be that my little mage will need to find a basher to team up with to achieve some goals, or my archer will need to find a mage to get into a cave sometime. Life is like that.
That's my 2 lire in case anyone is trying to say we all need every mob to be defeatable by any solo player with the appropriate skill set.
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@PeachMcD It's more important to make sense in a gameplay perspective. By all means, elite enemies, rare hunts, and themed dungeons should be more or less appropriate for some character builds. One example I've heard mentioned on this forum before is a fire-themed dungeon like a volcano being unsuitable for a character whose skills all do fire damage.
The final game's world will be quite massive, and everybody will likely be able to find a route that works for their character's abilities, especially if the generation engine intentionally selects neighboring biomes that are sufficiently different from each other.
But in this alpha, the Heartwoods was not a plausible biome to sidestep. Elementals were confined primarily to the actual ruins in the center and were thus very avoidable, but the Wisps inhabited a good third to half of the continent surrounding these ruins, and were not avoidable when traveling from one side to the other.
There was at least one Wisp every two screens which rendered the game unplayable as soon as they began attacking, because you can't pick up heavy items or seize your handcart while in combat (which is itself being addressed.) They had a bad habit of gravitating around house resource nodes like heavy stone spots.
Even a well-developed mage would not be able to handle several Wisps at a time, which was fairly common, because the Wisps would stun too frequently to upkeep the DPS needed to outpace their healing. (I presume the "save roll" formula is not finalized either.)
One of the criticisms of this game - and of fantasy in general - is that magic has too many advantages and non-magic has too many punishments. One of these punishments is these stupid Wisps.
I'm perfectly fine with the occasional elite Wisp, akin to a Treant being an elite Sproutling or a Greater Elemental being an elite Elemental, but the regular Wisps being such gross wastes of time - even for a mage, who has to wait for their stupid shield to go down and then hope their mana holds out until kill - was the single most frustrating part of this alpha for me.
Gatekeeper enemies should not be this common, but I suspect they won't be, due to the much larger worlds and more varied biomes in the future.
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@FibS
There are a ton of melee abilities that "never miss".
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@Fibulator I will try again when I next get a chance.
