Basic mechanics. Campfire, fight, grind and camera.
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We need a lot of ingredients to improve things. Some of them are very rare. Therefore, we need to kill a lot of enemies. At the same time, some of the enemies are garbage, they do not give us what we are looking for. Because of this, how the fight is perceived is very important.
Collecting ingredients from monsters is obviously a basic mechanic. Ingredients are needed to improve things so that we can kill more difficult monsters and get better ingredients from them, and so on. But the fight feels really bad and is very long. The fight quickly turns into an unpleasant routine. Now I would like to avoid fighting and collecting carrots is much more fun. Bow hunting is now the most exciting thing I've found.
If the fight had been shorter in time it would have felt better, but I would have preferred the more complex mechanics. Standing still and waiting for a few minutes until the enemies die just by clicking the mouse button is very boring. The need to press the skill buttons does not save you from this boredom.
Campfire is a very important mechanic, but I ran into a problem. There are places where stones cannot be found. I can take them with me, but they are heavy. If I go after the ingredients that I get from killing monsters, there is a problem. Either I take stones for a fire and then I can collect very few ingredients, or I do not take stones, but then it is extremely difficult to play alone. The campfire feels like a great mechanic, but if the stones weighed less and the campfire burned for less time, the balance might be better. Now the game makes you put a fire and beat the monsters next to it. It is very difficult to use a campfire to move deeper into the territory. Perhaps the developers have pursued just such a goal and the fire works as it should. But if the goal was different, it may be worth working on the balance.
I'm sure camera position has been discussed many times. But I cannot remain silent. Now the camera position is very bad. This becomes a big problem if you go down. Downward vision is extremely limited and monsters attack you from behind the screen, you don't even see them. The upward review is slightly better, but not much better. Now I have to move very slowly and only upwards in order to be able to assess the situation and choose whether to engage in battle or not. If trees or stones limited the field of view, this would be understandable. Now my field of view is limited to the edge of the screen. In those places where there is no dense forest, it feels very strange. I'm sure the camera was made that way. It is simply impossible to make such a camera by accident and not notice the result. Considering how much we have to travel around the map and how often we engage in battle to get the ingredients, such a camera becomes a problem. Even if I want to kill a deer, I go around it from below. It doesn't feel like a healthy behavior. But I have to do so. Also, opponents appearing at the bottom of the screen often look oversized as they are closer to the camera. This causes difficulties in assessing their real threat.
Perhaps all of this was done on purpose. But what I see now and what I wrote about feels strange and uncomfortable.
Oh yes, a little addition. Can be used to make tree crowns transparent when the character approaches them. Right now, the only way to pick up an item above the tree is to move too far to the side. From other positions, even if you can see an object, you cannot pick it up. Which feels like a problem. It forces you to act in an unnatural way. If you have killed many enemies just above a large tree, it will be very difficult to take a reward from them.
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As far as campfires are concerned, I would suggest that they are just too hard to build. The stones are too hard to find. I can't imagine a real life situation where a person would have the wood and kindling, but be unable to start a fire because of a lack of stones. It just doesn't make sense. I have build many a campfire, and clearing an area around the fire is much more important than any stone. Using that many stones, actually makes the campfire into something more like a stove.
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That are very good ideas.
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@Woode
Campfires remain there for a while, which means that you don't need to create more than one when farming somewhere. For example, when I'm farming goblins, I'm building a campfire between some trees a screen away from the center-north fire mage and I return there after every rotation.
The only problem I see with the current system is when you're roaming with a low STR character because the stones weight a lot.
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I agree with you on these points. Also most isometric games give you the ability to pan the camera using E and Q. There should be alot of camera options for control.
I still feel fighting/hunting for ingredients only is going to become rather boring in the game. Any game where the monsters did not drop loot was always a fail for me.
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I play low STR characters a lot and I haven't found it to be a huge issue. I usually carry half the stones I need and find the other half + branches as needed. Where have you been that there are absolutely no stones? Along the way, if I find a house, I use their fireplace instead of wasting my resources on a campfire.
I've played melee, bow, and mage and haven't come across anything that takes minutes, although as melee against wisps I don't even bother since they are immune to physical damage. I'm curious what you're fighting and with what build that takes minutes.
The camera angle definitely makes you have to work around the issue and I've been netted many a times by goblins I can't attack since they are off-screen.
Items like trees and tents being in the way and not transparent is annoying when fighting since many times goblins hide in the tent and you can't see them unless you start mousing over the entire structure until you see their red outline.
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Okay, as far as Camera Angles go, I agree, they could be improved, however, as this is an Alpha, they simply may not have implemented camera panning as of yet in the design, that's all. That's my assumption anyway. There's no additional keybindings as of yet, which leads me to believe they are still working on a lot of the extra key functionality.
As far as Campfires go, I think they system they have works wonderfully. I've played characters with the absolute minimum strength you can start with as a Mage, and still I manage to carry 20 Stones and 20 Branches almost everywhere. yes, it limits what I can pick up, but part of the problem is more picking up too many useless items. Once you've picked up a few pieces of wolf meat and enough claws for maybe 2 or 3 necklaces, you really don't need to keep grabbing them. Same with plenty of the other items in the game. I have a huge storehouse of Reagents stockpiled in my house, like 7 chests dedicated to just Reagents, actually. This is in addition to outfit chests, food chests, and miscellany chests. My house right now looks more like a wharehouse. The point is, most of the plants your grabbing are very light, and stackable, you don't need to carry a ton of stuff with you usually, and in most areas, you can rely on getting the sticks and the stones on the way to an area.
Another thing I do, when going into an area I may end up doing a lot of hunting at, I'll throw down a campfire blueprint, and load it with maybe half the stones and branches it needs, so I have an easy quick camp in the general area I can finish as needed. Right now, blueprints don't expire, and I'd prefer if things like campfire blueprints that have been added to, didn't expire, or expired after a really long time based on what's been added to them. This is the same as a Hunter/Camper setting up a blind or roost in their favorite hunting spots, that is already stocked with necessities for their big hunting trip, so they only have to bring some stuff to keep the stockpile going.
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@kellewic
You have to account for the fact that right now the population is low and you're the only one collecting those stones. Looking how fast you go through arrows and how much they weight, it might be quite hard to solo pve as an 6STR archer in a zone without lots of animals.
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As far as the other issues the op had, I think that trees and view during combat are the most troubling. A tree just takes up too much space making it very hard to click underneath it. You only need to make the center trunk area clickable for a tree.
Getting attacked by someone off screen is very frustrating. I need to be able to get a wider view or something.
