Feedback from Weekend Test

Trug

First, I wanted to say thanks to the devs for offering this free weekend, it was an awesome opportunity to check out the game without having to worry about money. I know several friends of mine also checked it out, and I think you've got some new backers.

Now, on to the feedback.

The Good:

Love the sheer depth of the game, even at this early stage. PvE, PvP, city building, crafting, etc. Added to the insane degree of customizability with skills and talents, it honestly surprised me.
The knowledge system does a great job of giving you a reason to explore. I'm not sure if it's technically any different than having quest givers sprinkled around the map to encourage movement, but it certainly felt more natural and less artificial to me.
Unfortunately I didn't get much chance to play around with PvP, but I really like the karma system. It was fun to be able to flag up as the evil red named one and roam around looking for fights. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out in the longer test in February.
The building system works pretty well, and I didn't feel like it was terribly onerous to build a large house. That said, it would have been nice to be able to see a preview of a finished house before you place a building blueprint down. I actually liked the look of a much smaller house better once I saw one of my neighbors build one, but there was no way to know what they would look like until they were complete.

The Not-So-Good

Mostly my bad for not reading enough ahead of time, but I had no idea that the talents existed until Saturday. Might be good to include the talents in the tutorial the same way it already walks you through skills.
Being able to rebind the action bar keys would be huge. I'm very used to using 1-10 for MMOs, and it feels really clunky to switch to the letter keys. I'm sure muscle memory would eventually catch up, but it would be a nice QoL change to just be able to set them to whatever we like.
Targeting mobs is messy. I did finally figure out that I could right click to just swing away without accidentally looting things mid-fight, but it's still hard to pick any one combatant out in a melee. Some way to cycle through targets might be a nice feature.

Not a ton of feedback, and probably not anything you haven't heard before, but I wanted to be sure to get my two cents out there. Thanks again for the opportunity to test, and looking forward to seeing more in February!

-Trug

PeachMcD

@Trug said

Mostly my bad for not reading enough ahead of time, but I had no idea that the talents existed until Saturday. Might be good to include the talents in the tutorial the same way it already walks you through skills.

Targeting mobs is messy. I did finally figure out that I could right click to just swing away without accidentally looting things mid-fight, but it's still hard to pick any one combatant out in a melee.

for these, and thanks @Trug!

In just a few game-hours, I think I talked 3 or 4 new players through the 'how to add a talent preset and memorize it' procedure. That's a clue the devs should be hearing. That said, the tutorial is way basic at this point. It doesn't tell a new player HOW to do much, it just instructs them to try to do things - not even rewards for figuring the things out and doing them. Not sure whether that's the plan for the long run, but I'd be all the way down with working on a real tutorial w/other players tired of answering basic Qs in chat.

The melee mess is definitely a 'it is known' sort of thing. Complicated at the moment by the fact that close-range/unarmed mechanic is so buggy. Hoping they've have this straightened out for the next test.

As far as being able to rebind hot keys goes, I wouldn't hold my breath. Devs have resisted every suggestion of that sort so far. I'm not an experienced MMO sandbox player, so I don't know why the WASD movement thing feels so important to so many people. I just roll with the game as it is.

Thanks again for thoughtful & constructive feedback. Hope to see you in-game!

Kralith

Nice to see new backers

As for your "Good":
Nicely written and good suggestions.
A preview of all houses would be awesome.
We try to add them to the Wiki, but the zoom factor isn't anything, that support us in a good way, to get the houses on a screenshot.
Hopefully the Devs can give us some nice ingame 3D preview tool. It could have added to the Blueprint itself, before you place it, like pushing SHIFT shows the building in finished form and CTRL the building in finished form but without roof, if you release these keys, you see the normal blueprint (blue/red) on your mouse again.

As for your "not-so-good"s:
Good that you mentioned it, because some of them was already suggested and discussed in the past.

Adding Talents to the Tutorial would be for sure anything useful, totally up for that
Rebinding keys is a long time wish by Alpha-Testers, and they promised to add that - hopefully soon
The Targeting also was mentioned several times. In general i like the targetting system as it is, means that you need to have your mouse over the target to target it. But yeah, without this looting issue and also the overlapping problem, when someone is standing in front of the creature, would be awesome.

Trug

@PeachMcD said in Feedback from Weekend Test:

As far as being able to rebind hot keys goes, I wouldn't hold my breath. Devs have resisted every suggestion of that sort so far. I'm not an experienced MMO sandbox player, so I don't know why the WASD movement thing feels so important to so many people. I just roll with the game as it is.

For me it's not so much the wanting to move with WASD; the mouse movement feels natural enough since it's an ARPG-style game. I just want to be able to use the 10-key on my mouse hand to be able to trigger abilities instead of having to use QWEASDRTwhatever.

But like you said, if it doesn't change it doesn't change. It won't ruin the game for me personally, but I can imagine a lot of potential players being turned off if simple key rebinding isn't an option. Seems like something almost every game out there offers, MMO or not.

Trug

@Kralith said in Feedback from Weekend Test:

Rebinding keys is a long time wish by Alpha-Testers, and they promised to add that - hopefully soon

That's great to hear!