Feedback: Misc

[Mendel]

Graphics.

• Positioning. There are numerous trees and grasses that do not sit on the terrain properly.
• Brightness. There isn't a brightness/gamma control. The game, especially human and elf NPC models, are too bright, almost washed out. Since I have pretty weak eyes, this is a big issue for me. My monitor has no difficulties with a variety of other games.
• Target Box. The targeting box is frequently off the bottom of the screen. I play zoomed into 1st person view always, and short mobs are occasionally at my 'feet', leaving the box mostly off the screen.
• Text color. The font colors are often obscured, leaving the text difficult to read. Particularly, the mouse-over information for all buffs is almost unreadable. The text color issues continue to the target box, especially when the target box appears over the sky.
• Text Rendering. Text in motion is awful. There's lots of pixellation as the text moves around the screen (via a target box, or the speech bubble), making it nearly impossible to read. Other games with visible overhead names don't have these issues. This needs some real work.

Combat. Despite the recent changes, the combat system is a button-focused action combat scheme. The character doesn't perform any combat action without user input. The added delay just makes the button mashing a tiny bit slower, and still a Sword sequence of 1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5-1-6-repeat will mindlessly defeat most every mob.

Also, the new delay only appears to affect skills in the same bar. It appears to be no 'delay' between using Bar 1 Ability 1 and Bar 2 Ability 1. It only appears to be 'horizontal', but I've not had much time to experiment more with this.

Landscape. Overall, this is a major plus for Project: Gorgon. The landscapes are very well rendered, and factor well into the 'horizon' view. Only near the edge of maps do hills become unrealistically steep (and no one has ever tackled things like 'vision tracking' (adjusting the camera to follow the slope) or movement speed on a hill. Absolutely no one runs up a 60+ degree slope, and running down or across the same slope is almost as fatiguing. (and dangerous). The lakes are great to swim in, with very nice submerged terrain. I'd love to see some additional effort being put into the water (diminished light, murkiness, lots more plants, etc). The shadows of trees on landscape (and lakes) are great, playing optical tricks. I would love to see the sun move in a day-night cycle, with corresponding shadow movements on the ground.

Skill Experience. This is one area where the game doesn't shine as much. Combat skills go up very rapidly, but supporting skills (Butchering, Skinning) take forever. It ends up where I'm fighting big mobs when I want to, but in order to improve Butchering/Skinning skills, I'm hunting trivial mobs (rats, pigs, and deer). The big problem with B/S is the 'failure' experience of 1. I'll kill a Feral Bull, for instance, without too much difficulty, gaining combat experience in 2 skills. I can't skin or butcher it, and only get 1 XP in one of these skills, making the combat experience contributing to the problem.

The same applies to crafting skills. A level 1 recipe in one skill gives different amounts of skill than a level 1 recipe in another skill. The bonus on the first usage of a recipe is nice, but since there isn't any kind of crafting failure, it's meaningless.

Barriers. There are three basic types of barriers in Project: Gorgon -- Skill, Price and Faction. Knowledge of a recipe (action) is learned by increasing the Skill. Costs and Faction requirements are in place to limit the access to the skills themselves, the recipes and some of the abilities. Many of the combat abilities are earned as a result of 'using' the skill, but very few, if any, crafting skills are learned by using the skill. But filleting a perch and filleting a clownfish are 2 different skills, with different barriers. A swordsman (or mentalist) just acquires new abilities as they go, but craftsmen don't. The balance of these barriers, especially between crafts and combat skills, needs work.

Additionally, indirect barriers also exist. These usually take the form of a quest that requires a specific skill level. For instance, finding a Trophy Rat Skin requires a relatively high Skinning skill (and a lot of luck) and beginning Cheesemaking requires an ungodly number of Stomachs, which relies on the Butchering skill.

Movement. The Up/Down commands (R and F) do not appear to work underwater. Swimming the releasing the R key immediately causes the character to sink back to the bottom. On one instance, there was a fish that I couldn't access, because it was at the surface of the deep part of a lake. As soon as I'd click the 'Catch Fish' button, I'd sink back to the bottom, because I had either a) released the R Key, or b) holding the R key down overrides the automove feature when clicking the 'Catch Fish' button. Basically, this effectively makes the game appear to have no buoyancy.

NPC Favor. The absolute most interesting part of the game for me is the system of Favors and Hanging Out. Having a multi-tiered faction for individual NPCs is absolutely great. Spending out-of-game time in a positive manner helps encourage the role-playing aspect a bit, giving an additional edge to the NPCs. The rewards are generally pretty useful. It could only be improved if positive favor with one NPC hurt favor with another (Spying on Marne for Rita could hurt relations with Marne). That the different friendship levels open up different interface items for that NPC make it much more interesting. It's pretty sad that I actually looked forward to logging off more than logging on, because I was certain I could accomplish something new and unique.

Overall. This isn't the game for me. Allowing every player the ability to do everything reduces any advantages to specialization, and makes any form of inter-player dependency (i.e. an economy) meaningless. Project: Gorgon does a pretty fair job of avoiding the 'tank-mage' syndrome that many skill-based systems exhibit. Still, there will be enough Sword/Mentalism or Hammer/Druid combo users around that it will seem like a bunch of tank-mages.

I hope the feedback I've provided is useful to the development team. I'll continue to play off-and-on, but I'll put the bulk of my time elsewhere.

 

[Derpy]

Your main point about lack of interdependency doesn't jive with me.

You can only have two active skill sets at a time so you will obviously need other people to bring skill sets to dungeons/encounters that you are not currently using.

The accessbility of all skills to a character is akin to the "Job" system in Final Fantasy which is lauded for its versatility and breadth of progression options. Not everyone likes the idea of re-rolling a brand new toon to try something different. I like the idea that I can use a skill I'm strong in to assist with developing a new skill, without making a whole new character from scratch.

 

[Rucati]

There's definitely a lot of stuff I agree with, and some I don't, so I guess I'll just touch on each point that you did and bounce some ideas around.

Graphics.

• Positioning. There are numerous trees and grasses that do not sit on the terrain properly.
• Brightness. There isn't a brightness/gamma control. The game, especially human and elf NPC models, are too bright, almost washed out. Since I have pretty weak eyes, this is a big issue for me. My monitor has no difficulties with a variety of other games.
• Target Box. The targeting box is frequently off the bottom of the screen. I play zoomed into 1st person view always, and short mobs are occasionally at my 'feet', leaving the box mostly off the screen.
• Text color. The font colors are often obscured, leaving the text difficult to read. Particularly, the mouse-over information for all buffs is almost unreadable. The text color issues continue to the target box, especially when the target box appears over the sky.
• Text Rendering. Text in motion is awful. There's lots of pixellation as the text moves around the screen (via a target box, or the speech bubble), making it nearly impossible to read. Other games with visible overhead names don't have these issues. This needs some real work.

This is pretty much straight forward, there are a lot of issues with the graphics, but given that it's pre-alpha things like terrain issues and such don't concern me too much. But something like the target box is a pretty big problem. On top of that during combat all the numbers that are constantly flying around make it hard to figure out exactly what is going on, since they just kind of pop up wherever on the screen, especially if you're fighting multiple enemies.

Combat. Despite the recent changes, the combat system is a button-focused action combat scheme. The character doesn't perform any combat action without user input. The added delay just makes the button mashing a tiny bit slower, and still a Sword sequence of 1-2-1-3-1-4-1-5-1-6-repeat will mindlessly defeat most every mob.

Also, the new delay only appears to affect skills in the same bar. It appears to be no 'delay' between using Bar 1 Ability 1 and Bar 2 Ability 1. It only appears to be 'horizontal', but I've not had much time to experiment more with this.

I do have to agree that combat is pretty one dimensional. The only time things get challenging is if you fight multiple people at once, and that's really only because you can run out of power before you kill them all. But once you're out of power you're just left standing there doing literally nothing for 5 seconds before you get to press one button and then wait around again. Combat needs some work, but I don't think it's too far off from being good. As for the new delay, I admittedly haven't played around with it much, but I can't imagine it helps things.

Skill Experience. This is one area where the game doesn't shine as much. Combat skills go up very rapidly, but supporting skills (Butchering, Skinning) take forever. It ends up where I'm fighting big mobs when I want to, but in order to improve Butchering/Skinning skills, I'm hunting trivial mobs (rats, pigs, and deer). The big problem with B/S is the 'failure' experience of 1. I'll kill a Feral Bull, for instance, without too much difficulty, gaining combat experience in 2 skills. I can't skin or butcher it, and only get 1 XP in one of these skills, making the combat experience contributing to the problem.

The same applies to crafting skills. A level 1 recipe in one skill gives different amounts of skill than a level 1 recipe in another skill. The bonus on the first usage of a recipe is nice, but since there isn't any kind of crafting failure, it's meaningless.

I have to agree with just about everything here, and it's something I noticed pretty early on. Having quests that require certain butchering/skinning levels are kind of annoying when you get the quests far before you could reasonably have that skill leveled up high enough. Especially since you can either skin or butcher something, you can't do both, which means on top of them leveling slower than combat skills by default one will also be so far behind it's hardly worth using at all, you're better off just sticking to one or the other.

I also think as far as crafting skills go, being unable to see what the required materials are for recipes before you buy them is kind of a big problem. You might see a cooking recipe for Cabbage Soup and think "Oh man I just finished leveling gardening and have all these cabbages, I should buy this recipe and then use them" but then after you buy it realize it also requires potatos, which you don't have, and then you need to either give up on that idea or go back to gardening for a while. Just seems like there should be a way to see all the ingredients before you purchase it.

Barriers.
Additionally, indirect barriers also exist. These usually take the form of a quest that requires a specific skill level. For instance, finding a Trophy Rat Skin requires a relatively high Skinning skill (and a lot of luck) and beginning Cheesemaking requires an ungodly number of Stomachs, which relies on the Butchering skill.

This is the only part I really feel the need to touch on here. But for things like a Trophy Rat Skin, it's easier to just search all the vendors Buy Used sections until you can find one there and get it. And I think that's a pretty big problem, there's a lot of situations where it's easier to just finish quests by buying things used from vendors because actually completing the quest the "correct" way would take forever. Another good example I can think of is needing squash seedlings in Serbule for one of the quests, but it would take forever to raise your favor high enough to buy them from the vendor, so just buying them used is significantly easier. Often times you can even buy the required items from the person who gave you the quest. A good example is needing dinosaur scales for the gardener in Serbule, I picked up that quest, looked through her shop, and just bought the scales from her and then gave them to her to complete the quest. Just feels kind of weird to do that.

Quests that require a certain skill or favor level should probably be looked at, because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that just buying your way through those is much more fun. Having to go back and skin things for hours to level up isn't enjoyable, which touches on the previous point of your combat skills leveling so much faster, you literally have to go back to enemies you can basically one shot just to level your skinning.

Movement. The Up/Down commands (R and F) do not appear to work underwater. Swimming the releasing the R key immediately causes the character to sink back to the bottom. On one instance, there was a fish that I couldn't access, because it was at the surface of the deep part of a lake. As soon as I'd click the 'Catch Fish' button, I'd sink back to the bottom, because I had either a) released the R Key, or b) holding the R key down overrides the automove feature when clicking the 'Catch Fish' button. Basically, this effectively makes the game appear to have no buoyancy.

Just wanted to add on I've noticed this same problem and was about to make a bug report about it actually, there have been a couple of fish I've seen that you can't actually get because they're above you and you'll just sink before you can catch them. I think this has something to do with the fact that if you jump straight up you can't move forward at the same time (another problem, especially when trying to jump to platform to certain places, but whatever) since swimming seems to be very much like jumping in a lot of ways in this game.

NPC Favor. It's pretty sad that I actually looked forward to logging off more than logging on, because I was certain I could accomplish something new and unique.

This is something I've been feeling a lot the past couple days as well. I'll just log on, check all the vendors for whatever quest item I'm looking for that I don't know how to actually get because the quest doesn't explain anything, so I'm hoping I can just find it in the Used section of a vendor, and then I'll find a NPC to hang out with for a couple hours and check back after that. When I'm going to sleep I'll choose one of the longer hang outs, but it's the same thing. I haven't actually left the city in a couple days now, and it feels really weird to be rewarded for not playing the game. I have no problem with being able to hang out with NPCs, it's a really cool idea, but I feel like if I hang out with a NPC for 1 hour it'll be more beneficial than if I actually play the game for an hour, which is a problem.