Build 21

[hgking]

I found that if you're paying attention, you'll pick up the game after an hour or two, mostly thanks to the handy tooltips on all of the UI elements. Other players also help with that, of course. I'm dismayed that the tanks on the selection screen lack tooltips, as it's useful to be able to preview the weapons, shields, and manuverability the tanks have when making your choice.

Also, my primary operating system is linux--specifically Linux Mint: Debian Edition (LMDE). I was originally using the 11.0 version of the flash plugin for amd64, and I had an atrocious 7 FPS in the tutorial, and an even worse 4 FPS in the game world. It was then that I decided to see if I had the most up-to-date plugin, and found that I did not. So updated to the most up-to-date one, 11.2. This helped tremendously, as my FPS went up to a solid 20-30. I'm also using Chrome--I'll test other browsers as well, and other versions of the plugin, if I can wrangle them.

When I hopped on my Windows partition, my FPS was a strong 50ish, also through Chrome.

I also noticed the same 'not being able to open the chat dialog' issue as frog. I'm still trying to pin down exactly what causes it--all I have so far is that it seems to happen whenever I've been out in the wilderness for a while and think that it'd be a good time to teleport.

EDIT: Oh, and this is not so much a bug as it is silly. It's probably reproducible through good ol' fashioned FPS manipulation as well. When I was playing in windows, I had Java updating in the background. I was currently going through the tutorial when the installation caused a massive lagspike, putting me on the other side of the wall. I then spent some time driving around in the empty world until deciding to use /tutorial to get back in. You could make the walls thicker or something if it's considered an issue.

[remm]

Zero hitpoints acquired! I took two blows from a buffed ground fortress. The first one knocked out my shield, the next one did that to me.
I was still able to fight, and still able to be shot at, and my health regenerated. I just couldn't see myself.

[remm]

Okay, played again today.
I see a lot of potential here, and there are a few things holding the game back.

The basic grid structure of the enemy bases needs to change. It's just well... boring. There's no chaos to it. Every fight is made similar because the environment in which it happens is identical. There's no chance of coming across a tight cluster of three enemy buildings, to give me a slightly different battle. There are no wide open areas with little or nothing in them.
Currently it's like having an Undead Lair where the enemies change as normal, but the dungeon layout is identical every time. There's only so many times you can do it before you get bored of it.
If enemies can appear in close proximity to each other, it forces the player to change how they fight them. If there was a Ground Fortress next to a building that was spawning enemy tanks, that would create new gameplay from enemies that you already have.
The random distribution of enemies is part of what makes the RotMG godlands fun. Dodging single gods is simple. You know the dodging pattern to beat them, and you apply it. When you get two different gods, you have to figure out how to merge the two dodging patterns so that you can kill them. Sometimes, combinations of enemies can be difficult because the firing patterns are opposites (Slime + Medusa), and sometimes it can be easy (White Demon + Ent). When you get whole clusters of gods, your strategy changes again, and you are simply trying not to get hit, or find a way out while taking the least amount of damage. The point is, the fighting is always changing slightly because the enemies interact and work together against you. And that makes it fun, and is part of how people are able to play in godlands for hours and hours in a day.

And along similar lines as that, is that there needs to be roaming enemies. Everything out there is pinned down around a base of some sorts. Nothing can surprise you, and the strategy of the battles never change. What if there were enemies that swarmed at you on sight, and didn't return to their base? Or didn't have a base to return to? For the tanks that can't fire backwards, they would be a real issue, and would force you to think fast and reverse away from them. Most of the time, dying isn't such a big issue in this game, so why not let it happen more? Make the player fear some of the normal, unbuffed enemies. The few short times when I was able to play cooperatively were the funnest part of playing this today. Things got demolished so much quicker even when it was just two tanks working together. You could make people want to work together not simply because it's easier, but because you can do so much more, and can kill so much more if you are working together.

Okay. Two questions.
How many people would you want as a maximum allowed to be playing at once on a single map?
Do you want players to kill the buffed enemies?

Also, bugs. This happened after zooming in to the maximum on a ground fortress' green shots. I lagged out, and appeared back at Origin with it looking like that.


Another thing that is a little annoying is that your last camera setting is not stored. After dying, it resets always to Camera 1, when Camera 3 is clearly the best.

[linkshot]

Agreeing with remm on enemies. If I can just sit my guy down in deep wilderness for 2 hours and ignore him while he shoots at a 1.4M HP enemy, something has gone very, very wrong.

[sven]

During the first hour or two of getting adjusted to game-play mechanics, it' a worthwhile warm-up for the main course whereas tutorial serves as a mild teaser. Basics of knowing movement controls and auto zapping nearby foes for loot are tips users get are known once they play the main game. Especially learning to upgrade their town defense mechanism by using certain amount of grid-shards to prevent the enemies from having their way.

The fun aspect I enjoyed the most was searching for uncovered towns, for some odd reason I considered each discovery as progress making than upgrading towns. Later in time, after over 20 deaths I realized that what I really strive for was for the AI to hunt me down for each town I passed by. I was thinking of helping others of open possibilities of expanding defenses/ shelter or it could be the satisfaction of traveling from a far distance without teleporting. Along the thrill of reaching to buffed enemy territory while staying alive as possible.

Also here's a short bug list. (Mentioned by fellow Testers)

• Tooltips from the game screen such as towns and enemies overlapping Tank Selection interface.
  i.imgur.com/O8V8S.png
  
• Based on HGKing's edit of FPS Manipulation through tutorial. Shooting through walls are possible same for buildings, I assume. i.imgur.com/kW0iM.png
  

I concur on the roaming enemies that Remm's suggested, which means I don't have to scroll out with a mouse and set the control in auto-pilot towards designated point like if I was carefree. ^^;

Overall, the game's slick interface/ graphics and settling music are utmost brilliance towards the game's direction. (I mean very fitting!) The genre would probably be a mix between time management and co-operative rpg. (not much action yet?)

There's one object in tutorial that's been bothering me for a while now... According to tooltips, TutorialExit was marked an Enemy with 100 HP how can we trust it when the autoshoot feature wouldn't detect it as a foe?!

Well, it's fun and yet interesting process of expanding town defenses and experiencing or learning a variety of methods of being co-operative. I'll keep in mind about there's more to the game than just exploration.

[remm]

okay, had another go at it this evening. As linkshot said in game, it is the brightness or the clarity of the lenses that matter, more so than the shape or the colour. I was dismayed to have a set of 4 brights with three identical blue prisms get me 9200, whereas a set of any 5 bright ones got me 38000 consistently. It's quite misleading to have three variables on the lenses and to only have one of them matter. And I got 38000 three times, in fact.

Now that's a lot of gridshards. Consequently you'll find that the global speed and range have been dramatically buffed. When 4000 gridshards => 3% global stat buff, all that dosh goes a long way. I teleported around all the towns and upgraded all the pink and blue buildings I found to level 3. I decided level 3 was the most efficient use of my gridshards because I was actually running out of specific buildings to level up. Anyhow, you've now got 150% more speed. Wheeee.
Sidenote - it doesn't appear that acceleration and braking are increased along with the speed, which makes controlling the tank just that little bit harder when the speed is high. Just something you might want to think about.
Double Sidenote. Try driving at high speed into a building, and then reverse away from it immediately. It doesn't work for about three seconds. Something about momentum conservation and buildings not affecting it.
Triple Sidenote. Collisions between players are possible. Why is that?

Now, camera views 1 and 2. I have decided that the reason I do not like them is that I do not feel like I am the one controlling my tank. It's like I'm the movie director, and the tank is the actor. This means that when I'm crashing into stuff because I'm unable to control the speed boost well, I feel myself blaming the tank and the game, rather than my own poor driving.
With camera view 3, I am controlling the tank directions directly. There are no path calculations done by the game, so any silly mistakes are my own, and that makes it so much more enjoyable.

One request with camera view 3. Clicking outside of the tank control circle does nothing. To maintain a maximum speed, you would click and hold inside, and drag your cursor to the outside of the circle. So why not make clicking outside the circle work, and doing so would cause the little red direction marker to snap to the edge of the direction circle. It's just I find that if I'm panicking to get out of a bad place, I sometimes click too far away, and it does nothing, which is a strange thing in a game where you only have your mouse.

Also, Pulchritudinous Prisms. Great word choice there.

[amitp]

I agree with remm that the combat would be far more interesting if the world presented different challenges each time instead of a regular grid of identical enemies. That's the kind of game I enjoy most -- a combination of my skill, what my game character has available, and what the world throws at me. If Poker didn't have any one of those, it'd be a far less interesting game. Grid12 uses skill and game character but the world doesn't throw new and interesting things at me. I know there are new enemies being created but given that position and orientation is what the combat is about, the combination and layout of enemies is probably what needs to vary a lot more.

As far as being able to sit somewhere for an hour and shoot at enemies, frogboffin is going to be very unhappy with the next build.

remm, have you tried the double click control mode? Double click outside your tank, move the mouse around, then click on your tank to go back to the regular controls.

[remm]

Yes, amitp I have used double click to switch between the manual and continuous movement controls, and it is really useful. But if (in double click mode) moving the cursor outside the control circle does not stop you from moving, then clicking normally (in single click mode) outside the control circle should similarly not prevent you from moving.


Other things. Why can I highlight over friend's tanks to see their stats, but I cannot highlight over my tank to see my own stats? Surely my own stats are more important? Maybe they should be displayed somewhere on the screen.

[odin]

It would be nice if there was a method of turning of sound effects in the game. The pewpewing can be rather annoying at times.

[elrondel]

I haven't played enough to make a long review, either. However, I can say my first impressions :
Firstly, my laptop with 3GB RAM / Will post further specs later can definitely not run this game so far, although background programs might have something to do with that.

My desktop, though, can definitely run it -
I was a bit confused at what to do when I first joined the game after Tutorial. The tutorial was simple enough, but I feel that it would be helpful to explain the depositing gridshards, leveling up, prisms, etc. at the end of the tutorial.

After wandering around a bit and reading the Instructions on forums and asking Linkshot for some help, I really got happy with the game. I'm enjoying the different classes and ease to swap; those are really great factors to me.

I've heard about the collisions with players- While it may become a problem later on, I like the metaphysics of the game as they are.

I think that the environment needs to change more dramatically, but that's a minor issue to me right now.

I also enjoy the ease of camera swap - I like both modes, right now, but would be interested to see what could happen with the traditional WASD / QE option, similar to RotMG's camera rotation.

odin, M is for mute.

Last thing for now; I think that lenses should be more defined in level, as to make it more clear to which a player wants to collect; I also think there should be an option to discard (Some people like the $$$ factor from collecting five of the best lenses, for example.)
All of these are minor points. So far, I'm really enjoying the concept of the game. Can't wait to see how it progresses.

Edit: Also, I think 3-5 seconds on the wait after leveling up a building would be better. It gives time for the tank to turn around and whatnot.

Edit 2: Alright, after playing a few hours, I'm at level 4 and think that drops are a bit too easy to come by. My loot at this time are Double Resplendent Abs. Prisms, a Flawless and Exquisite Focusing Prism, two Resplendent Stabilizations, a Resplendent and Exquisite Dissipation, two Flawless Deflections, and a Resplendent and Pulch Overdrive. These seem good to me (Pulch best?) for only a few hours of play at a lower "leveled" zone.

Edit 3: Hurricane range seems flawed. I can snipe off a tank without getting hit or moving period.



Edit 4: Are there any thoughts on the item system right now? As far as I can see, loot is global and everyone gets the same loot, and you keep the best gear you find and the rest is destroyed. Are there plans for the future of this?

[hgking]

Enemy buildings won't get in the way of our construction.

[odin]

Sven and I were talking yesterday and had some interesting insights, I'll try to remember them later in the day when I haven't just woken up.

A screenshot (or two) of bugs (at least 1, one could be intentional)

I got overkilled by some overhealed tanks, HP bar extended for less than a second. I had to record it happening and then take a screenshot from a paused frame.



When I was trying to shoot as I neared the nest I instead had the beginning of the shot animation and then I had these weird red lines appear. Could be intentional, but I'm not sure. (maybe my shot is being blocked?)

[zuboki]

Yep! Those are shields, that only the pink enemies have now, if I recall correctly. They scale up with wilderness buff at the same rate health and damage do. I don't think they make too much of a difference (when compared to extra hp in that amount) at this time.

Also, wilderness-buffed enemy settlements that are "locked in" by a town will retain their buff even if the wilderness is pushed back by additional research levels. This makes it possible to grief by expanding a town that's deep in red- either someone has to spend 10 minutes clearing it, or no buildings can be built/maintaned there.