Initial impressions

[statico]

I played for a few minutes. Nobody else seems to be online, which is expected for an early beta, but there didn't seem to be much to do other than get my butt handed to me by some drones. Here are my initial impressions.

• Overall the loading and play is really smooth. No loading bars. I got into the action very quickly. Allowing me to play impulsively will certainly make me want to come back.
  
• I'm not sure what I am or what I'm doing. It took me a while to realize I'm a tank, and after that, I'm not sure why I'm supposed to keep moving. Am I looking for something? Am I defending the realm from the evil tanks of Krag'noth? Am I in the movie Tron?
  
• On a similar note, I'm not sure what everything else is, and this is probably due to the lack of visual cues. Why should I collect the yellow things? What are the red baddies? Why is the ground made up of squares? Is it ground or some sort of matrix?
  
• I'm sure the art is intentionally draft-ish, but even for an early game I felt that a lot of the contrast is off. A lot of the ground is high-contrast and it was hard to determine what's what. The stars seem too bright — I expect them to move in parallax, so it's a little disconcerting to move around the world while the stars stay fixed.
  

Keep up the good work! I look forward to seeing how this progresses.

[rob]

Statico,

Our newbie experience is pretty bad right now. We keep changing the rules, and we are not pausing to rewrite newbie tutorials and things as we go. I'm sorry about that.

Personally, your goal is to level up, unlock all the tanks, collect the highest level prisms, get enough crystal splinters to craft some good potions, and earn victory points by building up the cities.

Collectively, the goal is to get 150 total city levels, which actually awards the victory points you've been earning. You do this by finding towns, connecting them to the main civilzation, clearing out the area around them, and depositing gridshards into them.

The lore is not totally worked out yet, but the general idea is that the "good guys" used to own Grid 12, but then a race of evil enemy machines took it over. It's our job to take it back.

You can turn off the background stars with 'B'.

Rob

[guss]

Hello everyone. Guss here. I didn't want to create a new thread so I thought I'd tack on my thought in this one. Sorry in advance for the wall of text. I think it flows though

Let me introduce myself a bit. I play realm, IGN: Awal. Really like the freshness of Realm so I thought I'd follow Rob and Alex and see what else they would come up with. Let me just say that your games so far have been very different than the "normal" strategy or FPS games I have been seeing quite a bit of and I like it, keep it up!

OK so I been play about a week or so, leveled up to 21 I think. and I have all the tanks unlocked (except the new build 32 tank). I have played with all of them and I realize that they all have different strengths and weaknesses. Some are for exploring, though I haven't yet gotten the hang of that, some are for ally support, some are for solo, some are for... well you get the idea. I was trying to read the descriptions before I use each tank to see if I would be interested in it? Eventually I just said fuck it and played each one to see for myself. I have a few that I'm more comfortable with and play more often than the others.

I understand that you kill enemies and get experience/gridshards and deposit them to level up yourself and towns. I see the lightning bolts and prisms on the sides and bottom of the UI but I'm not sure how to use them? Is it automatic? I think they are stat boosts but I really haven't noticed much of a difference from when I started playing to now. Maybe that's because I was pretty lost at first. I love the autofire thing. I also understand that tank placement/direction factor in huge because of the sheilds. I think those are the basics but I'm not sure what else to do other than to learn how to explore and keep leveling. I suppose the "loot" is not noticeable enough for me to notice what I should be collecting.

As far as the UI everything looks fresh and futuristic. Pleasant to look at. I did have an issue with the tank, the directional command circle, and the mouse clicks being off if I changed the size in chrome or used full screen in flash projector. I would love a full screen view. The zooming in and out is great.

Also regarding the reset. I was playing the other day when we reached the 150 goal for the town and the map was reset. Not only did I lose my ~8k shards I had on me but the map was reset into a tiny blip with only the origin whereas the previous map was seemingly unending. I was thinking to make the map open up more, not just small pathways in in between towns. I like killing things and I think there should be some sort of clear bonus for clearing some sort of grid sector on the map. Also, I was thinking to make the map start out with more open area than just the tiny bit around the origin. Maybe that goes against the history of the game I'm not sure. The reset seemed pretty anticlimactic for me considering it took weeks to get to that point.

These are just thoughts. Take them with a grain of salt. I'll see ya'll in the grid!