Game speed and splitting forces
Remo
Member
Disclaimer: I come from a sc2 background so that influences my perceptions. I have been playing Celesta.
The game feels slow. It's not that there aren't enough abilities to use but units, even faster squads, feel very slow and deliberate to move. Avoiding splash damage feels more like walking out from under the spell zone than splitting and you would certainly never pre-split. Even building a nice concave feels pointless because of how tanky units are against regular attack. You seem to do better to ball up and stutter focus into and back out of a battle.
I'm not sure if these things are a result of pathing, unit speed, incompetence with this games mechanics or what but it all feels like I've poured maple syrup on my mousepad and that is frustrating.
On a similar note, it feels like there is no benefit to splitting your forces. I don't mean one player here and two there but a single player splitting off some forces seems to never be worth it given the strength of static defense. Yeah you can cube spam and attack away from your squad but its very a-move on the minimap, they don't benefit from micro. Perhaps if there were more workers mining more resource spots you could benefit by focus firing down workers rather than just attacking the expansion.
Between these two things I feel like my camera always stays in one place watching my army slowly mill about. Macro is nearly non-existant in this game so all I'm doing is casting spells and moving a single ball of units. I don't feel any pressure to multitask and neither do I feel like high apm play is rewarded. It seems to be more about pushing together and landing your spells.
Another poster, also from a starcraft background, said the game feels more like a moba and maybe as such he isn't qualified to critique it. I have a similar feeling here, this might just not be my style of game at a basic level. I never felt that wave of panic/exhilaration that I get in starcraft when there are simply more things to worry about that I have capacity to keep track of. I will keep playing but for the moment I'm kinda disappointed.
Unrelated: I enjoy the positional aspect of the purifier but I find myself wishing it were weaker and faster to fire. An attack animation that lets you see the splash radius more would also be welcome.
More Unrelated: The upgrade structures make you pick the type of upgrade that structure will build. Why even continue to show tiles for upgrades that are no longer available to be built on that particular structure anymore? Buttons that don't do anything are frustrating, either gray it out or remove it once it is no longer an option.
Comments
I agree. After several PvP games with Vela and Vex, it seems the best strategy (at least as a ranged hero) is to poke in, dump your spells, try to kill the enemy hero or at least a couple higher tier units, then back out and wait for your cooldowns. Very MOBA-like.
I have been attempting to find the words to write my critique, but after reading OP I think this is what I have been feeling while playing this game.
When it was initially release that Atlas was to be a 3v3 game my heart dropped a notch. After milling the idea around in my head a bit I began to realize this may not be such a bad thing.
So comes two days ago when I played my first game against Bots. After one game, again, I felt very disappointed by the way the game played. Again, I thought about it some, and as I played subsequent games I began to become more interested. Being a long time Starcraft player I think the initial notion of not having T,Z, and P just bothered me.
So long story in a nutshell I agree with OP. The game has a lot of dimensions to it, but it just doesn't give you the 'too much stuff to keep up with' feel. I think this is intended, but perhaps there is a middle ground that could be met?
@Remo as a Dota and SC player I totally agree. I feel like the combination of slower units, a tight map, and poor pathing made it like I was watching things happen more then making things happen. It feels like playing starcraft on normal.
This I think is the biggest sign of this issue. Many of the testers yesterday are high level sc2 players and/or moba players, and they didn't split their units more then a single screen. I do think the map and game speed don't play to the strength of the micro play possible with this game.
I think a larger midfield. slightly faster game, and better pathing would perfectly address this feeling. Along with more reason to split your army.
The only splitting I found effective was to split the hero off from the army to get gems. You can leave your army to siege your opponent, maybe with an ally, and deny them gems while still collecting as many as possible for your team.
With Celesta I found myself splitting my army fairly regularly, I'd do runbyes to kill harvesters with my wisps, leave my Purifiers sieged up in strong positions to control space while my hero + wisps went to creep, have my hero running around collecting gems / setting up wards / ect.
But yeah, mostly the game involved keeping your army together. I never felt like so many things were happening I didn't have the skill to deal with them all.
I actually rather liked the pathing even though I know I'm in a minority here. With the bulky tier 1 melee units it felt pretty bad because of how easily they would get stuck behind eachother, but with smaller units the pathing was great and had plenty of micro potential (moving units to make a pathway to retreat your hero just as an example, surrounds and blocking were really powerful too) and required good coordination with and awareness of your teammate.
Actually MOBA's are a ton about movement as well. For instance in League of Legends predicting enemy skillshots and dodging/juking them is one of the most essential (and imo interesting) mechanical dynamics of the game.
Heroes of the Storm is probably the MOBA's with the lowest movement speed and in that MOBA there also isn't as much juking as in LOL which makes it more about about a-moving and then spamming abiliities, which imo is a ton less interesting.
As you point out, units need to be relatively fast and response to feel microable and that's regardless of whether its a MOBA or an RTS.
I completely agree with what you Remo. I am also from a SC2/RTS background (although I have played quite a few games of LOL/Dota) and I felt bored. I did not feel like I should be multitasking much at all because splitting my army was not useful. The movespeed and damage all felt sluggish and that was only exacerbated by the bad pathing. The collision size of the units and the low damage made the battles feel a bit like Warcraft 3, except that the pathing kept me from really trying to pull back my injured units or doing any of the fun micro.
I also feel that the map layout may have something to do with the lack of multitasking. The position of the bases is so naturally protected by the midfield where the gems spawn that it is very difficult to outmaneuver the opponent and get damage without losing your units. I also missed having some sort of way to get my units into position like dropships or nydus worms.