Pursuit's PvP Feedback
Pursuit’s PvP Feedback
For 12/6/15
Tried to format this in a way that can easily be viewed as several smaller sections. Nonetheless this post is going to end up being huge.
edit: lol had to break it into multiple posts xD oh well.
edit2: Here's a link to my pre- PVP thoughts for comparison
General non-Design Gameplay Feedback
Game Length
What Happened: I played 8 games total in the PvP and had a pretty similar experience in terms of game length. Here’s a quick rundown of how long each game was-
Game 1: 28:18
Game 2: 24:34
Game 3: 20:29
Game 4: 24:40
Game 5: 19:23
Game 6: 27:22
Game 7: 17:58
Game 8: 24:10
So for me the game length was very consistent, with most of my games falling in the 20-25 minute range.
How I Felt: I really enjoyed this game length, it seemed just about right to me for a competitive game. I could definitely tell in my game 7 though that the games had the potential to go on for much longer. I won 7 of the 8 games as well so maybe I just figured out a strategy that let me win around the 20-25 minute mark that other teams were unable to counter, and that’s why my game times are so similar.
Suggestions / Feedback: My experience with game length so far has been great. I’ve heard rumors about 50+ minute games, which sounds too long to me, but at the same time I wish several of my games had lasted longer because they were so exciting. So without actually experiencing a few longer games I’m hesitant to say that long games are an issue. There’s nothing I would really set out to change in regards to game length based on my experience.
Unit Responsiveness / Lag
What Happened: Units felt incredibly responsive to me, although that didn’t always translate into them moving the way I wanted them to (in part because of the pathing; more on that later). I experienced only one instance of lag across all 8 games, shared by everyone in the game, and it was during a down time so gameplay wasn’t really affected. Playing on maxed out settings with a consistent 60fps with Vsync on. For reference, my rig has a i5-3570k processor, 16gb ram and a 960 graphics card running on Windows 10 and my internet is 40gb download.
How I Felt: Unit responsiveness was exactly what I was looking for from a RTS style game.
Suggestions/Feedback: Nothing really to add, unit responsiveness was great!
Pathing
What Happened: Unit pathing is generally considered to be a source of frustration for players.
How I Felt: Unit pathing was initially a source of frustration for me as well when I first started playing Atlas, however as I got more used to the way the pathing worked I actually grew to be quite fond of it.
Suggestions/Feedback: I think the main problem that most people seem to have with the pathing is that units will not make any attempt to go around other units but instead get stuck trying to move past them. This however creates a ton of micro opportunities both offensively and defensively. Things like surrounds and attacking into positions carefully felt very satisfying, and it added an element of depth to pulling back heroes / units because you couldn’t just right click them away and watch them go, you had to manually clear a path for them. This added a bunch of depth to the pathing system which really allowed more skilled players to differentiate themselves from less skilled player.
In my opinion the problem with the pathing was more to do with units with a big collision size, and specifically tier 1 units with a big collision size. Most of the big tier 3 units you can only make 2 of and have abilities that let them change their position. With the big tier 1 units, specifically from Grath and Hydros’ squads, they ended up being too big to micro effectively (especially in choke points). I’d recommend making the tier 1 melee units smaller.
I would really encourage people to play around with the pathing more as is.
Hotkeys + In-Game UI
What Happened: Selecting just 1 unit of a type highlighted the unit portrait at the bottom, making it hard to tell when you weren’t selecting all of that type of unit.
How I Felt: As a veteran SC2 player, The hotkey system took no time for me to figure out and felt extremely intuitive. My only real issue with the UI was that it was hard to tell what unit(s) I was selecting and could be misleading in certain scenarios.
Suggestions/Feedback: Add some kind of visual indicator of what units you are selecting and maybe make it more visually clear what units are being selected on screen (consider making the ring showing selection a more different color from health and attack cooldown?).
Mechanical Difficulty
How I Felt: Right now the game feels quite easy mechanically, even more so due to the incredibly intuitive hotkey setup. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I’ve never felt like I couldn’t do something I wanted to do, and I think after 50-100 games or so of deliberate practice a lot of the mistakes I’m making now would be extremely rare. The game seems to be a lot more about coordination with teammates and strategic / tactical moves than mechanical difficulty.
Suggestions/Feedback: Personally I’d like to see more mechanical difficulty, but this is coming from a hardcore RTS player’s perspective and I’ve been enjoying the game as is, so take that as you will.
3v3 Format
What Happened: The games ended up feeling more like a 2v2 and a 1v1 happening at the same time.
How I Felt: I only ever played on the top spawn (with two people) and honestly forgot bottom spawn even existed. As long as neither side got horribly outplayed on bottom is barely seemed to make a difference, whoever won top decided the game. 2v2 was incredibly fun, but I think with 3 armies running around with the way the pathing currently works it might become unbearable.
Suggestions/Feedback: 2v2 would be a better format IMO, or maybe have more open / less chokey maps to accommodate two additional armies.
Comments
Economy
Gem Collection
What Happened: Gems are a great source of conflict in early game but become overabundant in late game, which leads to issues with neutral weapons.
How I Felt: I absolutely love the way Gems forced conflict in early game. I always feel the need to get out on the map early and collect my own gems while denying my opponents from doing the same. I even started making it a personal goal to try to prevent my opponent from collecting 8 or more gems in the first 2 waves (so that they couldn’t take a third expansion on the down time).
Mid-late game however, I always ended up with an overabundance of gems, and often I would use these to straight up win the game by running past the central towers and throwing down 15+ mini ion cannons (often per person!) in range of the Nexus. Even with all three of our opponent’s armies there to try to prevent it, they couldn’t kill them in time to prevent their Nexus from dieing. Alternatively I saw replays of other games where players would throw down 3-4 Ion Cannons and slowly siege the Nexus core and win the game that way. This felt very anti-climatic as an end to the game. (edit: anti-climatic because the opponent really had no chance of holding against it.)
Suggestions/Feedback: Make gems always give 2 (not increasing in value over time as it is now, if anything make them spawn less!) and if this proves to starve players for gems too much instead add more gem expansions (and maybe give those things a small buff too!). This keeps the incentive to fight each other early game, helps to prevent an overabundance of gems in late game and creates more opportunities for players to attack strategic positions.
I think this will also help deal with the current issues with Ion Cannons (different topic) since you’ll have less gems to make mass Ion Cannons.
Also as a side note, I think a lot of people didn’t know the top left and bottom right bases gave you gems. I remember seeing lots of people asking what they did.
Gold Collection
What Happened: Gold collection was super important but didn’t visually look like it. Players weren’t taking expansions quickly enough.
How I Felt: As a try-hard RTS player taking lots of early expansions was my go to strategy. Playing bot games I would take the early expansion, gather 20+ gems on the first cycle of gems and grab both expansions at the easy camp on the downtime, then go for the medium camp ASAP (and again double expand). Once I started playing team games (and sharing expansion with allies like a good little boy), I immediately realized how much I missed that extra gold. Visually however it was very difficult to tell how important that gold was, and I noticed lots of other players were not expanding as quickly as I was.
I feel really gold starved in the mid game regardless of how many bases I take, but I think this is perfect for the current state of the game because it forces me to really think about where I want to spend my money.
Suggestions/Feedback: Add some kind of visual indicator of gold income. One example I think would work is to have a “+ XX” show up after each return from the workers. I also wouldn’t mind seeing a slight buff to gold income.
Unit Composition
What Happened: Unit compositions looked extremely similar in early and late game, mid game had more diversity.
How I Felt: I really feel like making a good amount of Tier 1 (if not maxing out on it) at the beginning was required, then you could tech to either tier 2 or 3 or both whenever you wanted. I was pretty okay with this, the early action with heroes + tier 1 units was fun and I’m willing to give up early game diversity for fun (Starcraft 2 for example has had periods of time where too much earlier game diversity made the game extremely unfun). A way to have both diversity and fun would be ideal though. Late game army compositions were very stagnate feeling, I really wish there was more diversity in the way late game unit compositions work.
Suggestions/Feedback: One idea would be to have some upgrades where you can only pick one or the other for that unit that change the way the unit is used. For example, with Purifiers you can choose to upgrade them either to Purifiers with increased range or to Purifiers that move and siege / unsiege more quickly. Deciding which one you want to upgrade allows you to pick between two unique play styles and would (hopefully) create more diverse late game unit compositions.
Towers
What Happened: Towers felt very strong early game and very weak late game. Building / upgrading towers was almost free in terms of gems but took a long time. Expansions were very difficult to harass and it was hard to tell if it was worth it.
How I Felt: Towers added too much defensive power early game IMO, and became almost useless late game. You never need to grab more than 1-2 early game and it almost wasn’t worth building or upgrading them in mid-late game.
Suggestions/Feedback: Make towers cost more gems to build and upgrade but less time to upgrade (initial build time is fine IMO). This way you can get to the higher tier towers in a more timely fashion if you need to defend a far out expansion, but the cost of doing so is correspondingly higher as well. It also indirectly nerfs them in early game and buffs them in late game.
Upgrades
What Happened: Upgrades were only useful after units in the vast majority of cases. Some upgrades were extremely powerful (+range on Purifiers) while some were very weak.
How I Felt: Honestly I only ended up getting 1-2 key upgrades until I had maxed out my units, and then they became the thing I spent gold on after I had all my units. Armory upgrades were too powerful relative to the racial upgrades IMO, especially since the racial upgrades changed the way the game was played and felt more unique while in most cases armory upgrades were just straight up buffs. Really the whole upgrade system just felt weird to me.
Suggestions/Feedback: Make it so that the armory isn’t removed from whatever control group I had it on. Otherwise see my suggestions / feedback on unit composition.
Combat
Respawning Mechanic
How I Felt: When I first heard about the respawning mechanic it was one of the things that scared me most about Atlas due to my memories of Swarm Hosts forcing stalemates in Starcraft 2 by constantly spawning units for free. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well implemented the mechanic is, and I after having played with it I don’t think games will be forced into a stalemate due to respawning. It helps to add a little bit of mechanical difficulty to the game (something I think the game is lacking currently) in the form of constantly respawning and changing rally points.
Suggestions/Feedback: This mechanic is fun, interesting and dynamic. Honestly I’ve really just enjoyed the way the respawning works. I wouldn’t change anything about it atm.
Recall
What Happened: Recall was rarely used both by me and my opponents. Looking back on it, I think it was hugely underused.
How I Felt: Honestly I currently feel a little stupid for not using this mechanic more. The only scenario I was really using this in before was to run past enemy towers, kill workers / an expansion and then recall whatever I could out. However, recalling restores units to full health, which is something I could have used many times in many situations (i.e I would have units just chilling by a tower to heal up when they could have just recalled back and then ran back out to rejoin my army) but it just never occurred to me.
Suggestions/Feedback: Maybe a better tutorial or some mention of the fact that it fully restores hp? Really I think even if left untouched we’ll see Recall being used a lot more.
Ion Cannons
What Happened: General consensus seems to be that Ion Cannons were too powerful.
How I Felt: Honestly I didn’t face this problem as much as other teams did, I think due to my playstyle which revolved heavily around denying gems. I also personally used Mini Ion Cannons way more than Ion Cannons. I think a large part of why Ion Cannons felt so powerful was simply that gems are so plentiful in the mid-late game, so players were able to make them en masse and with relatively little commitment.
Suggestions/Feedback: Reduce the number of gems players get in mid-late game (see my suggestion on Gem Collection). Make more options for things to spend gems on. This would make each Ion Cannon a bigger commitment and make mass Ion Cannons or Mini Ion Cannons a much more rare strategy.
Game Winning Options
How I Felt: Ion Cannons and Mini Ion Cannons felt like the best / only way to win games. This made every game turn into some kind of siege warfare or risky runby -> defend push.
Suggestions/Feedback: I’d like to see more options for potentially winning the game. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this since it wasn’t as big of an issue in my games, but more end game variety in general would be nice.
Healing
What Happened: Healing Wards and the towers with healing Auras favored low HP units over high HP units.
How I Felt: I was honestly a little annoyed that healing was so much more effective for low hp units when the high hp units are supposed to be the tanky ones. It made low hp units feel like they had similar surviveability to high hp units when fighting under a healing ward, which made tier 1 melee feel even worse when it already feels pretty weak.
Suggestions/Feedback: Make healing based on a % of maximum health rather than a hard value. This might end up being too powerful on super high HP tier 3 units however, so I’m honestly not really sure how to approach this. I just think that healing your tanky / beefy units shoudn't feel so inferior to healing the wimpy glass cannon units.
Unit Interactions
Suggestions/Feedback: This would take a long time to go over and is worthy of it’s own post IMO. To put it short, I felt like there were quite a few interesting unit interactions but I would have liked to have seen more unique units and heroes. The Purifier and the Seedbot were two of the most interesting units to me because no other units were like them, but most units seemed to overlap a lot with others in design. For Tier 1 units this is less of an issue for me, but I think most of the Tier 2 / 3 units should feel pretty unique.
This is amazing. Thanks for helping with the discord feedback as well. But damn. You need to talk more
ok its 10pm my time so I'm going to bed soon but.... wow amazing stuff! Thank you thank you for writing such incredibly clear and well organized stuff. Really appreciate it!!!
I'LL RESPOND IN ZE AM! :D
Your format and thoroughness are inspiring.
Thanks for the compliments guys ^.^
I just realized two major topics I forgot to talk about- Healing / Vision Wards and Competing for Gems / Expansions With Allies. I'll add it in tomorrow, for now I really need to get going to sleep.
edit: Sorry for any typos or unclear phrases, I really wanted to get this posted tonight while it's still relevant and didn't have enough time to proofread. Just let me know if you need clarification on anything!
awesome feedback! I'm still reading! :P
Wow, that's pretty comprehensive.
I do disagree about the mechanics. As I'm also a SC2 player (though not as good as the OP), I felt that SC2 was really unapproachable to my friends due to the mechanical skill required. I remember trying to teach one of my friends to play SC2, and he'd always insist on zooming in to watch the battles instead of playing the game. Needless to say, the battles didn't last very long at all.
I currently think that there is potential for a ton of player vs player interaction and positioning in the game. Always poking forward and scouting, maybe laying down wards for increased vision, etc. I'd like to see play like this in the grasp of an average player, as opposed to something like SC2 where the vast majority of players can't interact with their opponent and manage their base at the same time. Myself included, in SC2 when I knew I'd have to not look at my base for a while, I made sure to queue some extra units and add extra supply buildings first, which kind of worked, but I'd love to see depth comparable to build orders in SC2 (or maybe even more) without the mechanics required, ideally. Vision wards, counterattacks, flanks, and army positioning/control are ways for players to show their mechanical superiority while being easy for everyone to understand and more awe-inspiring than frustrating to lose to.
The recall thing is great, I wasn't aware of that. I agree that proper use of recall could be extremely exciting, and would probably help with side attacks.
And I think that builds other than spamming Tier 1 units have more potential than most players think
! Though I think that getting early unit-specific upgrades is generally bad, I haven't actually tried it. Perhaps those upgrades would help for specific strategies in specific circumstances, and could be used to help combat it. For example, if I am Hydros and I keep getting kited, I could use a different build to get the increased slow ability or something. The upgrades seem like a poor choice early on, but I don't think the game is anywhere near "figured out" yet that this can be said for certain.
I agree with most of this. Very well formulated feedback.
Epic feedback Pursuit, thanks for taking the time to add so much clarity! Hope you keep testing for us!
@Trfel Thanks for the feedback on my feedback! Now we can start a feedback loop right? ^.^
Yeah, that's why I made sure to say that the game felt too easy mechanically as a hardcore RTS player. Compared to MOBA's this game feels about equally demanding, maybe even a little harder if you aren't used to controlling multiple units like I am. At the end of the day I'm still having fun playing the game, but my biggest worry is that due to the mechanical ease the game will never have players who are able to do things no one else can. This is a huge part of why I fell in love with games like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 and why games like DotA or LoL never really kept my interest.
I do agree that just 'making mechanics harder for no other reason than to make mechanics harder' is a bad idea. I'd rather it be along the lines of there are 10 things you want to be doing, but you only have 3 seconds to do it. An average player could do 1 or 2, but a dedicated player who practices every day could maybe do 5-6, and then there's that one guy who did like 9 of them and everybody's jaw drops.
Yeah, I agree that this would be nice, as you can play the game for your first time ever and still understand what's happening and still do a sort of okay job. In Starcraft 2, you need to basically be in the top 1% of ranked play before you have some shred of proper build execution, and even some GM players can't effectively execute pro build orders (source: Gemini's guide to a Rain PvZ build, he had to change the build so he could execute it, despite being GM).
I mean, it's great that the game is this hard, but I'd prefer the game if the average player could get most of the way there, instead of not really there at all.
Well contact Razer and get me a sponsorship because I can execute the heck out of a 6 pool (12).
OK! I'll try to answer this in chunks!
PHEW! :D
@Artillery.Day[9]
5: Really glad to hear this!
7: I definitely think either the escalation is too much or the cost of neutral weapons in general is too low. They just felt too spammy and not as interesting as the squad's regular units and unit interactions.
8: I'd agree with this- even just to kill the workers took an army dive which cost me half my army, and I was never able to tell if it was worth it (but probably not?).
9: Awesome, I'm glad to see you're moving in the same direction I was thinking here. Can't wait to see what kinds of ideas you guys have!
10: Yeah, that's exactly what I felt too. You needed your army there to defend them while they were building / upgrading when the whole reason you were building them was so that your army didn't have to be there to defend it- they literally defeated their own purpose!
14: Awesome, can't wait to see how it plays out!
15: Here's a quick list of the units that felt very simliar to me:
Scuttleguard and Terrapin Trooper: Both with beefy Tier 1 melee units with a larger than normal collision size and an engaging mechanic that let them get in close and made it difficult for opponents to retreat. Scuttleguard generally just felt much stronger between the two (more survivability and better longer lasting slows) barring pathing.
Rustborn Rhino and Aquadillo: Both were beefy Tier 3 melee units with a mechanic that let them jump over / past other units, dealing significant damage in the process, and then a mechanic that let them keep their hp high while fighting behind enemy lines.
The combination of these two really made Grath and Hydros feel too similar to me. Whatever strategies worked well vs one tended to work well vs the other.
Pyrosaur and Ancient Ice Frog: Both high health Tier 3 units with a cone attack that dealt significant damage. Ice Frog felt superior in every way (more damage, could turn using cone, cone slowed / rooted units).
Frostcaller and Apocalyte: Both long range caster units with a powerful long range ground targetted AoE ability. Frostcaller actually felt more powerful to me despite being lower tier and cost since it had higher base stats and an AoE doing up front damage + a slowing units and you could make 3 of them, whereas Apocalyte's ability was somewhat easy to dodge.
There were also a couple units that felt like they didn't fill any unique / interesting role within their Squad. Those were-
Precognitor: Wisps and Purifiers synergized really well, and I think the idea behind the Precognitor was to create something that would act as a support unit to that strong backbone. However, the support the Precognitor gives (temporary damage reduction to 1 unit and vision / range reduction) don't feel very effective at countering what Wisp / Purifiers struggles against (AoE and Bulky units that can close the gap quickly). Combined with mediocre stats (even after the upgrade imo) and the Precognitor just doesn't seem to have a role in Celesta's squad.
Deadeye: At first glance this guy seems to fit into the idea of a long range / sniper squad really well, but I honestly feel like his overall stats and abilities are just less interesting versions of the Hero's Ult + the Raptor. The Raptor is an all around pretty good combat unit with the ability to do one super long ranged shot every now and then. The Deadeye has similar stats but a long range attack all the time. The Hero can use his air Warning + ult to do massive damage to a single target. The Deadeye uses Fair Warning + Take Aim to do massive damage to a single target, except it's not a skillshot and instead puts the game in the opponent's court (move out of vision or damage the Deadeye).
As a side note, I also think Wisps / Sandstingers and Raptors / Sparkbots feel pretty similar, but they're different enough for that they feel fine for the 'basic' tier 1 units.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I can't speak for Pursuit, but as far as similarity of units goes I actually think Wisps, Raptors, Sparkbots, and sometimes even Sandstingers all start to feel very similar. A large part of this might just be in the visual associations, since they are all small, semi-triangular damage outputters, but even that is somewhat something to address. I think a few more distinguishing features between the grunts of those four classes might be nice.
Awesome discussion! Reading it has given me a bunch of ideas
This is one of the reasons that I strongly preferred having a dual resource solution and hope to see it return. It limits the amount of teched units that you can produce but also gives plenty of other options and decision making situations if you want to try to prioritize that or prevent your opponent from doing so. Having the super clear and simple delineation between coin stuff and gem stuff feels like such a wasted opportunity, based on my limited experience with the prior system.
I did find the prior system a bit flat in that expansions were always both resources. I think having the option to take either a coin or soup expansion would add so much to the mindgame aspect of RTS that's missing currently by creating possible options, and would potentially allow you to remove the unit caps with enough tweaking.
This made me think of the WC2 + WC3 Orc solution where you can invest multiple workers to build. A possible solution that gets the best of both worlds for some added complexity would be to add a layer of decision making by allowing the Hero to also target existing towers with his build ability to speed up an existing construction or upgrade. I think it could be both fun and very dynamic.