First Impressions
These are, quite literally, my first impressions -- I write this having only played one bot game. Take them for what you will!
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The very first thing I noticed was I wanted to full-screen the client but couldn't, and dragging it to resize it kind of borked it out.
I tried to watch the introduction video, and didn't make it more than 30-seconds for a variety of reasons:
- Too slow -- the video was too slow paced, taking too long to explain itself (I was impatient)
- I don't generally prefer learning via video. If it was a text-and-picture tutorial, I much prefer it -- additionally, then I can skim it or read it at my own pace.
- Don't have great internet, and the client was still downloading something. I stopped watching the video so it would download faster.
Because of this, I jumped into my first bot game with basically no idea how anything worked.
The first thing that stumped me was building units. I tried to build some and nothing happened. I eventually realized I had to hit deploy. I still never figured out why. Why don't them come out automatically? I have never found any reason you'd want to wait to deploy units.
So the second thing that confused me is how you get income. The green gears were obvious because I could visually seem them being harvested. I could see my gold and gem count, but they didn't have hover tool-tips saying what they were or how you got them. I gathered you were supposed to fight creeps, so I did. Some dropped gems but walking over them didn't pick them up. Hovering over them didn't say how to harvest them.
May notice a trend here -- more hover tool-tips may be helpful. My own philosophy of game design is not to rely on players watching introductory tutorials/videos prior and make sure the game can be understood intuitively in-game.
So another area I had trouble was figuring out the strength level of creeps, and what the reward was for getting them. Again, the resource things didn't have tooltips (selecting them just calls them "structures") -- I was also hoping to have the good old wc3 green/yellow/red mini-map blobs to show the strength level of creep camps. I was also hoping mousing over things on the minimap would have hover-tooltips with explanation, but no luck.
Anyways, through the course of my first play-through I DID manage to figure out how gems and green gears (scrap?) worked, but still not gold or gem harvesting locations. I also didn't realize Mercs didn't respawn like your other guys do.
Also, I tried making control groups but was thrown off by the fact they aren't visible. I really like that feature from SC2, where you can see all of your control groups visually. It helps me remember what I bound to what, and make sure I don't overwrite anything. Also having a blank one initially helps me know its possible to create them, I wasn't sure it was.
Was also a bit sad your unit selection group only shows unit types, not specific units -- in sc2 I sometimes use this to click a hurt unit to pull it back, rather than selecting the unit on-screen.
Side note, the harsh loud beep of building a gem harvester can be grating when heard too often, wouldn't mind that sound being changed.
Since my internet is spotty, I'd love for ping to show next to fps at the top-right. My units were often handling clunky and I wanted to check ping to see if it was my internet lag, or some units just handle weird.
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Anyways, thats about it! This is my very basic first impressions, where I was mostly blundering around trying to figure out the game, so its probably not very useful. I don't really have anything positive or negative to say because I've really only spent time figuring out the MOST basic features, not playing it for the sake of fun.
I watched the rest of the introduction video AFTER my first game with first impressions, though I wound up learning most things through blundering experimentation.
Hope the post helps somehow!
Edit: So I had a bot game running while I wrote this to remind myself of what I wanted to write about. It ended in defeat because I was afk most of it. There is a "leave" button on the defeat message but clicking it does nothing, it doesn't actually make me leave.
Comments
Hah!
Apologies for the rough first game. Currently, if you don't watch the tutorial, things will be very confusing. As you say, the ideal is to have everything teachable via an in-game tutorial or in-game experience. However, given our iteration speed, that would create a huge amount of wasted effort. Polished in-game tutorials will be something we add much closer to release. Until then, forgive my drawling videos lol.
Hey, I understand that -- I was just mentioning as an alternative for the time being some folks might appreciate a text tutorial, which seems to exist here: https://guardiansofatlas.xyz/forums/discussion/406/project-atlas-test-weekend-2-gameplay-faq-guide but wasn't linked too me initially. Would've probably been fine if I had noticed that first.
But thats generally why I thought this wouldn't be to helpful, I know its kind of early to worry about those sorts of things.
However I'd like to quickly add one of the reason I think the gems were confusing me is because the model for gems that you can gather looks totally different than the resource icon for gems and for how they initially look below creeps, I think if they were more visually consistent it might not have confused me as much initially.
Oh your feedback was SUPER helpful! Even though we are currently doing video tutorials, many people have mentioned the wish for an in-game tutorial/gameplay helper. The consistency of the requests will be the basis of when we DO make that in-game tutorial :D.
Also, I definitely hear you on the icon front. We literally had a discussion about them the day before TW2 went live haha. We'll get something better in there for TW3
Sounds cool!
Out of mild curiosity, why do you have to deploy your units? I still haven't figured out why you would not want your units to come out. I'm imaging playing SC2 and wondering in what situation I would want my Barracks to build marines, but not make them actually appear until I hit "deploy" o_0