Thoughts on 2K build
Overall, I felt like the build yesterday felt really weak. I've been busy and haven't made it to recent daily playtests, so I was jumping into the new build fresh with the rest of the 2K'ers.
Some comments:
- Since I opted not to buy Levs/Juggs, I felt like I had enormous amounts of scrap at all points of the game, and was fighting for gems to actually do anything. Early game it felt like a decision between expoing and pressuring, which runs counter to basic RTS strategy where you want to do both. It made me wish for the previous system from a few months ago where with excess soup I was able to upgrade and gain an advantage that way. Maybe squad upgrades could cost scrap instead of coin?
- I'm HUGELY in favor of going back to a three resource game, so I was really happy to see scrap. I didn't like, however, that coin remains by far the primary thing that matters for winning fights. It was frustrating that doing economic damage like killing expansions didn't really seem to have an impact. I lost two expansions and didn't care because they were just mining scrap I couldn't use anyway. I killed an expansion and a half dozen workers and that felt like it barely mattered: there's no real impact cost to these things that really seems to manifest itself. Maybe expansions could have a coin cost in addition to gems?
- It was incredibly frustrating to play against Leviathans, which I understand aren't a longterm solution. But when adding a "capital ship" with immense power that literally 1-hits most units, I feel like they should be introduced with "probably too weak" balance. This didn't seem like the case at all and it caused a bunch of players to completely strategize around immediately massing them rather than exploring the game. So while I don't really care about balance at this point, having something brand new to the game be so overwhelmingly "how you win" really ruined the rest of early/midgame gameplay. This is more of a meta-feedback: obviously you'll address Levs/Juggs, but I hope this mistake isn't repeated in the future, especially for a playtest with new players who are going to be jumping quickly to what's broken in order to win, rather than exploring various aspects of the game.
- I was very frustrated trying to attack a tower. I was pissed off that shields were added to towers, as incremental damage is a huge factor in most MOBA-style pushing and often in RTS as well. Especially with the addition of engineers, this change just makes zero sense to me and seems possibly just reactionary based on cubelet pushes being too easy with the regenerating plate? It also makes it basically impossible to push early game without plate or something of the sort (maybe I was just forced to buy the Short Circuit charm?), which has been a problem in previous builds as well. I ended up just walking past the tower and suiciding my army to destroy expos/workers, since by the time I would've killed the tower most of my army would've been dead and the enemy would be defending anyway. I want to MAKE ATTACKS THAT MATTER, not just skirmish back and forth over gems for twenty minutes. Attacking a tower, to me, shouldn't feel like trying to 5hatch Hydra bust a Protoss who's just massing cannons where you're just throwing units at it without any serious regard for micro.
- I was frustrated trying to walk across the map to help my ally. The map seems even bigger than the previous split map, which I felt we had talked about many times as being too separated and too big. So I felt like an obvious concern of the daily testers here was completely ignored with the new map. Given that a lot of time was spent nailing the "speed of battle", I don't know where the game can even go from here other than some sort of global "out of combat" movespeed boost. That frustrates me doubly because my initial thought was that development effort on this map was completely wasted.
Sorry for all the negativity. =( I had a really unpleasant experience with this build, as did a friend I was trying to introduce and who probably won't play again for a while, and that's frustrating.
Comments
Thanks for the feedback Decency! And no need at all to apologize for having and sharing a negative experience. It's all part of the (some times not so delightful) game development process
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First of all, I want to frame what our goals were with this build.
1. To increase the number of "mix-and-match" systems available for players. These systems are mercenaries and charms. Note that I bolded systems. We want to see if it is fun/reasonable to players to buy extra units & items for their hero. We were not as concerned with having finalized content to fill those systems.
2. To tune the other systems in the game to be more focused on people using the mix-n-match systems. For example, we temporarily removed upgrades and made the resourcing merc/charm based
3. To make a first pass at a larger map. We knew that we needed more overall space on the map to achieve our goals (TW1 map was cramped for longer term changes we needed to make). Also, it takes a while to set up a map for the purposes of an art pipeline. So, we tossed the old map and made the TW2 version so we can iterate going forward.
4. To do some "quick-fixes" for clearly bad problems to let people have a reasonable game. For instance, gold-income was on a track. This is not a final ideal, but we wanted people to have relatively even army sizes. As another, bigger example, with the increased size of the map, we found that games were incredibly difficult to end. So, we gave leviathans and juggernauts "game ending power" to ensure that games ended at all.
I bring these up because I want to clarify some of your concerns behind the "intent" of certain pieces. I never want anyone to think we're throwing in Leviathans OP willy-nilly or that we're disregarding feedback about the map. Rather, we are often forced to carefully consider which pieces of the game we want to work on, and which pieces we need to use "band-aid" solutions for.
To comment on some of your feedback:
1. Resourcing -- We already had a resource reconfiguring planned that we hope will achieve a few things. First, we plan on having resource dumps for the important resources you're collecting, such as upgrades/charms. Second, we hope these dumps give more meaning to the killing of expansions/workers. Third, our resource plan should help us avoid needing "ultra-game-ending-doom-mercs" as the only method to end games. You could instead sufficiently harm your opponents economy or get sufficiently far ahead! This will allow us to balance things like Leviathans a little more simply and reasonably.
2. Towers -- I have the sense that the overall power of towers is too high HP wise. I'm personally a fan of the shields because of how often a player is literally nowhere near his own towers (contrasted w/ League where a player is mostly in-lane and there to protect the tower). However, the current numbers really make it feel like you need some ultra powerful doom-pushers to knock the towers down, rather than a window of opportunity. The towers felt good when we had 50%+ additional coin/army in the game. But, with the small armies right now, towers feel super daunting. We'll continue to tune these to make sure they add a bit of safety w/o being too flimsy.
3. Map -- Even before TW2, we've been overhauling the middle of the map. I've mentioned a few times before that I think the 1v1 region is the worst that it has ever been. The size of the map truly makes 1v1 feel deeply isolated. The overhauling should bring the 1v1 closer to the 2v2 and make the regions a bit more fluid/fuzzy. To address the bigness issue, we're experimenting with increased movement speed (+15% test is at the next Daily Test).
I like to say internally that the goal of playtesting is not to have fun, but to develop learnings so that we can make Atlas fun later. That said, we still strive to make Test Weekends as fun and engaging of an experience as possible for testers. An unfortunate reality of design is that not every step we take is forward progress. Sometimes, things get less fun and new systems caused unrelated problems (such as a bigger map+mercs don't spawn from hero = games impossibly hard to end).
I will emphasize though that we always listen carefully to all feedback and are working actively on the problems you've mentioned. I hope that our future tests are more awesome for you! :D
For the goals:
1-2. Awesome! Matrixes are great for replayability. Happy to see Merc factions enter the picture, and to see how we can utilize them as we understand their various potential roles further. What you've done is basically what I was thinking back when reading Firezerg's enormously complex idea for mercs- just having units tied to spec choice at that time. And that's pretty much what we have now. Charms are also awesome! Looking forward to seeing something like scan sweep or speed-up-respawn or give structure immunity there in the future.
3. The larger map is really tough. More overall space is fine when you put objectives in it as has been done, and I like that there are now various attack routes that I can utilize to set up flanks and attacks. But it makes the gameplay soooooo split. I feel like this is going to be a big problem and it was really just put off with the new map- it's probably going to take a few attempts to figure out a decent solution, so let's start playtesting them! The movement speed will help I'm sure, but is it a real longterm fix?
4. I understand there's no easy solution here and it's probably something we should have caught in the daily playtest. I just found that the other aspects of the game like utilizing mercs to accomplish objectives suffered incredibly heavily due to the power of the ultra-mercs. So maybe something to consider in the future is "can people abuse this band-aid by just ignoring everything else?" and go from there. For example, in this case one solution would've been to make the Leviathan damage reduced to 25% or something against units, making them still effective game enders but not the core of your army.
For your comments on my feedback:
Thanks for the response! Always useful to hear the rationale behind things after being able to experience them.