Weekend 3 Feedback (LONG)

TheAshenKnight

This is Part 1 of 3 parts.

Due to my idiocy, this was originally split into three separate threads, but Hazard has reposted the other parts in the comments to this. D'oh.

Thanks!

First of all, sorry about this being so late! I ramble too much and I’m slow. Secondly, I’d like to say that this game is great so far. It has a ton of potential, even if it’s relatively early in its development. There’s a lot of great design work going on that I adore, a great aesthetic (I saw some people complaining about the art style; I loved it), wonderfully chill music, and large amounts of variety. Good luck with it!

Also, I realise there are megathreads, but a lot of what I have to say overlaps, so I'd rather format it in this method, rather than cherrypick certain bits out with little context. Hopefully it's clear to you.

I’m a new tester (came in this weekend), and I had the pleasure of playing 6 PvP games (it would’ve been more, but I had some prior obligations for about the first two hours of it :/ ), and winning 3, but I’ve played every hero via bots. The following views are coming from someone who used to play a great deal of Warcraft 3 (very casually; it was mostly custom games), Starcraft 2 (a bit more competitively, but I was never any good), and now League of Legends. I've also been playing Magic: The Gathering for a few years, with a special interest in eternal formats. So, that’s the lens I’m viewing this from, and here are my impressions of this Test Weekend.

Map Design

I don’t know whether or not you intend to make this game have multiple maps, but I was personally a big fan of having just one. Especially when you’re just getting into a new game, having a single map makes it easier to focus on the other elements of the game and learn those, rather than attempting to adapt to a new map every time you play. It’d add additional complexity that is, in my opinion, unnecessary. Of course, if multiple maps were never an intention, everything I said is irrelevant.

The one map we do have I quite like. Being symmetrical, changing sides from the bots game to PvP isn’t too jarring. The Top/Mid/Bot Juggernaut spawns serve as nice contestation points. However, I felt as though the very top expansion was relatively worthless. There were two expansions close to every player that could be more easily attained, making the less secure expansion either too risky (being undefended, guarded by Hard creeps, and out of the way, making your base vulnerable) to take early or completely unnecessary late. I’d suggest making a greater reward for the risk (something like high-yield minerals) or making them easier to take by reducing the creep difficulty in front of them.

Additionally, I felt the towers on the top and bottom sides of the map weren’t worth attacking. Neither of them directly defended any of the healing towers, and were often guarding expansions instead. While these are useful targets, attacking the tower below it offers an easier path to blitz and take a healing tower, while also opening the same expansion and partially exposing another. In short, I felt like there was no strategic significance to these towers, other than one expansion, which makes the other towers more critical targets.

Heroes

I did have the opportunity to play each hero, though I only played three in PvP (Ryme, Celesta, and Alder). Below, I’ll list them in order of favourite to least favourite, with an explanation as to why I liked or didn’t like them.

1. Alder: While I didn’t feel Alder was the strongest of the heroes, he was certainly the most unique, and definitely the best designed. His units are all different and synergise extremely well with one another, making it worth building each and every one of them. He excels at longer fights that are stationary (such as in a choke point where retreat is less of an option), and is weaker in fights where his units can be kited about. In my opinion, his uniqueness makes him the most fun, and his combined strengths and weaknesses make him what appears to be the most balanced.
2. Celesta: Celesta’s a very interesting hero. She essentially has two very strong playstyles: Spam Wisps and become a kiting nightmare, or spam the artillery units and become a stationary, defensive nuker. I heavily favoured the first playstyle, but the second has its place, and can be very devastating if the other team doesn’t have a dedicated tank. I mostly enjoyed her because she felt very strong using the strategy I had, which was to spam nothing but Wisps (and if I remembered, Martyrs and Motivators), as well as either Steel Bangle or Vitality, Blitz Orb, Soul-Something, and the Tri-Star (not necessarily in that order; I usually start either the lifesteal or Blitz Orb). This had an extremely high damage output, combined with survivability. However, I’m not sure she was meant to be played in this manner, as neither of her abilities synergise very well with this playstyle. If this is unintended, you may want to change Wisps. If they’re meant to be fodder to protect the artillery, they’re too weak, with too high damage and mobility. Despite the weird juxtaposition within the hero, she was my second favourite to play. My biggest issue is that if you go with the Wisp spam, her last unit is (and most of her upgrades are) completely worthless. It feels like she’s having an identity crisis.
3. Vela: I saw it mentioned in chat that (and I could just be remembering incorrectly), assuming proper control of her, Vela is considered the most overpowered of all the heroes so far by the devs, and the most difficult to balance. I agree. Vela’s kit is extremely powerful in the right hands, and can output massive amounts of damage at an extremely long range. However, just due to how fun the other two heroes were, Vela is third in my favourites list (but could be higher if I spent more time with her, as I enjoy doing lots of damage insert sinister emoji here). I think that this strength is due to a lack of any glaring weakness. Her units are squishy, yes, but behind a tank line at a long range, this simply doesn’t matter. In combination with her ult (and maybe a Rabbit’s Foot for good measure), and you just can’t catch her. Nerfing her damage would make her too weak, so she’s in a tricky spot. Therefore, I’d suggest removing her ability to damage buildings with her snipe, or reducing her mobility. Both her and Celestia seem to be intended to be long-range, high-damage squads, so a good tradeoff would be mobility, at least in my opinion.
4. Vex: Some of my first games were with Vex, and I liked his combination of damage and tankiness. He seems like a fairly good starter squad, as unlike the hydro squads, he does a fair amount of damage. His well-roundedness made me quite enjoy him, with no huge weaknesses or strengths.
5. Eris: Eris felt like a weaker version of Celesta to me. Honestly, I’d guess my playstyle of Celestia is what you intended for Eris, but Celesta’s versatility in swapping builds, longer range (her Wisps even have a range upgrade and, unless I’m mixing them up with Vela’s units, an ability that gives them more range), and extremely low stock cost made her feel more powerful for the high damage/high mobility role. I did like her quite a bit, and Eris’ units certainly synergise better to work toward this role, but I simply preferred Celesta to Eris.
6. Ryme: Ryme was strange. As you can probably tell from my list, I’m not a big fan of tanks in about any game, but I see their necessity, and Ryme is a pretty dang good one. His ult felt powerful, and I loved his variety of units. I didn’t like him as much as the others because damaging things is fun to me, but he’s a good hero, whom I don’t have many gripes with.
7. Grath: Grath felt, at least to me, very much like Ryme. The biggest difference between the two is I felt that Ryme was based more upon utility and casting, while Grath was more of a pure tank. I loved the dive ability and the rhinoes. Of the two, I’d probably rather play Ryme, but both seem to fill a good niche in what’s nearly the same space. Utility? Ryme. Brute force and sheer tankiness? Grath. As a meta begins to form, I believe there are two things that could happen with Ryme and Grath. They could fill different tank roles, and both be played a great deal for different circumstances, or one or the other will be played far more, as they’re almost strictly stronger, and right now I feel like that’s what’s more likely to happen. Perhaps directly due to his utility, I also believe people would favour Ryme.
8. Other blue person: I honestly can’t remember this hero’s name, and now I can’t look it up (I don’t think…). It was the hero in the hydro squad that wasn’t Ryme, with… um… those units? This hero was the first that I played, but I simply did not like them, especially after I played a few of the other heroes. This hero seemed to want to become a version of Ryme that was even more utility based. The problem with this was that none of the abilities felt very powerful, or possibly worse, memorable. I can’t for the life of me actually remember what units this hero had. I also never saw this hero played in PvP, which could mean I either just got unlucky (or lucky, as the case may be ;P), no one likes this hero, or this hero is actually weaker. Or, I'm just forgetful. Now, I haven’t crunched numbers, so I could be terribly wrong, but this is how this hero felt to me.

Unit Design

In general, I quite liked the unit design. With the exception of a few units for the main heroes, each and every one felt unique and, for the most part, useful. However, there were some that felt nearly identical to the exact same. Below, I’ve listed the units that feel incredibly similar to each other.

• Celesta’s Tier 1 units
• Vela’s Tier 1 units
• Vex’s Tier 1 units
• Eris’ Tier 1 units

Eris’ units feel the most unique due to their ability, but their general feel is pretty much the same.

I find it interesting that these are all Tier 1 units. While a few were a bit different, and had unique abilities, they all seemed to be high damage, fragile units meant to take a backline and/or kite. I’m not sure whether or not you want them all to feel similar, but to me they all did.

There are two big problems I had with the units in general, however: Mercenaries and Flying units.

Let’s start with mercenaries.

At the beginning of the game, you’re presented with four different options of mercenaries for you to use. However, while each of the heroes are designed with a certain feel in mind that lets you know more of what’s intended for their playstyle (for example, the bulkier looking heroes were tankier, the more elegant ones were fragile and high damage, and the ones with fire… well, they blew stuff up), the mercenaries are instead represented by four different shapes. This immediately makes it far more ambiguous as to what each of these groups is supposed to do. Additionally, some of the units in each group overlap, leading to even more confusion. Plus (I may have simply missed it, but I can’t go back now to check, and even if I did, I didn’t feel it was clear. I’ll hit on that later), there was no way to tell what mercenary groups the other team picked until you saw the units (but even then, due to overlap, sometimes it wasn’t clear).

I’d recommend removing overlap, as well as making some unique symbols for each of the mercenary groups. The units themselves felt fine (at least, the ones I got to try), but the ambiguity was troubling to me (once again, something I’ll hit on later). While the mercenaries should always (at least in my opinion) take second choice compared to the heroes, making them feel almost irrelevant isn’t good.

Additionally, I noticed something strange; there were several mercenary units (or maybe it was just the one and I’m making stuff up x] ) dedicated to being anti-air. But, um, where was the air?

I have a love/hate relationship with air units. Sometimes they can save your bacon, but other times they’re the one stealing it from you. In Starcraft, for example, you need always be prepared for the possibility of a sudden tech switch to Mutalisks wrecking your base while your blob of units waltzes around on the ground trying to figure out how to build slingshots.

In Atlas, however, I almost never saw them. Part of the reason is that none of the classes tech into air units. You’ve got some in certain merc groups, but that goes back to a mercenary issue of being unable to see the opponents’ mercenary choices. Why would you pick the group with anti-air mercs if you have no way of knowing whether or not your opponents will actually have access to any air units? Certainly not for the anti-air unit by itself. That group essentially has a dead unit when considering its value. Plus, even if they do have access to air units, they’re so few and far between that it’s usually more worth killing them with your regular units (most of which can hit both air and ground anyways) rather than specifically building anti-air units.

The two air units I did see were the Transport and what I believe is named the Leviathan (it was a gigantic ship with huge wings). I’ll cover the transport in a different section, seeing as I have a few issues with it that stem from a portion of design that really doesn’t have much to do with the transport itself. However, the Leviathan is a different story.

The Leviathan is a giant ship that shoots things and is pretty tanky. However, for being such a large, scary-looking ship, it didn’t seem like it did much. Every time I encountered it (I don’t ever remember my allies building one), I was on the opposing team, and it went down fairly quickly while seemingly doing little to either our units or our buildings. Granted, I never built the Leviathan, so this might just be me being ignorant of what it does (or just not seeing what it did in large battles), but I felt as though it had relatively little or no impact. It seemed to be an attempt from the other team to either catch up or to ‘win more.’

So, other than that (and the brutal Titans, if those count), I saw exactly zero air units. I feel like either adding more or making them more viable would add a bit of strategic diversity to the game, but at the same time it might create some balancing issues as well.

Look below for the other parts.

Hazard

You know you could have just posted more times in a row right?

Hazard

I got you

Sound Design

From the impressions I got from the survey, the sound design is even less final than the game. Therefore, I’ll try not to write another wall of text.

The biggest problem I had with the sound design (other than things being different volumes) was that I felt it was too difficult it was to determine what sounds came from what units. Many of the attack and death sounds were very similar (or possibly the same, now that I think about it) across several units. I’d recommend a distinct sound for each (rather than a ‘pew’ ;P), similar to what Warcraft 3 has an abundance of.

But, from the sounds of it, there’s something already in the works, so this is probably pointless, haha.

Miscellaneous

I’ll list some of the other impressions I had while playing here.

• This game is a lot of fun. The idea of combining an RTS with team play, while simultaneously making it less stressful than something like Starcraft is excellent. Props to you guys! Hopefully it gets popular, as this is something I’d love to watch casted (or possibly play? I doubt I’ll ever be that good, but I can try!).
• The tutorial, at least to me, did a fairly good job of explaining how the game worked, and in combination with the intro bots, I felt as though I had a good grasp on how to play.
• Is there some way of creating your own chat rooms in the client (or will there be)? This is pretty necessary when the game launches. Just something to keep an eye on.
• One of the questions in the survey was what would keep us coming back. Other than great gameplay, I noted that several other games (namely League) have progression systems that feel like you’re gaining something. This was somewhat present with the levels, but there was no benefit to leveling up other than bragging rights. Ranking systems also help this somewhat (but I heard this was in the works). Additionally, I’d recommend adding cosmetic changes you can buy with some premium currency (probably one you can slowly obtain some of by playing). This is likely already on your list, but it’s a great way to both make money and keep people coming back. Just make sure it doesn’t become Pay-to-Win, and you’re fine.
• You’re probably aware of this already, but I and many others had major pathing issues when the battlefield got cluttered, specifically with melee units, which directly led to me enjoying the heroes with primarily melee units less (which partially contributed to why heroes like Ryme and Grath were lower on the favourite list earlier). It also made me pretty annoyed sometimes. It seemed like the units would be attempting to find a way around the concave of ranged units, but wouldn’t go far enough around the concave, or would get stuck on the other ranged units trying to find a spot to shoot. Additionally, many of the hitboxes felt bigger than they looked. The combination of these issues (and likely a few more) made it difficult to effectively use melee units.
• Having Juggernauts selected with Tilde causes it to frequently change targets/stop attacking when you don’t want it to, which was a bit irritating. Forcing it to be controlled separately would make it less clunky to use.
• Occasionally I would attack move near a Titan camp and end up aggroing them, typically the Brutal guys. That wasn’t fun. If attack move didn’t work on non-aggroed camps, it would be especially helpful in reducing mistakes and annoyance.
• Splitting units from one big team blob felt weak, and there wasn’t much incentive to do so, especially after early game and the scramble for the Juggernauts. Individual units are too weak to cause much damage, and even if they did, having expansions destroyed didn’t feel as though it impacted much. More on that in a bit. A possible fix for this would be more neutral objectives for mid/late game. Perhaps they’d get significantly more difficult the more units were near them to incentivise taking it with fewer units?
• A few times I was a bit annoyed when I had units near a wall and I clicked somewhere beyond it. Some units were closer to one entrance, and some closer to another, so my force would split. Sometimes I wouldn’t notice until half of it walked into an enemy army. This is entirely my fault, but I think it might be worth looking into adding dotted lines for movement paths, such as if you queued movements, to help show exactly where units are going. It might also cause too much screen clutter, though.

Towers feel weak. Far too weak. This directly affects several things in the game.

• Juggernauts are less valuable, and later in the game completely unnecessary to take towers. They’re still useful, but their usefulness is diminished.
• Backdooring is far more viable than it should be, as units can run directly through towers with few casualties, and because the Nexus can be attacked at any time, just… boom. Theoretically. I suppose this could be another viable strategy, and you don’t want to remove it, but it simply serves to make towers less useful, and gives less incentive to attack them.
• Expansions are incredibly vulnerable. Those towers you can build don’t do diddly squat against the enemy team past early game. Granted, they’re cheap, but also feel like they aren’t even there.

Additionally, Scrap doesn’t feel like an incredibly valuable resource. At least, to me it didn’t.

• Yes, it allows you to get charms and build towers. However, because towers feel weak, this means their only real use is for upgrades. Early game, this is fine. Late game (if the game is long, anyways; this won’t always be an issue), however, it becomes a totally useless resource. As a direct result, there’s little incentive to protect expansions past a certain point in the game, especially seeing how easily they can be rebuilt.
• Because of this, harassment of expansions using Transports becomes less useful, as you aren’t going to constantly be using scrap for the entirety of the game. Having three players to a team also does this. Harassment is extremely effective in games like Starcraft or Warcraft 3 because there’s one opponent who’s going to be directly hurt by this. However, when there are three opponents, this effect is heavily diminished, especially since they can still produce units as normal, with the only difference being they might be slightly weaker for a little longer (a big difference, I’m aware, but a heavily variable one as well, depending on their micro, your micro, the hero, etc.). Thus, during extremely late game, the only uses for transports are flanking and backdooring. They’re still useful, but much less so.
• However, one of the biggest reasons scrap doesn’t feel as valuable, at least to me, is that I didn’t feel a gigantic difference between having two and three expansions or so. Instead, I felt most of my income actually came from gems. While I realise this is likely isn’t the case, the slow mining rate of workers made it feel like they had little impact. A possible fix for this is to simply have the workers mine faster (or have multiple workers), but in smaller increments. The number changes more, but increases at the same rate, making it feel like they’re gathering faster.
  Another possibility is to, instead of (or alongside) regenerating stock slowly after running out, have the ability to purchase units for exorbitant amounts of scrap instead. Or, perhaps mercenaries could be bought using scrap instead of stock, or a combination of the two if you’re worried about all-merc armies.

One more thing… I felt like it was more worth targeting units instead of heroes. Since the only thing I can really compare this to is Warcraft 3, I’ll go over to that.

• In Warcraft 3, when your hero dies, instead of them respawning after a bit, you have to both pay a fee to revive them and wait for them to respawn. Additionally, the heroes in that game all have very powerful abilities (they aren’t one-man armies, granted, but they can do a significant amount of damage left unchecked, or heavily upgrade surrounding units with auras, or help strengthen them strong abilities), meaning your army will be at a pretty big disadvantage if you’re lacking your hero(es).
• In Atlas, there was very little consequence to losing my hero, especially since they didn’t cost any stock to revive. Additionally, while there are many hero abilities that are great, there are fewer of them, and most feel weaker than ones in Warcraft 3 would’ve. This leads to your hero feeling like a slightly tankier unit that has two abilities instead of one, shoots slightly slower than most of your other units, and does a bit more damage per shot. At least one ability is significantly stronger, but the cooldown is also longer. Because of this, I found myself targeting the units in the opposing armies instead. Why? Because they cost stock to replace, and are typically much squishier. There’s a greater benefit to me destroying those units than their hero. Likewise, losing my own hero is less detrimental than losing an actual unit. I’d often use my hero to tank Titan camps early game because it was a quick replacement that didn’t cost me anything.

Hazard

Clarity

This was my largest issue within this test weekend. Part of it had to do with things, such as sound, being incomplete, but that wasn’t the entirety of my problem with clarity.

Back in Season 5 of League of Legends, Riot Games decided to start improving the ‘clarity’ of the game. It’s a pretty ambiguous statement, but it was apparent what they meant as the season progressed. Essentially, they made the game more accessible by more clearly presenting information.

When I was playing Atlas, one of the biggest problems I had was how incomprehensibly or strangely information was presented to me. I mentioned earlier that the Test Weekend Tutorial did a great job of explaining how to play. Without it, however, I would’ve been pretty lost.

I’m going to use the scoreboard as an example (the one displayed at the top). Maybe I just missed this information, but it took me a bit to figure out what the ‘score’ was. And this wasn’t the only instance of information being unclear. For readability, I’ll just list a bunch of things below, with recommendations. Maybe these would all cause too much clutter, but I feel that changing these would make the game feel less confusing, both to watch (potentially very important in the future) and to learn.

• The biggest clarity issue I felt the game had was what Ability Power did. I still don’t know. In League, Attack Damage and Ability Power scalings are colour-coded with orange and aqua respectively. You can hover over tooltips at any time to see exactly how much these stats are benefitting your abilities. Atlas lacks this. So, while Attack Damage is pretty self explanatory, I didn’t know what Ability Power affected, and therefore couldn’t gauge the effectiveness of Magic Resist as opposed to Physical Resist, or Ability Power versus Attack Damage. Some abilities I noticed had the word ‘Magical’ in purple when you showed their tooltip, but how was Ability Power affecting these? Was it affecting these? I don’t know. I’d assume so, but I don’t know how much. Additionally, were any units doing Magic Damage with basic attacks instead of Physical Damage? I couldn’t tell. I’d assume not, but in that case, Magic Resist isn’t very helpful. There are a limited number of damaging abilities, such as Celesta’s two abilities, Vela’s snipers, Vex’s two abilities, the Scuttleguards’ roll, Alder’s ult, the blue Sage’s frostbolt thing, and the rhino’s dive. Knowing me, I probably missed some. However, none of these felt like they did as much damage as basic attacks, with the exceptions of the snipers, Alder’s ult, and Celesta’s ult, and two of those can be dodged with varying levels of difficulty. But are these affected by Ability Power? I think so. Then, by how much? Adding that scaling tooltip would be immensely helpful, or even saying something like, “This ability deals 7 damage, and more with Ability Power.”
• On a similar note, piercing, heavy, and normal attacks with the light, normal, and heavy armours weren’t explained very well, and I only learned about them from the website. They make a bit more sense to me because I played Warcraft 3 which had a similar system, but it was unclear which units had what type of armour, and which units had what type of attack. I suppose it was in the left-click menu (I can’t check now), but it isn’t always intuitive by each unit. How do you tell what type of attack that fire breath is? Is it heavy? Is it normal? Why aren’t there other types of damage if you’re going to make this type of distinction? League’s damage system is a bit simpler, and thus easier to comprehend. There’s physical damage and armour, and magic damage and magic resist. I’m not saying simpler is better in every circumstance, but simpler makes it easier to learn faster.
• The left-click menu felt a bit clunky. I can read the numbers in the menu, but it’s difficult to read at a glance because there are no symbols in it, which serves to both clutter the menu and make it more intimidating. You either need to take the time to read it, which slows you down, or memorise where each value is.
• Missile attacks, for the most part, looked similar to one another: a little blue ball of energy. Making unique missile effects for each unit would fix this problem. Alternatively, another, probably much faster, fix would be to make allied missile attacks blue and enemy missile attacks red. Think about Star Wars; you aren’t confused by who’s shooting at who because all the bad guys shoot red and the good guys shoot blue (... or purple or green. But mostly blue). The same is true with the lightsabres.
• I was confused as to exactly what gems did. For the gems that summoned the Juggernaut, it was fairly obvious due to the numbers around the buildings (what are those buildings called?), but the other gems confused me. I eventually found out they gave you scrap and experience, but this could easily be fixed with a little popup that displays exactly what you gain from the gem (for example, +1 EXP and +10 scrap symbol here, though I noticed you did do this with the Juggernaut gems by having a little +1. Adding this to all gems would be nice). What I wasn’t confused by, however, was exactly when the gems were collected, due to the bar below each, as well as who could collect which gems (red gems were obviously for the enemy, blue were for you, and the grey ones were neutral. It’s amazing what colours can do).
• I felt as though the Tab scoreboard was one of the most confusing UI aspects. I eventually found out what some of the numbers meant, but some I’m still unsure of. If I had more time to study it, I’d figure it out, but I unfortunately don’t. Something as simple as putting “LVL” over a column of numbers is enough, or adding tooltips for these elements.
• Certain hero abilities confused me with their damage. For example, Alder’s vines damaged Titans, while Celesta’s owl didn’t. This is likely intentional, but adding that to the tooltip would help with clarity.
• Mines, at least to me, didn’t look like mines. It was very obvious they were bad with the giant orange circle, but I didn’t realise that not only could you destroy them, but exactly how they damaged you (I.E. exploding. ‘Cuz I didn’t know they were mines. I might not be the brightest lightbulb) until I watched an old PvP game between some devs and daily playtesters. Perhaps this is my own ignorance, but perhaps adding a beeping noise would help. I still find it strange that shooting the mines keeps them from exploding, though.
• Brush would be confusing to those unfamiliar with the concept. Granted, a large number of players will have likely played either Starcraft 2 or League of Legends before, and this same concept is in both games, but without either of those contexts, you have these random reeds you can walk through and, for some reason, also keep you from seeing things. This is nitpicky, but it could matter, especially to newer players.
• Once again, mercenaries being represented by the shapes was confusing, and was more about memorising what units each shape had, rather than being able to guesstimate using symbols or pictures like you could with the heroes. I hit on this earlier, but just wanted to reiterate it here as an issue with clarity.
• While I’m mentioning things I’ve already talked about, I’d like to reiterate that pathing lines would be helpful in certain circumstances, as it makes it more clear as to exactly where your troops will be moving, reducing a bit of confusion or annoyances… but it could also clutter the screen. Or not. I’d have no idea unless I saw it.
• Certain units, especially tiny and thin ones (like Wisps), were somewhat difficult to see in certain areas (in brush or more colourful backgrounds). Something that might help with this is having a constant border around units, be it a black border, or blue borders for allies and red borders for enemies (and perhaps green for your own).
• Certain units looked very similar to others. For example, Vela’s Tier 1 and 2 units looked almost identical at a glance, as they have similar structure and colours, and Eris’ Tier 1 and Celesta’s Tier 1 units were also close. Having slightly more pronounced colours or altering appearance might fix this.

At the same time, however, there were many instances in which you did clarity very well. Games are very audio and visually driven, so the more you can show and not tell, the less you need to explain, and the easier the game is to learn, both watching and playing. Some examples of this were…

• The sound that plays when your units are targeted by a tower
• The circles around the mines
• The yellow highlights when units are built, and the “Unit Construction Complete” soundbyte
• Ping sounds and symbols
• The tower shooting effects (straight beams of energy that pulse when they shoot)
• Upgrades being colour-coded based on tier (which also corresponded to cost)
• The numbers around the Juggernaut spawning buildings
• The ethereal appearance of the Juggernaut while it’s being built, as well as the circle at its feet
• The text near Titan camps, as well as the size and colour of the creeps guarding them
• More that I can’t think of at the moment

More of this type of stuff would be great, and I think would help get people into the game easier. If a game is easier to learn, it’s easier to simply pick up and play, which makes people stay. This is one of the problems Paradox games have (or, if you’re insane, Dwarf Fortress. I love that game, but man…). They’re extremely fun, but because they’re difficult to get into due to the sheer amount of stuff to learn and how unclear it is, most people don’t or can’t. It’s partially why I prefer League of Legends to Dota 2.

So those were my impressions of this test Weekend. Once again, sorry I’m so late, but this took a bit to write (probably because it’s way too long. Sorry! I just wanted to be thorough).

Told you I’d post some feedback DayJ. ;P

TheAshenKnight

@Hazard said:
You know you could have just posted more time in a row right?

I'm an idiot.

Well, it's all here now, regardless.

EDIT: I can repost them so the formatting isn't lost if you delete those, then delete the other threads. Less clutter all around.

EDIT EDIT: Nevermind, looks like you're already on top of it. You didn't have to do that, but thanks!

Hazard

I got you. Thanks for posting such a detailed Feedback. I can't wait to read it tonight

TheAshenKnight

@Hazard said:
I got you. Thanks for posting such a detailed Feedback. I can't wait to read it tonight

And then RIP the forums. x] (At least, for us non-daily folks.)

Now that I can post again, I hope some of this was helpful to you guys. Thanks for having all the testers again! Wish I had more time this weekend than I do.