General list of feedback for TW4
Some background: I played and followed Starcraft II up until HotS died, was gold league solo and plat 2v2. 2K mmr with as many hours in Dota 2, and completely unranked in Hearthstone since I only just broke down and started playing it. So in other words, I'm a mediocre player who likes to think he knows design, so take this as you will.
I really like the mix'n'match concept of the game, it promises some very nice customization to match one's style more than just picking a particular race/hero would allow. I like that I can adjust my preferred race like I can adjust my preferred deck in Hearthstone: one element at a time until I feel I have most bases covered on my "standard" pick.
However, there are a few aspects of the game in its current state that does not communicate enough information quickly to the player. Each of the below items can probably be alleviated almost strictly through UI improvements.
During the picking phase I can't see what my teammates are planning. Yes, we can chat with one another to plan and so on, but this doesn't offer the instant info that could be offered if I could see the currently-selected hero and units. And as someone brand new to the game, I lose the opportunity to hover over icons to learn from experienced players' picks.
Similarly, in-game I can't click on things to learn more about them. Oh, the enemy just started building a unit you're not familiar with? Better hold down tab and scan the spreadsheet that shows up. I can't even scan the names (since I have no way of finding a unit's name out in the game view), I have to compare the icons to find a visual match, which is unnecessarily stressful when I need some tactical info RIGHT NAOW. I can see that Hearthstone has had some impact on the design of the game itself, and I would encourage you to also take a leaf out of their book when it comes to displaying information: 90% of everything you'd ever want to know about a card in Hearthstone is available on mouse-over. RTS games already have a tactical readout on units you have selected; there's a good reason other RTS's allow you to select individual enemy units, and I'd encourage you to re-evaluate the decision to making enemy units non-selectable.
This extends further than just enemy units: what do those mineral deposits on a creep camp do? The orbs? I can't select them to find any instant info, and so if there's a piece of information I'm missing, I'm just SOL that match. Does it matter which teammate gets it? Being able to click on it and getting a little blurb in the unit view that says "This deposit generates X gears per second for the team that controls it" (which is kind of what I assume they do for now) would do a TON to flatten out the learning curve.
What tooltips DO exist take a second or two to show up. Mid-game, I do not have that kind of time to spend with my mouse idle.
Beyond potential UI/player information dissemination techniques, I have a handful of things to say about the gameplay itself:
Gears are precious. Too precious, it feels. I only have a very limited number to play with, and it makes building a diverse lineup (i.e. more than 2 units) feel very risky. At current numbers, having units cost 10-50 gears on top of normal costs instead of 100-175 might help alleviate this somewhat.
Holding a titan facility down against a bigger opponent can feel futile at times. There are 5 red orbs hanging out that they're going to get all at once the moment they decided to look in your direction, and then the fact that I've camped it for the last 3 minutes means nothing. Destroying orbs-in-progress is a great touch, could that be extended to untapped orbs? Give them 10x health, even, just something to do that is an option to slow them down for the few seconds I might have caught a superior opponent with their pants down.
Most abilities feel like they could use a middle ground; everything's either all or nothing: either the AoE nuke lands and everyone dies, or nothing dies. Either the line root hits and everything's frozen, or nothing's frozen. How about some AoE DoT? How about some large AoE slows or speedups? This might be my inexperience showing through; perhaps those very things do in fact exist, and I just haven't run into them yet.
Positioning is super important in any strategy game. The fact that my allies can inadvertently sentence me to death because I can't move through them is disastrous. Realistic, yes, but so annoying when I lose a chunk of my army because everything is vibrating in place instead of moving fluidly. I can control 50 marines in Starcraft II with minor hiccups at best; but moving 15 units in Atlas requires some unnecessarily complex logistics just to move a few inches on-screen. Cutting the collision box sizes in half might be the place to start.
And what is surely a bug:
- Alt-tabbing minimizes the window in windowed fullscreen. This utterly defeats the purpose of having non-fullscreen mode when I'm on a dual monitor setup.
And yeah, that's about it for flaws. Overall this game shows a lot of promise. I'd reiterate that the lack of information-gathering in-game is crippling; there's no user-based wiki or how-to videos for me to watch, but even if there were, I should be able to get information on the units at least without needing to change windows.
I do have one design-based suggestion, if you'll let me indulge:
The color-based system reminds me a lot of Firefall's crafting system, and you could make options feel a lot deeper by following a primary-secondary color scheme. What I mean by this is thus: each hero is usually one of the primary colors, either Red, Yellow, or Blue. Each of the units is either a primary color or a secondary color: Orange, Green, Purple. Any Red hero can take on units that can be made with Red, so either Red, Orange, or Purple, but not Green. Yellow can take Yellow, Orange, and Green but not Purple, and so on.
You could then fold the neutral units into this scheme, so maybe more aggressive Red heroes can't get engineers since they're now Green, or whatever. I can see that the unit divisions seem to have been inspired by Hearthstone's Class/Neutral card setup, and this system would allow a bit more flexibility while feeling less arbitrary at the same time. You could also have specialized heroes be a secondary color themselves; an Orange hero would be quite limited in not being able to get any except Orange units, but then perhaps their hero abilities can stand to be a bit more outlandish in return.
Comments
Definitely still lots of stuff like this that we still want to add into the deck-building screen. We want you to be able to make as informed a decision as possible.
Similar to the first response -- we'd like to give as much information to the player as possible. We previously had a very rudimentary stat panel before our UI overhaul, and that module will be returning, likely with more detail than it had previously. Clarity and information are super important to help inform player choices, from deck-building to what engagement to take!
This is an excellent point. Other games will let you mouseover the object to get information about it that might not be displayed elsewhere. We should consider doing this for Gems, Stock Clusters, etc. on mouseover. Love this feedback.
Responsiveness of mouseover tooltips is also on the roadmap!
Definitely need to tune these more. The "alternative basic" units (things like the Shield Slug, the Howling Commando, etc) were added to make ramping towards your advanced army smoother. They may not have quite filled that role as well as we wanted them to. In terms of gems (and thus scrap) being very precious, though, that's certainly our goal with them. If they're not VERY valuable, you have less incentive to do virtually anything on the map that gives them to you. This also makes Scrap generators more attractive in situations where you're shut out of it!
The gemming mechanism is one that we're taking several looks at over the next few weeks and trying some experiments with. Something like this suggestion isn't off the table. We definitely feel what you're talking about here and have a few plans to tinker with that and hopefully make that experience smoother.
We have a few of these, but perhaps not enough. The Zephyr, for example, has the Squall ability -- a large AOE that slows enemies and speeds up allies. The Sludge itself is a massive moving AoE DoT. Scorch (Vex's basic ability) applies a weak DoT, but if basic units are hit by it once or twice, it whittles them down well over time. Also, that axis is a strong one to explore as we add more content.
It's not trivial to do this, but we do have some experiments we want to try on with collision sizes in the future. I also think allied pathing/collision will feel some degree of frustrating as long as the system effectively provides what it needs to. The goal is to find the balance there. And that's what we'll push to do!
Oof! What OS are you on?
The closest thing we have to a wiki is AtlasPedia, which has a good amount of information about our units/heroes. That information will all, very likely, be accessible through the game's HUD (and mouseover tooltips, etc) in the future!
Frankly, I think most players would be overwhelmed by this at first. One fear of making deck-building overly complex is that we don't want to instill analysis paralysis. Failing that, this would be fairly impossible to scout. Right now, if you see an Eris player, you have a pretty good understanding of what his unit roster might look like. Same with Ryme. If, suddenly, we had a purple unit roster that was shared between those two, it becomes very, very difficult to reason about. Letting our "colorless" units be neutral and shared across the board is much easier to reason about in both senses.
That's not to say we can NEVER have multicolored units or something of the sort though. That'd be a decision we'd make far in advance though and prepare content for accordingly.
Thanks so much for the post! Lots of juicy stuff in here!
No problem, glad I could help.
As for OS, I'm on Windows 10.