Comments

• Hazard Member

  April 21 edited April 21

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

  April 21 edited April 21

  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 Member

  April 21 edited April 21

  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 Member

  April 21 edited April 21

  @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 Member

  April 21

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

  May 20 edited May 20

  @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.