Feedback after about 20 games(or more?)
Hi,
After several hours of playing, I wanted to give you feedback. Mostly because I want this game to be good( I want this really badly), but unfortunately I saw a lot of thing which just doesn't seems right.
The art is good. Unfortunately, lack punch? every ability you use just doesn't feel good. It is bland. You does not feel powerful when you execute your hero ultimate ability. I feel like the only two abilities in the game done good is the charge of Battlehorn and sniper of Deadeye. Everything else is just bland light, which slowly(or instantly) reduce the healthbar of your opponents. I want to see better animation and sound effects on all spells. Beside that, the art is good(not my taste, but the gameplay is more important).
Ahhh. the Gameplay... So sad... So, so sad... So many cool looking units. And all of them move like idiots. This is probably one of the worst path-finding I experienced in a RTS after the famous Dragoons in BroodWar. I found myself playing with only range units, mostly because all of the melle units get stuck on everything. They cannot understand, that they need to move 3 pixels to the right in order to get to where I pointed them to go. You can argue that "It is just an alpha", but may I ask you - Isn't this one of the most damn important things in a RTS? If you have bad path-finding you can hurt even the balance of the game. You have this amazing unit called Brambelthorn(the giant three) and it is unusable(you cannot micro it) because in 80% of the time, the unit need to be constantly re-adjusted on every pixel, so it did not get stuck on everything. Of you end up using it like a meat in front of a tower. Yes, you can use transporters to drop them on the enemy, but unit is so slow, that such strategy cannot work if the enemy can shoot up. Anyway, enough with that. The conclusion is that path-finding is horrible and I want it to be better.
Another example of bad movement is the engineer. From what I saw in the games I used it, this unit cannot attack. However, if he is in the selection of your army and you attackmove, this unit will blindly move to the attack-move point and die. Yes, you can have it in another control, but the bottom right(bottom left, if your map is on the right) corner of the screen is a bad place for this information to be located. I need to look to the edge of the screen to see what I have selected. I would proffer to have the selected units in a little squares in the middle, instead in the dead corner.
I like the way the upgrades are done. Two type of damage, two type of damage mitigation. And all little upgrades for every unit feels like a nice touch. However, something doesn't feel right here. For instance, lets take Alder(the mage hero for Hord of Gorok). This is a mage hero, who deals magical damage and benefits from it. However, his units use physical damage(why?). For me, every units specific to a Hero should benefit from the same upgrades. Otherwise, this unit does not feels like it is designed to be the companion of this hero.
Unlocking units and heroes in an RTS game - just NO. If you are going to stuck with this model, would be nice to have like 40USD all package where you get all units of the game. Otherwise people would need to grind in order to be able to use different strategies, or play different race. This is extremely bad in an RTS game. Especially when you cannot try the particular unit/hero in a real game before unlocking it to see if you will ever want to use it.
As a conclusion to everything, I want to say that this game have a lot of potential. I will continue to play, just to be able to see, if my current opinion is wrong and I just had to play the game more to understand the mechanics and the balance.
Hope that, the future patches will fix a lot of those stuff and once the game launch it will be real RTS, not a clunky mess of a such.
Comments
I agree, although in open alpha this is very understandable.
That's not really a problem imo, when there is no more towers to take, i usually put in my main group to soak up a few hits and release some supply. So i do like this behavior.
To be honest, i think physical damage is more efficient than ability for Alder himself. The only thing that (probably) scales well with ability damage is the saplings attack, and they arrive only at level 15.
I don't mind, especially since the units unlock very fast. With a good player pool and matchmaking, this shouldn't be a disadvantage for new players, anyway. On the plus side, this makes it easier to get into a new faction. If the game has to be free to play, some things need to be unlockable anyway.
Saplings are physical, only the dot from the vines is magical I think.
100% Disagree about the opinion on pathfinding. Love that there is scope for controlling better in order to get more value out of my units.
You need practice to master the path finding, it can takes time but it's very rewarding when you get it and it allows a lot of cool micro moves (a lot more than a "better" path finding will allow).