[POLL] What is your *overall* rating for this Pre-Alpha Release 4? [UNOFFICIAL]

Ok everyone, for those of you who've had a chance to playtest this Pre-Alpha Release 4, what is your *overall* rating?

Here were the areas highlighted in the release notes for R4:

Performance Optimizations
Overworld Map System
10 Scenes
Combat
Quests
Loot
Crafting
Player Housing
Parties
Mac / Linux Patching
Swimming

Feel free to break out your ratings to those categories above or any others and elaborate in the comments below, or link to a thread you may have started already.

Note: This poll is designed to show trends of overall sentiment with each subsequent Release. It's not designed to rate it as a final game, but merely as a snapshot of the community's opinion at that point in the development cycle. Previous polls here: R1, R2, R3.

Thanks for voting and looking forward to your overall feedback!

 

Quick thoughts:
Performance - much better. Getting pretty good framerate, although still on fastest video quality. I'm prepared to wait on further optimization.
Map system - err, could be better. I've heard it's a placeholder, so no complaints. I found my way from A to B fairly easily.
Scenes - great. Love the enw content.
Combat - it is what it is. Was never advertised to be more than basic auto-attack, so it's a great start.
Quests - encouraging. Couldn't finish the red sash quest, but no biggie.
Loot - lovely!
Crafting (and gathering) - coming on really well. I'm loving it.
Housing - ++didn't worry about it this time - too much other stuff to do
Parties - yay - got to be in one. Awesome!
Mac/Linux - can't comment as I am a slave to Windoze.
Swimming - great!

For the first time the game feels solid, and I seriously don't want it to end. They're taking it away tomorrow - not sure how I'll cope.....

 

I hope people will vote based on the fact it's one of several pre-alpha releases, and not judge it as a complete game (which is what I've seen some doing in the game chat window these last few days...)

As part of a pre-alpha roll-out of content, I'd peg this around 4/5. It's got a long, long, long way to go and tons of stuff is either frustrating or not there at all... but, vitally, it's doing what it says on the box for this moment in time.

I'm really excited to see the game grow from here. Running around the game world, it absolutely feels like being in a 3D version of UO, and that's jut awesome. When all the promised content is in there... wow, it will be amazing.

 

This is the first time I've given a truly bad rating. I gave it a 1.

I found the new map system (yes I understand it's not finished; I hate the direction) to be the biggest disappointment I've suffered since I first backed this game. It hit me HARD.

I found combat to be so tedious, that I finally just gave up and stopped playing. I realize it's just the auto-attack with no skills, spells, experience, maneuvers. I wasn't expecting any of those things. I WAS expecting combat that didn't require 20 to 30 hits to kill anything bigger than a lizard. It was boring and time-consuming. Painful even.

I found this to be the most disappointing release to date, by a very large margin.

 

Performance Optimizations: Not bad
Overworld Map System: It's a start. Hard to see where they're going with this.
10 Scenes: More content is always a good thing.
Combat: Extremely boring but not unexpected given what was stated. Looking forward to real combat.
Quests: NPC conversations are the worst. I gave up trying. Also, too many bugs preventing completion.
Loot: Initial loot targeting needs improvement
Crafting: I enjoyed this. Looking forward to cooking and alchemy
Player Housing: Didn't test this much so can't comment.
Parties: Good start, looking forward to improvements.
Mac / Linux Patching: AMEN!!! Now fix game crashes and we'll be good.
Swimming: Very nice.

Overall, I rate it an average 3. This game has potential but needs a uniqueness not found in the hundreds of other MMOs it will be competing against.

For a pre-alpha I think the team is definitely progressing. However, there are too many "Looking Forward To X". I personally don't see this game entering beta until the end of the year let alone attempting to achieve a release date at that time.

 

Performance Optimizations - I've been very lucky to have had a smooth gameplay experience from day one.
Overworld Map System - Definitely a work in progress, would have preferred if they stuck with what they showed in the early video footage but I have faith.
10 Scenes - Great variety to start, the first hex I ran in to was the Forest01 hex and it was pleasant and full of players and mobs.
Combat - It is what it is, auto-combat, VERY basic stuff
Quests - Great to see some game loop entering the world. Lots of bugs here but definitely a basic proof of concept
Loot - A LOT of creatures I killed had no loot but I suppose spider venom sacs and such wouldn't be usable just yet anyway.
Crafting - Continues to improve, I really enjoyed gathering ore and took advantage of the infinite ore node until they fixed it Made my own full plate suit of armour.
Player Housing - No time for that, lots of other stuff, I don't own a house and that part of the game doesn't initially interest me. It was cool seeing the basements though.
Parties - This system saved me from having to delete and restart my character, got stuck in Owl's Nest and was able to /zone to a party member. Hooray!
Mac / Linux Patching - Windows user, sorry...
Swimming - Yay! It's like I've moved from Assassin's Creed to AC2, finally my avatar doesn't hit immersion breaking walls around water.

I give it a 4, I've enjoyed playing it all weekend and have probably had about 5 hours logged in game.

 

Given the options, I gotta say 4, but really, I consider it a 4.5, not enough to call it a 5, but better than 4.

Breaking it down...

Performance Optimizations - VERY noticeable. While there were a couple of loading hiccups; for me, attending a gathering at the FireLotus Tavern with Lord British and a LOT of players as well as a hunt in the Dragon Fields again with a rather large group, I noticed very little to NO lag compared to last month when even half of the numbers in Owl's Head made it almost unplayable. 5

Overworld Map System - I like the concept and even the style of it, but it DOES need fleshing out. 4

10 Scenes - Well... 12 Scenes plus 2 placeholders. We already knew 3 (Owl's Head, Kingsport, Braemar), so the rest were new. Even though different hexes opened up the same scene, the scenes provided were good sized areas with plenty to find and do. Forest01 (aka Spider Pass) was the buggiest and most incomplete of the (non-placeholder) scenes, but that made it fun in itself really. Also having chests of goodies to find is a great thing to have as well. 5

Combat - It's a start, and still VERY rough. The little dot before the name seemed odd at first, but became a great method of knowing where you were in the combat. 4

Quests - Having been teased with these from as early as R1, it's good to be able to complete some of the quests. While they still retain some of the basic CRPG/MMO quest tropes, the implementation requires you to think a little differently than just "Get quest, kill things, loot things, turn in", you have to let the NPC know you have the item to give to them in conversation which once you break the mold MMOs have been put into, becomes more realistic. Res Sashes are broken, but we can blame that on Lum. 5

Loot - So far it's making reasonable sense, animals and creatures such as wolves and spiders don't carry gold, humanoids do but in small amounts. Having them have equipment and resources as loot that is later processed and used or sold will make for better gameplay than farming for gold. 5

Crafting/Resource Gathering - Crafting continues to expand which is good. It would still help the game to have the recipes included in NPC conversation as well as ingame books. They would not have to add the recipe to your Recipe Log, but allow the player to write down a possibly previously unknown recipe to try out when they have the opportunity. 4

Resource gathering will be nice and while node based, I'm glad that the nodes don't quite stick out like sore thumbs the way they do in other MMOs. However once you know what you're looking for, then they kind of do. A little variation in in the node graphics would be nice and Lord British already stated that there would be plenty of ores to mine. Only other issue to me is that the nodes should be randomly placed where they are "legal" to appear in a hex scene instead of being static and always in the same place. 4

Player Housing - This is one that I tested in R1 and haven't worried about since. The housing just doesn't mean as much to me in temporary test phases.

Parties - System still seems kind of buggy. Tried last night in the Forest01 hex and we had quite a few problems getting it to work with someone outside of the hex. 4

Mac / Linux Patching - Windows here so N/A

Swimming - VERY happy with this, even with basic surface swimming. Jumping + Swimming + Walking + Running = movement feels complete now. I know Jumping and Swimming make the dev team cry, but it really is necessary to make the world feel more "real". 5

 

Performance Optimizations (4.5)

• The game ran smoothly - before - I could not play it on fantastic setting and have fun - this time around I could ( and I don't have a gaming rig)
• I only had 3 crashes (one in game, and two when I hit the quit game button - after the new patches)

Overworld Map System (1)

• I really want to rate this higher because I understand that it is the first go around and that there are things in the works to improve it - but at this moment in time I have to give it a one
  • Mountains that do not cover the entire hex - give off the impression that we can traverse the landscape - it creates confusion and leads to the problem below
  • When you double click on an "impassable" space the computer thinks that you want to enter into the hex you are currently on OR it sends your "board piece" all the way around the map to get the desired spot (some of this has been addressed with the re-working of the mountain ranges near owl's head)
  • The "Board Piece" is not bad - but a vast majority of the player base seems to prefer the "mini avatar"
  • Entering into a town from the overland map is not working properly
• I also think that this map has a lot of potential - but I would hope that we could see a more - worked out piece within the next 3 weeks
  • I also am interested to see what a river would look like

10 Scenes (2)

• I liked the open scene - where the dragon is attacking - it game me a good feel for urgency, danger and exploration
  • I liked the elves - and liked them even more when they made their AI more responsive and a lot more dangerous ... I specially liked that they were a little relentless once they honed in on you ... I really hope that they do not give up easily once they see you and you run away (its too common now a days for folks to run through mobs with no consequence)
• The rest of the scenes did not feel as complete ... the spider/bear area was cool ... but the openings into the vast desert like area ... not sure if they were intentional or just there ( the statues could look better - I liked the Ank)
• The scenes with the Satir - what in the world are they doing? They were just standing around - do they live there? Are they looking for something? I guess some type of context as to why they are congregating there might help give the feeling that they are there beyond making the region harder to explore ...

Combat (3)

• Auto attack works
• "Dot Damage Meter" works
• I like some of the enemy death animations

• Concerns
  • The "responsiveness" of the combat system ... I now its really early ... but enemies sometimes ignore you completely even if you hit them;
  • The "arrow" animation is weird/broken
  • Fireball is too big

Quests (n/a) didn't really try them

Loot (3)

• We had loot
• I don't understand why the animals get a "coffin" that's always empty? Will they have items to drop?
• Draggin the gold pieces is annoying because I always have to let the computer know how many I want to take ...

Crafting (3)

• I like gathering

Player Housing (n/a) really like the new house

Parties (n/a)

Mac / Linux Patching (n/a)

Swimming (3)

• It works ... maybe just a tad too fast but not a big deal ... the only problem is getting back on land ... many of the edge surfaces do not let us get on land easily

Overall 3 - but there is a lot of work to be done ... I'm really concerned with the instances ... I truly hope that they can create a multitude of diverse and uniques zones to explore and not just areas to kill and gather ... looking/hunting for resources is not my idea of exploration

 

I loved the partying. Worked great for my play-style.

The combat was what it was, unfinished, I cannot fault it.

Loot was fine, I suspect many of the drop items are simply not in-game yet. I expect more specialty resources to be dropped by the non-harvestable creatures in the future, or there will be blood!

But... I did not like the way the generic hexes reused such a small number of scenes. Needs more variety.

At least switch around the entrance points on the maps which have universal entries, that would be *something*.

So a Four it gets, again.

 

Overall, great job. I gave it a 4 out of 5.

One thing I'm a little concerned with is the disconnection of player experiences. Here's what I mean, I went adventuring with several different parties during R4 and what I noticed is that although my PC showed a VERY clean game (no lag, no frame rate problems, not very many odd animations), my fellow party members reported a vastly different experience.

There were times when I would say "I'm right around the corner" and they would say, no you're not I'm there and you're not here. Or "I'm just in front of you" and they would say "No, you're just behind me".

Another thing I continue to see is people using skills and moves that have animation (like the fire staff) that doesn't work correctly for all viewing the scene. It's not synced up correctly. So when I shoot a fireball with my character, no one else sees the fireball, they just see my character lunging at things in a weird animation.

I also have seen a lot of people walking through doors that have shut. My hope is that this is not intended to work this way long term and this only represents a part of the development process to date. It would be nice to hear from the devs that the design is not to shut a door but only have that door actually shut on your personal screen. That would really make doors a silly thing and devalue housing, imo.

 

Pressing Shift when you click and drag drags the whole stack, pressing CTRL when you click and drag peels off 1 from the stack, click and drag by itself brings up the "choose an amount" gump.

Hope that helps with that issue.

 

Performance Optimizations - Slightly choppier than R3 but this varied.
Overworld Map System - Could be improved on.
10 Scenes - I loved many of the new scenes introduced 5/5
Combat - Can't comment on this as it isn't fully developed.
Quests - Frustrating as I have been unable to successfully finish any of the ones I tried. I had pretty much the same issues that the other players had.
Some look like issues with flags not setting when they should. Looks promising though 2/5
Loot - Could be better
Crafting - Only did a little of it, so can't comment much on this
Player Housing - Really like the basements. Glad I bought the 5 story stone and timber split level basement at the store.
Parties - I mostly soloed and in single player mode so can't really comment
Mac / Linux Patching - N/A
Swimming - Nice

Overall, I had to give this a 3/5.

 

Performance Optimizations - Ran great on my pc, only very minor occasional lag. i5 4670k, gtx560ti, 8g ram, wdblack 1tb hd, asus heros 6 motherboard, 750w ps
Overworld Map System -I understand the need for a simpler construction, but not feeling the current "flag icon" as a representation of the avatars. very pop up book looking (which I remember hearing was intentional). Much prefer the placeholder.
10 Scenes - Great amount of work done so far! Scenes were full of monsters and even though were somewhat linear, were still very enjoyable in R4 format
Combat - It worked as intended. Nothing really worth saying except that it was a success.
Quests - Buggy but beginning to come together. NPC's still need more responses to flag words, and etc.
Loot - Seemed to be working, had many creatures drop no loot, or have very minor loot on them. More work needed with highlighting what corpse is being looted/searched when picking from a pile of monsters.
Crafting - Coming along very well. Had some trouble with scaling, and changing the interface.
Player Housing - Houses are looking good. Some still need more polish. (Lord's Home)
Parties - Was put into low populated zones too often.
Mac / Linux Patching - Windows 7 Ultimate.
Swimming - Michael Phelps.

 

Performance Optimizations - It was noticeably better for me than R3 with a crap graphics card. I'm gonna have to build a game PC for SC anyway, so not too worried.
Overworld Map System - I was a fan of the vision for this. Could be better obviously. Make it like Ultima V with creatures running around hexes you have to avoid that get you.
10 Scenes - Pretty nice. Didn't like the laziness of the words in the sky on roads, that was the first thing I saw out of Owl's Head, disappointing. Could have put a cheap skybox up
Combat - It was awful, just a placeholder so moving on
Quests - Too painful to bother with these broken quests at this point honestly
Loot - Rabbits should drop meat and fur that can be used, There is nothing worse that having empty corpse boxes it's so depressing to get nothing. Too many games do this
Crafting - With such a limited release, I didn't bother. Crafting was extremely painful in R3 and I didn't see it's much better yet, Thank god for the recipe book enhancements tho
Player Housing - Yeah, you know. It could be better. Lord Benefactor Home ? Not much incentive to upgrade beyond Knight for those of us not filthy rich or crazy
Parties - I was in low populated zones like O'Sullivan... tried talking to people and role playing but most people were afraid to, which was sad
Mac / Linux Patching - Hell yes !!! Awesome
Swimming - It's great we can swim. It was broken for me all of Friday where I was running on top of water tho.

 

Thread moved to R4 Feedback.

 

Performance Optimizations - Never had much trouble with performance aside from some lags - 4
Overworld Map System - Horrible! Totally removes the exploration aspect and the feeling of roaming around in a living world. Also the change from third person rpg to map/boardgame rips me out of the immersion. I hope they bring back the original 3D-zoomed out world - 1
10 Scenes - They need to be fleshed out a bit more. In some scenes I thought that someone must have forgotten to smooth the ground. But they are atmospheric and nice - 3
Combat - Not much sto say there. It was a placeholder
Quests - The conversation system definitely needs it's own interface. It is way too confusing the way it is now. Quests were ok and Show potential - 3
Loot - Didn't get that much loot... - 2
Crafting - Crafting is ok, but it is not the reason I play the game - 3
Player Housing - Same as with crafting - 3
Parties - Didn't Play together with others
Mac / Linux Patching - Do not use a Mac and/or Linux
Swimming - It adds a lot to the freedom of moving around, but sometimes didn't work correctly - 4

 

Performance Optimizations - Worse than R3. -2
Overworld Map System - A bit weird. Interested to see how this evolves. Way too zoomed in. -3
10 Scenes - Pretty ok. -3
Combat - Splat, done. Not really anything to say about yet. -2
Quests - Better conversation system needed. Quests... Ok. - 3
Loot - Didn't find much loot. - 2
Crafting - Overcomplicated. Crafting needs to be simple and fun. Also, where's my gathering! - 3
Player Housing - Not really interested in this. - 2
Parties - Didn't play together with others.
Mac / Linux Patching - Works great. - 5
Swimming - Great addition. I like it. - 4

 

Well this is my first time in one of the Alpha builds so I'll offer my first time experience:


Performance Optimizations - I really didn't have any issues at all with this, granted I played it Single Player Online so that might have something to do with it.
Overworld Map System - Looks remarkably basic to me, I would have preferred something a little more colorful, not a paper map style
10 Scenes - Only went to one forest and 2 towns but so far they are really nice and well made I feel
Combat - Given that all I have managed to do is auto-attack kill an elf and a deer I don't think I've had enough experience to rightfully comment on this yet
Quests - Pretty nice, I like the lack of handholding in it
Loot - Loot? What Loot?
Crafting - After scratching my head for a few minutes on it I actually found crafting to be very intuitive however very slow, I couldn't just add the ingredients to make 4 ingots for example, I had to make each one individually.
Player Housing - Looking very nice so far, though I have serious concerns over lot availability and how long post-launch we'll have before ALL lots are gone for good and replaced by a seedy player-to-player house trading system
Parties - Didn't join one
Mac / Linux Patching - Windows here
Swimming - So far it feels nice but I couldn't figure out if I was able to dive or not

Additional thoughts:

Animation - Felt nice but my character felt weightless like they were just gliding over the ground instead of actually walking on it
NPC Conversations - Felt a bit underdeveloped so far, I couldn't even ask a simple question of "Where can I buy weapons?", I really hope a lot more time is put into this feature so it will be awesome and not feel like the text parser adventure games of yore.
Bartering - Very straightforward but simplicity is always nice! I just wish there was a better indicator of what merchants sold before bothering to go talk to them.

 

Early systems aside. The game ran very well for me in R4. Stability had improved considerably, as had speed. I rate R4 highly.

 

Two comments:

1) mac performance was acceptable but obviously needs some more improvement ( mid 2010 macbook pro )
2) Map - WTF?!? Horrible. Obviously this received no love. I hope there wasn't more than a day or two of development spent on this...

Bare minimum for the map to be functional

• hexes without content should be grayed out and not clickable
• map should be scrollable and zoomable, really, was this so hard?!?
• The jerky marker animation made me feel I was playing a Commodore 64 game or something. This is the 21st century folks, even phones are capable of smooth 2d animation without too much effort.
• click feedback, basic UI idea. You couldn't just paint a X on the click point or something?! again, wtf... A click should produce a X and a dotted line showing the proposed path. The marker could traverse the path, leaving a solid line behind.
• Ability to change direction, path mid movement would be nice, especially if you are not gonna allow scroll
• map fog - i.e. you have to explore it to see it.

In general this release got a 4/5 from me, so that is what I rated it. But the map implementation is scaring the heck out of me.


PS. you didn't ask, but between scene load times are unacceptable atm. sure it's on your list todo.