My Early Access Feedback
Kenaf
Join Date: 2017-02-13 Member: 227864Members
Hello, I wanted to do a longer writeup of my thoughts on the game. I bought it awhile ago but had decided I wanted to wait until it was finished to play it. However, I was bored this weekend and in the mood for a survival style game, so I decided to give it a go. I spent a good chunk of the weekend on it, and wanted to leave my thoughts. The feedback tool in game was too small to express all my opinions. At this point I think I'm done playing until the game is finished.
First, I do want to say that I really like this game. I think you've really got something special here... exploring an ocean is a lot of fun and I haven't seen many (any?) games like it. Even in its early phases, its very good, and you should be proud.
I played this game on the PC using the Steam Link device with a Sony Dual Shock 4 controller. This worked pretty well, though despite having "Full Controller Support" on Steam, I still had to leave my Steam Link, go to my computer, and manually enable the gamepad using a mouse before it started working. As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn on the gamepad without a mouse. This is only a minor annoyance for someone playing on the Steam Link.
On the topic of the gamepad, the game worked pretty well with it in general. I do think an aim assist feature would be a huge help, though. Trying to catch fish using a gamepad is an exercise in frustration. They dart around so fast and you have to have the crosshair perfectly on them before you can catch them. I imagine this is much easier with a mouse, but it was pretty frustrating with gamepad.
Whenever I was on land or in my base in a walking sequence, using Sprint was a huge pain. For gamepad users, I believe Sprint should be a TOGGLE, not a press-and-hold feature. Running around for long distances with the thumbstick pressed in is quite uncomfortable.
Some fine tuning would be nice with the gamepad as well. For instance, if I'm sitting in my Seamoth looking at my PDA, if I press the "B" button to back out of the PDA, it actually exits the Seamoth instead and leaves the PDA up. Pressing B again will put away the PDA. I think pressing B should first put the PDA away, and then exit the Seamoth. Also, there was some weirdness from the Pause menu when pressing B. The Pause GUI would go away, but the game would still be paused.
Oh, and one time I was in the ocean and got my PDA out to drop an item, and one of those arm leech thingies latched on to me. I started slamming the B button to get it off of me, but with the PDA open I ended up dropping half of my inventory.
Using the 5 hotkeys was easy enough with a gamepad, but assigning the hotkeys was annoying. If I ever wanted to put up a poster or briefly use a fire extinguisher, my only option on gamepad is to push A to assign it to a quick slot. If I want to get the fire extinguisher off my quick slots, I have to go re-assign 5 different things to get the fire extinguisher to fall off. A minor frustration for gamepad users.
The game could really use an auto-save feature. During my first gameplay session it caught my by surprise when I saved my game manually that the game hadn't saved any of my progress up to that point. This is the kind of game that its easy to get lost in for hours at a time, and a missed save and game crash can ruin it.
The game crashed on me one time. By then, the game framerates had gotten frustratingly low. After some research I found that it is a known issue with the caching, so I won't go into it. I did "delete" my cache once, even though I would have preferred to have the world persist the way it was.
For the game itself, I had one of those huge non-aggresive whale like creatures beach itself around where my life pod was. It would flop around in the shallow water and knock the lifepod around a lot, and damage my Seamoth. I don't think those guys have any business in that area. You could argue that it could add to the realism, but the way they were flopping around didn't look natural and was immersion breaking.
At one point, I left my Seamoth outside my base with a Stalker roaming around. The stalker kept attacking my Seamoth. It didn't do any damage to it, but it did manage to push my Seamoth underground. I had to use the debug console to spawn a terraformer to dig out my Seamoth. Was pretty annoying.
Regarding bases, at one point I was walking into my moonpool and I... fell? Through the floor to the ocean floor. I was still "walking" around beneath my base, in the water. Had to use the debug console to warp myself back "inside".
There seems to be a feature where if you eat/drink too fast, it ends up hurting you. Googling shows that this is an intended feature to show realism with eating too much. I think that's fine, but some sort of indicator would be nice. In real life if I was eating too much, I would feel full, and that would be my indicator. In game, I eat something and suddenly suffer... blood loss? I must have been really full.
On the floating island, I got stuck a couple times in the same spot. It looked like a very small tunnel. Trying to go through it results in you getting stuck and having to use the debug console to get out. Sorry, I don't have more specifics than that.
During the early game, you receive messages and beacons to kind of point you where to go next. I really liked this, but they stopped coming before long. I hope the final product has more of a sense of direction... after a certain point it came down to aimless wandering and hoping I find something cool. Which there is enjoyment to be had there, but eventually I'm like "okay, I really feel like I'm supposed to have upgrade xxxx by now, but I have no clue where to find it and I'm tired of looking."
I hope the final product is also fully voiced. I enjoyed the bits that were voiced, and mostly ignored the ones that weren't. The "problem" with this Oxygen mechanic is that there is always a sense of urgency that I need to keep moving or risk drowning. I'll pick up a PDA, some text will pop up on my screen or a prompt will tell me to read my PDA, but if I do any of that, I risk drowning. So I ignore it. By the time I get back to my base or somewhere safer, I've forgotten to go back and read them and I lose their context from where I found them. If someone would read it to me as I find them, it would be much more ideal...
Speaking of the PDA, I found the UI wouldn't scroll when using the gamepad when trying to read logs. If I push down on the d-pad, the highlighted cursor eventually leaves the PDA and keeps going down my screen until its completely off screen, instead of scrolling. So I suppose that's a bug.
The beacon system seems a little cumbersome. I don't particularly like that I have to equip them. And by the time I've got 4-5 of them, I don't remember which ones I've visited. If the final product has more of these, its going to get out of control quickly. Is it really necessary for them to be treated like items?
I still haven't figured out if I'm supposed to be "fighting" these dangerous creatures or if I'm supposed to avoid them. I like the fact that there are no traditional weapons (except the knife), but I also feel like I should eventually find something that helps me deal with these sharks and leviathans. I didn't get far enough to create any of the "torpedos" that I found, but they also seemed pretty expensive.
I want to stress again that I really enjoyed my time with this game and I think it is absolutely something special. All of these remarks here have mostly been minor annoyances that I imagine could easily be dealt with during the polish phase. I'm very excited for the full game to be finished, and at this point I think I am going to wait until then.
First, I do want to say that I really like this game. I think you've really got something special here... exploring an ocean is a lot of fun and I haven't seen many (any?) games like it. Even in its early phases, its very good, and you should be proud.
I played this game on the PC using the Steam Link device with a Sony Dual Shock 4 controller. This worked pretty well, though despite having "Full Controller Support" on Steam, I still had to leave my Steam Link, go to my computer, and manually enable the gamepad using a mouse before it started working. As far as I can tell, there is no way to turn on the gamepad without a mouse. This is only a minor annoyance for someone playing on the Steam Link.
On the topic of the gamepad, the game worked pretty well with it in general. I do think an aim assist feature would be a huge help, though. Trying to catch fish using a gamepad is an exercise in frustration. They dart around so fast and you have to have the crosshair perfectly on them before you can catch them. I imagine this is much easier with a mouse, but it was pretty frustrating with gamepad.
Whenever I was on land or in my base in a walking sequence, using Sprint was a huge pain. For gamepad users, I believe Sprint should be a TOGGLE, not a press-and-hold feature. Running around for long distances with the thumbstick pressed in is quite uncomfortable.
Some fine tuning would be nice with the gamepad as well. For instance, if I'm sitting in my Seamoth looking at my PDA, if I press the "B" button to back out of the PDA, it actually exits the Seamoth instead and leaves the PDA up. Pressing B again will put away the PDA. I think pressing B should first put the PDA away, and then exit the Seamoth. Also, there was some weirdness from the Pause menu when pressing B. The Pause GUI would go away, but the game would still be paused.
Oh, and one time I was in the ocean and got my PDA out to drop an item, and one of those arm leech thingies latched on to me. I started slamming the B button to get it off of me, but with the PDA open I ended up dropping half of my inventory.
Using the 5 hotkeys was easy enough with a gamepad, but assigning the hotkeys was annoying. If I ever wanted to put up a poster or briefly use a fire extinguisher, my only option on gamepad is to push A to assign it to a quick slot. If I want to get the fire extinguisher off my quick slots, I have to go re-assign 5 different things to get the fire extinguisher to fall off. A minor frustration for gamepad users.
The game could really use an auto-save feature. During my first gameplay session it caught my by surprise when I saved my game manually that the game hadn't saved any of my progress up to that point. This is the kind of game that its easy to get lost in for hours at a time, and a missed save and game crash can ruin it.
The game crashed on me one time. By then, the game framerates had gotten frustratingly low. After some research I found that it is a known issue with the caching, so I won't go into it. I did "delete" my cache once, even though I would have preferred to have the world persist the way it was.
For the game itself, I had one of those huge non-aggresive whale like creatures beach itself around where my life pod was. It would flop around in the shallow water and knock the lifepod around a lot, and damage my Seamoth. I don't think those guys have any business in that area. You could argue that it could add to the realism, but the way they were flopping around didn't look natural and was immersion breaking.
At one point, I left my Seamoth outside my base with a Stalker roaming around. The stalker kept attacking my Seamoth. It didn't do any damage to it, but it did manage to push my Seamoth underground. I had to use the debug console to spawn a terraformer to dig out my Seamoth. Was pretty annoying.
Regarding bases, at one point I was walking into my moonpool and I... fell? Through the floor to the ocean floor. I was still "walking" around beneath my base, in the water. Had to use the debug console to warp myself back "inside".
There seems to be a feature where if you eat/drink too fast, it ends up hurting you. Googling shows that this is an intended feature to show realism with eating too much. I think that's fine, but some sort of indicator would be nice. In real life if I was eating too much, I would feel full, and that would be my indicator. In game, I eat something and suddenly suffer... blood loss? I must have been really full.
On the floating island, I got stuck a couple times in the same spot. It looked like a very small tunnel. Trying to go through it results in you getting stuck and having to use the debug console to get out. Sorry, I don't have more specifics than that.
During the early game, you receive messages and beacons to kind of point you where to go next. I really liked this, but they stopped coming before long. I hope the final product has more of a sense of direction... after a certain point it came down to aimless wandering and hoping I find something cool. Which there is enjoyment to be had there, but eventually I'm like "okay, I really feel like I'm supposed to have upgrade xxxx by now, but I have no clue where to find it and I'm tired of looking."
I hope the final product is also fully voiced. I enjoyed the bits that were voiced, and mostly ignored the ones that weren't. The "problem" with this Oxygen mechanic is that there is always a sense of urgency that I need to keep moving or risk drowning. I'll pick up a PDA, some text will pop up on my screen or a prompt will tell me to read my PDA, but if I do any of that, I risk drowning. So I ignore it. By the time I get back to my base or somewhere safer, I've forgotten to go back and read them and I lose their context from where I found them. If someone would read it to me as I find them, it would be much more ideal...
Speaking of the PDA, I found the UI wouldn't scroll when using the gamepad when trying to read logs. If I push down on the d-pad, the highlighted cursor eventually leaves the PDA and keeps going down my screen until its completely off screen, instead of scrolling. So I suppose that's a bug.
The beacon system seems a little cumbersome. I don't particularly like that I have to equip them. And by the time I've got 4-5 of them, I don't remember which ones I've visited. If the final product has more of these, its going to get out of control quickly. Is it really necessary for them to be treated like items?
I still haven't figured out if I'm supposed to be "fighting" these dangerous creatures or if I'm supposed to avoid them. I like the fact that there are no traditional weapons (except the knife), but I also feel like I should eventually find something that helps me deal with these sharks and leviathans. I didn't get far enough to create any of the "torpedos" that I found, but they also seemed pretty expensive.
I want to stress again that I really enjoyed my time with this game and I think it is absolutely something special. All of these remarks here have mostly been minor annoyances that I imagine could easily be dealt with during the polish phase. I'm very excited for the full game to be finished, and at this point I think I am going to wait until then.
Comments
The walking on the seafloor thing is a bug that's being looked into. Your decision to warp back in is currently the only way around that (The only non-console way is to build a corridor and hatch, then enter/leave or hop into a sub)
You're not supposed to fight them no. This isn't like Monster Hunter, so there's no real benefit for beating down on them except to perhaps clear some breathing space or just because you're really ticked at a certain creature giving you grief. Reapers can be fought with the Stasis Rifle or the Prawn suit, but I still feel they're better just avoided. The 'other leviathan' tends to just ignore you for the most part, which is probbaly a flaw in its an AI than intended behavior, so I wouldn't worry too much about that one.
One of my gripes with the PDAs actually was that it came up and started reading it to me on its own with no prompting from me xD
They're all sorted in your log though grouped by context (i.e. the Island base, etc) and if you want to read them before long you can just hop back into your sub real quick.
Aaaah that spot on the Island where you got stuck.... I got stuck there so many times myself too xD Report that with the Feedback tool.
Non-aggressive whale-like creatures.... I can only think of the Reefback, and if that's the one (They moan a ton and have tentacles) then them being that close to your lifepod definitely isn't intended behavior. On that note, Sandsharks and even at rare cases Crabsnakes can also wander into the area.