Mercurysteam's Hangout
BARRACKS => Gameplay Feedback => Topic started by: GlitchTheRobot on May 28, 2017, 09:46:14 AM
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I'll start by saying I have played around 7-8 matches ,but have yet to play as an antagonist yet. I am having quite a bit of fun ,but there are some issues. I realise you are not finished yet so if I repeat something you already know or are working on I apologies.
The first is the information that is kept from players
- The character menus still need some work. Stats would be nice for them and maybe a class as well. The descriptions do give you most of what you need ,but lack the depth you might need to make better decisions ,stuff like base move and sprint speed ,health , regen for health, and cooldowns on abilities.
- The weapons also need stats as again I can tell what the gun is and does ,but not without the flavor text obscuring that information. Stuff like damage, rate of fire, ammo count, altfire (like the miniguns pre-spin that is on your reload), and special attribute.
- Telegraphing needs to be put on grapples ,or some rework for them as it is too easy to be caught off guard and be hit and instakilled which does not feel fair to most players who had no chance to react. specifically the elite guards telegraph caught me off guard many times as it is nothing like regular grapples and they can continue moving longer than most as well. That is more of a consistency issue that could be resolved with an indicator of some sort on grapples that is the same and maybe have it show if it's near and off screen like an arrow
- Back to the character menus, it's hard to tell or at least not clear what stage a weapon is at (unlocked , blueprint, or needs blueprint) in said menus. Something like a lock if it needs a blueprint and a money icon if you need to buy it.
- The card icons on the right when you hover over them is cut off and a lot of white space is left where the rest of the text could fit ( meaning you don't need to have a little box that you need to scroll through for stuff like weapons with a lot of text in their descriptions).
- loadouts should also show stats that have been enhanced clearly and quickly when changing between them. It's hard to tell the impact of a weapon and card combo if you have to hover over them and guess the stat change.
- The matchmaking needs to tell you how long you have been in it ,maybe what it is doing ,and some indicator of the wait times. There is also UI issues where it was hard to tell what I was queing up for ( as in if I select antagonist did I need to select a mission , and what if I selected multiple missions). An indicator on how many people are qued up for which mission would also be nice ( even just a high player count or low player count indicator).
I also have issues with unlocks and currency- Players should not have to share rewards, all it does it make things harder to unlock ( in a bad way) and pits people who worked together against one another.It's also bad as you already have to choose between 4 different types of loot and coordinate it with the other players ( with out any way to communicate in game from what I can tell) in a small amount of time ,where if you choose nothing you are left with nothing and it makes it feel like some rewards are wasted. I am going to be honest and say that I would rather have it where it is already split up for the 4 and given or the rewards lowered and no one has to fight for them.
- I understand the reason for using multiple currencies as you are ( so you can get part of a card or weapon for someone) ,but maybe lowering the amount of currencies would be nice, like take the card currencies and just give them as 1 card unlock token or something. Make it feel less clunky is all. I do understand that would get rid of the half a card unlock that we have now and would be hard to change it and balance it ,but would make for an easier player experience.
- As I said I did not play as an antagonist yet ,but I have seen that they gets no rewards for playing a hard and long wait time mode. They should get around the same or I would say more than the raiders in rewards for it being in 4v1 as it is (that is unless you change the balance around). It's as I said a lot of wait time and hard work for a leader board it seems.
Those are my suggestions so far, Gameplay needs a bit of work in the melee ,but seems to be working fine otherwise. Just my thoughts on the matter hope they help.
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I almost forgot spawning needs some work as well, The antagonist can spawn and walk near you without you knowing it and sneak grab you which has happened multiple times. They need to spawn away from the players and not be able to close that gap while the invincibility and cloak are still on from the spawning. Raiders on the other hand can hide in spawn and wait for the antagonist if they are out of lives giving them a nice choke point to use while they wait. Putting a one way wall on the spawn would solve this as well as spawn killing from the antagonist. The problem with the one way wall would be how to deal with people waiting on the other side of it, maybe have it be a ledge they fall from. Something to stop both sides abusing it.
There is also a problem with some one who is afk staying in a match and soaking lives from the team. I don't know how it's being dealt with right now but I did an entire objective with someone afk that ,at the very least, was soaking one extra life from the team. Not a big problem at the moment ,but annoying.
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PC specific issue as well is that we have no text chat. Seems there is cross play with consoles, as in, we on PC can play with people on console but text chat goes a long way towards coordinating with your team, especially so on PC since most people don't have or won't use a microphone.
The pre-made messages are also not enough to coordinate effectively on specific actions.
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I was going to make my own post about my issues with the game, but you seem to have hit the nail on the head.
The loot system is the single most asanine thing I've ever seen, and is probably the most frustrating part about the game. Back in the day when I played Payday 2 (which I see a lot of similarities to in this game, at least in the base design structure), what inevitibly made me quit was the fact that you have to grind the same couple of missions over and over again in order to actually unlock ANYTHING. Because of the way the blueprints are currently set up, where you can only MAYBE unlock 1 per mission, this is really starting to go the same way.
Lets look at it as math. There are currently 9 unlockable weapons in the game. You have to BEAT missions a minimum of nine time. However, this number is increased because of duplicant blueprints, and also the fact that up to 3 other people are grubbing for the same blueprint. Let me arbitrarily increase this to 30 missions because of that. Each mission approximately takes 25 minutes in my experience. That's nearly 13 hours of continuous playtime JUST to get the blueprints, not to mention the coins you need to buy the weapons themselves, or that you need to unlock skillcards, new characters, etc, etc.
At its current design stage, Raiders is just a huge grindfest that I can't see myself investing too much time into. On the other hand, I really love the concept, I love the fact that the devs are making this kind of game into a story-based adventure, and I'd really love to see where they can take that.
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Any changes done to the keybindings are not saving (at least for me) after closing the game.
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I almost forgot spawning needs some work as well, The antagonist can spawn and walk near you without you knowing it and sneak grab you which has happened multiple times. They need to spawn away from the players and not be able to close that gap while the invincibility and cloak are still on from the spawning. Raiders on the other hand can hide in spawn and wait for the antagonist if they are out of lives giving them a nice choke point to use while they wait. Putting a one way wall on the spawn would solve this as well as spawn killing from the antagonist.
I would argue that the Antagonist needs that, as a coordinated team will DESTROY an average Antagonist. As for the "spawning hall" for the Raiders I've said before but it needs to be changed. The Antagonist's real chance to win is when the Raiders are out of Aleph, and if they can just spit in spawn and spam down a hallway there's no point.
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Thanks for the feedback guys. Hopefully you'll see some welcome changes in the next beta session. We are listening!