First of all, I'd like to congratulate the Mercury Steam team on their launch of Raiders of the Broken Planet. I know a passion project when I see one and I'm glad you folks were able to put this out.
I love the art style and I'm surprised and impressed by the production quality. The cut scenes are well animated and directed, the writing isn't bad, and the VO work is very good as well.
Regarding the game experience, I think the first thing you should do...and I realize this is no small undertaking, but the first thing you should do is expand the Prologue. This is the player's first introduction to the game and I think that it's here that Mercury Steam has made a serious misstep.
I just played my third Matchmaking game for the first mission and while it was my first time encountering an Antagonist, it was the first time for a friend of mine who I asked to play with me. Right away, the Antagonist was murdering our group over and over. If this was my first match, we would have lost and I would have had a very negative experience with the game. Given that I had played it twice prior, I knew what I was doing and that helped us achieve a victory against the Antagonist player. I'm telling you right now, if I wasn't there helping my friend...he probably would have lost his first experience and his takeaway from the game was that he was getting bullshit-one-shotted over and over again. This is a very bad introduction to an otherwise fun game. You're competing for time and attention and if your game this unforgiving, you're going to miss out on players that might have stuck around if they had a better first experience.
Let me start by outlining what I think the player experience should be for the FREE Prologue:
1. First Round
2. NEW SINGLE-PLAYER MISSION
3. Hanging by a Thread (Solo by Default First Playthrough)
4. Hanging by a Thread (Full Multiplayer...the way it is now.)
From the list, #1 and #4 and self-explanatory. You can leave those missions as they are. However, I think there should there should be an extra solo only mission after First Round. Here's what you can do in this second solo mission:
1. Tell a bit more story. Get the audience to love your world and characters more.
2. Let the player choose a character besides Harec.
3. Allow the player to practice using in-world objects like buttons, machine guns, etc.
4. Have simple examples of Engineer NPC's targeting player's objectives.
Contextually, it can be like a training simulator...so it fits within the story somehow. It can also serve as a foundation for a future "horde mode" if you wish to expand your content in that manner. Importantly, it lets the player experience the sort of gameplay they'll encounter in real matches with other players...but in a safe space.
Second, I think the Hanging by a Thread story mission should be playable only in solo the first time and furthermore, you should be able to queue for it with friends and start the game with 2 or 3 players. In other words, a Friends Only match. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, this lets you learn more about the game and experience it at your own pace. Two, this eliminates the frustration of experienced players playing with inexperienced players that don't understand things like needing Aleph to activate the reactors in the final part of Hanging by a Thread. Three, this can be the means by which players who already love your game introduce their friends to the game. Playing Hanging by a Thread cooperatively is much more fun than playing solo...again, in a safe environment where they won't get their faces pounded into the concrete by an Antagonist in their first match.
I'm not afraid of adversarial games. I grew up playing online deathmatch style games like Quake and Unreal. I played Counter-Strike when it was a mod all the way up to 1.6. I play Overwatch and Rainbow Six: Siege these days and those games...well, you have to be able to handle a loss and encountering players well above your skill all the time, otherwise, you just stop playing...but I'm telling you, I'm a certain kind of player. I played the single-player aspect of any game that had multiplayer before I jumped into the multiplayer. If the game has a campaign? I beat the campaign first before I even touch multiplayer.
Raiders of the Broken Planet is an odd bird...it has a strong storytelling aspect to it but it's built into the multiplayer experience. For players like me, and I know I'm not alone, I like to immerse myself in the world and build up my confidence a little before I get into multi-player. Give me a chance to love your world before an expert Antagonist pounds me into the ground. Give me a chance to build up my skills a little bit so when I get killed by a better player, I know WHY he's better. Just getting killed over and over without understanding why it's happening, it can be frustrating. My first Antagonist was a trial by fire given that it was only my third time playing the game...but by the end, I was killing him over and over. Which brings me to my next point...I'm another type of player. I want to get better. I want my revenge. I see a character I love (Alicia, in this case) and I'm like, "Fuck that, you're not doing that to my girl ever again. I'm gonna get better at her and I'm gonna be the one pounding YOUR face into the concrete." That's me though...I can handle an online beating. I've done it since the Quake days. Modern audiences...maybe ones with less experience in adversarial games, maybe ones who were attracted to your games fantastic art style, maybe ones who were fans of your Castlevania games and wanted a great single-player game...they might have less of a tolerance to being on the receiving end of a severe online beating.
Your game needs to be multi-player too, I understand that. I believe the single-player gamer will give it a shot...but you have to make the entry point for them a bit easier. Anyway, I've already been a bit too long winded but I love your game and I want you to succeed because I want more of your game and I want to reward developers who make fantastic passion projects...but I have a few more suggestions.
Modern gamers are spoiled. One of the ways they're spoiled is that their spoiled for choice. There are...SO...MANY...GAMES. So why should they play yours? Another way they are spoiled is because of Free to Play. Why pay for your game when they can play another game for free? I'm all for the Pay to Play model. I'm fine with it...but as long as you made a F2P Prologue, here's what's wrong with it.
1. It's too short. In perfect world with time and expanded budgets, it would be four missions long. I know it sounds like a lot of work. It is. It absolutely is...but I think it would be worth it.
2. Allow the player to unlock and experience aspects of paid version of the game. Don't hamstring it. Allow certain things to be unlocked and allow them to play with those abilities and weapons for free in the Prologue...it's not like they can use it in anything other than the Prologue, right?
These suggestions fall under the umbrella of meeting the player half-way. As it stands, the Prologue feels a bit too cheap. Yes, I realize it's free...but if you just scan the forums here or on Steam (which is, admittedly, almost always toxic anyway), you'll see this is a common complaint.
Anyway, that's it for now. Thanks for reading if you got this far. I love Raiders of the Broken Planet so far...best of luck with it.
P.S. Thank you so much for the character Alicia. She's amazing. I love that she is not traditionally attractive. I love her beady eyes, her terrible haircut, her nose which is upturned just a bit too much, and her pronounced overbite that gives the impression she's bucktoothed. She is fucking perfect. Bravo.
