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Consultant said
Thanks for these comments -- I think you guys are doing a great job of balancing the pluses and minuses for SoH. I'd like to add a few thoughts:1. As you can probably guess, we are furiously working to respond (which sometimes means "fix" and sometimes means "upgrade" and occasionally means "explain") items brought to our attention during the Steam Beta. At first, we were kind of let-down. We literally had a zero known bug list when we turned on the beta, and yet, several doozies turned up. But this stuff happens, and in fixing the bugs we get a chance to look at the game as a whole. And that is positive.
2. One thing we are going to do is open up a new kind of testing. Once a week or so we are going to have a 2-3 hour period where we ask for volunteers (under NDA) to jump in with members of the dev team and test something specific. For example, we will probably be testing a fix we put in place for the "invisible barriers" that popped up when the servers were rapidly rotating players in and out of the exact same map (like missions 1 and 2, in particular). If we have a fix that works for this, then we can deal with some other stuff, but first we need to eliminate this invisible stuff because it was probably not only impeding motion, it was breaking Line of Sight. So it affected targeting. Ackk. And if Ackk is not a technical term, well it should be. 🙂
3. We received a number of comments about the camera. And in fact, we've been testing our camera, and also comparing to some other currently available MMORPGs. We've concluded that there may not be a one-size-fits-all answer on the camera issues, so naturally what we've done is to add additional controls to the player control panel so you guys can set the camera the way you like it. But the most common camera complaint was that it was possible for your character to be moved out of the center of the screen by very rapid movement. So what we have done to address this is to set the camera lag to zero as the default, and then allow players to change this setting if they want to. We'll have a video and a newsletter about camera controls coming out in a couple of days.
4. We've made a pretty comprehensive review of combat, and we're going to have a bigger newsletter about a raft of changes we're making to make combat even smoother. Before we jump into that, we're going to discuss the SoH tab targeting system, and the use of augments. Apparently we don't need to discuss using infusions, as the typical demo participant seems to have used 100 or so during the event. Wow.
We're also looking at possible future dates for another public event, but we want to resolve the feedback we've already received. So some of the team is working on resolving the feedback, and some team members are already building the next event. It's fun to watch!
Feel free to respond this post if you think you might want to jump into a 2-3 hour test window with us, on a weekly or every other week basis. And if you could tell us what times and which days of the week you could easily participate in, that's good too. Thursday in the late morning? Friday evening? Sometime on the weekend? Let us know.
Heck yes I'd love to participate in 2-3, or even 5 Hour tests! Weekends, Weekdays, anytime at all. Especially since I'm retired, I got all the time in the world.
I should note... I took on level 3, 4, and 5 NPC's with my newly created character in the City & Park areas before starting the missions. Surprised that I wasn't beaten, by mobs of 2 to 3 at a time, of each level I attacked. 👍👍💝
Thanks again for the detailed information and fixes. TEAM SOH, in my experienced opinion, you are at least in the top 3 Development Teams in the Real World.
The Doughnut King is back! Watch your snacks!
Thanks for these comments -- I think you guys are doing a great job of balancing the pluses and minuses for SoH. I'd like to add a few thoughts:
1. As you can probably guess, we are furiously working to respond (which sometimes means "fix" and sometimes means "upgrade" and occasionally means "explain") items brought to our attention during the Steam Beta. At first, we were kind of let-down. We literally had a zero known bug list when we turned on the beta, and yet, several doozies turned up. But this stuff happens, and in fixing the bugs we get a chance to look at the game as a whole. And that is positive.
2. One thing we are going to do is open up a new kind of testing. Once a week or so we are going to have a 2-3 hour period where we ask for volunteers (under NDA) to jump in with members of the dev team and test something specific. For example, we will probably be testing a fix we put in place for the "invisible barriers" that popped up when the servers were rapidly rotating players in and out of the exact same map (like missions 1 and 2, in particular). If we have a fix that works for this, then we can deal with some other stuff, but first we need to eliminate this invisible stuff because it was probably not only impeding motion, it was breaking Line of Sight. So it affected targeting. Ackk. And if Ackk is not a technical term, well it should be. 🙂
3. We received a number of comments about the camera. And in fact, we've been testing our camera, and also comparing to some other currently available MMORPGs. We've concluded that there may not be a one-size-fits-all answer on the camera issues, so naturally what we've done is to add additional controls to the player control panel so you guys can set the camera the way you like it. But the most common camera complaint was that it was possible for your character to be moved out of the center of the screen by very rapid movement. So what we have done to address this is to set the camera lag to zero as the default, and then allow players to change this setting if they want to. We'll have a video and a newsletter about camera controls coming out in a couple of days.
4. We've made a pretty comprehensive review of combat, and we're going to have a bigger newsletter about a raft of changes we're making to make combat even smoother. Before we jump into that, we're going to discuss the SoH tab targeting system, and the use of augments. Apparently we don't need to discuss using infusions, as the typical demo participant seems to have used 100 or so during the event. Wow.
We're also looking at possible future dates for another public event, but we want to resolve the feedback we've already received. So some of the team is working on resolving the feedback, and some team members are already building the next event. It's fun to watch!
Feel free to respond this post if you think you might want to jump into a 2-3 hour test window with us, on a weekly or every other week basis. And if you could tell us what times and which days of the week you could easily participate in, that's good too. Thursday in the late morning? Friday evening? Sometime on the weekend? Let us know.
Integral said
Access to Mission 2 and 6 has been restored and the bug that caused it yesterday was fixed in the overnight patch. Please let us know if it reappears.
Granted that Solo, mission 6 was a pretty good challenge. I managed to finish it, with only 2 defeats. Guessing the Bugs have been sprayed well.
The Doughnut King is back! Watch your snacks!
First, I'd like to say that there have been clear improvements to the feel of the game since the last beta event I was able to participate in.
Positives:
Stability was excellent. In my first run, I never lost connection to the server and only got stuck on one loading screen. Even during large events for last two missions, my framerate never went below 65 FPS.
The city feels more full. Nice to see groups of people hanging out. Makes it seem more active/alive.
Character animations are smooth and, for my character, flowed.
I appreciated that buffs for unobtainium luck do not have a "cast timer," which slows down gameplay. Not sure if this applies to other powersets.
For the demo itself, the missions told a full, coherent story, which is a good indicator of quality of the mission writing team.
Room for improvement:
I'll try not to dip into other people's comments, I echo them, but know you all are already taking them to heart.
While there are more people in the world, I do think that there could be more vehicles on the road. There is so much space for driving and it felt like the cars were quite sparse. Along with this, even with the view distance turned up (4), it felt like the people and villains would only appear when I was fairly close to them. When running around trying to find enemies to beat up, I felt like I had to be pretty close before they would show up.
I would like to see a higher texture quality in the environment. Within the mission instances, I would say they looked fine, but in the city, park, and industrial area, they feel bland in comparison to character models.
From a gameplay perspective, at level one, enemies had an appropriate difficulty for where my character was. Inspirations felt useful then to help ensure victory. By level five or six, groups in the open world that were three levels above me were not a challenge and inspirations were unnecessary.
Based on my build, energy management/consumption was a non-issue. All buffed up, I could continuously use powers without needing to worry about energy regeneration, even during the long encounters featured in the later parts of the demo.
Unsure if this will be an issue when the game is released, but I don't think the travel powers, such as superspeed, should be available at the beginning of the game and should be earned through progression.
When rotating the camera, it feels floaty. What I mean is when I have finished moving the mouse, the camera continues to slew briefly. May not be an issue for some people, but over time, I feel a bit of motion sickness from it, especially as I have to move the tank's view around often.
I plan on giving the demo another run and will provide additional feedback if it comes up.
Thank you for another opportunity to see the game in development.
Hey all,
Well, some impressions:
1: The look of the world/city is too pristine in certain areas. Some of this probably has to do with the texture quality.
2: Character faces, man these need another pass. Especially the female faces.
3: Character animations are excellent; generally pleased with the way my male hero looks.
4: Obviously, need to see many more costume pieces heh.
5: Power animations/effects/particles look really good; no complaints
6: Umm, really dislike have to choose secondary powers that do not thematically match my primary powerset. I disliked this about CoH (though I seem to recall I could do fire/fire/fire if memory servers) Can we get something like this? Disregard if already in the works
7: Generally, add some 'flaws' to the overall city so it's not so sterile and dry; it's too perfect, IMO
Overall, 4.5 out of 5. Members in my gaming guild gave it a thumbs up with the caveat that a few more passes need to be made of the graphics as I mentioned.
We just posted a game play video of mission 2, life hacks. You can see it and yesterday's video at https://shipofheroes.com/demo/
Peregrine Falcon said
It's called a demo, but it's clearly a beta. Something that I didn't realize at first.- Lots of little bugs. For example: my character constantly being caught on nothing in the first mission.
- The controls are laggy or "squishy." Sorry, I couldn't think of a better way to describe it. My character didn't feel "locked in" to my controls and camera. This made it difficult to maneuver and fight in the game. I'll try again today to see if there's an option that I should adjust or check.
Yes, this is definitely a Beta. We decided to use the Steam Next Fest for a Beta, rather than for a pre-launch event because we wanted to make use of the opportunity to test a bunch of new features in as lifelike a scenario as possible. We thought we said this in the newsletter, but obviously we did not get the point across well.
On the controls, we're eager to make improvements, but we're having trouble defining exactly what the issues are. But you previously told me that part of the issue is keeping your character locked in the center of the screen. We're looking at that right now. I can say that I've never had this problem in the demo (or anywhere is SoH), but clearly you and some others are having this issue. If you tell us any other specific aspect that you can identify, that is very helpful for us.
It' a surprise for us that people are being restrained on something in mission 1. We didn't see this in testing, but it is definitely happening. We are searching for the cause of that issue too.
Someone else is looking at your CCT comments, so I will just add thanks for playing the game demo, and sorry we have such issues. When we turned this demo on yesterday morning, our known bug list was at zero.
It's called a demo, but it's clearly a beta. Something that I didn't realize at first.
- Lots of little bugs. For example: my character constantly being caught on nothing in the first mission.
- The controls are laggy or "squishy." Sorry, I couldn't think of a better way to describe it. My character didn't feel "locked in" to my controls and camera. This made it difficult to maneuver and fight in the game. I'll try again today to see if there's an option that I should adjust or check.
- It was very difficult to tell which colors were which in the character creator. Now part of this is because I have red/green color issues (just like 1 in 4 of all men do so it's not rare), part of it is because the colors look different in game than they do in the character creator. Please put the NAMES of the colors in the character creator somewhere. If I want the top and bottom of my character's costume to match I can just READ the name of the color.
- The hair looks horrible. I have an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti. So please, don't even bother with the "are you sure your graphics settings..." The hair looks horrible. Hair that is a little thicker and looks more like hair and less like threads would be better. Or go the other way and make the hair look more "cartoony." Either way, this in between hair just looks weird.
- The default Female faces look ugly and masculine. Yeah, I know that's the trend now days, but if the default female faces are all of bunch of ugly butch masculine trans-females then good luck getting more than a dozen or so people to subscribe once the game launches. Judging by the character creator, and the hair, your game clearly has something in common with Black Desert Online. Go with their example and make your female characters attractive, not like Kirk Douglas in a dress.
Being constantly offended doesn't mean you're right, it means you're too narcissistic to tolerate opinions different than your own.
I'm getting a strange difference in texture qualities. Is this deliberate?.
1: costume textures are blurry
2: ground, floor textures are clear and crisp
3: random npcs wandering around look a little blurred as well
I'm running an RTX 3060
Overall, I'd have to say the graphics are a bit hmmm sterile. I think it's the lack of detail. Is this on purpose for the demo?
thanks
Cal
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