Finished the 'Newbie Experience.' Here's my suggestions.

Hi everyone! I finished the “Newbie Experience” so I guess it’s time to talk about it. For the most part I’m loving this game. It’s the simple, silly, but relatively deep thing I was hoping it would be. A many congratulations are in order to the Devs and testing team that have made it what it is so far. Bravo!

Let’s get into the meat of it. This game is very charming in a lot of ways, but I think my favorite thing about it is the honest challenge posed to players to explore not only the world but also the gameplay mechanics and what is possible to do.

A lot of what feels kind of bad to interact with in the game so far can be chalked up to things being unfinished. While those elements have to be addressed, and it’s good to point them out, I will try to refrain from simply criticizing unfinished work. Rather, the rubric by which we judge this game should be the evident design choices, not just their current implementation.


What’s Working?
-This game does a good job of rewarding you for taking charge of your own gameplay, but also rewards you greatly for organizing your efforts with other players. That is a good quality in an MMO.
-The combat is simple, but engaging, and there is a fair level of team ‘build’ strategy to engage with when taking on challenging encounters with a group.
-The sense of progression is good so far, with [time input to perceived progress] feeling like it takes some doing, but the payoff is worth it.
-The dizzying array of skill classes becomes easier to navigate when you realise that skills give synergy bonus levels to other skills and stats.

What’s Not Working?
-Inventory management is a little too much of a pain in the ass. As I played, this was the element that stopped me in my tracks the most. It really breaks the flow of the game when you realise that you need to keep these spoons, or paintings that don’t stack, to make an NPC like you more, to grant you more inventory / storage to manage all the crafting items and equipment that you need to do tasks to make NPCs like you more. The fiction doesn’t hold up; My character can hold 99 sharks in his pocket, but one more bronze coin breaks the bank? What’s good about this design is that you are constantly needing to make decisions about what goal you are pursuing; you have evaluate what you are picking up (spending inventory space on) based on how it helps you achieve your current goal. The friction comes when the game encourages you to pursue all the goals! There’s not enough space to do everything, so partnering with a friend to cover each other’s needs for access to certain crafting skills is probably best. But, as a tester, trying to play every part of the game, I ran into the inventory jam more often than was enjoyed. I’m not sure what the solution is here, but I do not enjoy this aspect of the game, even though I agree that some limit on inventory is necessary.
-Gardening is the bane of my existence. It’s not that big of a deal, it’s just really boring. It’s another activity that takes me out of the game flow. Literally, I usually plant a bunch of stuff, check the timer on the longest thing, then ALT+TAB the game and look at twitter for that long.
-Primary Combat skill classes feel kind of samey sometimes, but I also think it is good if they have a lot of overlap, and then there are things that each one does better than the others like it. This could definitely be one of the things that is simply unfinished, but I don’t know so I’m going to address it as a design issue. I think it could be improved with more quantity/variety in the skills that each weapon/combat skill has access to, so that if a player really wants to do their build with swords for RP flavor reasons, they have a little more opportunity to have a unique playstyle and fulfil various roles in a party. There is already a little bit of this in the game, and I think it is a strong point, so I would love to see it improved further. I also think combat classes could be made more distinct by having a passive effect they apply based on them being equipped to your Primary slot vs your Secondary slot [Primary passive / Secondary Passive].
-Surveying is pretty neat, but the speed bonus thing really makes me feel like I can’t take the time to engage with game content while I’m running between Survey Locations. Just gotta run past everything. Don’t fight that enemy, Don’t pick that fruit, Don’t dig up that grave. When the game is telling you to not do things that you enjoy about the game, it feelsbadman. Again, not sure what to do with this one. Maybe being able to see how much time you have would help, because then I’d at least be able to make an informed decision about what to spend my time on as I trek to the next Survey.
-The Quest Tracker is wack. This is probably an unfinished thing, but I feel like I have to give feedback on it. I hate having to hunt down the quests in the quest list just to take them off of the quest tracker. There should be a button I can hit to clear all the quests at once, and it should probably come with a “Are you sure” prompt. It might also be good to be able to right-click quests in the tracker window to remove them. Quest status updates on a delay sometimes, that’s probably a bug of some sort, but it is really disorienting.
-The Crafting UI needs some love. This is another probably unfinished UI things, but there are some things I’d like to see done with it. The biggest one is a search/filter option. I would really like to be able to search by the recipe name and also filter by ingredient. What I mean by that is I should be able to type “Perch Fillet” into a search bar in the crafting window, and all the recipes that either require or produce a Perch Fillet should be shown, and all other recipes should be hidden or grayed-out. I should also be able to filter/order by recipe level. For cooking especially, I find myself hunting for the highest level recipe I have all the time, and it is something I should be able to ask the game to tell me with just a couple of clicks.


What would I like to see added or changed?
Here is a rough wish-list of other things that I think would improve the game experience.

Application / Graphics
-Borderless Windowed Fullscreen pls. This is helpful for dual-monitor people.

UI / HUD
Loadouts:
-The loadout menu should have a button for ‘Update selected loadout’ which overwrite the selected slot, but does not change the name
Chat:
-Friends chat would be nice. /f or /friends messages are sent on the friends channel to all currently online on your friends list.

Navigation / Movement Gameplay:
-Trees and some other world obstacles have absurd collision, could be cleaned up to improved gameplay interaction / ‘immersion’
-Ability to right-click on the map and have your character begin moving to the location
-Ability to see the coordinates you are at on the map, this could be an ability unlocked from cartography
-Ability to right-click on the map and see the coordinates of the location. This could be an ability from cartography.



Thanks for the fun time so far! I’m excited to see what the future holds for Project: Gorgon

~Brylon

I don't have much to add here, just wanted to say I liked your post and pretty much all of your suggestions. Picking on a few things:

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Originally Posted by Brylon

-Inventory management is a little too much of a pain in the ass. As I played, this was the element that stopped me in my tracks the most. It really breaks the flow of the game when you realise that you need to keep these spoons, or paintings that don’t stack, to make an NPC like you more, to grant you more inventory / storage to manage all the crafting items and equipment that you need to do tasks to make NPCs like you more. The fiction doesn’t hold up; My character can hold 99 sharks in his pocket, but one more bronze coin breaks the bank? What’s good about this design is that you are constantly needing to make decisions about what goal you are pursuing; you have evaluate what you are picking up (spending inventory space on) based on how it helps you achieve your current goal. The friction comes when the game encourages you to pursue all the goals! There’s not enough space to do everything, so partnering with a friend to cover each other’s needs for access to certain crafting skills is probably best. But, as a tester, trying to play every part of the game, I ran into the inventory jam more often than was enjoyed. I’m not sure what the solution is here, but I do not enjoy this aspect of the game, even though I agree that some limit on inventory is necessary.

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Yeah, this one tends to be one of our favorite forum topics. I also don't have any ideal solutions. Inventory gets a bit easier as you level and gain a few more slots, plus the experience of knowing what to keep and what to discard. The new casino is a really nice place if you are looking for more storage.

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-Gardening is the bane of my existence. It’s not that big of a deal, it’s just really boring. It’s another activity that takes me out of the game flow. Literally, I usually plant a bunch of stuff, check the timer on the longest thing, then ALT+TAB the game and look at twitter for that long.

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I'm also not a fan of gardening. At higher levels, it's possible to plant enough stuff that there's always something to be clicked on. I tend to do monster sessions of 2 of each vegetable from potatoes to carrots, plus 5 cotton, plus 3 flowers, plus 2 barley/sugar cane, plus 2 red/green pepper. With the object names turned on, I can see when stuff needs feeding or watering and it's actually kind of fun to try to keep my giant garden happy. Not enough fun I want to do it more often than every few months though. :)

My usual solution is to post work orders and make other players garden for me. I'm a bit afraid to try that for flowers though since higher-end flowers get pretty expensive. I already collected the seeds, so it seems it would be a lot cheaper if I just grew the seeds myself. Slowly. Sigh.

(If you have a very slow garden and are looking for an in-game diversion while you wait, you can also type /wordhunt to bring up the vocabulary game. )

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-Primary Combat skill classes feel kind of samey sometimes, but I also think it is good if they have a lot of overlap, and then there are things that each one does better than the others like it. This could definitely be one of the things that is simply unfinished, but I don’t know so I’m going to address it as a design issue. I think it could be improved with more quantity/variety in the skills that each weapon/combat skill has access to, so that if a player really wants to do their build with swords for RP flavor reasons, they have a little more opportunity to have a unique playstyle and fulfil various roles in a party. There is already a little bit of this in the game, and I think it is a strong point, so I would love to see it improved further. I also think combat classes could be made more distinct by having a passive effect they apply based on them being equipped to your Primary slot vs your Secondary slot [Primary passive / Secondary Passive].

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I'm not sure I'd really use primary/secondary when talking about combat skills - you can make any skill primary just by putting it in the first bar and you can combine skills that both logically feel like "primary skills", e.g. sword and archery.

I kind of like your suggestion of the passive benefits.

I believe there is more specialization planned for higher levels which may address some of the RP flavor - I don't have details though, just something's that's been mentioned from time to time. I personally feel that you can get a lot of variety already just by choosing which two skills you are going to use together... (My favorite weird combo was someone being in rabbit form, just so they could use both ice magic and unarmed at the same time.)

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-Surveying is pretty neat, but the speed bonus thing really makes me feel like I can’t take the time to engage with game content while I’m running between Survey Locations. Just gotta run past everything. Don’t fight that enemy, Don’t pick that fruit, Don’t dig up that grave. When the game is telling you to not do things that you enjoy about the game, it feelsbadman. Again, not sure what to do with this one. Maybe being able to see how much time you have would help, because then I’d at least be able to make an informed decision about what to spend my time on as I trek to the next Survey.

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This is very much how I feel about surveying. I definitely like the shiny speed bonus rewards, but I also like stopping and chopping some wood, or maybe making a small detour to fill out a blank corner of the map for my cartography.

Also, like gardening, surveying rewards me for doing a whole bunch of stuff at once. So, I clear out my bags, get every single slot loaded with survey maps via crafting auto-repeat, sort 55 maps by quadrant in my inventory and by the time I get to actually survey, I'm kind of worn out by the effort. I'm thinking it would be more fun if I could reasonably mix geology, mining and treasure cartography, and maybe do some quests in between, using skills I want to level rather than my max speed skills and gears. Which I of course can, if I'm willing to accept losing the speed bonus. Which I'm not, because I have an efficiency bug.

My only idea is to make the survey rewards random rather than speed based, but it also feels nice to have the reward be achievable because of player effort instead of just chance.

I do like the metal motherlode surveys.

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-The Quest Tracker is wack. This is probably an unfinished thing, but I feel like I have to give feedback on it. I hate having to hunt down the quests in the quest list just to take them off of the quest tracker. There should be a button I can hit to clear all the quests at once, and it should probably come with a “Are you sure” prompt. It might also be good to be able to right-click quests in the tracker window to remove them. Quest status updates on a delay sometimes, that’s probably a bug of some sort, but it is really disorienting.

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Hah, yes. For now, I have the quest tracker auto-add disabled, and just add the occasional quest or work order myself. I like the concept of auto-add, but it's not worth the effort of hunting down quests I didn't want added so I can turn off their display. The right-click would be a huge help and I assume it's on the list of future improvements.

I like your idea for primary vs secondary passive depending on what loadout slot your skills are in. That could really create some interesting dynamics and uniqueness between players using the same skillsets.

However, in fairness, citan has planned for more in depth specialization further down the road with the combat classes. I.E. One fire mage will differ from the next depending in where they decide to specialize with their fire magic. I believe combat wisdom will be used towards this process.

Cool idea nonetheless!

Perhaps for surveying there could be some recipe whereby you create ahem, a divining device, rod or whatnot, and as you move around the map you may or may not get some random reward.

I've not got the skill to do mother lode surveys just yet, but in a similar vein to those, there could be other advanced surveys. For example, where you must triangulate some rare deposit, and where there is no speed bonus, but some other bonus based on the initial surveying work carried out, like accuracy. Maybe mining apparatus to reach deep burred ores.