Hi Everyone!
Firstly I want to say another huge thank you to everyone who was part of our playtest, we’re planning another sooner so if you missed out sign up now! We also just hosted our very first AMA for SoI and will be doing this more regularly, so be sure to keep an eye out for it and follow us on our socials.
Since the last test, going over everyone’s feedback had taken us quite a while, but rest assured that we’ve already been incorporating into our dev pipeline, and a number of the issues you raised we’ve already started to work on.
For the survey, we asked people about their experiences both pre-match and in-match, spanning various elements such as roles, weaponry, auxiliary components and abilities, maps, loadouts, etc., with an emphasis on ease of use, clarity, and engagement. We asked for feedback both on the Stars Discord and on Steam - we’ll continue to review on a rolling basis, so please keep posting! The other was the responses we received from the survey we sent out. For this post, we’ll be focusing on the review and analysis of the survey results.
If you want to read a detailed breakdown of findings please check them out HERE.
Top level takeaways:
Loadout customisation felt like information overload. Multiple responses called for better presentation of stats. There was also confusion about how changes were saved, and whether or not selections had been saved at all. We received great suggestions and feedback from you all on this and are looking at the best way forward.
There was a strong skew of interest towards certain weapons like the sniper and mass driver, as well as both machine gun types. In the coming playtests, we will continue to improve weapons balance so that more weapon combinations would be effective, especially at shorter ranges.
You’re all the captain now! We saw over half of the surveyed players pilot a crewed ship which is great to see. Based on the great feedback everyone gave, one of our top priorities is to improve ship positioning for pilots as well as management of ship components for the crew.
Map sizing / finding enemies can sometimes take a little long, we saw a lot of roadrunner type chasing happening during matches and we’re looking for ways to resolve this - especially given the size and scale of some of the maps.
HUD and UI clarity is needing a little bit of exploration, there’s a lot of information to take in with full six degrees of movement plus abilities as a pilot and we saw a number of you letting us know that it’s not always the clearest.
These learnings are hugely important and crucial in helping us shape the game as we go, please do keep dropping feedback on Discord, Steam or Reddit!
See you in the stars,
Howard