As I look over what I’ve written below, this would have been a good “Start of 2024” post… except we were neck deep in NEW Combat. This is the first chance we’ve had to really reflect and make some strategic choices. I hope you can read it in this context.
We read every forum post and every review. Game dev is hard partly because it involves a series of guesses, like taking shots in the dark. Feedback helps improve our aim.
Negative Review Analysis
Last week Phil analyzed every negative review since we launched to Early Access April 2023. He broke it down into 12 categories. Our goal is to understand how people feel and make sure we work on tasks that matter.
(There are a few special case scenarios we culled out of the data, and I’m not addressing the < 5% issues here, even though we did discuss them internally)
1. Liked the game and think it has potential (59%)
- Over half liked what we are doing and the project vision. But somewhere along the road we let them down. We simply have to deliver.
2. Game is repetitive / not enough content (56%)
- Totally understand. We haven’t closed the game loop and this is hurting the experience.
- Our next update, Exploration, contains Dynamic Quests based on NPC goals. It will be basic no-frills at first, but we have to start and improve from there.
- We are also adding our first Faction of the Conclave earlier than expected to help flesh out the world a bit more.
3. Bugs (37%)
- Yes. We’ve had some lousy showstopper bugs.
- Quality has been incrementally improving, but we’re not there yet. Every major bug we encounter gets a testcase so it can be tested before the next release. Some of our test cases has your name as the reporter on it. In the spirit of “Melf’s Acid Arrow”. Our battery of tests continues to improve.
- The demands of running this business and building the game have led to shorter dev cycles. Starting now, we’re changing how we build/release our larger updates. Rather than design and programming working simultaneously, then shipping, we are going to do programming first then bring in design after to polish, allowing it to ‘bake’ longer. Then we’ll put the update into Beta for a week or two and see how it sits, before releasing it.
- I’m doing a lot of studio planning right now and one of our initial hires in April/May timeframe will be a Quality Assurance person. Not a tester, but an actual Quality Assurance person who can play and guide design with wise feedback.
- Every Thursday (or sometimes Friday) we put out a patch fixing the bugs we could resolve that week.
4. Missing features (35%)
- Absolutely. No one is more frustrated than me with all the unfinished systems or systems lacking content depth. The game is unfinished, so this will be valid criticism until it is.
- Negative reviews significantly decreased around the time we re-wrote the new store page to better clarify where the game currently is at.
- Our path forward here is to continue to work the roadmap and close the game loop.
5. Combat-related issues (31%)
- We’ve written a whole NEW combat system (and much of the rest of the game).
6. Quests are too simplistic (27%)
- We feel your pain. There are currently only 2 kinds of quests: gather resources and kill generic monsters.
- Our tech has limited us in the kinds of quests provided. We are adding two new quest types in Exploration:
- Unique Item - the quest creator can create as many special/unique items as necessary for the quest: secret love letters, political overtures, long lost tome of knowledge, a storied sword like the Sword of Fargoal.
- Specific Monster - don’t just kill any goblin, but 5 goblins from a specific lair. Not just any goblin in a lair, but the one named “Grubnub” who has been terrorizing farmers. With this the quest creator can create elite forms of monsters.
- These quest types are staples in rpgs and it’s been rather silly we haven’t had them to date.
- I don’t believe the solve here is just a matter of more people writing more elaborate quests. The real solve is a dynamic quest system able to generate tasks based on NPCs of opposing or competing goals. This is coming in Exploration.
7. Dungeons lack variety / don't like dungeon system (23%)
- We’ve heard everything from throwing the whole thing out, to just increase the number of assets.
- Update #7 is to solve the dungeon experience. Make it more interesting, engaging, and rewarding.
- I’m considering possible extreme solutions to this. The only thing that matters is it feels like a dungeon crawl and there are interesting choices to make as you proceed. Everything else is subject to change.
8. Bad UI / UI issues (20%)
- Agreed. As posted last week, we are revamping the HUD and main player screens.
- The new UI is coming in Exploration.
9. Lacks purpose / driving factor (12%)
- There isn’t a strong game loop yet. We’re working on closing the loop and providing more interesting purpose
- I believe introducing a faction and dynamic quests will help this
- I also believe improving the spell progression to involve upgrades, choices, and chases will address this. I just had a design meeting on it for Exploration today.
10. Lacking variety of monsters & monster difficulty progression (12%)
- I think some of this is already addressed in the new combat update where the monsters are much more interesting. This doesn’t mean we’ve solved it yet.
- In Exploration we’re adding the ability to have elite monsters and monster progression. This will create tough boss fights and have areas of the world feel different.
- In a few weeks we will be releasing Mage Rivals which allows you to fight a rival mage. These are new combat experiences and intended to be like a boss fight.
11. Game feels slow (UI/animations, etc) (11%)
- One of the reasons we rewrote combat from the ground up (started a new scene in Unity and new code in Visual Studio, went from there). By making combat into smaller pieces (combatons) we got rid of the delays in the old system.
- User Experience (UX) is more of a priority now and hopefully you see this in the new UI.
12. NPCs dull and repetitive; World not Responsive (10%)
- Agree. Broadly speaking, we are working on it through the roadmap update features to bring this to light.
- The next minor update, Rival Mages in a few weeks, will allow rival mages react more realistically to you
- Rival Mages will also contain a new NPC reaction system to improve their responsiveness to your recent actions. It’s not a total solve, but initial testing results look really promising!
- The dynamic quest system and the factions will improve world responsiveness.
What you think about the game matters to me. I’d love to be able to fix it all right away with a magic wand, but it will require steady regular progress to get there. I hope this explanation behind the thinking of our current development priorities helps.
Mage Rivals
This update is almost ready for internal testing. It is being worked on by James, Zach, Tyler, and Nolan.
Key features:
- Hunt down your rival mages in the world and kill em.
- Make rivals appropriately respond to you (instead of being clueless when you talk to them)
- Add a better reward to the Mabren’s Tower for completing the quest
- Add in a new NPC reaction system. This is prep for the next big update.
Update #3 Exploration
Mark, Michel, Thomas, Jessi, Josh, and Phil are working on this. It’s still a ways out yet, no firm idea on date yet as we still are sorting out some of the design scope.
- Dynamic quests - having the game generate quests based on local data. Starting with two types:
- Kill Named Monster quest
- Find Named object quest
- Create our first faction: The Conclave. A simple version of it.
- Ability to climb up some ranks with some rewards
- Hands out quests using the Dynamic Quest engine
- Update the map generation
- It’s way too mountain heavy in the middle
- Have better more meaningful biomes
- Better distribution of lairs for where the player starts
- Improve interacting with Points of Interest on the map
- Finding lairs
- Seeing and encountering patrols
- Finding resources
- A new UI with new HUD