The Collective "First Impressions" Thread

Grandy 2016-08-05 18:32:52 UTC #1

Hello and welcome to all of the new players joining us over this, the so-called "soft launch".

@JustinPierce's development and vision, twinned with the private playtests of every release, has brought the game this far - we know it has a few bugs and needs polish in some areas, but that's what early access is for, right?

Either way, what we do lack in is first impressions. You only really get them once - the things that first appeared as confusing or odd; us old'uns can't give opinions on the matter with much conviction, so any and all feedback about this, or any other part of the game - bugs, guts and all - would be greatly appreciated!

So, here's a central thread for the musings of new players to Arms of Telos. Thanks to you in advance.

Zen 2016-08-06 09:43:06 UTC #2

I had a very enjoyable first few games. Mostly things were easy to understand. Didn't realize that staying on the enemy's flag longer made your capture worth more until i read it somewhere, still don't know how to make speed boosters (I haven't done the tutorial things so..). Didn't realize that those platforms in the lowG area were magnetic if you pressed shift.. mostly actually pretty intuitive, easy and fun. Still don't know how to use the grappling hook effectively, but that's probably just something you figure out over time.

OK I don't have anything useful to say so I'm going to stop writing now

help 2016-08-06 10:08:24 UTC #3

First of all, game is very fun and all kinds of awesome! And at least for a Tribes vet it's quite easy to get the basics down and start playing. Loving it.

I'll share a few points of confusion I had during the 3 or so hours played. These are exactly first impressions, so I try to not over analyze:

Map design is great but a bit confusing. For example the colored rectangles in walls nearby doorways. They look like a door more than the actual opening and are quite distracting. In my opinion every map feature should have a function and serve to help focus instead of disorient. Also the very bright colored background planets look like important objective but serve little purpose.
Me and other players had trouble remembering to "ready up", there should be some way to avoid excessive waiting. I was also initially confused by the intermission and challenge mode stuff upon joining a CTF server.
VGS shortcuts are so close to the Tribes equivalents, that muscle memory causes all kinds of erroneous communications. I think it should be either completely different, or even better, exactly cloned so that all the same commands work with same keys.
It's a bit hard to judge rocket distance for timed explosions. Initially I had trouble realising you need to keep the button pressed for rockets to travel further. I felt like an idiot but I saw other players repeatedly having similar trouble.
Also the rocket launcher alt fire where you charge up minirockets.. If you click and hold it too fast after making a shot (while the gun is still in the reload phase), it does not do anything, you need to release and then click & hold again to make it work. Would be more intuitive to have it start charging automatically after the timeout, even if you started holding the button down too early. I lost many duels because forgot to wait until reload is done, and it just feels clunky.
I still have trouble adapting from the Tribes skiing/walking distinction to movement in AoT gravity areas. Like, am I running or sliding? If running, I would expect to have a fixed top running/walking speed. Now if I gain more speed by whatever means, I can run faster? That doesn't make much sense. A bit hard to explain why this confuses me. In Tribes it simple; skiing allows to gain speed and play with momentum, running/walking is totally different and works as you would expect in real world. AoT feels like something between those two modes of moving.
Related to the point above, with the grabble it's even more confusing. Feels like if I walk slow, my feet work are braking against the reeling power of grabble and I can't gain speed that way without jumping. But on higher speeds I can reel in no problem while touching the ground. It's not very intuitive or logical, how it works.
Zero gravity areas are more intuitive. However I would expect to be able to jump when against any surface. And I feel like one should be able to snap into the magnetic surfaces regardless of roll orientation (if I fly bellyup near magnetic surface, I still should be able to snap to the surface, I would be automatically flipped the right way).
I still didn't "get" how to get most out of the magnetic surface. Or whats the utility in them. Not sure if one should jump, boost, or both to gain speed from them.

Also a few feature requests:

Switching weapons with mousewheel should "roll around", as in, going up from slot 4 goes back to 1 and vice versa. At least a config option to do that would be nice.
Please allow team change midgame to balance servers with low population (3vs1 or something happens, and it sucks). At least we couldn't figure out how to do it. Vote shuffle teams command or something could serve the same purpose.
Would be nice to have grabble not take a weapon slot, usable through a key without having it separately equipped. Grabble was in all litle bit disappointing, for some reason it's personally very important feature and a selling point, so to say.

AdelbertSteiner 2016-08-06 16:21:29 UTC #4

Very fun and interesting game! I will keep on playing this and watch what happens.
I have messed around solo a bit and played a few matches, which were very fast paced and fun.
I will just make it short, with these suggestions/impressions:

Login: Make it possible to remember the login info and make it possible to press "Enter" to login. That way I just have to launch and press "Enter". I really dislike having to re-type my password all the time.
Sticky: I would love to see the Teleporter Blade be a sticky mine. Where players do not have to keep locking them in. When you have to keep looking at enemy, it kind of isolate you, instead of making it possible to do a fast attack and move on to next enemy. Or if capper grabs flags and fly away around a corner. A sticky mine would be so much more fun.
Maps: I really like the map and how it opens up for so many approaches. However the colors made me confused 24/7. I had much trouble telling where or who enemy base/flag was. I could not even find my own. The color layout often confused me and made me mess up my route. Maybe make the future final art something that kind of shows the way in a natural way? I dont know. It was however very easy for me to tell enemy players from allied and actually see a enemy player, which is nice.
Self Regen: It should be just a tad faster. Most of the time when it is used, is when battle is over and not while in the middle of the battle. This leaves players hanging in space for too long. When used you are almost always alone and in a safe spot, where you will not get attacked. Therefore it should not take that long. Just heal up and get moving. It should not even be possible to use while in battle however. No self healing while fighting. That is support's job.
Weapon Slots: I would like to be able to equip the G-Hook to my 2 weapon slot. I find it annoying to press 3 in order to equip it. Freedom to choose what weapon you want in each slot. If you are able to, then I do not know how and am stupid. Maybe even have it as another key like "F" or "G".
Minor stuff: As mentioned by others, the VGS should just be a complete copy of T:A. The case of having some, made me want all the VGS and I felt empty in my heart when there were some VGS I could not say, or they were a different key. Lots of confusing with the F4-Ready. Most of the time new players (including me) will not know to actually press F4, before someone tells us.

None of the things above annoyed me that much and I really enjoyed the game. Very interesting to see where it goes.

Zen 2016-08-07 01:35:14 UTC #5

I agree that the self regen should be a little faster

JustinPierce 2016-08-07 06:24:14 UTC #6

Love reading all the feedback. Will respond in more detail later but wanted to mention --

Remember login was actually supported in the recent past. Long story short, I replaced an old account system with a new account system that is much more secure right before launch. New account system is missing some features -- one of those is having a way to remember the login securely (I wasn't going to save your password anywhere, even on your local machine). The account system is the one part of the game I didn't make myself, but I hope to have this fixed soon. Game is ready to support it as soon as my friend updates the account system.

In the escape menu, there's a subtle button that says "Change Team"

I assume you're referring to the Light of Apollo's self heal and not the regen rate of soft damage. I already have plans to replace the self heal with another function. It was shorter in earlier playtests, but it made the LoA too good of a choice because everybody could easily self heal -- increasing the time of self heal really improved team coordination and made other equipment more viable, but yeah it made self heal feel crummy so I thought of something to replace it with that I think is a lot more interesting.

Changelog

osvg 2016-08-07 09:24:07 UTC #7

I had decided to put this game out of mind until it hit an early access state, so here I am. I have dabbled for about 6 hours so far since Friday and here are the result of my practice

My impressions on the movement systems without any matches played.

Boost: Overall, I think implementation is great. I haven't really played that much combat, but the HP/regen mechanic makes it a very good trade off for mobility vs HP during a firefight. If you are alive you have boost. Similar to the first point, but HP being the resource managed makes it both unlimited and comes at a cost. No slow down if you are going fast. By this I mean, if I need a slight vertical (Z axis) correction I can input a diagonal boost and my XY momentum is preserved. Good for fine adjustment to hit / miss platforms.

Don't have any issues with this.

Grappling Hook: Feels very satisfying. Grappling hooks that swinging and not beeline to target are always fun to use. This is the tool for momentum conservation and manipulation and it is fairly well done. This took me a little bit of time to get used to grappling in this game versus Smashball. In Smashball hooks tethers can wrap around map geometry creating new center points for the pendulum motion. This made down boosting to capitalize door lips very lucrative. Another feature of this system was an ability to reel the grappling hook in to narrow your tether arc and bring you closer to the center. While I can understand not wanting to implement a system where map geometry can effect the tether angle, I think the reel could be interesting.

One big short coming of the swinging grapple is that new people don't get it quickly (more speaking to a general gaming populace). Due to Smashball movement being 100% reliant on being able to use the grappling mechanic it made the skill floor very high for new comers. There were many people (both friends and randoms) that I attempted to teach, but they ended up frustrated and quitting due to being bad at physics. With that being said, I think the grapple tutorial will need to be very good and more fleshed out. As it stands there is only one tutorial that requires one grapple most to get the target time. There will need to be zero g practice in the tutorial as well, specifically to make players aware oh how to turn well in these environments. I understand this is only early access, but I feel the need to stress the importance.

Sorry to reference a HL2 mod that barely any of you have played. But the grapple in that game is one of the best I've used ever, and AoT is at least scratching that itch. I think it is a good resource to draw upon.

Mag Strips: Personally these feel lack luster. The main issue I have is that I feel like the strip requires you to look at it in order to become active. When messing in free roam, I would often line myself at very acute angles to hit the strip. I am very close to the mag strips and begin to point my cross-hair where I want to jump. Unfortunately (especially at high speed) it would often input a manual HP boost instead of sucking me to the platform. I would like to see these be proximity based and not require looking down at them.

Zero G: While getting used to handling in zero g was 'weird' a first I enjoyed it. I haven't really dabbled into playing many games with zero g, so I don't have any critiques. I do have to say the transition from gravity to zero g is noticeable and the arrow helps intuitiveness of transition zones.

Skiing (or surfing / gilding / whatever it's called): I like that I don't have to hold down a button for this. I like how going up smooth surface does not lose much momentum. Overall it is fine and feels most like skating on ice (at least at high speed). I would however like to see a brake to gradually shave off some speed. Like a quick tap of CTRL make slows you 10 speed or something.

Jumping I like the charge jumping system, but is there way to cancel a jump? I would really love that.

Grandy 2016-08-07 10:23:49 UTC #8

Great work already, man!

Reeling in already exists in the right click functionality - albeit slightly slow. JP has mentioned a few things about the grapple he has plans to alter so we'll see if this changes.

It may be that the community may be able to pick up most of the slack through the use of guides and videos. Of course tutorials should be reviewed and there's always a few things that will generally be helpful most of the time, so those kinds of things should try to be covered. Though after the basic "here's the mechanic" and "here's a few places to use it", the rest is a little opinionated and in some cases personal (e.g. I do routes no-one else does currently); I'd rather see guide videos on places to grapple, routes to try etc and build up that side of the community than try to tweak them endlessly.. but I do get what you mean, there should definitely some level of fleshing out in all tutorials, always enough to 'get going' so to speak, which the grapple tutorial is greatly lacking in I agree.

Spider surfaces (mag strips) might be something you get used to over time - I have never really questioned the looking down mechanic to be honest as I've never found it all that intrusive.. I've never wanted to be looking elsewhere right before I land, as you have to fairly carefully plan when to charge jump and eject from one, so my aim is naturally drawn towards looking at the pad anyway when using it as a place to fly off.
Proximity could become a problem if you happen to be in the vicinity of a spider surface, in a fight perhaps, and want to boost. Increasing their general size so that it is easier to latch on, land, charge jump and fly off might be something to try in general, though.

I would probably advise giving the pads more time and see how you feel about them - as a tip, I generally plan quite well in advance as to whether I want to use the pads. Most usage is to get early speed up from a standstill, after course adjustments coming out of the base asteroid, or during firefights to be more 'grounded'.

Funnily enough, [ctrl] cancels any jump you have charged, so there may be a conflict between those two things

JustinPierce 2016-08-19 16:41:35 UTC #9

Sorry for the late reply! Been caught up with working on the game

I'll try to think of ways to make these more clear. Would love to hear any suggestions

Yeah my thoughts were to try and simplify them -- I think Tribes has so many that it makes it hard for new players to learn them and they end up being underused. I'm going for fewer but more frequently used VGS options. I know it can be confusing for Tribes vets, but at the end of the day I think most of the audience will be people that haven't played Tribes. I do want to support customized VGS though, so later it may be possible to set them up to mimic tribes in the config.

Yeah depth perception is something I want to try and improve before Greenlight. It's tough out in the open zero g spaces but I have some ideas to play with.

Agreed. I'll try to get this in soon.

I think this can be helped by better communicating your mech's physicality.

You are sliding around -- can almost think of it as caster wheels where you can control the swivel. So you can turn around and keep moving backward while maintaining speed, but if you try to take a sharp corner you can lose traction.

Yeah right now the grapple is optimized on swinging -- I haven't put too much attention into the rest. Plan to keep refining it, though.

It was like that in the past, but transitions where you rotate over 90 degrees felt pretty jarring so I changed it in an effort to get people in the habit of pre-adjusting their rotation before landing -- might revisit.

Compared to zero g thrusters, you can change directions faster so you may be harder to hit in some circumstances. They're also good for maintaining or gaining speed.

Got this done yesterday -- will be in 0.18 update

This suggestion comes up a lot but I think that's a consequence of the current meta. My plan is to expand the equipment so that grapple isn't the only option for increased mobility. It's not meant to always be equipped, but that's often how it works out at the moment unless you're playing a specific role in 5v5.

I think charging the explosive is an important part of the weapon -- it gives the other player a chance to fight back. I'm open to exploring that mechanic that you describe with other weapons/equipment though

Agree 100% -- something I want to improve before Greenlight.

Hmm, right now weapon are limited to first two slots and equipment to the last two slots -- and you could rebind those however you like, but that'd mean always having equipment in slots 2. Will think about it.

Yeah I have plans for a zero g grapple challenge. Wanted to get more feedback on existing challenges first

Might explore that when I make it possible to separate boost/land on magnet inputs.

Hmm, C is brake in zero g but does nothing in gravity -- might try that. In the meantime, you can just let go of forward for a bit.

VGS ideas and refinement

JustinPierce 2016-08-20 20:35:13 UTC #10

4 posts were split to a new topic: VGS ideas and refinement

Ilses 2016-08-20 01:12:06 UTC #13

I'd grown so used to this behavior that it seemed normal, but this definitely bears mentioning! Yes -- the more quickly you travel toward the grapple's latch point, the more quickly you can gain speed from the reel-in. For that reason, it's often useful to immediately boost toward the latch point if you're using the reel-in to gain speed.

AdelbertSteiner 2016-08-20 14:03:07 UTC #14

Thanks for the replies man. I play here and there now, as my summer break ended. Yet I still enjoy the game every time. I've gotten the basics down a bit and was actually able to use the zero-grav platforms (shift) to get speeds up to almost 300. I know know, but it is much for me. Changing weapons is still a huge task for me, but that's just me getting old I think. I always hit the wrong key.

I am really looking forward to see more players join, so we can all screw around together.

EDIT: Oh !! And I can just press enter to login now, thanks man! Now I won't have to move my hands that much (;

squidking 2016-10-15 15:42:10 UTC #15

Disclaimer: I have not played any games with full teams yet

Gripes:

controls menu
Had a hard time finding it for some reason. It would really help to have the options tab be at the start menu, and have controls be more obvious (having it as a tab near the top, changing it's name from keybindings ect.). The first game I played, somebody was trying to explain the mechanics to me, but I couldn't figure out the chat key.
loadout menu?
Having the option to change a loadout without entering a server would be nice, especially when you add more weapons, I am the type of person who would obsess over synergy when I couldn't actually play. Having that be an option in the main menu or in settings could easily fix this.
tutorials on other things
Currently there are a few things left out of tutorials, such as the rocket launcher. I am one of the many people who had no idea you had to hold down a button to make the rocket keep going.
sound design
Sound design in general seemed off, for lack of better phrasing. Some weapons seemed obnoxious and not satisfying. Sometimes the sounds would play very quietly, other times so loud I had to turn down my volume. One game that has great sound design is Megabyte Punch, while only a mediocre game in other aspects in my opinion, it's sound design is almost soothing in nature, despite being electronic and futuristic. The other thing is that the mechs are as big as half a gundam? what? (I know there is already a thread on this)

Stuff you done good on:
pretty much every other aspect of this game excluding player base, which is beyond your power, is perfect

Edit:
I make some music and have some powerful audio tools, if you want it I volunteer anything I can do to help audio wise.

JustinPierce 2016-10-17 16:45:26 UTC #16

Feedback like this is great

There are Settings buttons in the login screen and server browser screen. Are they too easy to miss? "Edit Bindings" will now be "Keyboard Controls" (I want to leave mouse sensitivity in the main settings menu until it gets too crowded).

Yeah I plan on having the ability to save loadouts, too. Hasn't been a priority so far because of how few weapons/equipment there are. For now, you should be able to go into offline mode and set it there and it should remember it.

In 0.19 I had to remove some tutorials because they had issues with thew new map, but I updated them and put them back in 0.19.1 -- rocket launcher and other tutorials should be there now

I do want to make more tutorials though -- covering the custom CTF game mode etc. For now, the wiki and guides are the best place.

I hope to start improving some of the sounds soon. I know it's something I'm not as good at. What sounds in particular sound off to you? That'd be a huge help so I can have a better idea what needs improvement etc.

squidking 2016-10-19 00:20:36 UTC #17

-s :
initial boost out of the dock/launch thingy could be replaced with a more organic wind/woosh sound

the wobble of the grapple pulling could brought down to more of a buzz

the healer could sound more pleasant and smooth to make it seem more inviting or you could add a ton of bass to it to get a similar effect

rocket launcher primary sound with it's double nature gets annoying to me after using for awhile

multi cannon semi mode primary fire could be given reverb to have a more bell like quality

the shield alt fire could have an atmosphere sound when you enter it

there could be a scope sound effect for the semi multicannon

speed gates could be made more quiet with a more subtle wub/whoosh sound

a sound effect for when the wind/speed particles appear on screen would feel awesome

there could be quiet music in the back (atmospheric)

+s -
reload sound for semi multicannon

teleport sound effect

buzz from the teleport blade

build sound (speed gate, shield alt)

EoJ thunder

rocket launcher explosion and mini fire sound

grapple added sound when alt fire engaged

sound when you move with wasd

None of these sounds really are bad in my opinion, just some of them could be edited to really make the sound design shine. Thanks for the replies to my posts btw, it really means a lot to feel involved.

Settings:
ah, yeah I just missed it

Loadout menu:
yeah, just one of the things that I couldn't figure out how to do at first, I'm infamous for not looking hard enough, so maybe take things on that with a grain of salt

Tutorials:
great, will look there now