Post-Beta Feedback

[Riley_D]

Hey everyone,

Now that our longest Beta period is over, if you have feedback on the beta, the new stuff, the state of the game in general, please post it here.

In particular, I’m always interested in:

1. The state of disconnects and crashes (e.g. better for you than last time, worse, etc.)
2. Your thoughts on new features (in this case that would be the rest of the main story quests, the Wilds content and gear drops, the new Artificing class, etc.)

Note that I’m currently out of town at the moment squeezing in a quick vacation with my family before everything goes totally nuts as we move into Early Access, but I will read all of your thoughts and respond early next week when I get back. Thanks!

[J11]

Hi all,

Here is my feedback from this beta. I have tried to categorize it in multiple fields:
Take in to consideration I am an instinct driven player not a detail oriented player (unless it comes to PvP or raiding).

Journal feedback

Problem:
The recipes are really hard to read. As an alchemist, trying to make a potion, the step by step diagram in the book actually did not indicate whether i should put a new ingredient in at a given colour or not. Instead it says Ingredient1 -> color1 -> ingredient2 & ingredient3 -> color 2. by this point it is unclear to me if I should wait for color1 then put in ingredient2 & ingredient3 or put them in when it is color2??? real confusing.

Possible solution:
To solve this problem I instead recommend diagrams which have 1) color tick ingredient1 2) color time ingredient2 & ingredient3 etc… this would make it much clearer as to when I need to add ingredients and when I should wait to add ingredients.

Problem: The text is really small and hard to read in the text book. I enjoyed reading the lure, but the point of the quest was lost in some of the text. As a user trying to complete a quest, the context was lost in the lure.

Solution: Add a one line take away for each quest. Example: “Find object of choice at the sub location in the location to what to solve.”

Problem: The map was hard to read. As a new user, I was unable to locate key towns on the map and mistook a couple of places as other places when I was exploring.

Solution: When entering a given location, Add an onscreen display showing me the location I have entered (take final fantasy 9 as a great example here. When entering a new location, text on the screen would appear showing the user exact where they had entered)…

Solution 2: Make map drawings a bit easier to digest.

Problem: Buggy when flipping pages. As a questing user, I found that when I flipped the page to see information on the next quest or to see the maps, the pagination would be incorrectly displayed and I would see some pagination for some other quest *including ones I had already completed.

Solution: Fix Journal pagination.

Problem: As a journal user I had to be really accurate in making sure I was grabbing specifically the corner of a page in the journal otherwise I was unable to flip the page. This slowed down browsing speed when accessing the journal leading me to take longer to find the page I wanted.

Solution: Chill out on the accuracy needed when browsing the journal. When I click on the right page or the left page a subtle jolt to the left or right should be enough to turn the page.

Constant disconnects and character clones

Problem: My character got disconnected alot and I saw clones of my character

Problem2: When trying to complete the next step of a quest, i found myself constantly having to relog to see the question mark above the NPCs head to continue the next stage of the quest.

Problem3: When a players clone exists in the game, a player can open a portal to take the actual player to a new zone (elk loves this one when it happens to him so everyone teleport his clones to jungle ).

Solution(s): Remove clones, fix DC issues, fix issue with having to relog to continue quests.

Quests in general
Problem: As a new player (to quests; i didnt do any serious quests until this test really), I found it difficult to navigate the area unless I asked lots of questions on discord. This I felt, is not scalable for a mass player base. As much as I love to solve mysteries, I feel that If we want to have lots of people to play with, solving mysteries is not going to be their number 1 priority. They will probably want to kill monsters in dungeons or hang out with other players more so.

Solution: Find a way to get players to discover and complete missions with other players.

Solution2: Soften up on the difficulty of solving missions with more indicators as to where to go, or who to speak to.

Solution3: Add one liner hints in to the mission that a player may be able to relate to from playing previous parts of the game.

Problem: Quests felt really tedious. Most of the quests felt like I was travelling half way across the world to deliver a letter or a note or some random item. I noticed that most of the main story quests did not include actual combat or in-game minigames as an example…

Solution: To make the quest line less tedious, add some in-game minigames or involve a bit more combat (maybe even include dungeons in to the main quest line?)

My Stall

Problem: People were sniping my gear at 0 DRAM.

Solution: Fix the 0 DRAM bug when I list new items.

Archer class & skill cap

Problem: Archers have had a damage speed nerf which in turns, encourages us to form a rational rotation. The problem is now that I think the charge up time when aiming take too long which stops me from using this regularly in my rotation.

Solution: Decrease the arrow charge up time for the ‘charged shot’ or whatever we may call this mechanic.

Problem: Once we figure out our maximum shot time the skill cap ends (it is around 3 shots per second). In comparison to the skill cap for runemages it is massive from what I have observed.

Solution: Make runemage casting a little more forgiving or add ways to make the skill cap higher for other classes.

These are my main bits of feedback for now. Hope it helps!

Thanks,

[Arttu_m]

These are my thoughts of the game from a 3 day period that i was able to play during this beta

Runemage:

Awesome class
however, the detection of runes during this beta was little wonky.

it seems that the tilt and curvature of he rune is slightly too sensitive and could use some work.

as this is a first of its kind a vr mmo game, i think that the impact it will have on the mechanics of other games that follow might be significant.

the orientation of runes and the strokes needed seem to favor a right handed usage for certain shapes more than left handed use.

Can be hard to level up solo on lower levels(1-3).

Runemage could use a spell that allows you to cast a visible AOE shield around a certain area that completely blocks movement both ways and protects everyone inside for a duration of 5-10-30 seconds, based on the tier.

Also, a new runemage can have a hard time to start leveling, as the enemies that are good for leveling first few levels like redtails are relatively fast and because it may be hard for a new runemage to get fireball casted correctly due the enemy attacking and increased panic, it might be good to have a fast to fire low level attack that does not require to cast a run, but makes less damage.

The visual effect that decurse has would better suit a electricity based attack, maybe a “chain lightning” style of attack where a lightning bolt travels from 1 enemy to others nearby if they are too close.

UI:

The character select screen is slightly confusing at first if you start the game outside of the center of play area, as you might not see the ui in the middle properly from behind.

when using the Send message function ingame, the ui started to move in a weird bouncy way and the keyboard for sending a message is little bit too far away on the left.

Suggestion for sending messages: Keyboard that is located in the center on horizontal axis and tilted downwards a little bit and the message window in the center on both axises, it also might be a good idea to look into other input methods, maybe something similar to Steams Big picture text input with the touchpads on a steam controller/thumbstick

Teleporting:

When teleporting, the location where you highlight is not the location you end up at, its the location for the center of the playarea, which can lead to player ending up inside walls and confusing for new players.

On the riverbank near the witches cave, the area between the bridge and a house next to it, you can get stuck if you teleport next to the river, as you cant teleport back up from there.

Bugs:

If you have a spell casted and ready to fire and you press both triggers, the currently casted spell gets stuck so that when you try to fire it, it will not fire, and you have to remove it from your wand by drawing something and activating it.

If you have the Special ability loaded and hold both triggers and then teleport, the special ability can get stuck and fail to fire but it will use up your ability bar.

[Chrondar]

My Thoughts of what needs to be fixed or added for EA.

Quest givers should have different symbols above their heads for what they offer, i.e. Purple ! For main story quests. Yellow ! for side quests. Speech bubble for just dialogue. (Vendor) above their heads for vendors. Blue ! for repeatable quests.

Many more side-quests and or repeatable quests added to help the progression of your other classes. With the number of quests in the game now, you do have enough to level up one class, but leaves the others behind.

The map in the journal is only one small segment of the world which is not made clear. When I first found the map I found it was next to useless. I would prefer a map of the entire world itself with the main locations labeled so I can get a visual in my head when using the compass. I DO NOT want a WoW map that points to everything, to include quests! Just a basic visual of the world will do me.

The guild city needs to be populated. It had a very empty feel to it which does not support what the NPC’s tell you. Some more people moving about, going in and out of houses, kids playing, so on and so forth.

Have some side-quests introducing the dungeons. If I were a new player I would not know the game had dungeons.

More extensive training for every class. Perhaps have class specific quests for each class, that trains you on the use of special abilities and requires you to go out and perform those abilities. The Runemage in particular seems like it ends very abruptly. You gather what you need to become a runemage, you craft a potion, you sketch 3 spells in your journal, done. Nothing. Not even a have a nice day from the witch. Perhaps have her send you out to practice those spells with a few quests then have her hint to the existence of other spells and how they may be obtained.

The journal needs a bit of tweaking. Perhaps have tabs that can be selected. Tabs include: World map, Basic Game Information, Potion recipes, Artifice Recipes, Spells, Main quest progression (detailing all Main quests you’ve done to this point and what quest your currently on), Side quests, Fish log, perhaps a bestiary giving information on creatures you’ve slain.

Gear symbols in your inventory need to vary in some way to show you you’ve picked up new gear and not the same stuff you have on. For quite some time I ran with crap gear, not realizing that the stuff I picked up that looked just like the stuff I had equipped was different. Perhaps also have a comparison pop up when hovering over it to show you changes in stats to what you currently have equipped.

I believe these things alone will really improve new player experience a lot. For the future I would recommend spending your first infusion of money collected on Voice acting. Reading in VR isn’t the most comfortable thing.

Keep up the great work! What you have here is a true gem, a diamond in the rough to be sure, but a definite gem!

[Riley_D]

The recipes are really hard to read.

I assume you mean the Healing Potion and Tinny’s recipes (the ones that are graphical). We will clean those up, yeah. The rest of the Alchemy Recipe pages which you will unlock are just text like on the Wiki and just say “Add Ingredient 1 and 2, wait for Yellow, add ingredient Three and Four”, etc. We figure by the time you are making those potions are you experienced enough to just read the text and know what to do.

Example: “Find object of choice at the sub location in the location to what to solve.”

Which quest was this specifically? We’re trying to make sure each quest does have that “summary” in your journal.

Problem: My character got disconnected alot and I saw clones of my character

Other than the clones issue (which we know and are working on), how frequently were you getting DC’ed? We had a specific thread for this during the test and based on what was posted in their I was under the impression we were out of the woods on this one. So let me know how often you were DC’ing and all that. And in the next test please try and participate in that thread because this is something we can only really track down while testing is happening actively.

If you have a spell casted and ready to fire and you press both triggers, the currently casted spell gets stuck so that when you try to fire it, it will not fire, and you have to remove it from your wand by drawing something and activating it.

If you have the Special ability loaded and hold both triggers and then teleport, the special ability can get stuck and fail to fire but it will use up your ability bar.

Okay I’ll look into those, thanks!

Quest givers should have different symbols above their heads for what they offer, i.e. Purple ! For main story quests. Yellow ! for side quests. Speech bubble for just dialogue. (Vendor) above their heads for vendors. Blue ! for repeatable quests.

Yeah, we’re definitely planning to add this.

With the number of quests in the game now, you do have enough to level up one class, but leaves the others behind.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to really help that with questing, because if we add a ton more quests in (which we are to some degree, but still) then people will just do them on their main class anyway to make leveling that up easier. I think instead we will just need to give a base bonus to leveling other classes that are below your max-level class to make up for the lost quest XP.

Have some side-quests introducing the dungeons. If I were a new player I would not know the game had dungeons.

There is a main story quest that requires you to go into the first dungeon to kill a Wyvern. Did you not get that one?

Perhaps also have a comparison pop up when hovering over it to show you changes in stats to what you currently have equipped.

This would be very nice to have, I’ll see what I can do.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!

[Logan]

Warrior class feels great, just a couple things I feel may need work (you’ve probably heard them but just a reminder):

Horn: aggro needs fixed (enemies turn but instantly turn back to previous target) Also I think the warrior should get the shield buff too. No point using the horn while soloing otherwise. Sometimes after you use it it will stay on your shoulder when on cool down (have to watch the icon for the recharge because it always looks useable). Sometimes grabbing the horn puts the shield away. The grip spot overlaps the sheath back spot so they both happen at the same time.

Hamstring: please do something about this. Lasts 2 seconds, wastes a combo when you can use wound or cleave instead. Only use I see is when soloing 1 enemy with an iceheart weapon though the increased dmg might be lower than use using wound.

Can we get a ranged pull? Proximity pulls are ok, but when a mage has to pull (and the horn aggro doesn’t work) I’m left gaining aggro off allies instead of having any to start. A ranged ability to pull an enemy to you would be awesome to help our mobility.

Sword models: the models and designs look cool but are paper thin. If they were a bit thicker they’d feel and look heavier and pack a bigger “kapow”

Overall the class has felt great. Hit detection is pretty accurate, shield blocks well, horn triggers fast.

Edit: sword rush and teleports would put us close to mobs so if they moved at all we would get stuck inside them unable to hit them or slide out. Majority of the time you couldn’t slide until you teleported first. Huge issue when playing warrior.

[Johann]

Test was really fun. I did have a few disconnects everyday which created a clone almost every time. A few things about the Runemage.

-Would like to see Affliction do more damage to go in the rotation. As it stands now, there are hardly any reasons to cast it as fireball does about the same dmg. I love dots (I was a warlock in WoW) and would love to use this spell more.
-Arcane explosion is got very difficult to cast in the last test or 2. I use to be able to cast it almost 90% of the time, now I’m probably around 15%. I meant to take a video of me casting it to show you. I went really slow which makes it look like a perfect cast (even on the z axis) and it still fails. I wanted to see if something was wrong with the spell or if I’m doing something wrong. Also, the spell doesn’t do a lot of damage. So the damage needs to be increased or make it easier to cast.
-When I quickcast multiple spells in a row, I get lag on the cast at times. I’ll spam the button to cast it and half the time it won’t fire right away. This will happen to about every other cast that I am quick casting. I forgot to make a video of it to show you. It doesn’t seem to be happening to other people, but it is messing up my quick casting. I’m not sure if it is me or the system. Is there an internal cool down that we don’t know about for casting spells?
-Frostbolt for some reason powers up the ultimate meter 4 times more than any other spell. Is there a reason the other spells don’t recharge your bar up as fast as frostbolt?
-The strength stat does not seem to make spells go faster. I sat next to another runemage that had 0 strength and I had about 80 and we casted spells at the same time and they went the same speed.

Are you going to eventually have journal slots for all the spells that can unlocked through questing? It would be nice to trace arcane explosion and the t2 and t3 spells when they come out.

I’m looking forward to the next test as you finish up the classes. Keep up the good work!

[Pyrarrows]

The Musketeer class is feeling very nice, though it can be difficult to gain EXP when you have a good warrior with you due to their shield taking all of the damage so you can’t heal them & the low DPS of the musket. Aside from that Issue, I had a lot of fun this test playing that class. That gravity well orb turned out to be much more useful than I originally thought it would be.

It would be nice if Musketeers had a few more buff/debuff orbs available in the future to make combat a bit more interesting. Also it would be nice if your turret saved the mode that it was in last when you log off & back on.

Ultimate Animation Bug - If you die while your ultimate is active, the ultimate animation will keep on playing until you cast the ultimate again, or log off & back on. This is incredibly annoying for Musketeers as the ultimate plays a loud sound while the animation is active. I know for certain that this happens for Musketeer, I also heard Warriors commenting about it happening to them as well, I do believe that Rangers & Runemages can have this issue too. For warriors, the animation will be stuck at the location that they died.

Connection - I had a few disconnects that left clones behind, though they were much less common then they used to be.

Other connection Bugs - If I relogged to clear out a bug, I would need to wait for ~30 seconds before I could log back on, otherwise I would be invisible & silent to all other players, have a frozen clone & be disconnected shortly after logging in. Generally on the reconnect after that disconnect, everything would work properly again & the clone would be gone. It appears that the server may not always be informed of my disconnecting quickly enough? not sure on what’s going on there, would be nice if it was fixed so that logging back in could be a bit faster.

Tutorial - I feel that it would be a good idea to put a gate across the tutorial area with Guardian Bart that will keep new players from leaving the zone before they are ready. Also players should be taught some of the warrior combos in that zone. I ran into a few new warriors last test that were having a lot of trouble killing monsters as they were just hitting them with their sword repeatedly. After I showed them a few of the combos, they were able to take down monsters much more easily.

Also it would be nice if you could tell the game that you’re left handed so that the game won’t nag left handed players to switch their bow to right handed during the tutorial.

Quality of Life
Fellowship names - Fellowship names should be shown above players heads. Either that, or some other marker that they are in a fellowship.

Compass - The compass should show the names of players that are talking. The largest part of this would be having a different color to a persons name depending on whether they are talking in Party chat or Fellowship chat. Possibly White for party members & Green for fellowship members, like the compass?

Also the compass should change color when you shake it, rather than when you look at it to start talking after you shake it. I ended up talking into the incorrect chat so many times thanks to that glitch.

[Draven]

I’m going to give my feedback a little differently this time, as we’re coming down the last stretch before early access.

Foreword
I think Orbus is an absolutely incredible game, and I am legitimately obsessed with it the way I was when I first learned about muds and when I first started playing Everquest the day it launched. That being said, I’ve introduced Orbus to a number of friends/family and it didn’t capture them the same way for a few different reasons. I’m going to try to capture some of those here, as well add my own general thoughts on what I see as the most critical elements which may contribute to the success of the game we all love. All of this feedback is given solely with constructive and positive intent.

New Players
I’ve seen friends of mine as well as random new players really struggle with picking up the game, even with the new tutorial.

The tutorial teaches you how to equip a musket but if you aren’t using a good combination of orbs, healing yourself, and using your turret (which isn’t mentioned) you are going to die to your first redtail repeatedly and not know why. Similarly, not understanding how to use your shield effectively (which has a lot of nuance to it) or that certain swipe combos yield massive bonus damage will result in the same thing.

I know you tuned down the lower level of mobs, but we need some way to introduce the more subtle mechanical elements of each class to new players to allow them to be effective.

Aspirational Content
We haven’t seen a good chunk of what is planned here so I’m giving some expected impressions here.

I think the sharded dungeon progression approach is a good one for a number of reasons, but I’m worried it will not be sufficient for the most hardcore players over the course of weeks and months. If your most dedicated early adopter players lose interest, you lose your strongest evangelists and the first movers that drag their friends along with them.

I genuinely think there needs to be some additional content for the players that are going to chew through everything within days, beyond the shard dungeon grind. This could be rare drops from rare spawns, some form of epic quest chases, a luxury store that sells unique items for astronomical sums, some form of recurring leaderboard, getting at least one true raid in, some combination or similar features/content that fill the same niche of giving people like me things to chase after for extended periods of time so we don’t burn through the content and leave.

(I realize and acknowledge this is a difficult problem which MMOs struggle with, but I think there are some low cost approaches that can have a high impact in this regard.)

Engaging Content
The number of quests of content that has been added in the last few playtest has been incredible, and the associated dialogue and lore presented with them has helped immensely in fleshing out the world, which is great. I’m concerned that most of the actual mechanics associated with the quests in the game fall into the “Collect X”, “Talk to Y” and much more commonly “Go Kill Z of A”. These can be good distractions, but assuming the majority of players are going to skip over the dialogue regardless of how good it is, the mechanics themselves feel too limited to really maintain engagement.

Having methods of branching with different outcomes (even if purely cosmetic), having more unique scripted experiences, having more multi-objective targets, requiring some multi-player coordinate, etc, can go a really long way to breaking this sentiment.

This also applies to mobs in the field, where they function for what they are expected, but having the occasional rare spawn, or triggered event based on randomness, time, or player action will help player fatigue. Some random examples: if you depopulate all the X mob in area effectively for a while, there is a Y% chance a special Z event will spawn, sometimes when wandering alone in the woods an NPC appears before you to give you a buff or special item/quest, etc. Killing the low level mobs in an enemy camp causes harder and harder ones to spawn progressively until the boss shows up, when when it’s raining some type of mob goes away and another type comes out. All of these help break up the sameness of gameplay and help present the existence of a much more dynamic world where you can’t predict everything that is going to happen around you.

Bugs
There are a lot of small bugs throughout the game that slightly mar the gameplay experience. These vary across the board from typos to UI annoyances, voice chat instability, navmesh problems, AI wonkiness, etc. Individually none of these are a big deal, but collectively they add up in a way that can give an overall impression of a subpar product to some players.

Obviously it’s impossible to have a completely bug-free game, but I think there needs to be a serious focus on bugs and polish before a real launch. Maybe this is more of a live thing as opposed to an early access thing, but I know specific people who weren’t able to get into the game due to this.

I’ve been working off and on a small bug database for a lot of the misc stuff. It has been updated from this most recent test and I still want to go back through all the previous beta threads to make sure it’s as comprehensive as possible. All of that being said, linking here as it may be helpful.

Orbus Bug Database

Please let me know if I can provide any additional feedback or detail on any of the above.

[J11]

Draven I agree with most if not all your feedback here.
I would like to emphasize some feedback from Draven that I think will be most important:

I’ve seen friends of mine as well as random new players really struggle with picking up the game, even with the new tutorial.

I tried getting some friends involved in this game (ones who already own VR headsets). They could not grasp the game mechanics that easily. Some clear feedback I got from my friends were:

• Not being able to know what different orbs/arrows/spells do.
• Not knowing that if you flip the compass, you can open the quest book.
• Not bring able to read pages in the journal (like literally too much text. They hated the fact that they had to read carefully. One friend mentioned that they did not like the font).
• Getting lost was a big problem for them. When a quest mentioned a location, there was no clear colour indicator to match where they had to go on the compass.

I too could relate to this feedback from them.

Similarly, not understanding how to use your shield effectively (which has a lot of nuance to it) or that certain swipe combos yield massive bonus damage will result in the same thing.

Maybe some combat text would massive help this?

I genuinely think there needs to be some additional content for the players that are going to chew through everything within days

100% agree with this. something like including in-game cosmetics or rare items to discover would be cool. I would look at the gamification techniques that AAA studios have come up with for low-cost solutions for near unlimited content and progression.

[Logan]

I genuinely think there needs to be some additional content for the players that are going to chew through everything within days, beyond the shard dungeon grind. This could be rare drops from rare spawns, some form of epic quest chases, a luxury store that sells unique items for astronomical sums, some form of recurring leaderboard, getting at least one true raid in, some combination or similar features/content that fill the same niche of giving people like me things to chase after for extended periods of time so we don’t burn through the content and leave

Agreed. I think guild hall expansions would be great to work toward. Maybe move the guild hall to a new location eventually like the player houses.

[Outlander_Robert]

I’ve seen friends of mine as well as random new players really struggle with picking up the game, even with the new tutorial.

I agree with this and will be working more and more on the tutorial in the upcoming weeks, after finishing up the questing. There will be more changes to the tutorial before going into EA, and will need tested multiple times, so once we get it closer to where we think it should be, hopefully you can get your friends (and new ones) to try again and see if they have a better grasp of the game.

[Vulcan]

Personally, I agree with a more robust and complete tutorial teaching aspects of each class and basics of spells.

A little indicator of where to go is a must, either that or a real map with a point of where we are supposed to go, because new players don’t know what the areas are called or where they are even if they know the name or vice versa.

Maybe a “You are here” point in the map to help out.

Also, you loose track of your health sometimes maybe trying out different places for health indicator.

Quest book:

I enjoyed the quest lines but having everything in one book, the spells, map, and recipes really makes thinks a little messier than I feel it should be. Multiple books in you home you can switch maybe? Or be able to carry a resource book (containing spells, recipes etc…) and a separate quest log?

Overall game feels great and solid just some minor things.

[Logan]

1 more thing is pvp. I think an important thing to add soon are the movement trail effects. It’s almost impossible to track someone currently and movement still looks segmented.

Also is frost bolt supposed to stack on players? 3 or 4 FB nullifies movement down to 1 square that just shuffles you around. Currently the only cc in pvp. The test we tried it it persisted after death as well. Was a sitting duck after respawns

[Shiki]

I found the “equip to change class” pretty awkward. I enjoyed play the runemage as secondary class in last test, but i was always wandering around without gear due to 2 reasons:

• A complete set of gear + weapon consume 5 weight, i played a bit with every class so if i should take all the gear in my inventory to switch class in every moment i’d constantly have 20/45 weight (21 if we count the fishing rod).
• Equip every time the gear of the current class (+skills if you are a ranger/musketeer) is pretty annoying.

I’d like a class menu where you can select a class with saved skills and gear (which doesn’t consume weight since is not in your inventory) to easy switch class.

[Bashal]

New player here. Prior obligations stopped me from playing more than one day in the beta, but hopefully some of this will be useful anyway. I haven’t tried Orbus prior to Closed Beta 3. During the test period, I played with an Oculus using two sensors.

• Archer - Maybe this has been fixed already, but the bow was very difficult to use compared to other VR archery systems. I think it was too sensitive to physics input from the arrows; whenever I notched one, it usually caused the entire bow to turn sharply or to spin. I eventually gave up and started shooting with the bow on its side and arrows strung across the top like a crossbow, as this kept it the most stable.

• Warrior - As others have mentioned, it was hard to tell whether the shield was working. I tried various things like raising it to different heights, crouching behind it, and thrusting it forward whenever I knew an attack was coming, but nothing worked consistently. (I paused at one point to look this up on the wiki, but it still didn’t work very well - is the height you have to hold the shield at relevant to the headset and not the game world/monster?)

• Musketeer - Easiest mechanics to learn so far; the instructions made sense and the weapon functioned as expected. I did manage to find the turret, which probably helped.

• Trading - I spammed some poor soul with trade requests (“Hey, I’ve got like three bows now. I’ll share!”) before realizing all equipment in the game is soulbound. In fairness, I should have known this from reading the wiki, but by the time I got into the game I had forgotten about it. This will probably throw a lot of new players off as it isn’t common to bind unworn, low-level, low-rarity gear. This might be a good thing to add to the tutorials; another approach would be to warn players about items that can’t be traded the first time they try to initiate a trade.

• Loot and Gatherables - I realized halfway through my play time that I don’t know how loot works in Orbus. Are gatherables shared or instanced? If two players hit a monster at the same time, is the loot I see mine or can anyone grab it? I realize the wiki can probably answer this, but I couldn’t find a way to access the information in-game. This might be a good snippet for the gathering tutorial quest or maybe as something that shows the first time a player picks up loot in the game.

• Quests - As discussed by Chrondar and Riley_D, different symbols above character heads would be a great help! I’ve gotten so used to “! == New Quest” in other games that I thought I was bugged when NPCs with that symbol did not have quests for me.

• Items - I second Shiki’s gear set idea. Trying out multiple classes was really fun, and I’d love a way to quickly swap weapon/skill sets or to at least hide the gear of classes I’m not currently using for easier inventory management. Even if the gear weight stays, it’s a nice quality of life perk to change roles without spending a lot of time swapping skills. Aside from that, my only complaint is that I have no idea how to feed treats to my dragon.

• Navigation - Like others, I struggled with navigation and locating quest objectives. I actually kind of like the current map system, but it was difficult to find what I was looking for as a new player (maybe a magically zoomable map or showing your starting location during the tutorial would help). I can’t remember whether I ultimately found this information or not, but I also remember being frustrated when I needed a reminder on where to go after the tutorial quest.

That’s about it! Sorry for the long and rambly post. Despite all my griping, I really enjoyed my first Orbus experience and am looking forward to seeing what the game becomes.

[Chrondar]

Aside from that, my only complaint is that I have no idea how to feed treats to my dragon.

You equip the treats like you would a potion then hand it to them. I would be nice if the person who gives you the dragon explained that though.

Like others, I struggled with navigation and locating quest objectives. I actually kind of like the current map system

I too absolutely love the map system, I don’t think we need hand holding when it comes to quests. Currently the quest giver gives you enough clues to figure it out, for instance your first quest to visit the chef, it tells you to look for the house with two chimneys. Although a more detailed map of the entire world instead of just a small segment would be nice. That would give us the ability to get a visual while also utilizing the compass to get your bearings.

second Shiki’s gear set idea. Trying out multiple classes was really fun, and I’d love a way to quickly swap weapon/skill sets or to at least hide the gear of classes I’m not currently using for easier inventory management.

I also feel that this is an absolute must have. If it’s equipped by another class it stays equipped to that class so it doesn’t go back into your inventory where you accidentally destroy them with the other extra gear you pick up. Perhaps a tab for each class, whereas only one tab can be active. Clicking on another tab will allow you to view your other class with a button to activate that class. Changing classes will require you to stow your weapon first.