Give us your feedback from the Stress Test Here!

Hey everyone!

As the stress test is starting to wrap up, we first want to thank everyone who took the time out of their busy schedules to help us out by testing the game with us. We know that a Saturday night isn’t exactly “ideal”, and we missed a lot of folks due to real-life commitments, but it was great to get so many people online during the test.

We’d love to hear your feedback on the game. There’s a lot left to do, but we want to make sure we’re going in the right direction. Teleportation, combat, lag…let us know how your game experience was. What worked well? What didn’t work as well?

I’m going to go ahead and start off the discussion with two things I’ve been thinking about:

  1. Locomotion. A lot of folks aren’t a big fan of the teleportation, and we definitely need a better way to get across the large expanses of the game. We could certainly add a “slide” locomotion system. Another thought is that it would make sense to have the ability to “portal” to different places in the world…after all long traveling is tedious in VR a way it’s not in a game like WoW where you can just alt-tab when you’re autorunning or on a flight path. What are your thoughts now that you’ve experienced the game? Do we need different locomotion options for in-combat vs out-of-combat?

  2. Combat with ability buttons vs. using physical items. Because we’re quickly protoyping the combat right now, it was easy to just set up the trackpad to serve as a sort of “ability button” the same way the hotbar works in current MMOs. However, I actually think the Runemage (with its lack of ability buttons) most closely represents the “ideal” of a VR MMO. Maybe instead of buttons, for example on the Ranger we actually put different types of arrows on your person that you have to grab to use. For the Orbhealer, maybe you have a stock of globes on your hips that you grab and “slam” into your crossbow to load the different types of buffs. Thoughts?

Locomotion: Look into having the player’s ragdoll slowly progress to a position, then the camera teleports there once they release the teleport button. A quick click could have them “jump” to a location with the camera setting into place after the jump has finished. This makes teleporting far less “broken” where people never have to worry about being hit since they can instantly be anywhere else. An option to move where my controller is currently pointing would also be nice, but could be cumbersome for classes who need both hands - I have an idea for locomotion that would solve that but I’d need to test it out before recommending it to anyone.

Combat: I agree that removing all the ability buttons is the ideal here where it’s possible.

For example, the archer could hold the draw longer for a charge shot rather than having a cool down. To fire a fire arrow they could have to draw the bow from a vertical position as if drawing from the sun itself. They could set the bow at a 45 degree cant to zoom slightly for a shot, or cant it completely horizontal to make room for multiple arrows to do a spread shot. The glory of the bow is the ability to be fast and dynamic much like the mage, having to select arrows would be cumbersome.

For the cross bow you could have them reload by simply bringing it to their side (like the pistol upgrade in raw data) and perhaps reloading from harder to reach spots like the back would be where they “draw” an ability bolt to use instead.

A suggestion for mages since I couldn’t get spells to work properly regularly - allow their button press to bring up a trace overlay of all the spells they know so they can be more precise. I got a fireball by making an F maybe 2 of the 10 times I tried. I’m not sure if my f was too curvy or if I had to write one fluid letter or what.

I didn’t get to play warrior or I’d have suggestions for that.

I think your next priority needs to be VoIP of some sort as the social aspect is part of what makes MMOs stick, and not being able to talk to anyone made this rather weird for me so I didn’t stick around too long.

Also, how many of you guys are working on it? Are you looking for any more help?

Yeah, for some reason i could not cast the shield spell, even when tracing back other party members. Everything else was awesome. We experienced no lag with other people. Sometimes it appears as if my spells were disappearing after releasing the spell.

EDIT: Having names above the characters would also be a approvement over: “Im the one standing by the boulder with my bow up and my arrow in my head”

I had a hard time with spell consistency. I knew the actions, but it didn’t seem to trigger.

Movement was jerky at times, and hard to get a good rhythm going to “run” down the path.

Just so you know, your sitting on a pile of money right now. This will kill all my free time.

Sucks knowing i will have to wait 6+months for this awesome game, but I know things take time to develop.

Thanks for the awesome test

Locomotion: Teleport during combat wasn’t really a big problem for me, especially when playing the Runemage where I can just point with the offhand and teleport to the side while I remain facing the mob.

Getting around the map was a big problem though, e.g dying while fighting the boss meant hopping from the village all the way back, requiring a lot of clicking on the pad per “tiny” hop.

All in all, this was a great experience and I can’t wait to see more of this. This really will take all my time :slight_smile:

Here are some things I felt was kinda clunky while playing:

  • For the Runemage, it was hard to draw correctly. Maybe have the free hand hold a spell book open to a rune page that we can flip around (with the other hand trigger finger?) to see the different runes and descriptions.Maybe the current drawing can be updated in there too.
  • For the Orbhealer, it was kinda hard to determine when the next shot will be available. Maybe if we have to cock the bow ourselves or have some kind of animation that shows that the shot is ready (like a arrow showing up in the bow).
  • For the Ranger, many times after drawing the bow the arrow wouldn’t shoot… maybe if the arrow always shot if the bow drawing was registered.

I only got to play the Ranger and the Barbarian since I joined so late.

As a Ranger, I was a bit annoyed that the arrow can only be pulled back at a fixed angle. The angle the Bow was relative to the controller made it hard for me to aim straight. The way The Lab implemented archery felt much better and in control because both hands were used to determine the arrow’s trajectory. Another thing I found less intuitive was when I pulled the arrow half way, I expected the arrow to shoot with less strength (shorter distance, slower travel). But nothing shot out and I thought I was lagging. I think as long as the arrow was pulling on the string, the arrow should fly…However, with the ranger’s current implementation, they would be able to rapidly fire. A way to prevent this could be forcing the ranger to reach for their arrows from a quiver.

At first, I didn’t think the ranger’s trap was a trap. It looked more like a shuriken, but that’s not a big deal. The problem I had was that I dropped it and teleported away. And then it was lost forever :frowning:. A respawn timer on it might be a good idea.

As a barbarian, it was pretty straight forward, but the small little rabbit monsters were annoying to hit since they’re so small. This made me realize how mob size is a huge factor to consider when making a VR game. I’d suggest either making them bigger overall, or at least make the hitbox bigger. They were even hard to hit as a Ranger.

I’m not sure how in depth you want to go with combat, but being a melee character and simply swinging the controllers to attack isn’t very fun. Adding some shielding mechanics or parrying mechanics would make it much better. I think the implementation in Vanishing Realms did a decent job on it, but it’s not exactly perfect in that game either. Detecting intentional swings from other movements is a really challenging task, and making it feel right will take a lot of play testing.

I’m assuming the inventory is still in development, because I wasn’t able to interact with any of it. But it did look nice! I think what could be helpful is to have the other menu button on the vive controller to bring up character stats or instructions on how to use the current class. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already thought of this.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to try the runemage because the server got shut down. While this isn’t exactly a priority in Alpha testing, a simple notification of server shutting down would be nice, or simply booting the player. I was wandering around wondering why my spells weren’t casting and everyone was frozen.

Hopefully I wasn’t able to cast spells because the server was down. If I was suppose to be able to do so anyways, I wasn’t successful at all. I’m not sure how you implemented drawing recognition, but you might want to look into this plugin: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/64218

It’s using a neural network so you just have to pass in multiple amount of the same gesture to train it. But it’s currently really dependent on how the gesture is drawn. So drawing a line from top to bottom is different from bottom to top. A way to work around this is to have a simple animated gif of how each spell should be drawn when teaching the players how to cast spells. It’s a pretty expensive plugin so the choice is up to you. I’m planning to create my own gesture recognition similar to it because I’m a cheap dude :smile:.

Anyways, this is a pretty neat demo and I can see myself playing a game like it in the future. I wish you luck!

edit: My thoughts on the locomotion–
It’s pretty standard for VR right now to teleport around. I was a little annoyed with the cooldown because 1. I didn’t know there was a cooldown, 2. The cooldown bar wasn’t intuitive/labeled, and 3. There was a cooldown. I understand that the cooldown is there so players can’t zoom across the map instantly. I personally liked how Vanishing Realms implemented it by making the distance of the line grow over time.

edit edit: Haptic feedback would be great!

ALSO forgot to mention it earlier, but please have bows function as aiming with two hands rather than just the front hand, especially as likely all your audience has come from “The Lab” where the bow aims with both hands trying to always have the bow face directly at a target, as if it were a gun, was very unnatural feeling.

Bugs:

-Teleporting has an odd delay sometimes. (Not in combat.) Sometimes up to a full second or so between teleports, while other times is had almost no cooldown.

-As Barbarian the hit order UI faces the person who the monster is currently attacking, not you. So if a group attacks something, your hit UI often spins away from you entirely. It also is a consistent height, so fighting small monsters entails hitting above their head.

Uncomfortable Bits:

-The crossbows would have been more comfortable if they were rotated slightly down from straight with controllers.

-The launcher/character selector is only desktop mode, so launching from VR entails going to the desktop to hit the character select

EDIT -The hitbox on the boss was very wonky for melee characters. I had to flail around to find where on the leaves it was, and the stem rarely seemed to have a hitbox. The swift rotation of the boss also caused difficulty finding a valid spot to attack.

Suggestions:

-When drawing spells, consider not having the order of operations be important. (As far as I can tell the order and direction makes a difference in success.)

-When drawing spells, have each successfully drawn line segment flare to confirm success. This would help know if I have botched the spell partway through.

-When drawing spells, show other players a very short trail of sparkles. This would help teaching other players spells, but disallow giant dick drawings.

-Audible indicators of successful hits would be nice

-As others have mentioned, having the ranger’s bow direction be determined by the line between the two hands, rather then the orientation of the bow hand, is more comfortable.

Compliments:

-The art style is dope, environment and character models are very clean and crisp looking

-The inventory system looked very cool, though I wonder how it will work in a limited space? Didn’t have a chance to try that.

-Overall looked very clean for an alpha, the multiplayer seemed stable, with the exception of the server restarts. The relative motion and position was very precise, and the time delay seemed very minimal in various interactions.

I’ll update this is I think of anything else!

Completely agree about the runemage, it’s an ideal system for a VR MMO. After I had exhausted all the content I still played around with and learned the different spells for almost an hour, killing a hoard of monsters in the process. I really liked that the spells required practice, I felt that I was actually learning magic. At the end I could cast Fireballs and Frostballs at will, but the other two were much harder to pin down. Maybe tweak the recognition system a bit, but still have them be somewhat difficult to cast consistently.

I also just want to say that this was an amazing experience, I played for the whole two hours and I’m still thinking about it and going through the footage. It really gave me the same feeling as when I played my first mmorpg. Can’t wait to see the finished game.

If you are planning on having large expanses between areas you should include lots of things to do in between. Crafting, gathering, grinding, random quests, etc. Doing an MMO is no easy task, but if you want it to be as an MMO should, it should feel mysterious and people should be encouraged to explore. I noticed with the teleportation it is very limiting with exploration and takes a lot out of the experience.

I played for about a half an hour and got some enjoyment from it.

Characters:
Ranger: I enjoyed playing the ranger the most. Some improvements that could be made (which other people have mentioned already) is make the arrow be part of the aim trajectory. It was a little awkward pulling back the arrow. I did enjoy grabbing the bomb and throwing it on the ground for an enemy to walk over though, and some of the abilities, like raining arrows, were really cool.

Warrior: I think you’re on to something with the beat circles so it forces a cool down. I didn’t get to play it too much as I died quickly (being up close and personal was disadvantageous for my level)

Runemage: Great system but currently marred by touchy registration for the symbols. I think the more powerful spells should have a more advanced symbol you need to draw. It’s a great start though.

Orbhealer: This class was a bit boring for me. Maybe have some kind of motion to reload the crossbow?

Teleportation: The available teleportation area was sometimes inconsistent so i would have to constantly change how far my target location would be.

Art & World: the art style is great so far in the game. Really adds uniqueness while keeping the system requirements low.
I also did a little exploring and found a miniature village, which I assume are test assets for future revisions?

Keep up the great work!

The rhythm game Berserker was soso. With practice it got better. More feedback might make it more enjoyable but I think I’d rather be able to go all out with some sort of guard against wiimote wrist waggling. It’s a hard one to get right, there needs to be some sort of dps gate i’d imagine but I don’t have any great ideas on how to manage that.

I did feel that the trackpad implementation of abilities didn’t really seem to work. It was distracting from the fight and easy to swipe the wrong way.

Berserker - Maybe attack patterns for abilities? Two overhand swings at the same time = ground slam.
Bring the controllers together near your chest and then pull them apart and look up like your screaming at the top of your lungs for taunt.
Swing horizontally right to left, then left to right, then right to left again for a cleave attack
Cross the axes and bring them to your chest and wait a moment to activate the lifesteal buff.

Ranger - Really, really like the multiple arrows idea. That feels very authentic and ‘real’

Orbhealer - Could have a lever or something on the crossbows. Maybe more magitech looking crossbows? Something interactable on the crossbow to swap the buff/debuff. Something you could reach over with your free hand and adjust.

Mage - The only thing I’d ask for here is a spell book and that stronger spells get more complex maybe with a series of runes you have to lock in. Perhaps it’s more of a recipie system where you’d enter the rune for Fire, lock it in, then the rune for ball and lock it in to use fireball. You could also enter Fire and lock it in then the run for ray to shoot a fire ray. Mix and match element, delivery method, enhancement, +whatever other aux runes. The more you enter, the longer the cast time, the stronger the spell and the greater the fizzle chance. It would take great skill to cast great spells as well as a level of intelligence and planning. Would be very mage like.

The game was a hell of a lot of fun and I’d love to see more of your ideas. You could probably kickstart this if you’re in need of funds.


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Overall, I had a good time and there is tremendous potential here. I agree with a lot of the feedback above so I’ll try not to repeat it. I would like to echo the ranger draw issues.

Locomotion: I didn’t have a problem with teleporting as it’s pretty standard across all the VR games I play. I did have one bug when I died and revived and was stuck in combat so teleporting was restricted. It cleared when I entered and exited combat again.

Ability based combat. I played Ranger and Orbhealer and didn’t have a problem with the ability buttons but I like the idea of physical based abilities across all classes. For example, the Ranger could use the arrow like a wand to draw an ability prior to notching and firing.

Mob pathing. Some area were really bad. As a healer, I could one shot spiders because they would die of the DoT while they ran in the wrong direction while pathing to me.

Healing. I was able to heal others but I wasn’t sure if I was healing myself. I tried shooting myself with the crossbow but couldn’t see if it did anything. Consider a ground target aoe heal. I target an area on the ground similar to teleporting and everyone in the that circle gets healed directly or gets a HoT buff.

Keep up the great work! Can’t wait for the next test session.

Also a great thing i loved about this networking option is that there is only one instance. We (the guys on discord) were always in the same session which alllowed us to have a great time at the tiny village!

EDIT:


this is the result (sorry for the annoying filmora tag…)

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That was a blast! I was in the group that fought the boss at the end of the test which was a ton of fun. It kept respawning over and over immediately after it was killed, so we killed it quite a few times without breaking a sweat. You may have to make it a bit harder for us next time!

After that group disbanded, I ventured further into the forest, past the house with the porch you can actually go on, and I happened upon what I have to image is a bug. There was 2-3 trees surrounding a house, but they were all tiny! Like, smaller than my character. The house was too! It was pretty cute.

I found that the archer could fire as fast as you can pull the trigger if you don’t need the arrow to go very far which was a little overpowered. I would say make the arrow’s power correlate to the distance it is drawn back… or just only allow an arrow to be drawn every .5 seconds or whatever.

I also noticed if you are teleporting up or down a staircase, you can do it well beyond the range of your normal teleport. I feel like locomotion should be enabled by default, as constant teleporting is not a good way to talk long walks.

I can’t wait to see what becomes of this game. Well done devs.