Okay, thanks for the heads-up!
This is your one hour warning! 1 hour left to play! 
Some minutes before the end, all at the first village for a great amount of fireworks!
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I was there shooting off fireworks with you ā it was great fun! \o/ I have some screenshots maybe I can post later!
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Yes that was funny, thatās why i want to do it with much more players lol
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I thoroughly enjoyed this alpha. I tried the last one and it just didnāt do it for me. In particular the addition of faces and hair really made it more of an enjoyable social vr experience. Good job.
awesome glad you really enjoyed it.
Thank you for this open alpha test! I had been following OrbusVRās updates whenever I saw them on r/Vive but as of yet hadnāt looked very closely mostly because I donāt want to hype myself up for something that isnāt coming in a long time. 
I clocked maybe 10 or so hours this weekend and got to Level 7 (not rushing, no min-maxing leveling at all) and thoroughly enjoyed it. And I mean that; even some initial frustration with the rune casting turned into enjoyment when I got the hang of it (and even more, as @Shikiizaso just said, when a few of us tonight were helping each other learn the fireworks rune and shooting them off together ā where else do you find people gathering to just socialize & have fun and not actually play a gameās core path?!).
I think thereās something special here, and I just bought the $50 backer package because I want to support this development, the development of good games in VR especially in these nascent VR days.
The social aspect of players actually helping each other sincerely with tips and fighting mobs together ad hoc is something I havenāt seen frequently in MMORPGs in years. It reminds me a lot of the years-past WoW days, in the good way. =)
And gameplay itself is fun. I started out tonight thinking ālast night of the test, no reason to go crazy leveling, but I just want to cast some spells and feel awesomeā and I did, and I met a bunch of people and fought mobs with them. It was all-fun, all the time. =)
One more bit of gushing praise, and itās a big one for me:
IMHO, youāve done the artificial motion (via touching the Viveās trackpad and moving in the direction of the controller) RIGHT.
I get sim sickness very easily from artificial motion, and I was able to play all night tonight like this without feeling queasy at all! This is a big deal for me, in owning a Vive for over a year the only other game I can stand artificial motion with is The Left-Hand Path, which is similar. Even āarms swingerā style can get to me after a while.
Hereās an Imgur album I just put together from screenshots I took via SteamVR (click the image to see the gallery) ā
There was a bug I hadnāt seen mentioned yet that I kept experiencing:
Whenever Iād cast the Light spell and fire it off, then every other spell Iād cast in that area would go to the Light spellās location, but on the ground. So if I cast a Light spell 10 meters in front of me and in the air, even after it ran out if I had cast a Fireball or Affliction spell for example and fire that bolt off, it wouldnāt fly and follow my wandās direction, it would just shoot out toward the ground location of where that Light spell had been. I could only resolve this by quiting Orbus and relaunching.
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And thatās a wrap! Thanks everyone!
Weāll be writing up a blog post summary of the weekendās events probably early next week. Weāre also planning to send out a survey to collect feedback, so look forward to that.
Thanks so much for joining us!
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I enjoyed so much this test, I played all three days so i donāt know if i forgot something, but hereās my feedback:
- The night in some zones was too dark for me and i had to logout and wait the day because i couldnāt see much (and itās not good if you never seen that zoneā¦), maybe a bright option would be nice so everyone can set it as they prefer.
- Should be helpful see the enemyās level for know if you can kill him.
- As a ranger, I would like to use more skills in the same fight. There is space for at least one more arrow in the middle of the other two.
- The rangerās arrows sometimes donāt disappear when you sheath the arrow.
- The rangerās trap in some zones stay at mid-air for few seconds and disappear.
- I donāt know the other classes, but if you get debuffed as ranger the debuff icons are inside the super skill bar.
- I had a bad time to find some quest objectives because they were too far for the compass or i had to return to an npc that i forgot where he was, you should add an option on the quest page of the journal that show quest points to the compass (like all mmorpg do).
- The roto spores near the lake are out of the teleport grid.
- Some drop was wrong, like a spirit or a wolf that drop a featherā¦
- Some places appear in the compass only when you are close enough to see them, making the compass useless.
- The stairs on the āMaāat mountā (i forgot the name, that mount with giant statues) arenāt easily visible, I had to walk on the edge of the zone for find them. An arc or something should make them easy to find.
- You can normally cross the bridge from pigās zone but when you cross it from the other side you do one step at a time.
- The tigerās teleport really scared me, now i donāt want to fight more tigers lol.
- I donāt know if it is balanced or not, but i solo killed adult pigs at level 7 (i have read somewhere that you need a party for elite monsters) and adult lizards at level 11, but maybe my level was too high for they?
- At the world boss event i had so many crashes but they was different. Normally i get a process error without sound but there the game instantly closed and i get a sound without error, i think the game isnāt so stable when too much players are in the same place.
- Sometimes the BGM disappears and returns after a few minutes.
- Sometimes the first page of the journal is covered by the second and you can read it raising a bit the page.
- The rangerās cooldown shows just for trap and charged shot, not for the arrows in the belt. I remember the arrowās cooldown was in the pre-alpha.
Also hereās a misadventure: at level 3 i was stuck in the jungle because i died at the entrance and i respawned in a jungleās graveyard and i didnāt know the road for exit. Also i died several times and respawned in a different graveyard so i was totally lost (as if isnāt enough, this happened at nightā¦), but after almost an hour i encountered a mage that made a portal for me.
And a fun thing: i was wondering for all the test why no one could hear me, just 5 hours before the end i noticed SteamVR changed the mic input. Thank you SteamVRā¦
Iām happy to see the progress this game did from the pre-alpha test and as i said on the pre-alpha test, i really love this game!
Got to play for a few hours on saturday for the first time. died to the stag, died to the daemon rabbit and even the chicken which i swear went invincible at some point.
I got few real feedback points.
- The night is a bit too dark.
- The contrast between the roads and not roads could use improvement.
- Rotating the compass 180Ā° is literally 180Ā° like 179 isnāt good enough. I find this really uncomfortable to do a like plus or -30Ā° tolerance or something would be nice .
Hi, Iāll just say that I played for probably 5-6 hours during sunday and all of the time was pitch black night time. Night is, as Lorem^ above me is saying, a bit too dark. Itās a pain in the arse too see thing really.
Iāve got no other issues with the game, at face value itās what Iād expect out of a MMO Alpha, or even better. It feels solid, I only encountered a few bugs. Movement isnāt perfect but it works (I use touchpad locomotion). Runemage is a blast.
I also want to tip my hat to the developers who seem to really engage with the community, that much is clear from this Open Alpha.
Thanks! See you in December
I played maybe around 6 hours to 8 hours and pretty much played warrior only. Although i will mention now all the things that can be improved i will say that i had a really great time and just didnt play more because i didnt have the time. To not get confused i will use the names for combos and so on used by the wiki: https://wiki.orbusvr.com/Warrior
The Combos:
This is what really makes this class fun. I had a great time practicing all the combos. Sadly when you play alone it is best to use just wound and nothing else the entire time.
I really dislike all the Up swings that are required. A swing upwards isnāt really nice to do. A downward swing would be so much more comfortable to use and somehow that isnāt used in a single combo.
You really need a way to tell players about combos other than wikis. A lot of players probably donāt even know about them. Maybe something like skill books could work out.
What i really disliked is that a succesful combos ādeletesā your previous moves. E.g.: When you use Cleave it ends on a left swing. If you followed up with a Wound which starts on a left swing you need to perfom the left swing for Wound again instead of the last swing of Cleave counting towards the new combo. This has the downside that if i spam Cleave all the time and i perfom a mistake I will actually perfom Provoke which results into another Provoke and so on. This is very annoying to deal with. I feel like there was also huge potential lost by not allowing to combine combos.
The Shield:
The shield is very awkward and i really donāt like it. 75% of the time you have to hold it in front of you while performing combos which is really not very comfortable. It is also very easy to trigger a shield bash accidently. This is a problem because it actually interrupts your combos.
The Sword:
Holding the sword like a gun is really strange. I guess it was done to be more comfortable? I really would like to see an alternate grip mode where you hold the sword like a real sword.
Sword Rush:
It is quite a nice ability. Although it is kind of strange that a Shield bash interrupts your combos while Sword Rush doesnāt. Would be nice if it would be more consistent.
I used the 180Ā° option and found the 90Ā° turning left and right a bit jarring. Wonder if you can implement optional side-turn loco as diagramed. Slow turn left or right when thumb close to center, faster on the edges, with a dead zone in the middle third column to prevent accidental turning while going forwards or back 
Great alpha test by the way!
Barry
Hi!
I had a lot of fun this weekend. The basics are already there and working quite well. It took some time to figure out some peculiar ways of how the UI operates (examples: locomotion and when using scroll bars: that you have to take your finger away) and how to actually play the classes, which at the moment is hardly possible without reading the wiki.
Contrary to some criticism here I applaud your design decision against hand holding. We donāt need maps, quest pointers and insta travel everywhere. I see where those people are coming from. The game is confusing in the beginning, but thatās a necessary condition for the world not becoming stale and boring very fast. Once you get around a bit and found your orientation, you will actually feel that the area could not have been designed much smaller. If someone doesnāt like exploring, he has to find other people to show him the way. Thatās part of a group centric MMO.
The night is indeed a bit dark, but you should not get rid of that interesting aspect completely. I propose to make the transition more continually during the whole night, so that it will reach the peak of darkness at midnight and then begin to slowly get brighter til dawn. You could also change the relation of day and night time.
The graphics style is partly good (houses, monsters), partly acceptable. However I think the ground looks terrible, actually worse than āMeridian 59ā or āEverQuestā, just because of the total lack of texturing. I understand that itās part of the style, but giant monochromatic single polygons spanning many mĀ² just look bad and ruin the stereoscopic perception of depth in VR. You should experiment with different shaders, maybe with some gradients. Another alternatve is to add some rather abstract (graphical) texture to add some (material) texture (for example ānoiseā). Lighting helps a lot too. The game looks beautiful when the sun is standing low and casting long shadows.
Regarding combat: I was surprised that the basics work quite well already. Long term the classes probably need more special abilities, but thatās not the main priority right now.
I wanted to address / nitpick another detail of combat: the very fast out of combat health regeneration. While this is good for casual gamers and eliminates downtime, it severly limits the strategic element and resource management of the game. If I can start every fight with full health, most of the fights will follow the same pattern and get repetitive much faster. I havenāt tested health potions yet, so I will just speculate. I want to recommend the potion design philosophy of āDragon Age: Inquisitionā and āThe Witcher 3ā. Both games a) limit how many potions you can use / take with you during a trip, and b) make it rather cheap to refill them. This a) eliminates grind to get potions, b) makes the usage of potions more complex than a simple healing over time effect that can be applied after the specific potion usage cool down timer (if there is no limit on how many potions you can take with you, you must limit usage with a cool down, which then renders the whole mechanic utterly trivial and a waste of development resources).
Combined with such a system, you could reduce out of combat health regeneration drastically. Each fight will have more profound consequences, as the damage your group takes will determine how soon you will have to return to the city to refill your potions. This would make especially sense in a dungeon, where each run will drastically vary from each other. A good run will bring you much further, while a bad run will have to be aborted prematurely.
I hope you consider to add such a mechanic, to bring even back more flavor from the original āEverQuestā days!
Yours,
Arno Nym
I already took the survey so I wonāt repost stuff here but I would like to address the musketeers turret. For the past few tests it seems to like to switch between targets every 8 seconds. It was my understanding it was supposed to attack the target of lowest health. This behavior was repeatable from the farm in highstep to the healer and bug groups in the jungle.
If needed Iāll try to get a video of it next test.
Oh one tiny alpha issue I noticed ā if you go into your Home when itās night time out, the blue stained glass windows are still bright as day.
Okay so hereās a bit of a hilarious bug report.
I was running the Lvl 8 Stone Golem Dungeon past the burning forest with a couple people and when we got to the rope bridge part of the dungeon we attacked the Ogre monster on the other end.
This caused what I can only determine to be a path finding bug where the Orge got to the bridge then dipped down through it into the bridge continuing to go towards us dipping in and out as he went. I knew this wasnāt a client side bug as the all my party members were also losing their minds as the dipping and diving Ogre made its way angrily towards us. This also made us die as we were all laughing too hard and also under lvlād. However that turned out to be helpful in a way as it meanāt we were able to replicate the bug by trying to attack him again. Hilariously it did happen this time with even more dipping and diving through the bridge from the Ogre, it was like he was some kind of bridge shark that only came to the surface occasionally to instil fear into our party of 5.
However we did end up completing the dungeon.
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(TL;DR at bottom)
I decided to make my won thread for this, since itās quite sizeable. Iāll say a bit about myself first: I pre-ordered the Vive, and as such have had it for a full year, but have not actively used it for the entire time. Instead Iāve hopped into VR when I felt like it, and in some periods I did so every day, and also for demoing it to other people. I have recently finished my bachelor in IT, and have experimented with VR, so I might have a bit higher technical level than most people, though the VR community as a whole is pretty techy.
While I havenāt played that many games, but have paid attention to various games, trying a lot of free ones. Particularly, I have followed on the particular challenges VR face with locomotion and UI/UX. The open alpha is also the first time Iāve tried the game, and I only played one session, albeit one that lasted multiple hours. With that preface, letās start at the beginning.
Getting the game running was pretty painless, with the launcher handling things, though the process of checking if I had updated files seemed a bit exaggerated, andthat extra time on each launch was a bit annoying(more on that later).
I enter the game, and start creating a new character. The process was familiar, having played quite a few (MMO-)RPGs. The user interface itself, with the pointy-finger being a bit weird to use at first. I got more used to it as I played, but thatās my first complaint/feedback: The hand entering to āpointā pose didnāt feel as responsive as it should. A new model or at least qucker animation should help.
That also lets me segway into another topic: Grabbing stuff. With the Vive controllers, holding the grip buttons to grab is awkward, and I am mostly fine with that - Iāve had others complain quite a lot about using them at all. Here Iād like to point to H3VRās system, a toggle-grab for ālargeā objects(the stuff in your quickbelt would count), with hold to grab other things. It uses the trigger, though, which feels more natural. A situation-sensitive trigger button would be better, I think.
Next up would be the classes, as introduced in the tutorial. The warrior seemed interesting and useful, though I didnāt really play around with it. The rangerā¦ The bow was super wonky, and seemed to shoot up when I was aiming straight forwards. From waht I saw you can get some serious damage by spamming arrows in melee range, tho.
The only class I really felt like playing was the musketeer, and I got mine around 75% to level 5. I ended up just spamming the trigger, though, so Iād like moreā¦ solid feedback for when itās ready to fire. A small vibration or sound would be nice. The animation sorta works, but doesnāt seem to match perfectly, and is not always in focus.
Stability: There were a few times, during loading not-quite in the background, I think, where the screen blinked into the SteamVR bland environment/loading screen. Then there was disconnects, but thatās to be expected for something like that with crappy net. There was also crashes. LOTS of crashes. And they could happen with no seeming cause. In particular, it seemed to happen a lot around the starter town, though I was generally around there, so ehh.
Moving around was also a bit awkward, since I had to turn 360 degrees. A system similar to rec Roomās swipe to turn would be very nice(swipe touchpad to rotate at fixed intervals), as you can quickly turn, even in combat, to face where you need to.
TL;DR/summary and final thoughts:
ā¦ I didnāt play very much, and only the musketeer.
ā¦ Overall very interesting
ā¦ It will definitely benefir from the obvious grindwork of performance and stability.
ā¦ Iād very much like to see some alternate or upgraded controls, as they felt wonky compared to my two āmainā VR games, H3VR and Rec Room. Options are nice; I used the trackpad motion to get around.
Sidenote: Maybe a tag for feedback? The mega(?)threads seem unfit for these longer posts, and specify (while X is ongoing)
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Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Very much appreciated. A lot of the things you all are saying (locomotion, combat reworks, crashes, etc.) are the very things on the top of our list for next test. We really appreciate your ideas and you all taking the time to tell us what you think of the game. Although I donāt have time to respond to every post point-by-point (since that would leave me no time to actually code in the things you all want, haha), I do read every post so know that your suggestions are being taken into consideration.
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