Hey guys,

firstly and most importantly, your booth at PAX was excellent. Your staff was kind and knowledgeable, the line was fast moving, and the actual experience of playing the game was great. I wouldn't be surprised if you guys had one of the highest turnover booths at the expo, it was such a tight-run ship. I work as a software developer so I like to think I'm familiar with the process of getting to MVP (an alpha in video game terms?) and from my view you guys struck it perfectly. The game felt really polished while playing, but looking at it from an objective standpoint, it was run from a batch script and leveraged team speak. It was by far the best alpha or pre-alpha I've ever seen.

I'm really excited for this game. This style of sci-fi navy warfare is something I've been looking for since I discovered I wasn't hard core enough to play eve.

I do have a couple comments and it was suggested that I sign up for these forums to voice them, so I have. I hope this doesn't come across as a rant or as me blasting this game, because I think it's excellent as is, and I'm really looking forward to the final product.

In an attempt to keep myself on task I'm also going to use a sort've problem-solution format.

goal: make combat more confusing/chaotic, less direct
why: perfect omnipotence for a player is boring.
mitigations: the maps (& range) currently provide a lot of interesting strategic elements. The warp ability also frequently makes seemingly simple fights very messy.
suggestion: add more smoke and particle effects. One of my favorite combat systems was the one in World in Conflict because line of sight was very important and very hard to maintain, with buildings exploding into dust and many units intentionally firing smoke grenades. When a ship fires a salvo or a nuclear missile it might add an interesting gameplay element if that ship and/or its target were left in a position where they were in a cloud of smoke, and thus couldn't see and/or couldn't be seen. To that end I think that replacing the artillery craft's invisibility with some kind of smoke ability might be a good way to go. Certainly it would reduce the gap between the effect that skill has on experienced players (who still know exactly where that cloaked ship is) and newbie players (who have no idea where that ship is).

goal: make the environments more interactive (though not necessarily non-static), adding to the removal of omnipotence in fights
why: hiding behind terrain elements is a fun and effective dynamic but with purely static maps it will likely lend itself to a kind of counter-strike, or left-for-dead type map-fatigue (campers go here, check spot A, check spot B, get killed from spot C. Of all the possible places to be on the map the enemy is only ever at spot A, B, or C)
mitigations: specifically the warp but possibly other maneuver oriented abilities on many ships means that camping or playing the same spot repeatedly will likely become difficult or ineffective.
suggestion: add damaging (or smoke-creating or sound-producing or otherwise environment-changing) asteroids or solar flares or comets. I feel like a meteoroid-collision-wrattle like the one in interstellar (spoilers!!!) could add a really dramatic element to the sound-scape.

goal: make the importance of difference in attack angles more evident through UI overlay.
why: as a tanks and ships I assumed that direction you were facing was important, but I didn't know until I'd watched the dev videos that your weapon type could actually change based on how you were firing.
mitigations: I might just be an idiot, a friend of mine figured it out much faster than I did.
suggestion This can always be exposed through tutorials or (god forbid!) a manual, but adding some kind of overlay perhaps similar to the one in assassins creed black flag, changing your cross hair dramatically between weapon types, would make this more evident.

My .02, again I really enjoyed this game and I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on it again!

-Geoff

ps this form supports markdown!? :joy:

welcome to the forums captain thank you for the feedback

here is my small feedback
i would love to see some abilities with smoke and decrease your view range.There is already a scrumble torpedo that destroys your view range for 3-4sec and makes the screen like a tv when it's losing signal.We call it "snow effect"

right now i believe the battles are really good and if experienced people play it[or organized teams] it will be a really good battle.
For camping:this is why we have corvettes.Corvettes aren't the assasins of the game.They should be using to spot the enemy players and destroy snipers.Specially the fulgora subclass witch has a stealth.But many people use this class as an assasin.Crosshair change can be used as mods.The scripters will make their crosshair and share it like CS:GO

interactive enviroments is something i like.
I think the cloak on sniper can be changed.There is a big variety of abilities that you can choose

all ships have speacial angle.Light tactical heals better with front beam,Dreadnought is dealing more damage on the sides

First of all:
Heyho, welcome to the Dreadnought-forums, where a bunch of DN-addicted guys sometimes know as much as the guys who actualyl played it and off-topic the way to go!

Groostav#2962 posted (#post-6170)
goal: make combat more confusing/chaotic, less direct
why: perfect omnipotence for a player is boring.
mitigations: the maps (& range) currently provide a lot of interesting strategic elements. The warp ability also frequently makes seemingly simple fights very messy.
suggestion: add more smoke and particle effects. One of my favorite combat systems was the one in World in Conflict because line of sight was very important and very hard to maintain, with buildings exploding into dust and many units intentionally firing smoke grenades. When a ship fires a salvo or a nuclear missile it might add an interesting gameplay element if that ship and/or its target were left in a position where they were in a cloud of smoke, and thus couldn't see and/or couldn't be seen.

So
The DEVs aim to optimize the shi† out of this game. So adding more clouds, smoke, etc. makes the game more damning for sure (but by how much is the question. UE4 seems very cool at making games look awesome while not being very demanding processing-power-wise).
I also find the current games "chaotic" enought, while still having a very strategic focus.
That's also what the DEVs really aim for, AFAIK. More of a slow, but very strategic approach.
The individual Rambo-1v1-killstreaker is in the backround.
In the foreground are the strategy, setting up plans, executing them and leaving the enemy no room to breathe.
However, making the games more chaotic would go against that more clear and strategic approach.

and leaving a Dreadnought in a cloud so he can't see shi† after he's fired a Nuke or Missiles isn't gonna be the best option, IMO, from the point of view of a Zmey-Cap
First of all, the cameras or the radar would still pick up enemy ships and display them on the HUD, so true visual confirmation is not really needed. Furthermore this would be a disadvantage for Dreadnoughts.
Sure, the Zmey can't see you and you can't see him, but that's not really "cool", I think

(that's just my own pesonal opinion though )

Groostav#2962 posted (#post-6170)
goal: make the environments more interactive (though not necessarily non-static), adding to the removal of omnipotence in fights
why: hiding behind terrain elements is a fun and effective dynamic but with purely static maps it will likely lend itself to a kind of counter-strike, or left-for-dead type map-fatigue (campers go here, check spot A, check spot B, get killed from spot C. Of all the possible places to be on the map the enemy is only ever at spot A, B, or C)
mitigations: specifically the warp but possibly other maneuver oriented abilities on many ships means that camping or playing the same spot repeatedly will likely become difficult or ineffective.
suggestion: add damaging (or smoke-creating or sound-producing or otherwise environment-changing) asteroids or solar flares or comets. I feel like a meteoroid-collision-wrattle like the one in interstellar (spoilers!!!) could add a really dramatic element to the sound-scape.

This idea has also been brought up, like moving asteroids, hiding behind these, etc. (just as an info, tho).
Someone also suggested a map around a bursting sun/star, so you have to hide behind asteroids, otherwise your HUD get's maybe messed up, etc. etc.
This is a nice idea, but I think the DEVs might think about some kind of "levolution" at a later point in development, I am sure. But more often than not, implementing levolution to a map might also take much processing-power, like for example in BF4 the falling tower (you catch my drift?). So this might also go against the "optimize-right-now"-rule that the DEVs are following (They are really focusing on making it work right on PC)

Groostav#2962 posted (#post-6170)
goal: make the importance of difference in attack angles more evident through UI overlay.
why: as a tanks and ships I assumed that direction you were facing was important, but I didn't know until I'd watched the dev videos that your weapon type could actually change based on how you were firing.
mitigations: I might just be an idiot, a friend of mine figured it out much faster than I did.
suggestion This can always be exposed through tutorials or (god forbid!) a manual, but adding some kind of overlay perhaps similar to the one in assassins creed black flag, changing your cross hair dramatically between weapon types, would make this more evident.

This is already in to a certain extent. For example the some ships are most effective at certain angles.
The Zmey shoots best when being broadsided or down to an enemy, and it is bad, when parts of the environment obstruct the line-of-sight or the travel-path of a plasma-ball.
edit: Dangit, writing longer posts is often not beneficial to getting the first text-slotspotpost :p

Welcome Captain. Have fun here in our circle of crazy people.

Welcome to The Fleet, Captain!

I see, another poor soul already addicted to Dreadnougnt ^^'''

The DEVs aim to optimize the shi† out of this game. So adding more clouds, smoke, etc. makes the game more damning for sure (but by how much is the question. UE4 seems very cool at making games look awesome while not being very demanding processing-power-wise).
I also find the current games "chaotic" enought, while still having a very strategic focus.
That's also what the DEVs really aim for, AFAIK. More of a slow, but very strategic approach.
The individual Rambo-1v1-killstreaker is in the backround.
In the foreground are the strategy, setting up plans, executing them and leaving the enemy no room to breathe.
However, making the games more chaotic would go against that more clear and strategic approach.

and leaving a Dreadnought in a cloud so he can't see shi† after he's fired a Nuke or Missiles isn't gonna be the best option, IMO, from the point of view of a Zmey-Cap
First of all, the cameras or the radar would still pick up enemy ships and display them on the HUD, so true visual confirmation is not really needed. Furthermore this would be a disadvantage for Dreadnoughts.
Sure, the Zmey can't see you and you can't see him, but that's not really "cool", I think

(that's just my own pesonal opinion though )

Yeah, I just thought the cloak was a little problematic from a skill-gap point of view. IMO giving the player a tool that has such a different effect on somebody whose played the game for ages and somebody whose only played it for 5 minutes could make the game like COD, where the there is a very experienced core playerbase that consistently wrecks everybody else. I feel like smoke might be a more fair tool, in that it would have the same impact on both new and experienced players. Its worked well enough for CS:GO. I dont think it would be too much of a leap to fog the camera or empty the radar when in smoke as well, thats more of a technical challenge than a design one.

My point about chaotic gameplay elements isn't to try to detract from the strategic elements. Quite the opposite, I think that when plans get jumbled up it allows for more player agency and more strategy, rather than less.

And while I was playing the game I wondered if it was unreal (funny how you can start to tell what game engine backs a game by the way it plays/looks). And certainly there are some very good looking smoke effects on unreal, so hopefully they're not too difficult to add.

This is already in to a certain extent. For example the some ships are most effective at certain angles.
The Zmey shoots best when being broadsided or down to an enemy, and it is bad, when parts of the environment obstruct the line-of-sight or the travel-path of a plasma-ball.

I realize that now, and its hugely important. But I didn't realize that the broadside weapon was different than the bows weapon until I watched one of the gameplay videos put up by the developers --read: I didn't notice it while playing the game. I don't think the actual gameplay of the ships needs to be modified, I just think that the fact that there is a difference between what kind of weapon you're using should be made more overt.

DEVASTRATOR#4326 posted (#post-6178)
For camping:this is why we have corvettes.Corvettes aren't the assasins of the game.They should be using to spot the enemy players and destroy snipers.Specially the fulgora subclass witch has a stealth.But many people use this class as an assasin.Crosshair change can be used as mods.The scripters will make their crosshair and share it like CS:GO

I donno about sharing crosshairs (I've played around with that stuff in CS:GO and i thought it was pretty silly), but I really like this concept, it was one of the things I really liked in theory in world of tanks. The idea that half the battle was spotting the enemy heavies so they could be targeted before they could do too much damage was a really neat.

Welcome Captain!

Groostav#2962 posted
Yeah, I just thought the cloak was a little problematic from a skill-gap point of view. IMO giving the player a tool that has such a different effect on somebody whose played the game for ages and somebody whose only played it for 5 minutes could make the game like COD, where the there is a very experienced core playerbase that consistently wrecks everybody else. I feel like smoke might be a more fair tool, in that it would have the same impact on both new and experienced players. Its worked well enough for CS:GO. I dont think it would be too much of a leap to fog the camera or empty the radar when in smoke as well, thats more of a technical challenge than a design one.

My point about chaotic gameplay elements isn't to try to detract from the strategic elements. Quite the opposite, I think that when plans get jumbled up it allows for more player agency and more strategy, rather than less.

And while I was playing the game I wondered if it was unreal (funny how you can start to tell what game engine backs a game by the way it plays/looks). And certainly there are some very good looking smoke effects on unreal, so hopefully they're not too difficult to add.

But Smoke might actually be the opposite of what Cloak does
It shows everyone you're 100% there, but not 100% where you are
(Ofc you could also deploy the smoke and fly away and make the enemies think you're still there, but that's not really useful, I think).

I also think the Cloak is not 100% cloak, but you maybe can still see some flimmer-immer-thing where the ship is. So it's just not thaaat visible.

[Groostav#2962]
And while I was playing the game I wondered if it was unreal (funny how you can start to tell what game engine backs a game by the way it plays/looks). And certainly there are some very good looking smoke effects on unreal, so hopefully they're not too difficult to add.

Yep, Unreal Engine 4 Unreal Tournament 4 already runs on it and looks like a blast. UE4 is awesome when it comes to making things look superb without using that much processing-power actually

Groostav#2962 posted

This is already in to a certain extent. For example the some ships are most effective at certain angles.
The Zmey shoots best when being broadsided or down to an enemy, and it is bad, when parts of the environment obstruct the line-of-sight or the travel-path of a plasma-ball.

I realize that now, and its hugely important. But I didn't realize that the broadside weapon was different than the bows weapon until I watched one of the gameplay videos put up by the developers --read: I didn't notice it while playing the game. I don't think the actual gameplay of the ships needs to be modified, I just think that the fact that there is a difference between what kind of weapon you're using should be made more overt.

What do you mean with "overt"?
That it should be more visible which weapon you're shooting?
Bc. I think that's pretty clear, if you've seen like 1-2 videos. For example the Zmeys primary-weapons are Heavy Plasma Cannons that fire blue orbs, and the secondary-weapon are Flak-Turrets that shoot mini-rockets exploding on impact.
The bullets and projectiles look very different, they sound different and shoot relatively slow (Plasma) or relatively fast (Flak).

Irish has it pretty spot on. Once you're in the driver seat it quickly becomes easy to tell the various weapon types. Very soon after that you start to associate those weapons with the various ships that are firing at you.

Smoke screen would be a pretty interesting tactical tool. In a game like this where positioning is so important, concealment is just as important (if not more so) as cover.