My experience - Why I gave up in frustration after an hour

[Angus Prune]

I really wanted to like this game. New isometric RPGs don't come along every day, but I just can't bring myself to continue playing this. It's just bad in every respect. Maybe it gets better later, but I'll never know. When I pay money for a game, I don't expect it to be bad from the word go. Mediocre I can deal with, bad is right out.

Lets start from the beginning. We open on a little in-engine "cutscene" where three mooks discuss the running of.... someplace. We've so far not had any backstory about where or when we are. Is this Earth? If so, is it the future, or perhaps an alternative past? It this a different place and time entirely? Who knows.  We've just hit the classic RPG problem. The player is ignorant of the setting, you need to ensure their avatar is at least as ignorant if not more so. Hence the incredible prevalence of amnesia attacks amongst potential heroes. You can probably come up with something a little smoother that cliche, though. 

Anyway, we learn precisely two concrete facts from the opening scene:

1) I'm apparently the man (or woman) with no name just wandered in to town. That's apparently all anyone knows about me. Maybe it's explained who I am later, but I kind of doubt it.
2) There's been an earthquake. Clean up efforts are in progress.

That's the sum total. I can only think you consider this to be the most important things to convey to the player, since you completely break the game's convention that I am my avatar to tell me it. I couldn't possibly have witnessed this conversation. I just can't figure out why. What is this scene supposed to achieve? I'd love to know the rationale in the design document.

This single scene not seen from the avatar's perspective would be a good chance to show us something about the personalities of these three (I can only assume) important NPCs. Unfortunately, the writing isn't up to the job. Please, as a spiritual exercise at least, refer back to your design documents and see what they say about these characters' personalities (if a) You don't have a design document, or b) it doesn't say anything about their personalities, then you've discovered the problem right there.) Now compare what it says to the script and see if you can intuit some of those traits from how the characters interact. If you can't, rewrite the script.

Now I'm in the game and controlling my avatar. I'm looking around my room and find, amongst other things, my computer terminal. I have an email summoning me to the boss man's office. There's a little bit of gating in that I need to find my key before I can let myself out of my room, but I can happily leave other more-or-less critical items behind. Is it game critical that I have to see every container in the room? I missed the credits first time I played, and almost missed the armour. You've taught me how to loot containers by making me take the key. Why do I have to do this again for the other gear?

I head up to Tanner's office. Right away I notice the edge scrolling doesn't accelerate. Worse, the text log that takes up 25% of the left edge of the screen prevents you edge scrolling there. That's annoying. That's the kind of thing you'd expect would be caught before alpha. Doesn't that annoy just about everyone who plays? Oh well. Moving works OK for the most part, so there's that.

The game having taught me to rifle through containers, I promptly take a look through Tanner's shelves. Oh, a bolt recipe! I'm playing a sneaky crossbow character, I could use that! Wait, oops. Looks like Tanner is pissed at me. I guess that red cursor meant that would count as stealing. You die and learn. Lets reload, ho-hum. You've trained me by failure, but you could have trained me much better by making it much more obvious that RED HAND MEANS THEFT and having Tanner tell me to put his stuff back, giving me a grace period to do it. With decent game mechanics, that should be a standard part of the NPC's AI. Most people don't automatically go berserk and try to kill you if you breach commonly accepted social etiquette. They have solutions short of violence.

Now I know not to blatantly steal peoples' stuff, lets see what Tanner wanted. Woah, wait. Is that the size of font we're going with? It's tiny. Lets go to the options and see if we can jack that up. I have an astonishing two choices. Small and large. It's set to auto, which considering the screen resolution (1080p in this case) I would have thought would go with large, but apparently not. It's not rocket science to choose a font size that uses an appropriate number of vertical pixels to the screen resolution.

The conversation I have with Tanner is, how should I put this? Yes, that's it. Bland. Right away I spot a typo ("queue the chores"), not a good sign. Tanner hopes the earthquake THAT COLLAPSED SEVERAL TUNNELS didn't disturb my sleep. Is he been facetious? No, he seems like he's serious. Help, I'm trapped in the city of the morons. I'm given an opportunity to exercise my adopted persona a little, but I don't get any feedback that the game cares what I say. Perhaps it really doesn't. I get my marching orders and leave.

Away to the armoury. Hello, Lucas! Can I have my gun back. Oh, apparently we've met. Funny, I have no memory of that. Probably hit my head in the earthquake. I guess we're skipping the introductions then. Thank you, gun vending machine dressed as a person. Lets go talk to Gorsky. I've seen him before in the opening cinematic. I had the impression he was the taciturn type, he certainly wasn't over fond of using prepositions. Now he can't even bring himself to use contractions. He's an enigma! Or poorly written. Yes, that one. He punches me in the face, I guess I shouldn't have called him poorly written. Is that how things work here? Can I go around punching people with no consequences? Lets go try it out. Nope, apparently starting a barfight in this town is a sin punishable by summary execution. Well that's a bit of a mixed message. How exactly does the law work around here? Next council meeting I'll bring that up as something to add to the orientation. Or maybe it is in the orientation. I seem to have gaps in my memory. I can't even punch Gorsky back, which would be a nice easter egg possibility to win his admiration, the  initiate dialogue icon prevents me from actually hurting him. Never mind, he's forgotten the slight in about 3 seconds. I guess we're cool again. Still getting the message my actions don't matter worth a damn.

Back to the task at hand. Lets see how good a marksman I am. As it turns out, not very. At ten yards, I have a less than 40% chance to hit a stationary target. I take 23 shots to make my ten hits. I now have 20 rounds in my magazine and another 33 ready. Oh, it's fine. It's not like the game would give me motive and opportunity to fire ammunition I need for my real missions.... right? They'll load me up before I head out of course. Of course.

Let us away to see the good doctor. He starts jabbering about my psionic potential. More obvious typos ("this trait came to be.") Again, this stuff it bland, bland, bland. Compare and contrast something like Planescape: Torment that hooks you from the first line of dialogue. Put some personality in to the script. Why do all these people speak like they're attending elementary elocution lessons? Aren't there any tics any of them have? Doesn't this future argot have any interesting and different turns of phrase? Their manner of life is so different from ours, but they speak exactly like us. Can't I be a scruffy Nerf Herder? A cutter? The ayatollah of rock and rolla? Give me something to work with here, please.

I choose to take the red pill. I don't really intend to use psi powers, but I'm told its a decision without consequences, so why not? Why give me the choice at all? It'd be a nice decision point if being a psionic lowered my physical abilities somewhat, but as it is this is a non-choice ripe for the cutting room floor. What's the intention behind this little scene?

When I come to, I ask doc Feelgood to tend to my injuries. He misses a nice opportunity to make a disparaging remark about me having tangled with Gorsky and lost. Little touches add personality to the world. They keep me interested. Sprinkle them in to your script at every conceivable opportunity. Personality is just one IF statement away.

Reporting back to Tanner, I'm told I'm being assigned to take back some power stations in the cave tunnels to the north. I'm told the tunnels are "below the station." Now I have two problems. Which way is north? I guess the top edge is supposed to be north, but we're looking at the world in an isometric perspective, so the geometry as been rotated 45 degrees. Which direction? I think the answer is supposed to be clockwise, but really any direction could be north. If you're going to give me compass directions, I need a compass to interpret them.

Now where are these tunnels? Below is a bit vague, considering we're not given a hint which direction is up. I try the station platform. I get slaughtered by a pack of rathounds. That's a bit discouraging. Maybe it isn't that way? Lets try the other extreme. Hrm. The only way to go down here is towards the docks. The ferryman demands money (remember I didn't find my wallet earlier... yeah.) Guess it isn't that way. It must be at the station platform. 15 minutes of getting slaughtered, and fruitless trips to various npcs to try and get better directions, I give up and go and look on the internet. OH! I have to ask the bloke behind the locked door to let me out. Well someone could have bloody told me. Lets do that.

On the right track at last! Oh crap, more bloody rathounds. What's this happy horseshit? These bastards can kill me in two turns. I'm glorified pest control and the pests are as tough a I am! Oh, oops, I guess I forgot to put on my armour. This leather armour reduces their otherwise lethal bites to merely annoying stings. Well it's a good thing I gave my room another once over before I left, otherwise I could have completely missed that vital detail. Certainly nobody mentioned on the way out that I should probably put some armour on before I go hunting, and I can find some in my room in case I missed it. I dispatch the initial room of vermin without bother and loot their corpses. Standard RPG faire thus far. Lets head in the direction presumably known as north. Look, the first power station! Oh my, but it's guarded by three rathounds. That's a bit more challenging. I shut them behind a chain link fence and blaze away. They run off. Nice touch to the AI there, I think. Ha.

I open the fence to pursue them. They come back to me, rabid as ever. Oh. I close the fence again, they run off. Oh look, I've seen the matrix. They're not smart, they're dumber than rocks and at the same time psychic. They know there's an alternate route, and they're just following the shortest path A* spits at them. I can exploit them like a tower defence game, repeatedly altering the shortest path so they run back and forth while I shoot at them unopposed. What year is this? 1992? Back in the day, when processors were clocked at less than 100Mhz, I could forgive this idiocy. It wasn't easy to find spare cycles to do AI with. But this is 2013. You have upwards of four threads of execution each more than 20x as fast to play with. Even the most naive pathfinding takes less than a millisecond and doesn't block your graphics or sounds threads besides.

Are these critters idiots? Then they should throw themselves at the chainlink fence trying to reach you. You can make that appropriately dramatic by making the fence destructible. Can you kill the slavering beasts before they rip down the fence and tear you to shreds. Are they smart? They seem to be pack hunters after all. They could leave one of their number guarding the front entrance, while the rest of them sneak round the back. That'd give you a nice "clever girl" Jurassic Park before they tear you to shreds. Neither of these is beyond the beginning programmer, and you can probably think of many more interesting things that might happen.

As it is, the fight seems to expect you to exploit the AI, because you can't take these things in a straight up slugging match. They're faster and powerful than you en masse and it takes two turns to kill one. My exploit works fine until I balls it up. Instead of clicking the 10 pixel wide target that is the door, I accidentally click the floor and move through the entryway. Now I don't have enough action points to move back. I'm torn to pieces for my mistake. Apparently it's 1988 and all our mice have only one button. Now that I think about it, the entire interface is designed that way. I haven't had to right click at all.

Take two. I dispatch my furry foes and move on to activate the power station. This seems to be the trigger for five of the slavering brutes to come and attack me. I hide behind a fence and shoot the blighters, who conveniently stand perfectly still and take the bullets. How do these things ever survive to breed? Well, that was an anticlimax. Now I'm out of ammo. I trek back to base to trade in my ill-gotten loot for a handful of bullets. Good thing I took a few points in barter or this'd be impossible. As it is, I hope the guy restocks because the 100 odd 5mm rounds he has isn't going to be near enough at this rate. Next station!

I head further possibly north, yet more rathounds. But they're clustered around an explosive barrel. I think I have a plan! I engage stealth and sneak as close as I dare to the barrels to get a better shot. Lets see what my chances are like. 20%? I have a 20% chance to hit a large, stationary barrel at 5 feet? Do I have cerebral palsy or something? Am I blind? Seriously now. Of course, it's not like I could expect such sophisticated factors as size or speed to be taken in to account when assessing my chance to hit. Oh well, lets risk it. I've got three bullets before I get mobbed by furry vengeance.

Miss! Miss! Hit! What, no boom? Oh crap. It takes two bullets to kill a barrel. I put on a desperate last stand, but apparently in this place my chance to hit even at point blank range has been reduced to 20%. Is it a bug? Oh I don't care any more. I'm through taking this crap. It took less than an hour for this game to break me. That's 7 quid I'll never see again.

Maybe I'll have another go when it goes gold, but I'm bitterly disappointed with my purchase thus far. Hopefully you can take this advice to heart and make some serious improvements. I'm not interested in a game where I'm rentakil man to bland subhumanoids.

(PS, your board can't seem to handle accented characters and just truncates and post after them. Sigh.)

[UnLimiTeD]

Well, everyone is entitled to his opinion.
A few things though:
A) This game is done by one person.
You can't expect sophisticated AI. Ever.
B) The game being silly hard, you being hardly told anything, having to loot every container and constantly being low on ammo is kinda the point.

I feel taken for a fool everytime in a new game I get forced through some silly Tutorial "Press mouse 1 to click", and even if I skip it the next two hours the game tries to "teach" me the most elementary things.

[Angus Prune]

Well, look, I'm not asking the dude to solve Go. I'm looking for AI a little smarter than "charge towards enemy, bite."

I'm a software engineer, I know what I'm asking for isn't rocket science. I also know the limitations of budget. It would be an unfair complaint to criticise the art or sound, but this is a very fair complaint.

As long as you have the basic building blocks in place, this even qualifies as easy. If you don't, your engine is designed wrong.

The basic building blocks are:

1) Your NPCs aren't psychic. If the map changes (e.g. a door opens, etc.) they don't know about it until they see it, or hear it (or possibly smell it, but that's pretty much hunt the wumpus and nothing else.) This means that every NPC has a map in their head of the terrain that is possibly different from how the actual map is currently configured. If you're doing that right, each of those maps is probably less than 500 bytes. If you're doing it very right, those maps are less than 10 bytes each. You have many gigabytes to play with. This is not a problem.

2) Terrain changes change the various maps constantly. They don't get out of sync.

3) NPCs have planning abilities and a good heuristic for when to change their plans and when to stick to a plan that's now possibly suboptimal.

Once you have that in place, adding heuristics like the ones I suggested above is a handful of lines of code each. You can abstract them in to strategy nuggets and give NPCs individually and as teams the ability to choose an appropriate nugget. Bonus points if strategies that require communication between NPCs actually show that communication to the player so they can react. This is so much easier in turn-based than real time, and you can get much more sophisticated results. But you do have to try, and this game doesn't even try.

As for being "hard", why is that the point? I've been trained by every RPG ever since about Ultima 6 that there'll be non-combat solutions to problems, and this game fronts like that'll be the case here. I'm not forced to take any combat skills and I'm not given an appropriate weapon to my skills. Does it even want me to fight? But the front and reality on the ground are significantly different, and there's friction between them.

You also have a strange idea about how games train their players. Try playing half life 2 with the commentary on sometime, you'll learn a good deal about player training beyond the blatantly obvious. You may be surprised. Hell, I present my solution to training players that stealing is frowned upon as a good example. There's no explicit prompt "don't steal" involved, and it adds realism to the setting while helping the player.

[UnLimiTeD]

Honestly, Half Life 2 and Portal are great examples of doing it right.
I am a Game Designer, I can appreciate it.
Even then, I had those moments, say, in portal, where I thought "Oh, now they try to show me that again, in case I forgot."
But overall, those are great games. Some of the best around. Portal is 90% tutorial. To it's credit, it also has decidedly unique gameplay.

I would probably agree that getting a weapon for the combat skill you picked would be neat, why would my avatar have run around with a gun when he can't shoot for his life?
I can't possibly say anything about AI. Sounds like work, though.

[Elhazzared]

While I do respect your opinion I think you do are being quite a bit unfair towards the game even if you have some valid points as well.

As for the dialoge. I can't say i explored all the dialoge in game, for the most part i avoid antagonising dialoge because I just don't roll that way so, yeah, don't know much about that. I go about it the nice way or the I kill you way. As for typos or the lack of giving you a way to express yourself. I liked the conversations for the most part, i don't find anything wrong with them, they are good enough to immerse me and I dare say more than 99% of the players. Your points over typos and by Typos I'massuming you meaning the use of wrong grammar. Quite frankly, it's the kind of things that nearly no one notices, it's really at the level of, someone who has an master degree on english language like say a teacher or something like that would notice. For everyone else they will see no typo, if you try to point that out they'll say, what they say makes sense to me... I don't mean with this that you're wrong, just that it's a classic example of grammar nazi which no one likes and which quite frankly, if that is enough to make you dislike the game. Well I guess you'd reach a point where you'd hate the world for not speaking or writing properly.Again you may have found the script to be bland. I'll respect that but to me the script was just fine. Now of course there is a lot of info missing. It's an Alpha, and as such it's an unfinished product not really up for evaluation. Buying into an alpha is meant as a help to the developer with money and of course to help with bugs and offer sugestions. At very least it could be said that dialogue is not what you might have expected, but the general consensus of the people who play it is that it is actually rather decent.

Now for other things which probably didn't needed to be explained but well. What do you learn by opening all containers in your room? Leave nothing untouched, if it can be opened and it's not a theft then open it... If it's a theft well, I suppose that depends on the situation right?

On the theft kills you matter. Now while you may not know a lot about the setting you do know this. pos appocaliptic world. This means nukes abouve, surface is unhabitable. this means lack of resources to go around. If you try to steal me, I'll put a bullet through your head and get your stuff. this makes a hole lot of sense to me. In a way this is not much different from the good old isometric RPGs like fallout.

Next you waste your ammo firing at 10 yards. Let's ignore the fact that gorsky tells you that if you are using a pistol then to at least try 7 yards, you should always make it easy however by doing 5 yards. You assume the ammo is expendable just cause you're supposed to train. In a place with scarse resources you get what you get, I usually do it in 11 to 13 shots.

Then there is the weapon hit chances with range. I agree that there should be better chances to hit over range but let's try to go at this in two parts. You are a level 1 character. This means that you are relativelly incompetent even in the stuff you trained best. Second. You are walking in caves with barely no light at all, even something at 7 yards is a blur in the darkness.

The pathing or indeed the AI of the enemies I like. Now, you can say i like it easy but no, i like predictabillity. the game is hard and the way the game forces you to play is by learning how the enemies will respond to you and plan ahead... I will agree on the enemies shouldn't know if another pah was open for them but if you are fully closed by fences it's good that the rathounds will stay at the fences. think of yourself running from a dog and you leaping over a fence. The dog will stop at the fence, he can do anything else than throw himself uselessly at the fence trying to get you and fail. Now if you were to have a gun and shot the dog at the fence. The results would be just as predictable in the game so it's not totaly off.

Also you know there are pack mentallity with the rathouds. Psi-beetles gain buffs near eachother, the more there are together the stronger psi-abillities they can use. it's not like, they have a super complex AI but they do have very good synergies.

Not having armor against any opponent will have you die in seconds, in fact your starting armor barely helps, i've actually defended that alongside a more reasonable weapon towards the combat stats you have, you should start with a better armor, a 20/4 would be decent enough but hey, it's not like it's undoable without it.

Speaking of armor and weapons. You should look at this game as you look at fallout or similar games (though even harder). If you don't have a proper build, you're itching for some pain. My first builds were atrocious, I couldn't do anything. You didn't even reached a bit further. You know, if you had just assed yourself with a few more minutes you'd get past those dogs and com to a house. Inside the house there is a guy with a crossbow and 2 dogs of his own. trying to make him leave so you can reclaim it will only result in combat and since he has aimed shot he can start by putting a guaranteed critical hit with a bolt and then shot again, then his dogs attack and they are close. Sufice to say, if you tell him to move out, you'll die instantly. I'm sure you'd rage at this but the answer is pretty simple. inniciate the combat, don't even talk to him, just kill the bastard. there are 3 ways of doing it. One is if you have aimed shot (and if you don't have it then you are going to hurt a lot because that skill is almost obligatory to start) you can kill him before he even does anything if you use a crossbow (and you get one for free, if you didn't then you've failed one of the basic rules of RPGs. talk to everybody!) and if you fight by the door only one dog can come at you at a time and if your problem is health, go back for free heals, you can survive 2 dogs easly if you are even slightly well built. You can throw a grenade, even without skills, just savescum as needed until it just hits him and idealisticly, the 2 dogs. it's a oneshot kill. The other way passes through fleeing, assuming you didn't blew up the barel earlier. You can do this in 2 ways. You use sprint which is the only way to be faster. take cover by the wall and explode the barrel as he and the dogs come close and in case you're wondering, the movement points and paths will move all 3 of them in the radius of the explosion. Another is use a psi-abillity to put up a wall blocking the door for 2 rounds giving you the time to run into position. But again it's a pitty you didn't reached there cause I'd love to see what you'd think of that part although I'm fairly sure I'd know the general way it'd go.

So to sum it up:

What information is missing will eventually be added, this is an alpha so have pacience. You knew you were buying a product that was very far from being finished so the lack of a specific content isn't smething valid to complain.

Dialogue isn't bad, it's quite decent. It may not be at the level you want it to be but this is one person alone making a game, you can't expect excelence in every point, you can expect the game to be good at it's main points which are the combat and survival aspect and tehn to be decent at all else.

The game is meant to be hard and no, that isn't something wrong, if ther is something wrong is games being too easy these days. Breasing through content like you are such a badass and nothing being able to kill albeit a level of incompetence that's hardly human is not fun. Beating something hard gives you a sense of archivement, nothing feel as good as something you had to sweat for.

AI is not badly done. AI is done to be predictable. The focus of the combat is not to be adapting every turn to the AI but rather planing and executing your engagement. Both forms are valid forms and none is better, they are just different but work well.

Starting items will probably still be adressed in the future. There is no guarantee but all the feedback points out that it's the best way so there is some likelihood of it happening, again it's an Alpha, testing what woks and what doesn't is part of it.

There is indeed some warnings that should be added like a theft warning for example but hey, you do it once, you learn and that's it. While you can grumble when it happens, it will only ever happen once and then you know. It's hardly that big of a problem and will probably be address too but incredibly low on the priority list for sure.

Last, proper builds. You may be of the type whis agains't proper builds and thing that every single build should be viable. No, this is wrong. This is the same as saying that your BB gun should be as viable weapon as an assault rifle. Just because you can it doesn't means you should.

PS: Don't take this as a personal attack, I'm just explaining a few points and well, by debating stuff people reach a greater understanding of things.

[Angus Prune]

I'd suggest that offering a lot of blind choice up front and then yanking the carpet out from under the player by telling them "Hah! Your choices were wrong! Have fun dying endlessly!" is exceptionally poor design. I don't think much of this idea that there are correct and incorrect builds. Even less that you're asked to design your character correctly before you've even started to understand what you're supposed to do in the game. That's absurd.

Like I said, I really want to like this game. I had another try at it today, and quit at almost exactly the same point. I even watched your first gameplay video to see what you're doing that's different from me. The answer generally seems to be a whole lot more busywork that I'd find intolerable, and a specific build that gives you some crowd control from the word go. As it stands, I'm probably never going to get any further.

[oyayeboo]

whats the deal writing such a wall of text if you dont like the game? go play cod, skyrim, sims or whatever else 14yo girls are playing and dont EVER TOUCH INDIE GAMES THAT MAKES OLD GAMERS FEEL NOSTALGIC

i've enjoyed this game just because it doesn't have all this shitty and annoying help or where-to-go-markers

[UnLimiTeD]

Now, now, he put in some effort to give actually quite reasonable feedback and explain himself in detail.
We should have the courtesy to respond in kind, despite our potentially diverging opinions.

[Elhazzared]

Again the game is not complete so yeah, there will be some blind choices offered and you will have to learn to make good builds. I belive (not that it was said to be planned I think) that once the final build comes out there would be some pre-made characters, kinda like fallout had. It's not optimal starting builds but they are decent enough to get you through.

I'll go as far as giving you an idea of how to build a character.

Primary statistic at 10! So str 10 if you want to mellee, Perception 10 if you want to use ranged weapons or will 10 if you want to use psi-powers.

You can chose one statistic to have at 3 in most cases. As you seen In my vid I opted for str since it wouldn't affect my abillity to use crossbows. As a gunner I put my will at 3 since i won't use psi-abillities.

Skills. Always have 2 combat skills. To focus on only means will mean you are not adaptable enough to any situation. Mellee then to take throwing with it. Guns also tend to take throwing but you can put crossbows instead or maybe mellee but your mellee damage will be lower than a mellee guy due to a lower str. Psi abillities can take anything but it is in my opinion better with crossbows.

You should always take lockpicking and hacking because you can get more loot (don't forget to buy a haxxor from ezra before heading out and a couple bateries, also get a few lockpicks, maybe 2 or 3.

Get stealth to initiate combat on your own terms rather than on enemy terms.

Not required at the beggining but if you want to get all quests possible then get persuasion. I think to get you everything you need 45 effective points, I go for 50 myself to make sure.

Feats vary. Mellee guys will want to start with sprint for sure. Anyone who uses a gun or a crossbow cannot live without aimed shot in my opinion. My advice is to do a little bit of research on the wiki, there aren't many so it is easy research, find the requirements and plan accordingly. Also don't forget that every 2 levels you gain a feat and every 4 levels you gain one abillity point.

It is not absurd that there are good builds and bad builds. It is good that there is the option to even have bad builds. Who knows I want to make it even harder on myself? But still it's bad mentallity when a game just gives you everything. You don't have to worry about nothing and go on being a one man army. Choices will influence gameplay and while I don't often like to compare vidio games to real life. If you eat roten cheese, you can't complain about the taste, you chose to eat it after all. Similarly if you don't try to make a good character in a vidio game, you can't complain that it sucks, it was you who made it that way.

I remember when I played fallout 2 for the first time (yeah, I played 2 before 1). Being killed left and right. Only after I started to learn how to make proper builds did I hhad chances at winning. This isn't a game done wrong, this is a game done right but hey, it's an opinion after all and we all know what opinions are like.

As for the being a lot of busy work. any good old time cRPG has that. It's the way you learn the game and indeed a lot of the beggining is talking to A and B getting quests and stuff. After that it smooths out. You don't need to go back for healing often. You have like 2 more of those so called busy work quests. one to catch hoppers after you do the first mission. It basicly teaches you how to catch critters to sell and you'll get one more later one which teaches you how to fish. all of these are done in order to show you how to have some profitable abillities if you find yourself lacking just a little bit of money for this or that... Again, any cRPG has a bit of busy work front loaded because you need to get quests and be introduced to NPCs of interest, then like all cRPGs, it evens out.

To be honest I think your main problem with this game is that you are a little too used to the new games which just make you jump right into the action as a killing machine with no worries of anything whatsoever. All I can really tell you is to give it a real chance, just say to yourself. I'm gonna beat this shit cause no fucking computer game is better than me. And just do it. You'll find yourself enjoying this more and more as you sail along, you can be sure of that. But again, do a proper build.

[Gornodd]

What I love about this game is, that you actually can make a non-viable build but compensate just by always tackle eveyrthing "the smart way".

For example my first character (the one I beat the content the first time with too) was just based on Guns/Stealth. I predicted (not knowing anything about the game yet) that this way is bound to
having good ammo supplies. So I invested alot into scavanging skills like lockpicking, hacking, pickpocketing etc. and the core skills like intelligence, agility and dex ( all at around 7-8).

I quickly discovered that I have some trouble with stronger enemys and died a few times. After reloading the game I thaught the only way to compesate for my weak fighing capabilities is good preperation.

So I looted the quole starting compound armed myself a much as possble and started every encounter by coming up with a plan made of landmines, caltrops and high powered grenades.

The game became easier because of my high looting capabilities I was able to get rich very quick. I discovered the strenght of my character beeing always geared out as much as possible

[Styg]

Really wasn't worth going through your little cynical let's play, reading complaints about how you didn't know you should equip your armor or that red hand meant theft and such, to get a few tidbits of actual feedback that plenty of other people provided me already in a much more concise way (your high AI expectations aside).

You're not providing feedback, you're describing what sort of game you'd like to play and it apparently isn't Underrail. I'm sorry that you wasted your money because if you hated the game now, you won't like it at release either.

[Angus Prune]

You're not used to taking to criticism, or to customer relations, huh? All I can say is be careful surrounding yourself with yes-men, you're not going to improve that way.

So, if you're basically telling me to piss off and my feedback isn't worthwhile can I have my money back?

[Elhazzared]

Angus, there is constructive criticism and there is destructive criticism. Quite frankly if this was my game and I got an answer like yours I'd probably tell you to piss off too. Because I am not the one who's spending his days/weeks/months doing it I don't really answer in such way, my only attachment to the game is as a player who likes it and thus I do try to make you see the good points and well, debate stuff in a civilised manner.

I've posted about the problems I found with the game and yes, the game has some balance issues but it's an Alpha so it is to be expected, the finished product will of course be a lot better. But I've never go any answer of the kind and the reason it happened was because I didn't put any destructive criticism. I went right about the point and in some cases offered ideas for possible solutions.

If you search posts around with first impressions and final thoughts on what the game has curently to offer you'll see most people do it like so. You'll see most people disagree with some things despite overall liking the game. I don't belive you'll find yes-mans here. We don't get paid for that.

[Styg]

You're not used to taking to criticism, or to customer relations, huh? All I can say is be careful surrounding yourself with yes-men, you're not going to improve that way.

So, if you're basically telling me to piss off and my feedback isn't worthwhile can I have my money back?

That's not what I said. I said it wasn't feedback. I am used to taking feedback I disagree with and I got plenty of it here and on various other forums, but there's feedback and there's just hating everything about the game and wanting it to be something else.

I don't have a problem with that either, no game can please everyone, but I don't have time to defend/argue every single aspect of the game with someone who doesn't like it at all, which I think is the case here.

[Eliasfrost]

Felt like reading a Yathzee review, but less witty and more arrogant, which was not pleasant. I'm surprised Styg didn't shred you considering the unnecessary hostility in the original post. You're entitled to your opinion for sure, but being surprised and hurt when the dev takes offense to your writing is just being silly and childish, instead of reflecting over how snarky the OP was.