General Category > A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2

A beginner's impressions

(1/7) > >>

jabbahutt:
Hi all,

I'm rather new here, having just bought AVWW yesterday and started playing.

First of all let me say that for a beta product the polish level is very high, and the game is lots of fun.

Two things that bothered me a little:

1. wooden platforms - when running over the platforms, even if they are one near the other you can still fall to the acid below - ANNOYING.

2. difficulty level - I started playing using all difficulty levels at default, and I died many times before getting a little better at the game, but it's pretty hard at the beginning - no many healing options, too many enemies at some areas, some in areas where you can't manuever.

Those were my impressions from the Introductory mission.

Does anybody else feel the same way?

Jabba

keith.lamothe:
Welcome to the forums, I'm glad you're enjoying the game :)


--- Quote from: jabbahutt on April 13, 2012, 09:32:54 AM ---First of all let me say that for a beta product the polish level is very high, and the game is lots of fun.
--- End quote ---
Yea, we're glad to hear it's feeling polished.  Official release is in less than a week and a half, so we sure hope so :)


--- Quote ---1. wooden platforms - when running over the platforms, even if they are one near the other you can still fall to the acid below - ANNOYING.
--- End quote ---
Yea, we heard that a lot at PAX East too, Chris is working on it :)


--- Quote ---2. difficulty level - I started playing using all difficulty levels at default, and I died many times before getting a little better at the game, but it's pretty hard at the beginning - no many healing options, too many enemies at some areas, some in areas where you can't manuever.
--- End quote ---
Two things really:

1) Playing this game tends to involve a lot of dying.  We've made some recent changes to make it more obvious that this is ok :)
2) The default difficulty levels are still fairly challenging, but the lower ones should make it a lot less taxing if that's what you're looking for.


Thanks for the feedback :)

x4000:
Cheers!

Funnily enough, just having gotten back from PAX East and watched about 300ish people play through the intro mission over the weekend, we had a lot of the same impressions in terms of the wood platforms and some other related things you didn't mention.  Definitely on my list for today.

For the difficulty level comment, that's actually one I don't agree with: we did see people die a lot, but only if they made extreme tactical blunders like trying to jump down into a mass of swirling robots.  This isn't a brawler, and if you close range to the enemies you can expect to die.  Whereas if you stay at range and fire, even people who were not great with the controls were doing really well.

The tricky thing on that one in particular is user education, I think, because people tend to want to rush right in; and with a lot of fantasy games that's a great idea.  To some extent a lot of folks were figuring out that on their own, but still perhaps 20% of attendees were not and would just repeatedly throw themselves into the mosh pit until we said something about it. 

To some extent I'm not sure how much of a problem that is; we couldn't decide, when talking about this after the conference.  On the one hand, I suspect that everyone would figure it out eventually, and it's more fun to figure out things on your own when possible.  On the other hand, depending on the level of frustration it causes it could lead people to not get to the point of figuring it out (and people are distracted by everything else they are learning new, as well as sometimes getting single-minded about trying to beat an area using a certain skill technique rather than using a better tactical position).

Curious on your thoughts on that, since you just went through it.  I think probably we need a little note somewhere in there, but I have to figure out where and keep it brief.  Maybe just a tombstone in a couple of those key areas with the icicle leapers and skelebots that has a brief message about using wooden platforms to create "deer stands" and so on.

Penumbra:
I know it's too late to change the into mission, but what if you have virtually the same room twice in a row. The first already set up with platforms in the right spot, and the next without. The user would then hopefully come to the conclusion to create them themselves, since the first room was so much easier.

x4000:
That's true, something like that could teach without having to tell them.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page