Issues and impressions after 6+ hrs of doing near everything
Jun 30, 2018 2:06:55 GMT -6
21stbelmont, freddythemonkey, and 2 more like this
Post by cyberakuma on Jun 30, 2018 2:06:55 GMT -6
Ok, so after doing nearly everything there is to do short of just grind absolutely everything to 9/99 I figured I should post my impressions and issues with the beta during that time.
Any major bugs I already posted on the bug forum. I wasn't sure if "visual bugs" that just look funny but don't really impact the gameplay in any should be posted there, so I figured both due to how many I ran into (which would be a mess if I created a separate topic for all of them) and how they don't really effect gameplay, it would be best to post them here.
So I have posted my feedback in three sections, Visual Bugs, Gameplay Balance Feedback, and just general QOL suggestions:
Visual Issues:
- Miriam's mouth movements during cutscenes feel broken, her mouth mostly remains open during speech, none of the other characters were like this.
- The animation for when you don't jump at your max height both looks and feels very wrong, Miriam just drops straight down as if she hit her head against something above. Her scarf physics are off too (scarf rapidly shoots up past her body as soon as she hits apex of her jump, whether it's a full jump or not)
- All of Miriam's animations feel sluggish, as if they are too slow for her movements, especially changing directions while running. This is just in regards to the animations themselves, the movement itself is fine, but it feels as if the animations are too slow/elaborate to match the movement speed.
- Miriam appears to float/walk on air when walking up a and sometimes even just standing on a curved surface:
i.imgur.com/9gYoHoc.jpg
-Johannes just disappears in the cutscene in the sanctuary after saving the little girl. Dominique and Anne walk off to the left, but Johannes just stays there then disappears. I didn't realize Johannes was supposed to walk away too until I saw someone streaming the demo where the cutscene played correctly, so it seems that in some instances Johannes's walking away animation during that scene fails to play.
-Your shadow just floats awkwardly ahead of you if there is no ground under you:
i.imgur.com/56i5ebg.jpg
i.imgur.com/U6Q1EeG.jpg
- Cracks can stretch out oddly on sides of some breakable walls, this seems to be repeatable for the same wall but doesn't happen to every wall.
i.imgur.com/xGb4bFp.jpg
- Killing a Gieremund (likely other enemies too) on top of an arch of stairs caused it to be teleported in the arc below the stairs
and glitch out.
- Nearly every weapon flickers out of existence during the end of an attack animation. I was able to reproduce this nearly every weapon from daggers to swords to whips, except boots (possibly guns too, it was hard to tell) but it is most easily noticeable with large weapons such as the Gram sword or the Pelekus. Standing still and attacking causes it to disappear for a moment near the end of the attack animation.
- Johannes (possibly other NPCs) can appear to be in two places at once. (Such as Johannes being in the starting room of the boat when he should be in the alchemy room of the sanctuary, the game seems to have never removed him from that starting room after he should have left the boat.)
- Animations continue to play, though in a glitchy way, when you open the map or cause the game to "pause" while still displaying the gameplay screen in some way, such as absorbing a new shard. Things that continue to play out in a glitchy manner include physics when breaking/shattering an object, enemy death animations, or absorbing a shard you already have, among others.
- The doors between the loading zones appear to open inward, not outward.... it's very odd as it hits you every time and bumps you back, doors typically open outward (if they aren't a sci-fi game where they just slide up/sideways) or just get out of your way in general, rather than actually get in your way and ram you.
Gameplay Balance:
- Whipping on ground has a very long recovery time, is this intentional? There is no recovery time when whipping in the air, and just about every weapon's recovery time when used on ground, even giant weapons like Claymores and Axes, are significantly shorter. The issue appears to be the animation of Miriam curling her whip back up after attacking with it.
- For the shards that let you summon an ally, you seem to be able to summon as many as you want as long as you have MP for it with no other limits. You can even quickly switch shards and summon multiple different creatures at once. Is this intentional?:
i.imgur.com/aoD1Ucq.jpg
i.imgur.com/9isU9Hi.jpg
i.imgur.com/WwNqTXl.jpg
- Gun ammo in regards to crafting feels poorly balanced. Just about any recipe that requires ammo to craft normally requires a lot, from 10 to 50, treating ammo as a cheap consumable... which I agree with. However, this is not the case when attempting to CRAFT ammo, many of them require items that cost more than buying the ammo itself (which still isn't cheap for how much you use up when crafting on TOP of it being consumable), and furthermore despite the fact that you use up ammo in the tens to craft items... when crafting ammo you only craft one at a time, not multiple bullets from a single craft.... despite them using up items like Iron or so that normally you would also only need one or two of to craft some of the high-end weapons themselves.
- You seem to be able to rapidly swing around large weapons if you time it right with nearly no delay. This seems to be related to the weapon visual bug I mentioned, as the timing seems to be to press attack again just before the weapon would flicker. Is this intentional?
The bee enemies (Flying Morte I think?) are extremely annoying to fight for one big reason... they seem to love to fly inside walls and stay there, forcing you to wait until they come out or use a massive overkill move like the boss tentacle that can go through walls to hit them. Is this intentional? It makes it annoying how they basically just play keep-away by clipping into areas you can't reach or attack.
- It was a bit confusing at first that there were two ways to "upgrade" your shard abilities, one by collecting more and one by "crafting" better versions of the shards, and that they effect them in different ways. The abilities however seemed all over the place. Some seemed to barely make any difference (like the Dullan Head, it didn't seem to increase range much at all) while others feel extremely overpowered (the Straight Arrow, you can do absurd amounts of damage by getting to the point where you are shooting half a dozen arrows that each do as much damage as a single arrow did.... for the same MP cost)
.
- What would be the point of powering a shard back down to Rank 1 after hitting Rank 9? I can understand some people might want the option to make the game harder... but you seem to consume materials just to make the shard weak again... and the text for this was very misleading. It said it would "deactivate" the shard... but instead it resets it... without apparently giving you your materials you wasted leveling it up back.
- While we are on the subject of shards, it didn't make much sense that all the shards have the same selling cost. A very hard to get shard from one of the strongest enemies in the beta costs as much as a shard from the one-hit-to-kill dime-a-dozen enemies.
- Miriam seems to slide significantly faster than she can run, and even with the speed belt (which does not seem to effect sliding speed) she still slides a bit faster than she can run, is this intentional? I actually used a stopwatch to time running from near the beginning of the curved-area before the castle drawbridge, up to the switch, and these were my results.
Normal Run Speed: 9.8-9.9
seconds
Speed Belt Run Speed: 8.1-8.4
seconds
Sliding Speed: 7.1-7.4
seconds
I just hope this won't result in people sliding everywhere instead of running since it's a bit faster, kinda like how everyone in Ocarina of Time started rolling everywhere because it was faster than running normally.
QOL Features Feedback:
- I mentioned before in the Kickstarter from earlier footage that there seemed to be very little "impact" or "reaction" to register that you actually hit an enemy or are doing damage to it. In this latest beta, hitting enemies feels like they have more of a reaction now since they flash to show getting damage, though it still feels like it lacks a sort of "impact" to actually feel like you hit/hurt them.
- Is there going to be any fast travel? I feel like this is a VERY important feature to have a Metroidvania nowadays, especially ones that will have backtracking to get previously unreachable items/areas or to do sidequests. Fast travel was a godsend in the newer Castlevania games like Portrait of Ruin, and it had me tearing my hair out when it was lacking in newer Metroidvanias like Axiom Verge. There was no fast-travel in this demo, I hope that's just a demo/beta thing.
- The sidequests don't seem to track your progress much or even alert you that you are finished. When I was doing the first quest, I was waiting for some kind of message that had told me I had killed enough Mortes, similar to how Portrait of Ruin lets you know when you completed a quest, but nothing happened. I eventually went back to check on my quest status and noticed that it was considered completed and ready to turn in. Later when I accepted other quests, I was monitoring them but even when I was keeping an eye on them, they didn't seem to track my progress at all, just list if they were ready to turn in or not. The "Kill # of (enemy)" message never changed or in any other way indicated how many you had killed/had left to go.
- Also in regards to quests, after turning in the first one, the other three were added to my "Archives" menu... but since I had not actually "accepted" them, I was wasting my time trying to complete them. I didn't realize I still had to go back and accept them since they were already added to my Archives menu after I turned in the first one.
- The shop dialog is extremely annoying to put up with every time you want to use them. I am not talking about the first-time dialog that explains how to use the shop, that's fine. I mean that after that, the flavor "Hi Miriam" "What is it you need?" "Are you eating well?" etc type dialog. The issue is that the dialog system appears to be designed just for cutscenes, not shop smalltalk/flavor dialog like this. It's very slow to have the screen slowly dim, then the character portrait appear, say his like, then the screen slow undim/character fade until the shop opens up.... and then you have to go through all that again when they say their "goodbye" quote. It makes using the shops, especially if you need to use more than one, extremely tedious. I think a far better way would be to just open up the shop menu as soon as you talk to them and just play the voice line at the opening of the menu without having to make it appear as a "cutscene".
- The way you check/turn in quests is also extreme tedious. On top of the fact that it has all the issues that I just mentioned just above with the slow and tedious shop dialog, you can't accept or turn in multiple quests at once. In order to accept two quests, I have to do all that dialog annoyance I just mentioned.... accept the quest.... and then it immediately kicks me out of the quest menu and gives the goodbye dialog... so I have to go through all that dialog AGAIN to accept a second quest. This also applies when turning in multiple quests, it kicks you out of the menu as soon as you turn in a quest and you have to do it all over again to turn in a second quest.
I wanted to almost give up on the sidequests just to not have to put up with that design.
It's a bit tedious to repeatedly go back into the menus to equip a different shard/item/etc. Would it be possible to have a second "loadout" that you can switch between like in some previous Castlevania games?
And possibly a quick way to cycle between healing items and ammo?
- Continuing to play after getting a Game Over is a bit annoying. Usually when someone dies, they want to get back into the game as soon as they can. But this game actually has the same major issue that SOTN had with it's Game Over design that many had complained about. You need to watch the words "Game Over" slowly appear... then you are kicked back to the title screen instead of having any option or chance to go back to your last save... and then you have to choose to load your savegame all over again and have the game load from scratch all over again. Most people would probably want the options: "return to last save?" "back to title screen?" when they die.
- There are about 20 or so save slots, and you can create and delete saves... but there is no copy command. This has been somewhat a standard feature for decades in many games with multiple save files (in some cases since the NES era), including most Castlevania games with a save feature.
- I am guessing this is likely something already planned but just wasn't in the beta, but in case it wasn't, a type of bestiary would be extremely useful in a game like this, both to keep track of what enemies you have/have not killed yet, their stats/exp, and what items you have figured out they dropped, like the one in Portrait of Ruin.
Any major bugs I already posted on the bug forum. I wasn't sure if "visual bugs" that just look funny but don't really impact the gameplay in any should be posted there, so I figured both due to how many I ran into (which would be a mess if I created a separate topic for all of them) and how they don't really effect gameplay, it would be best to post them here.
So I have posted my feedback in three sections, Visual Bugs, Gameplay Balance Feedback, and just general QOL suggestions:
Visual Issues:
- Miriam's mouth movements during cutscenes feel broken, her mouth mostly remains open during speech, none of the other characters were like this.
- The animation for when you don't jump at your max height both looks and feels very wrong, Miriam just drops straight down as if she hit her head against something above. Her scarf physics are off too (scarf rapidly shoots up past her body as soon as she hits apex of her jump, whether it's a full jump or not)
- All of Miriam's animations feel sluggish, as if they are too slow for her movements, especially changing directions while running. This is just in regards to the animations themselves, the movement itself is fine, but it feels as if the animations are too slow/elaborate to match the movement speed.
- Miriam appears to float/walk on air when walking up a and sometimes even just standing on a curved surface:
i.imgur.com/9gYoHoc.jpg
-Johannes just disappears in the cutscene in the sanctuary after saving the little girl. Dominique and Anne walk off to the left, but Johannes just stays there then disappears. I didn't realize Johannes was supposed to walk away too until I saw someone streaming the demo where the cutscene played correctly, so it seems that in some instances Johannes's walking away animation during that scene fails to play.
-Your shadow just floats awkwardly ahead of you if there is no ground under you:
i.imgur.com/56i5ebg.jpg
i.imgur.com/U6Q1EeG.jpg
- Cracks can stretch out oddly on sides of some breakable walls, this seems to be repeatable for the same wall but doesn't happen to every wall.
i.imgur.com/xGb4bFp.jpg
- Killing a Gieremund (likely other enemies too) on top of an arch of stairs caused it to be teleported in the arc below the stairs
and glitch out.
- Nearly every weapon flickers out of existence during the end of an attack animation. I was able to reproduce this nearly every weapon from daggers to swords to whips, except boots (possibly guns too, it was hard to tell) but it is most easily noticeable with large weapons such as the Gram sword or the Pelekus. Standing still and attacking causes it to disappear for a moment near the end of the attack animation.
- Johannes (possibly other NPCs) can appear to be in two places at once. (Such as Johannes being in the starting room of the boat when he should be in the alchemy room of the sanctuary, the game seems to have never removed him from that starting room after he should have left the boat.)
- Animations continue to play, though in a glitchy way, when you open the map or cause the game to "pause" while still displaying the gameplay screen in some way, such as absorbing a new shard. Things that continue to play out in a glitchy manner include physics when breaking/shattering an object, enemy death animations, or absorbing a shard you already have, among others.
- The doors between the loading zones appear to open inward, not outward.... it's very odd as it hits you every time and bumps you back, doors typically open outward (if they aren't a sci-fi game where they just slide up/sideways) or just get out of your way in general, rather than actually get in your way and ram you.
Gameplay Balance:
- Whipping on ground has a very long recovery time, is this intentional? There is no recovery time when whipping in the air, and just about every weapon's recovery time when used on ground, even giant weapons like Claymores and Axes, are significantly shorter. The issue appears to be the animation of Miriam curling her whip back up after attacking with it.
- For the shards that let you summon an ally, you seem to be able to summon as many as you want as long as you have MP for it with no other limits. You can even quickly switch shards and summon multiple different creatures at once. Is this intentional?:
i.imgur.com/aoD1Ucq.jpg
i.imgur.com/9isU9Hi.jpg
i.imgur.com/WwNqTXl.jpg
- Gun ammo in regards to crafting feels poorly balanced. Just about any recipe that requires ammo to craft normally requires a lot, from 10 to 50, treating ammo as a cheap consumable... which I agree with. However, this is not the case when attempting to CRAFT ammo, many of them require items that cost more than buying the ammo itself (which still isn't cheap for how much you use up when crafting on TOP of it being consumable), and furthermore despite the fact that you use up ammo in the tens to craft items... when crafting ammo you only craft one at a time, not multiple bullets from a single craft.... despite them using up items like Iron or so that normally you would also only need one or two of to craft some of the high-end weapons themselves.
- You seem to be able to rapidly swing around large weapons if you time it right with nearly no delay. This seems to be related to the weapon visual bug I mentioned, as the timing seems to be to press attack again just before the weapon would flicker. Is this intentional?
The bee enemies (Flying Morte I think?) are extremely annoying to fight for one big reason... they seem to love to fly inside walls and stay there, forcing you to wait until they come out or use a massive overkill move like the boss tentacle that can go through walls to hit them. Is this intentional? It makes it annoying how they basically just play keep-away by clipping into areas you can't reach or attack.
- It was a bit confusing at first that there were two ways to "upgrade" your shard abilities, one by collecting more and one by "crafting" better versions of the shards, and that they effect them in different ways. The abilities however seemed all over the place. Some seemed to barely make any difference (like the Dullan Head, it didn't seem to increase range much at all) while others feel extremely overpowered (the Straight Arrow, you can do absurd amounts of damage by getting to the point where you are shooting half a dozen arrows that each do as much damage as a single arrow did.... for the same MP cost)
.
- What would be the point of powering a shard back down to Rank 1 after hitting Rank 9? I can understand some people might want the option to make the game harder... but you seem to consume materials just to make the shard weak again... and the text for this was very misleading. It said it would "deactivate" the shard... but instead it resets it... without apparently giving you your materials you wasted leveling it up back.
- While we are on the subject of shards, it didn't make much sense that all the shards have the same selling cost. A very hard to get shard from one of the strongest enemies in the beta costs as much as a shard from the one-hit-to-kill dime-a-dozen enemies.
- Miriam seems to slide significantly faster than she can run, and even with the speed belt (which does not seem to effect sliding speed) she still slides a bit faster than she can run, is this intentional? I actually used a stopwatch to time running from near the beginning of the curved-area before the castle drawbridge, up to the switch, and these were my results.
Normal Run Speed: 9.8-9.9
seconds
Speed Belt Run Speed: 8.1-8.4
seconds
Sliding Speed: 7.1-7.4
seconds
I just hope this won't result in people sliding everywhere instead of running since it's a bit faster, kinda like how everyone in Ocarina of Time started rolling everywhere because it was faster than running normally.
QOL Features Feedback:
- I mentioned before in the Kickstarter from earlier footage that there seemed to be very little "impact" or "reaction" to register that you actually hit an enemy or are doing damage to it. In this latest beta, hitting enemies feels like they have more of a reaction now since they flash to show getting damage, though it still feels like it lacks a sort of "impact" to actually feel like you hit/hurt them.
- Is there going to be any fast travel? I feel like this is a VERY important feature to have a Metroidvania nowadays, especially ones that will have backtracking to get previously unreachable items/areas or to do sidequests. Fast travel was a godsend in the newer Castlevania games like Portrait of Ruin, and it had me tearing my hair out when it was lacking in newer Metroidvanias like Axiom Verge. There was no fast-travel in this demo, I hope that's just a demo/beta thing.
- The sidequests don't seem to track your progress much or even alert you that you are finished. When I was doing the first quest, I was waiting for some kind of message that had told me I had killed enough Mortes, similar to how Portrait of Ruin lets you know when you completed a quest, but nothing happened. I eventually went back to check on my quest status and noticed that it was considered completed and ready to turn in. Later when I accepted other quests, I was monitoring them but even when I was keeping an eye on them, they didn't seem to track my progress at all, just list if they were ready to turn in or not. The "Kill # of (enemy)" message never changed or in any other way indicated how many you had killed/had left to go.
- Also in regards to quests, after turning in the first one, the other three were added to my "Archives" menu... but since I had not actually "accepted" them, I was wasting my time trying to complete them. I didn't realize I still had to go back and accept them since they were already added to my Archives menu after I turned in the first one.
- The shop dialog is extremely annoying to put up with every time you want to use them. I am not talking about the first-time dialog that explains how to use the shop, that's fine. I mean that after that, the flavor "Hi Miriam" "What is it you need?" "Are you eating well?" etc type dialog. The issue is that the dialog system appears to be designed just for cutscenes, not shop smalltalk/flavor dialog like this. It's very slow to have the screen slowly dim, then the character portrait appear, say his like, then the screen slow undim/character fade until the shop opens up.... and then you have to go through all that again when they say their "goodbye" quote. It makes using the shops, especially if you need to use more than one, extremely tedious. I think a far better way would be to just open up the shop menu as soon as you talk to them and just play the voice line at the opening of the menu without having to make it appear as a "cutscene".
- The way you check/turn in quests is also extreme tedious. On top of the fact that it has all the issues that I just mentioned just above with the slow and tedious shop dialog, you can't accept or turn in multiple quests at once. In order to accept two quests, I have to do all that dialog annoyance I just mentioned.... accept the quest.... and then it immediately kicks me out of the quest menu and gives the goodbye dialog... so I have to go through all that dialog AGAIN to accept a second quest. This also applies when turning in multiple quests, it kicks you out of the menu as soon as you turn in a quest and you have to do it all over again to turn in a second quest.
I wanted to almost give up on the sidequests just to not have to put up with that design.
It's a bit tedious to repeatedly go back into the menus to equip a different shard/item/etc. Would it be possible to have a second "loadout" that you can switch between like in some previous Castlevania games?
And possibly a quick way to cycle between healing items and ammo?
- Continuing to play after getting a Game Over is a bit annoying. Usually when someone dies, they want to get back into the game as soon as they can. But this game actually has the same major issue that SOTN had with it's Game Over design that many had complained about. You need to watch the words "Game Over" slowly appear... then you are kicked back to the title screen instead of having any option or chance to go back to your last save... and then you have to choose to load your savegame all over again and have the game load from scratch all over again. Most people would probably want the options: "return to last save?" "back to title screen?" when they die.
- There are about 20 or so save slots, and you can create and delete saves... but there is no copy command. This has been somewhat a standard feature for decades in many games with multiple save files (in some cases since the NES era), including most Castlevania games with a save feature.
- I am guessing this is likely something already planned but just wasn't in the beta, but in case it wasn't, a type of bestiary would be extremely useful in a game like this, both to keep track of what enemies you have/have not killed yet, their stats/exp, and what items you have figured out they dropped, like the one in Portrait of Ruin.
yey