Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
My General Feedback
Double Decker Dylan
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
UI
1. The UI felt basic, and there were some components of it that really need to be there (Which I know will be.) But for example a slider separate from game volume that controls the -music- volume. I like the music in the game, but hearing it repeat for 3 hours is uh.. Not enjoyable. I also noticed Streamers disliked this aspect.
2. The placement of spells or items onto the hotbar could be finnicky at times.
3. The 'Report a Bug' menu could sometimes completely 'bug' out and not allow you to submit a ticket. (Saw others with this issue as well.)
4. The translucent minimap ALWAYS present in the top right corner just bloats the screen (IMO). I also dislike the design of it (Personal opinion). I think there needs to be two variations of it, this current translucent map and a traditional 'compass' minimap, that is much smaller and compact; they both need to be toggleable however. Having it present 24/7 is annoying.
5. The toggling of friendly & enemy name plates. The siege test on 7/11/2021 proved how cluttering it can be to have 100+ names up on your screen.
6. Skills should become color coded upon distance. (Red for out of range, white for in range.) It should also display more information in their tooltips regarding any statistical information like cooldown length, damage, DoT, HoT, etc.
7. Chat system (obviously) needs more work, and a more straight forwarded way to change chat channels. Not knowing the specific forward slash command to enter a channel can be annoying.
Character Creation / Character Select Screen
1. The character creation, as to be expected currently, is extremely basic. But hope to see it fully fleshed out later down the line.
2. I feel when loading into your character, you have to press 'Play' 2 or 3 times and sometimes it seems as if your click doesn't register immediately (i.e. delayed login.)
3. Why is there a random flip flop in the log-in screen?
Sound (Music, Ambient, Combat, NPC's, etc.)
1. The music sounds nice, but obviously new tracks need to be introduced.
2. The NPC sounds can sometimes completely cut out and go silent, along with player actions / abilities. (Usually happens when at a certain distance away.)
3. Could be more ambient music in some places.
4. Some mobs need more noise, I swear sometimes some NPC's would die just absolutely soundless. (Bug maybe?)
Graphics
1. Everything in the world looks really nice. It's not like it is super MIND BLOWING or anything, but I have a feeling the graphics will be given the ability to be 'seriously' ramped up once there are more advanced graphical settings available besides presets.
2. Character models look 'Meh' in all honesty. Most of the armor looks cool, along with the weapons.
3. Ability effects & particles look really nice.
4. There were some places like caves which lacked proper lighting in my opinion, making them seem a bit.. too bright?
Quests
1. I personally am not a fan of the current quests systems. It seems like some quests keep you local to where you start, which make sense; whilst others are basically saying "Hey once you hit level 15 you can go across the map to do this." Which isn't for a while. There's also some quests which may mislead players into thinking they only have to accomplish a certain amount of things, but the quests can sometimes become longer then initially planned. This is an issue I found in ESO. Where one quest drags on much longer then it needs to.
2. Some quest rewards are good, whilst others are terrible. The weaponsmith quest was just.. not fun to do, and awful. It seemed crazy I needed to cut 20-30 trees down, and mine 8 nodes of stone ore; just to make a wand. I think these kinds of quests need to scale back the amounts needed, and the rewards need to be more beneficial. An extra small percentage of damage was not worth the time put in, nor' was it fun to do.
Mounts
1. The mounts look awesome! But their movements when going left / right / backwards can sometimes feel extremely clunky.
2. The delay in using a mount, dismounting, and using the mount sprint skill is extremely jarring an unenjoyable.
3. I personally had an EXTREMELY annoying bug where everytime I dismounted my horse, my game would go into a 'reload' state as if pressing CTRL+T. I have -no clue- why it kept happening, but it was really frustrating.
4. The mount weirdly running away into things after dismounting just looks silly. If you dismount, I think you should just 'hop off' the mount and the mount should remain in place and disappear after some kind of 'dismissal' animation.
5. You shouldn't be able to mount up in combat. Both in PvE and PvP. During the siege fights on 7/11/2021, players continued to 'engage' and when they got low they'd simply mount up and run away. It feels extremely annoying especially when you have a CC ability, land it; and all it does is CC the PLAYER and not the mount (Meaning they are still on the mount, and can still get away.)
Friendly NPC('s)
1. I appreciate the more colorful dialogue some NPC's have, trying to appear as if they are 'real people' speaking to you instead of some cut and dry speech about killing X, or retrieving Y. But I felt some of the dialogue choices for some NPC's were just.. overdone? It might sound weird, but a mixture of characters who ARE cut and dry along with those who are more expressive and 'friendly' should be the key.
2. Some of the 'paths' you took in certain dialogues felt pointless, and led to the same outcomes regardless of which way you went. Only 1 NPC displayed a different outcome which in going down it, resulted in you dying and not finishing the quest. However - You could simply return and just pursue the other path to actually complete it. Quests like these need to give the 'promised' reward regardless of the outcome.
Hostile NPC('s) / Mobs
1. A lot of creatures felt overtuned at times, despite their appearances and level; as in they would do extremely high amounts of damage for their level - whilst compared to other creatures of the area. Whilst some were literally super easy to kill it was almost laughable and boring.
2. The mob aggro radius is incredibly tiny. I only felt 'pressured' by mobs once whilst in the game, and that was when I was inside of the cave dungeon; but even then most mobs could be outran (Or I should say, outmounted) to avoid any confrontation. I honestly believe Classic WoW handles mob aggro pretty well - as well as balancing mob difficulty. I'm not saying every little mob should be extremely challenging, but it just felt boring at times just facerolling mobs. They need to present a bigger threat, and actually 'defend' where they are.
3. Mobs need pathing. It seemed to me it was almost non-existent as they sat in one place and never moved. Making it even easier to avoid them.
Looting
1. There needs to be an increased loot radius.
2. There needs to be a notification of the item name in chat of what you looted. Looting something, and not knowing what you received is 'meh'.
3. Mobs instantly disappearing after being looted is jarring for immersion. Honestly prefer the corpses remaining, then slowly fading away later after you've moved on.
Combat
1. Combat feels good for the most part. There were times where it would say my abilities aren't within the 'arc radius' (I think that's the terminology it used?) Even though I'd be looking directly at the mob, and would be within range. This would also at times effect my auto-attacks and I'd die being unable to attack or use any abilities.
2. The targeting needs a lot of work both for tab-targeting and action combat. It just felt really bad honestly.
3. The dodge seemed almost pointless. There was not much of an explanation on the usage of it, nor' a cooldown timer for it. I still don't know what it does other then create distance. I only assume it negates damage during the animation (But it didn't seem like it).
4. I played the Mage for the Alpha Preview. I had mixed feelings about it. I really enjoy magical classes, but the mage felt underwhelming for some things then overpowered for others. For example - single target PvE it felt really nice, but I never found myself using AoE in PvE since everything dies so quickly. But for example in PvP during the siege tests, I felt single target DPS was extremely lacking and my -strength- was just waiting and spamming all of my AoE abilities then running back and hiding until they were up again. During those two tests I was able to fight other players in a much smaller scale, and while I felt strong in those situations; it just didn't feel very fun.
5. Mounting during combat is just so hilariously bad and awful feeling. Engaging players only for them to magically mount up and get away is annoying; especially when CC does not knock them off their mounts. I assume this is simply a feature yet to be implemented or an intended feature (Which I hope it isn't, because it's just lame and unfun.)
6. Staying in-combat after winning a fight for an absurd amount of time is extremely annoying and doesn't make for an enjoyable experience. The only time this 'timer' should really be in effect is during PvP. An in-combat timer for PvE should end once all aggroed creatures have died.
Death
1. Losing stuff when you die is fine. I'm not sure I agree with it just being a flat rate of 50% of all your items, if anything it should just drop 'specific items' instead of targeting the entirety of your inventory. I also found when this happened - it was impossible to recover your items (At least in my experience.) This makes dying to things such as bugs, mistakes, etc. very frustrating. I saw a looooooooooot of people doing the blacksmith quest and then giving up because they died to a bug and had half of their resources lost.
2. Not sure if this is only a PvE thing, but if a player kills you and this 'loss' is still present; the player who kills you should uh.. ya' know.. get that stuff. I'd find it pretty stupid to have this in effect if all it does is delete it and throw it into a 'void' with no player really 'winning' out. One just loses, whilst the other is basically griefing (Which is fine in my eyes, but it takes away purpose from PvP.)
Gathering
1. Eh. I didn't really care for the gathering. Stuff was usually annoying to find, and if I did find stuff; I had to run the change of "you don't have this tier of tool equipped to gather" which is honestly frustrating for any players who enjoy gathering / crafting.
2. No real way to track any kind of nodes. Basically have to run around randomly to find gathering nodes. Which for some can be fun, but I just found it not very interesting; and found the task I did it mostly for unfulfilling and lackluster.
3. It should reward a small amount of experience when you gather something. (Personal opinion).
Crafting
1. Seems super placeholder and not all that interesting. From what I've heard / read the game plans on making the most important items player crafted, which is good to hear; but I hope the gathering / crafting gets a lot of love cause it needs it in my opinion.
Animations
1. Some of the animations need to be looped or improved. But it's an alpha!
And that's really all I can think of right now.
I say all of this knowing it is an alpha, and that Intrepid Studios will hold priority over more technical issues then balance / gameplay in the short term (Which is okay!).
I can firmly say however this is the first time, in a long time; I play a game that claims to be in 'alpha' and it actually -FEELS- like I played an alpha of a game with a promising future instead of some money-grabbing scheme of a game that will remain in alpha for 5+ years. There was content here, there was actual gameplay to be had, players to see, talk to, and play with; etc. etc. I'm extremely impressed and look forward to the month long test.
Hopefully we get more things to play with in that time as well. Players will go stir-crazy otherwise haha.
1. The UI felt basic, and there were some components of it that really need to be there (Which I know will be.) But for example a slider separate from game volume that controls the -music- volume. I like the music in the game, but hearing it repeat for 3 hours is uh.. Not enjoyable. I also noticed Streamers disliked this aspect.
2. The placement of spells or items onto the hotbar could be finnicky at times.
3. The 'Report a Bug' menu could sometimes completely 'bug' out and not allow you to submit a ticket. (Saw others with this issue as well.)
4. The translucent minimap ALWAYS present in the top right corner just bloats the screen (IMO). I also dislike the design of it (Personal opinion). I think there needs to be two variations of it, this current translucent map and a traditional 'compass' minimap, that is much smaller and compact; they both need to be toggleable however. Having it present 24/7 is annoying.
5. The toggling of friendly & enemy name plates. The siege test on 7/11/2021 proved how cluttering it can be to have 100+ names up on your screen.
6. Skills should become color coded upon distance. (Red for out of range, white for in range.) It should also display more information in their tooltips regarding any statistical information like cooldown length, damage, DoT, HoT, etc.
7. Chat system (obviously) needs more work, and a more straight forwarded way to change chat channels. Not knowing the specific forward slash command to enter a channel can be annoying.
Character Creation / Character Select Screen
1. The character creation, as to be expected currently, is extremely basic. But hope to see it fully fleshed out later down the line.
2. I feel when loading into your character, you have to press 'Play' 2 or 3 times and sometimes it seems as if your click doesn't register immediately (i.e. delayed login.)
3. Why is there a random flip flop in the log-in screen?
Sound (Music, Ambient, Combat, NPC's, etc.)
1. The music sounds nice, but obviously new tracks need to be introduced.
2. The NPC sounds can sometimes completely cut out and go silent, along with player actions / abilities. (Usually happens when at a certain distance away.)
3. Could be more ambient music in some places.
4. Some mobs need more noise, I swear sometimes some NPC's would die just absolutely soundless. (Bug maybe?)
Graphics
1. Everything in the world looks really nice. It's not like it is super MIND BLOWING or anything, but I have a feeling the graphics will be given the ability to be 'seriously' ramped up once there are more advanced graphical settings available besides presets.
2. Character models look 'Meh' in all honesty. Most of the armor looks cool, along with the weapons.
3. Ability effects & particles look really nice.
4. There were some places like caves which lacked proper lighting in my opinion, making them seem a bit.. too bright?
Quests
1. I personally am not a fan of the current quests systems. It seems like some quests keep you local to where you start, which make sense; whilst others are basically saying "Hey once you hit level 15 you can go across the map to do this." Which isn't for a while. There's also some quests which may mislead players into thinking they only have to accomplish a certain amount of things, but the quests can sometimes become longer then initially planned. This is an issue I found in ESO. Where one quest drags on much longer then it needs to.
2. Some quest rewards are good, whilst others are terrible. The weaponsmith quest was just.. not fun to do, and awful. It seemed crazy I needed to cut 20-30 trees down, and mine 8 nodes of stone ore; just to make a wand. I think these kinds of quests need to scale back the amounts needed, and the rewards need to be more beneficial. An extra small percentage of damage was not worth the time put in, nor' was it fun to do.
Mounts
1. The mounts look awesome! But their movements when going left / right / backwards can sometimes feel extremely clunky.
2. The delay in using a mount, dismounting, and using the mount sprint skill is extremely jarring an unenjoyable.
3. I personally had an EXTREMELY annoying bug where everytime I dismounted my horse, my game would go into a 'reload' state as if pressing CTRL+T. I have -no clue- why it kept happening, but it was really frustrating.
4. The mount weirdly running away into things after dismounting just looks silly. If you dismount, I think you should just 'hop off' the mount and the mount should remain in place and disappear after some kind of 'dismissal' animation.
5. You shouldn't be able to mount up in combat. Both in PvE and PvP. During the siege fights on 7/11/2021, players continued to 'engage' and when they got low they'd simply mount up and run away. It feels extremely annoying especially when you have a CC ability, land it; and all it does is CC the PLAYER and not the mount (Meaning they are still on the mount, and can still get away.)
Friendly NPC('s)
1. I appreciate the more colorful dialogue some NPC's have, trying to appear as if they are 'real people' speaking to you instead of some cut and dry speech about killing X, or retrieving Y. But I felt some of the dialogue choices for some NPC's were just.. overdone? It might sound weird, but a mixture of characters who ARE cut and dry along with those who are more expressive and 'friendly' should be the key.
2. Some of the 'paths' you took in certain dialogues felt pointless, and led to the same outcomes regardless of which way you went. Only 1 NPC displayed a different outcome which in going down it, resulted in you dying and not finishing the quest. However - You could simply return and just pursue the other path to actually complete it. Quests like these need to give the 'promised' reward regardless of the outcome.
Hostile NPC('s) / Mobs
1. A lot of creatures felt overtuned at times, despite their appearances and level; as in they would do extremely high amounts of damage for their level - whilst compared to other creatures of the area. Whilst some were literally super easy to kill it was almost laughable and boring.
2. The mob aggro radius is incredibly tiny. I only felt 'pressured' by mobs once whilst in the game, and that was when I was inside of the cave dungeon; but even then most mobs could be outran (Or I should say, outmounted) to avoid any confrontation. I honestly believe Classic WoW handles mob aggro pretty well - as well as balancing mob difficulty. I'm not saying every little mob should be extremely challenging, but it just felt boring at times just facerolling mobs. They need to present a bigger threat, and actually 'defend' where they are.
3. Mobs need pathing. It seemed to me it was almost non-existent as they sat in one place and never moved. Making it even easier to avoid them.
Looting
1. There needs to be an increased loot radius.
2. There needs to be a notification of the item name in chat of what you looted. Looting something, and not knowing what you received is 'meh'.
3. Mobs instantly disappearing after being looted is jarring for immersion. Honestly prefer the corpses remaining, then slowly fading away later after you've moved on.
Combat
1. Combat feels good for the most part. There were times where it would say my abilities aren't within the 'arc radius' (I think that's the terminology it used?) Even though I'd be looking directly at the mob, and would be within range. This would also at times effect my auto-attacks and I'd die being unable to attack or use any abilities.
2. The targeting needs a lot of work both for tab-targeting and action combat. It just felt really bad honestly.
3. The dodge seemed almost pointless. There was not much of an explanation on the usage of it, nor' a cooldown timer for it. I still don't know what it does other then create distance. I only assume it negates damage during the animation (But it didn't seem like it).
4. I played the Mage for the Alpha Preview. I had mixed feelings about it. I really enjoy magical classes, but the mage felt underwhelming for some things then overpowered for others. For example - single target PvE it felt really nice, but I never found myself using AoE in PvE since everything dies so quickly. But for example in PvP during the siege tests, I felt single target DPS was extremely lacking and my -strength- was just waiting and spamming all of my AoE abilities then running back and hiding until they were up again. During those two tests I was able to fight other players in a much smaller scale, and while I felt strong in those situations; it just didn't feel very fun.
5. Mounting during combat is just so hilariously bad and awful feeling. Engaging players only for them to magically mount up and get away is annoying; especially when CC does not knock them off their mounts. I assume this is simply a feature yet to be implemented or an intended feature (Which I hope it isn't, because it's just lame and unfun.)
6. Staying in-combat after winning a fight for an absurd amount of time is extremely annoying and doesn't make for an enjoyable experience. The only time this 'timer' should really be in effect is during PvP. An in-combat timer for PvE should end once all aggroed creatures have died.
Death
1. Losing stuff when you die is fine. I'm not sure I agree with it just being a flat rate of 50% of all your items, if anything it should just drop 'specific items' instead of targeting the entirety of your inventory. I also found when this happened - it was impossible to recover your items (At least in my experience.) This makes dying to things such as bugs, mistakes, etc. very frustrating. I saw a looooooooooot of people doing the blacksmith quest and then giving up because they died to a bug and had half of their resources lost.
2. Not sure if this is only a PvE thing, but if a player kills you and this 'loss' is still present; the player who kills you should uh.. ya' know.. get that stuff. I'd find it pretty stupid to have this in effect if all it does is delete it and throw it into a 'void' with no player really 'winning' out. One just loses, whilst the other is basically griefing (Which is fine in my eyes, but it takes away purpose from PvP.)
Gathering
1. Eh. I didn't really care for the gathering. Stuff was usually annoying to find, and if I did find stuff; I had to run the change of "you don't have this tier of tool equipped to gather" which is honestly frustrating for any players who enjoy gathering / crafting.
2. No real way to track any kind of nodes. Basically have to run around randomly to find gathering nodes. Which for some can be fun, but I just found it not very interesting; and found the task I did it mostly for unfulfilling and lackluster.
3. It should reward a small amount of experience when you gather something. (Personal opinion).
Crafting
1. Seems super placeholder and not all that interesting. From what I've heard / read the game plans on making the most important items player crafted, which is good to hear; but I hope the gathering / crafting gets a lot of love cause it needs it in my opinion.
Animations
1. Some of the animations need to be looped or improved. But it's an alpha!
And that's really all I can think of right now.
I say all of this knowing it is an alpha, and that Intrepid Studios will hold priority over more technical issues then balance / gameplay in the short term (Which is okay!).
I can firmly say however this is the first time, in a long time; I play a game that claims to be in 'alpha' and it actually -FEELS- like I played an alpha of a game with a promising future instead of some money-grabbing scheme of a game that will remain in alpha for 5+ years. There was content here, there was actual gameplay to be had, players to see, talk to, and play with; etc. etc. I'm extremely impressed and look forward to the month long test.
Hopefully we get more things to play with in that time as well. Players will go stir-crazy otherwise haha.
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