Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Experience so far...
Markune
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Just a quick post with some bullet points to attempt to describe my experience over the weekend. This is limited to my few hours of play on Sunday so it isn't meant to be a "Catch all".
- Only fell through the world once. Unfortunately didn't die on the way down so the quickest way to get out at that point was to recreate my character.
- Overall movement throughout was very stable and responsive. Outside of the one issue above there did not seem to be any issues with collision detection or "Holes" in the areas I was exploring.
- "Basic" combat animation seems a bit over the top, but this is not a "Make or Break" issue for me. Does seem a bit cumbersome in it's current form.
- I did not experience any spell issues (Cleric) in my limited experience. Nothing appeared to fail to fire when it should have.
- Each ability I was able to delve into during gameplay has a bit of flavor which is nice. Ranges became easy to estimate and the use of the abilities and spells in combat for maximum effect (Cooldown timers, effects, etc..) was intuitive.
- Crafting nodes seemed a bit touchy. quite often initiating the collection would stutter or fail result in my repeatedly attempting to restart the process. Other than that I think the collection of material is in the right spot. Personally I'm not a fan of the WoW "Node on Map" approach, and much prefer the "Hunt it down" process in AoC.
- Crafting was much more in depth than I thought it would be, but doesn't appear to be overly cumbersome in my limited experience. With that said I haven't had a chance to progress deep into the crafting trees yet, so the month long testing will be welcomed.
- Quest log and assistance seemed good in the early areas, but I'm one that favors not making it too easy on a player to simply run to the next giant beacon on the map and kill the highlighted creature. I have faith a good balance will come out of the Alpha/Beta testing. Seems like a good direction here.
- Experienced a couple of crashes over a few hours, but the client and files downloaded quickly and without issue.
Overall a positive experience, and I look forward to the Alpha Month to really dig in.
- Only fell through the world once. Unfortunately didn't die on the way down so the quickest way to get out at that point was to recreate my character.
- Overall movement throughout was very stable and responsive. Outside of the one issue above there did not seem to be any issues with collision detection or "Holes" in the areas I was exploring.
- "Basic" combat animation seems a bit over the top, but this is not a "Make or Break" issue for me. Does seem a bit cumbersome in it's current form.
- I did not experience any spell issues (Cleric) in my limited experience. Nothing appeared to fail to fire when it should have.
- Each ability I was able to delve into during gameplay has a bit of flavor which is nice. Ranges became easy to estimate and the use of the abilities and spells in combat for maximum effect (Cooldown timers, effects, etc..) was intuitive.
- Crafting nodes seemed a bit touchy. quite often initiating the collection would stutter or fail result in my repeatedly attempting to restart the process. Other than that I think the collection of material is in the right spot. Personally I'm not a fan of the WoW "Node on Map" approach, and much prefer the "Hunt it down" process in AoC.
- Crafting was much more in depth than I thought it would be, but doesn't appear to be overly cumbersome in my limited experience. With that said I haven't had a chance to progress deep into the crafting trees yet, so the month long testing will be welcomed.
- Quest log and assistance seemed good in the early areas, but I'm one that favors not making it too easy on a player to simply run to the next giant beacon on the map and kill the highlighted creature. I have faith a good balance will come out of the Alpha/Beta testing. Seems like a good direction here.
- Experienced a couple of crashes over a few hours, but the client and files downloaded quickly and without issue.
Overall a positive experience, and I look forward to the Alpha Month to really dig in.
2
Comments
We may not need to have them for Beta 2. Seems unlikely we will have Nodes on the map (without Cartography) since names can change based on the Government/Mayor.
But, when we only have a few hours to test.... having names on the map is essential.
Makes sense to me. Unfortunately I did not have enough time over the weekend to really progress in any way. I'm looking forward to the next testing window to get some more exposure.
Luckily in their dev discussion thread some months ago asking peoples opinions on quest breadcrumbs and how handholdy people like things most responses were against most hand holding