New Player Feedback

I have been playing and testing since Alpha 1 and I have enjoyed every minute of it, but my wife elected to wait, even though she had a key because she felt the game wasn't ready and she didn't want to have her opinion of the game tainted by bugs and incomplete systems. This is fine BTW, many people could benefit from this approach. She has been watching me play though and she decided this weekend that it was starting to look fun and wanted to give it a try. I was confident she would love it, as I am familiar with every system and their evolution over time and their intended future implementation. The reviews, however, we're mixed.

Positive:
the combat system has a lot of depth and it's easy to learn, but impossible to master. This could be the gold standard(her words, not mine) given time for polish and balancing.

The map is huge and the landscape is beautiful giving the player the urge to explore and the ability to climb and traverse the world makes it enjoyable to do so.

The mount system is fun and compelling although distinct mini games for each species are needed rather than just petting a wolf to death.

The skill trees and level advancements feel meaningful and rewarding. She played the mage and she was pleased with how later skills added utility and value to earlier skills rather than just replacing them.

The negatives:

The new player experience is daunting. She hit multiple quit points in the first hour of playing that would doom a finished product. Arriving through the portal does not feel like you are a settler returning to your home land, but instead like you are a refugee with amnesia. The assets in the starting zone look like they were plopped down rather than feeling like they have stood for centuries being eaten by corruption and the environment. The earliest enemies, the ones the majority of players will spend the first few hours fighting are place haphazardly on the path and are bugged out as often as they respond to player feedback. The beginning quests are the most boring chores and don't feel rewarding at all. They feel like they belong in a pre stage optional tutorial rather than in the base game.

The 1-5 leveling process is not solo friendly. When I have leveled up in the past it has always been when everyone else was leveling and so I always found easy grind spots with lots of other players doing events to help. But I started a new character so we would be at the same level and it was tedious. We could not split up and do anything on our own until level 4.

The cool downs and mana are not balanced properly for the leveling process. As a low level mage she never once ran out of mana and I was playing with a bard and never found a use for pensive melody because the only restraining factor was the cool downs. Cool downs should be shortened for early skills and resource management should be a higher priority.

Skill canceling should be considered. It feels really bad for a new player to die to an attack they could have dodged because they are locked into a 2 second animation . Powerful unchangeable skills should be introduced at level 10 for predictive gameplay, but early on it feels clunky and slow.

There is currently not enough content to level up to level 10. This means you arrive at a node feeling like you know enough of the systems and are ready to play the game at somewhere between level 3 and level 7 only to find out you are locked out of all the best content in the game. This was another quit point that my wife highlighted. She predicted that this would be the biggest player loss event in the gameplay loop. Leveling from 1 to 10 should be constantly tweeked and balanced to have the majority of players arriving at their first node as close to level 10 as possible.

The UI leaves a lot to be desired. It is great that the UI is intended to be fully customizable, but the new player will not care enough to customize it. Large fonts and distinct icons with large and simple explanation pop ups should be the default. The player should get annoyed 5 hours in that they can't fit everything on the screen rather than getting annoyed in the first five minutes that they have to squint at everything on a 32 inch wrap around screen that they are sitting 2 feet from.

There were a number of bugged quests and bugged npcs as well as desynched enemies. These were not concerning as she expected worse in an alpha.

She has decided to give it more time before returning to try again. Her conclusion was that the combat was fun, but the world was poorly defined, the enemies felt like placeholders that weren't tied specifically to any lore or backstory. She played for 20 hours and couldn't remember the name or story of a single NPC. And if anyone who didn't know about the game asked her to explain what it was, she would have a hard time doing so.

I did not expect this to be her feedback. These were problems that I did not even recognize because I have been following the game so closely for so long. Sometimes you can't see the forest through the trees. I really believe in this game and in the development team, so I still feel confident the that they have a plan to address all of these concerns.

What do you guys think is the best thing they could do or change to improve the new player experience?

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Noaani

Jwscoot wrote: »

What do you guys think is the best thing they could do or change to improve the new player experience?

4ight now, my thoughts as to what rhey could/should do for the new player experience boils down to "curate it".

The first 2 hours of a game like Ashes should be spent following specific instruction - or at least with specific instruction given should people want to follow it. A quest giver gives you a quest, you do that quest and only that quest and find yourself at another quest giver giving you another quest. At the exact point you gain a level, you should find the level of mobs you need to kill for the quest you are on goes up by exactly one.

Even in a sandbox game, the introduction to the game for new players needs to be exceedingly well thought out. It is actually the most important content in the game.

Right now, we don't have that. We just have some slapped together quests and mobs that are given a spawn area.

I can only assume the first 5 levels of content we have now is placeholder, with Intrepid knowing it needs to all be scrapped and redone. That makes tour feedback above quite useful to them, as it highlights the areas in need of drastic improvement quite well.

Jwscoot

The thing is I don't even think it needs to be linear. This game has a reputation for being unforgiving and refusing to hold the players hand.

They would only need to provide the option for curated missions designed to give you one levels worth of experience. There could be one for crafting, one for combat and one for adventuring/treasure hunting. Each with a main character who is a settler and is as clueless as the player and an old wiser character that is guiding the main character and by extension the player. When you finish all 3 quest you get a rescue quest that allows you to save the settlers from a bandit camp, kill the bad guy and meet them at the nearest node.

All of this could be lead into an introduction to citizenship quest. if you elected to follow the story you would have 5-10 hours of gameplay that gives you the lore of the world, how to interact with the systems, and gives you a few NPCs in the game that you actually care about. All of this culminating in you starting the game and becoming a citizen.

Noaani

It doesn't *need* to be linear, but it should be.

Players should be spending their first few hours in the game learning about the game systems - especially combat and PvP systems.

If the initial content isn't curated in a linear fashion, players could easily miss these things.

In my opinion, this initial content should all take place in Sanctus, with the player then going through the portal when they are done. This also gives the developers an easy point at which to allow players to skip this initial content should they wish to do so.

Volgaris

Positive:
the combat system has a lot of depth and it's easy to learn, but impossible to master. This could be the gold standard(her words, not mine) given time for polish and balancing.

The combat is fun, and smooth, but there are some PvP issues, action players and melee are at a big disadvatage due to network issues. I bet this is one reason Rogue isn't out yet.

The map is huge and the landscape is beautiful giving the player the urge to explore and the ability to climb and traverse the world makes it enjoyable to do so.

I can't wait to explore the world, I just hope it's fun to do.

The mount system is fun and compelling although distinct mini games for each species are needed rather than just petting a wolf to death.

It's hard to say what is placeholder and what isn't. I really hope hunting, fishing, farm, ect change for the better. Right now they're aren't fun

The skill trees and level advancements feel meaningful and rewarding. She played the mage and she was pleased with how later skills added utility and value to earlier skills rather than just replacing them.

I'd say this the trees are extremely basic, and lead nothing to in class diversity. Couple this with just one meaningful stat (your power level). The players actually agency over their character is really low. This is actually one of my biggest disappointments so far.

The new player experience is daunting. She hit multiple quit points in the first hour of playing that would doom a finished product. Arriving through the portal does not feel like you are a settler returning to your home land, but instead like you are a refugee with amnesia. The assets in the starting zone look like they were plopped down rather than feeling like they have stood for centuries being eaten by corruption and the environment. The earliest enemies, the ones the majority of players will spend the first few hours fighting are place haphazardly on the path and are bugged out as often as they respond to player feedback. The beginning quests are the most boring chores and don't feel rewarding at all. They feel like they belong in a pre stage optional tutorial rather than in the base game.

This isn't even a focus for them right now. It's 'placeholder' (get used to hearing that lol). But it's true. Just be happy we're not testing in greybox .

The 1-5 leveling process is not solo friendly. When I have leveled up in the past it has always been when everyone else was leveling and so I always found easy grind spots with lots of other players doing events to help. But I started a new character so we would be at the same level and it was tedious. We could not split up and do anything on our own until level 4.

Not to be mean, but maybe you're going to the wrong spot or doing something wrong. 1-5, really up to 9/10 you should be able to solo fairly easily. Much faster as a pair, which is actually my preferred number at this level. I don't really do commissions much, only do them if they are in the area I want to kill in.

The cool downs and mana are not balanced properly for the leveling process. As a low level mage she never once ran out of mana and I was playing with a bard and never found a use for pensive melody because the only restraining factor was the cool downs. Cool downs should be shortened for early skills and resource management should be a higher priority.

A mage and bard combo is a great duo. The resource management is still being balanced. We probably won't see the final product of this for another year or so. You're in testing VERY early. Got to keep that in mind, it's a game yet.

Skill canceling should be considered. It feels really bad for a new player to die to an attack they could have dodged because they are locked into a 2 second animation . Powerful unchangeable skills should be introduced at level 10 for predictive gameplay, but early on it feels clunky and slow.

You have a dodge skill, this will cancel your animation. I think sprinting will cancel some too, oddly though sprint is a toggle...

There is currently not enough content to level up to level 10. This means you arrive at a node feeling like you know enough of the systems and are ready to play the game at somewhere between level 3 and level 7 only to find out you are locked out of all the best content in the game. This was another quit point that my wife highlighted. She predicted that this would be the biggest player loss event in the gameplay loop. Leveling from 1 to 10 should be constantly tweeked and balanced to have the majority of players arriving at their first node as close to level 10 as possible.

It almost seems like she wasn't a perfectly curated quest chain to get to the Node. I'm against quest hubs and linear quest chain leveling. I think if it's there it should be slower than other methods. The problem with it is they become the faster way to level so everyone follows this same linear path in an open world game. There's actually tons of content if you explore but you need to explore. Engage in some gathering, find some random quests, ect. Does there need to be more meaningful content? Yes, for sure.

The UI leaves a lot to be desired. It is great that the UI is intended to be fully customizable, but the new player will not care enough to customize it. Large fonts and distinct icons with large and simple explanation pop ups should be the default. The player should get annoyed 5 hours in that they can't fit everything on the screen rather than getting annoyed in the first five minutes that they have to squint at everything on a 32 inch wrap around screen that they are sitting 2 feet from.

I don't know what to say about this. It's a settings issue. The UI settings have improved quite a bit since Phase1. But still do leave a lot to be desired, but having to tweak your own UI to your likely is something everyone has to...

There were a number of bugged quests and bugged npcs as well as desynched enemies. These were not concerning as she expected worse in an alpha.

Odd to accept this as a result of it being alpha but not other things.

She has decided to give it more time before returning to try again. Her conclusion was that the combat was fun, but the world was poorly defined, the enemies felt like placeholders that weren't tied specifically to any lore or backstory. She played for 20 hours and couldn't remember the name or story of a single NPC. And if anyone who didn't know about the game asked her to explain what it was, she would have a hard time doing so.

Good summary. The lore and story is lacking, I a bad feeling that it's not going to get much better. It's a PvP game...

What do you guys think is the best thing they could do or change to improve the new player experience?

Nothing really, it's a test at a very early point. To improve the test and bring more testers back they need servers that are accelerated, exp, drops, and materials. There's a massive time investment just to test things put this with bugs that break things and delete things it's extremely frustrating with zero reward as a player. She's smart to wait to test more. But all feed back is important for the devs, they ask for feed back on discord each week.

Jwscoot

Not to be mean, but maybe you're going to the wrong spot or doing something wrong. 1-5, really up to 9/10 you should be able to solo fairly easily. Much faster as a pair, which is actually my preferred number at this level. I don't really do commissions much, only do them if they are in the area I want to kill in.

It's possible to solo, but it's sloooow. The idea that you are finding and killing level appropriate enemies one at a time for hours on end is frankly an unreasonable expectation. After level 5 you can solo small world events like the goblin caravan raid outside of Samias Hope, but until then you are looking for similarly leveled players to group with. The difference between the two of us working together and trying to do anything alone was stark. Telling new players to get good is a surefire way not to have any new players, but it's also incorrect in this case.

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