The Feedback Thread
 

I thought it would be good to start a centralized place for feedback. I'll kick things off with a few things I noticed in 30 minutes of play. There will be MUCH more to come, but here's the initial stuff:

1. There is no option in the key binding screen to reassign the default hotkey (S) for the skills screen. I like to put my skills on ASDF instead of 1234, so it would be helpful to have the option to reassign the skills hotkey to another key.

2. In most ARPG's, the "stay still" key defaults to shift. In this one it defaults to control. It might be helpful to change the default to shift (which is what it is in Diablo and Torchlight).

3. The Hunting Party Timer/Diplomacy Icons are in an odd place. Would it be possible to move these to the right edge of the screen beneath the minimap?

4. What do the priorities for quests mean? I.E., A quest will have P1, P2, P3, etc next to it. This wasn't in Din's or Depths, and there is no help text describing what the priorities actually rank.

5. I notice my PC (Core I7 2600 3.4GhZ, Geforce GTX 560ti) getting very hot while playing the game. Much hotter than with Din's, Depths, or Drox. The fans spin up on full in Zombasite. I'm not sure if it's due to an unlimited framerate problem (there is no framerate counter in the options menu) or some other problem. But it seems like the fans should not be spinning up so high.

Here's a fairly critical bug:

Anytime you attempt to switch or replace a skill on the skill bar when the game is paused, you can make the switch successfully. However, when you unpause the game, the skills revert back to their previous order. This means you can't reorder or replace your skills. This happens to me after having rebound the skill keys (I'm not sure if it happens when they are on default).

Also, it is impossible to delete skills using the DEL key if the game is not paused. If you delete them when the game is paused, they reappear once you unpause.

When I am being alerted that I am a carrier of parasites a green border flashes around the screen. This is fine for the alert, but right now the border of the screen flashes green CONSTANTLY. This is very irritating and headache inducing over time. I suggest making the flashing border go away after the first few seconds, but leaving the icon under my health bar that tells me "Zombie Carrier of Parasites Stage 1" etc.

Ok I think the overheating problem is definitely a frame rate thing. When I turn on the 15 and 30 frame caps (using the power modes in the options menu), my pc seems to cool down. When I turn on "no power" settings the framerate is uncapped and the pc starts to heat up. Would it be possible to have an option for a 60 and 120 FPS cap so that the fans don't rev up so loudly? I assume I must be pushing a huge frame rate with no cap.

Feedback on game (mac)
 

Mac: Command key freezes the character in place and then you basically can't do much of anything.

"bag vendor" with potions, not bags?

The mouseover inventory info is OK but when your NPC's screen is in front, it would be nice if it was THEIR equipped items that pop up, and it would be better if the pop-ups disappear when you pick items up to place them.

When I am in a town, and I go into a hut I can't see anything. Shouldn't the roof be translucent so I can see inside the building?

Similar to Drox, I'd love a * next to quests for the area I'm currently in.

Fun weirdness: I was out & about with 2 people in my party. I sent 2 guys from my town out to hunt. The 2 people in my party died horrible painful deaths. I went and found the 2 hunters. I was able to get 1 hunter to join my party but not the other -- although he did follow along and stay pretty close to us most of the time, but he couldn't follow us through gates. he did follow us to other areas. Eventually I lost him somewhere and he zombied and died.

Gotta say, not doing very well! lol

I've played about 2 hours so far, only bug i've noticed so far is that when i was being raided by a faction with 1 guy left, they had a faction portal in corner of my grid on my side of the border/wall, the raider spawned on other-side of wall in next grid over but close to the portal which was on my side. even though i was being raided he just stood there against the wall, i couldn't attack him threw the wall as well, i ended up going into the next zone over and navigated my way to him and killed him which ended the raid and that faction. So there may be some bugs with how raiders spawn causing them to spawn on wrong side of the borders.

the screen turned to be black when the character is walking in some area. sometimes it is whole screen but most of time it is shown black square on middle of screen ( about 50-60% of whole screen). it seems to happen when i moves to some place such as under the trees or the area surrounded by building. i still need to investigate about those though. i didn't have any problem like that in the dungeon. graphic card driver are up to date (GTX750Ti)

※ after i disabled Bloom option on graphic setting, the black screen problem are solved.

This happened to me as well (GTX 660 Ti)

Although I list quite a few negative things here, I still very much enjoy the game (even in it's beta state), so don't get me the wrong ways...

Here are the bugs I encountered so far:

- that black screen-flickering too (with a AMD Radeon R9 290)

- a cape-vendor with an empty inventory/shop (he was already gone when I realized I could have sent a savegame)

- an npc party member who wouldn't stop screaming for help, even though there were no enemies nearby

Not really bugs, but maybe some suggestions:

- turn down the sound effects of the background fighting on startup in the main menu down a lot! It almost kills me everytime I start the game and like two dozen creatures scream at once

- I've only seen a few worlds, so this might not always be the case, but is it designed on purpose that every region only connects to two other regions? I do like the kind of progression-y feel you get by that, but it's also quite hard if the first region next to your camp is lvl 1-2 and the next is 8-9 and you die like 20 times before you manage to get to a lower level region behind that hard one.

- I get that this is the zombie apocalypse, so maybe it's on purpose that there aren't that many vendors (I'm kinda spoiled by Din's maybe), but last time, I reached lvl 6 before I could afford to buy my first skill due to a lack of money and not being able to sell anything.

- I also get, that the your-camp-is-under-attack-sound should grab your attention, but I think it's a little bit too annoying. Maybe just reduce it to some alarm-bell-ringing without the screaming?

- I usually increase the value of "r_viewFarDist" in the user.cfg to 1200, to be able to zoom out a bit further. I did this in all the previous games too. Maybe this time you could increase the maximum zoom level in the options? (this is not related to the black-screen bug I mentioned above)

Anyway,

keep up the good work!

What are the mechanics for causing party members to flee? Everytime i've taken party members with me in dungeons they fight for a few minutes then suddenly flee every time i engage any enemy after that point, i end up just sending them back to camp as they then seem useless. I'm playing by myself most of time due to this letting my clan stay at home. i'm still only on my first game and few hours in, maybe this gets explained later or they get better or maybe there is a game mechanic i'm missing that would explain this and allow me to fix it?

It would be SO HELPFUL if the sounds your members made while fleeing weren't the same sounds that people you need to rescue make. I can't tell you how many times I thought there was another person around and it turned out to be my own party members with a Fear effect. Ugh.

You could turn on monitor sync or change the maxFps user var directly (console or cfg file).

They lose morale from damage (especially damage from no enemy like a trap) and from fears (will show up in personality traits.

I think they contibuously loose morale when outside the camp. and once the morale drops below a specific point, they are too afraid to fight anything.

I'm not sure if killing stuff or other things can improve morale while in the field.

How does arch-nemesis locating work. For example i paid silver (almost all i had lol) to search for it, it said it updated my map but i see nothing on my map that i can tell represents where it may be. I also see a map icon on the quest screen that says "goes to general quest location on map" but that doesn't do anything when i click it as well. What am i supposed to see on the map after clicking search? i may just be blind.

For the most part it works like other quests, but your Arch-Nemesis might not be found in the current area. I should probably make it not let you search if it is not in the area.

I must be missing something. My skill progression is constantly limited by lack of cash. I never spend on anything but skills, I take every other clan's last copper, but I never had nearly enough from levels 2 to 7.

Is there a store that buys and sells stuff? It would not make much sense, but no more than having to pay money for skill upgrades. Whom I am paying? Why? Why am I not paying them in food, who cares about gold?

Some reason during a raid my party members kept attacking enemy healthstone, seems like no point to this since once their healthstone is 0hp nothing happens yet they keep attacking it. I thought i'd end up having to reset raid or go solo killing the rest of enemy but luring enemy towards the healthstone seemed to make my allies change targets. Might be not working as intended?

I've found about 2 merchants during my first game, after those were gone for whatever reason i started trying to get money from other clans by selling stuff to them. But hours later no other merchants ever showed up and clans were out of money. i have been able to afford my skills so far (i'm level 10). but there does seem to be a lack of merchants this early in the game.

So do i wonder from area to area until i get some kind of update on the quest, then do a search or fully explore that area? or do i search each area (paying money) until i happen upon the right area and my map updates (seems would be expensive). or do i just wander exploring each area thoroughly until i happen upon him? Trying to understand the mechanics. I've not won my map, but i still like to figure this part out before moving to the next. also there is one dungeon i haven't fully explored yet.

I'm not having any luck with party members at all. i don't know if it's an early game balance issue or i'm doing something wrong but having 2 party members and trying to equip them best i can (which isn't well this early in game) they seem to flee so quickly, even when i've only explored like 5-10% of area they already start fleeing, usually they still have 90%+ health so i don't know why their moral is dropping so quickly and i been avoiding traps as much as possible. I try really hard to get to next warpgate somewhere in that area but twice now I've had not only both my party members fleeing throughout most of area but twice now i've had my party members also go insane. I'm guessing more you use them/take damage/low moral their insanity goes up, before i can even clear one level of a dungeon or one area and get to a gate to go back to down and switch out party members to let old ones take a break they go insane and i lose them.

I suppose i could just send them back to down like i was doing before but it seems odd that they start having moral issues so early in an area/dungeon level and i have to send them back to town so early, this leads to me clearing out most levels/areas almost entirely by myself because they are so unreliable.

Anyway this is just my first hand experience with party members, i could be doing something wrong, this problem may not be a big deal later in game, i really don't know, but first 5 hours of gameplay and during my first "game" party members have been almost completely useless to me.

This is really up to you. You can take a look at your clan's available quests to decide what you want to do, and head to those areas. Or you can instead take a bunch of quests all in one known area and try to complete them all. You can also take and solve quests from other clans in the Relations screen, same as your own. Or, you can aim towards one of the specific win types directly and work towards those goals with less regard to specific quests.

The game will definitely make some quests and events more important than others -- for example, a boss monster may keep sending attacks to your town. These will continue until you defeat the boss monster, so that becomes a priority so you're not constantly making your way back to town to protect it.

Personally, in the beginning of a world, I try to explore the areas near my town and bang out as many quests in those areas as I can.

So far the only issue I've really come across is that I find myself having to refer to the automap in order to see where I can and cannot walk -- the ground/area is almost too cluttered to see clearly what is impassable. Is there a setting I can toggle to reduce that?

What I meant is that your Arch-Nemesis is special. You might not be able to get to them at all until you win/lose the current area and move on to the next. In the quest if it doesn't mention the name of the level he is in, then you won't be able to get to him yet.

I don't think it is you. There morale stuff needs tweaked.

There is a Detail Model slider in the advanced graphics menu that might help.

I'm okay with the amount of "normal" obstacles within areas, but defining the impassable edges of areas a little better would be very useful. Some of the area barriers, such as large stones, look like there's enough space to walk between them. There's a balance between "realistic" and "reads well to the player" that should skew towards "more readable".

Balance
 

So, I've just finished a 5 hour play time test. I've got a few pointers, after 3 hours of playing, i only had 5 silver. its Crazy hard to get money, so no money, no skills, so the basics of me playing where attack, die, run back, and damage the enime some more. but once i did have lesser heal, the game was about 50% less difficult, because i dident need to rely on pots for healing. Getting to a high level (20) was super hard. i have not even won one single game. and i only had 2 skills at rank one. ahah. alliances where good. i like how they work and it helped me a lot when i needed safety, i just ran to my allies bases, but the starting base that is given for the play has no guards, and only 2 followers. this in mind, i added my two followers to my party, and went out. after only 30 mins of running around, they went insane. but they had plenty of happyness so im not sure how that works. and in addition, they run in fear so often. about 70% of the time i'm in combat they run away.where as faction based guards or hunting parties never run way in fear. so over all i think it could use a little balanceing for the starting sronghold and allies run in fear too much. as well as quests giving just a bit more cash, no one wants to play for 5 hours with only lesser heal rank 1 and percice strike lol. i'll make another post after your next patch :3 looking good so far, its almost ready! its just a little SUPER UNFORGIVING AND YOU LOOSE 90% of the time ahah.

Food Sense on other stats is just listed as food sense 2 times over. This might be good to list a bit more seeing as new players will want to know what their chance is of sensing food.

Also I have a question for shadow, is there a chance that you get a really good npc that joins party that you can save them in a way so that they don't have permadeath. Maybe make it like diablo 2 so that the really kickass bodyguard can be resurrected or something. Otherwise it makes little sense to keep getting new hirelings if you are going to lose them anway.

You could make a steep cost to resurrect so that you don't lose the work/effort of boosting them up with equipment or stats.

I'll think about it, but that kind of goes against a lot of other elements.

I've been playing this for about a few hours now, and the game crashed when I went to kill a clan member who had been infected. The game crashed precisely as I struck the killing blow, and on reloading I had to go kill her all over again, though I managed to kill the NPC without further issue.

The other question I have is- will there be, or is there an option to disable player infection? Merely a matter of preference as it seems a bit of busywork to manage the player's infection by chugging potions all the while.

Otherwise the game is enjoyable, and looks a lot better, especially in the outside areas.

I wish to know the asnwer to these questions as well. I'm unable to use my skill points because I can't afford it. It's ridiculous that my skills are limited by money and not skill points.

I believe the first patch is going to get rid of the money requirement for allocating skill points.

That would be fantastic. I can't wait!

I've just played for a few hours. My first impression is that it has the potential to become a worthy new game in the line-up. A lot of Drox Operative's systems, fused with Din's Curse's setting and character mechanics, with Depths of Peril's clan system and a zombie apocalypse thrown in for good measure :-)

That said, it's an early game that has a few issues. Here are the things that stood out the most:

1. I also get the black flickering windows issues people reported on page 1 (GeForce GTX 980). Bloom was on, so that reinforces what others have said. Thinking back, I don't recall seeing the black windows after about an hour of play, so it might be bound to certain environmental effects that I did not see after that.
2. Why don't clan members defend the town by themselves, when they are in town? I can take them along in my party, and they fight. But if I go out into the wilds, and I'm 5 minutes' walking away from the nearest teleporter, it's very annoying having to go back to town to defeat a level 0.5 imp-thing while there are 3 combat-ready level 4 NPCs in town. I get that there are guardian statues, but this feels kind of ridiculous.
3. NPCs sometimes attack the gates of my town! I've seen vendors do it, and one of my combat NPCs did as well. Seems like a bug.
4. Is there a way to repair the gates to town? It is *very* expensive to keep having to buy new gates every 20 minutes or so, especially when my NPCs wreck my regenerating gate.
5. Necromancer minions count as party members. That means once you summon 2 skeletons, you can no longer invite any NPC party members to join you. Bug or feature? There is also no way to unsummon skeletons, is there?
6. During combat it happens quite often that I click on an NPC or minion and end up opening my inventory or the town wall/relic screen. Might want to disable this when there are enemies nearby.
7. I was able to make some money, but most of the time I have a number of skill points unspent because I can't afford to buy new skills. (Who am I buying the skills from anyway?) Also: there are not a lot of vendors and it's pretty easy to drain their money by selling them the gear you no longer need. If you then spend your money on skills, you empty the economy of money. Monsters usually drop way more loot than money, so you end up with an inventory and bags full of loot, and no vendors able to buy them. The balance feels a bit off here. Maybe have vendors carry more money, or have them regenerate money over time, or increase money drops from enemies.
8. Skeletons having a chance to roll "green" is nice. Gives you a reason to keep re-summoning minions even when you have reached the maximum number. Especially nice touch to replace the weakest, rather than the oldest minion.
9. The automatic gear distribution for the clan is a nice idea, but the interface leaves a bit to be desired. There is one slot to throw items in for distribution. The tooltip says you can hit space (the sell button) to add items to it, but that did not seem to work. Manually throwing 10 items in, only to have 1 equip and 9 fall on the floor is also not the best experience. Especially if you have higher level gear than your NPCs can handle, so you have to keep repeating this ritual every time someone levels up. Maybe have it function like a clan storage, that NPCs can grab items from when they are able? Item changes could trigger on level up and on item inserts into the clan storage.
10. The diplomacy and questing systems seem very similar to Drox Operative. Works well. Green asterisk marking for in-area quests are useful. Remote handing in of all quests is great as well, considering you are a lot less mobile than in Drox Operative. I've only encountered one other living clan so far, but all they do is try to sell me crappy items. I need my money for skill upgrades and walls, so I don't want to buy their grey items, or their food.
11. About half of the generated areas were empty towns. Is this meant to set the tone (almost everyone has died), can you do something with it, or is this a bug in the map generator? So far, these areas felt like they made my walk back to town longer, without serving a real purpose.
12. The areas themselves felt a bit too maze-y. It felt like there was a main path with a few curly branching dead-ends, so lots of walking (slow walking speed) when backtracking or trying to explore the entire map.
13. The monster spawn rate is pretty aggressive. Sometimes new monsters spawn within 10 seconds of me clearing a section of the map. Is this intentional, or a bug?

Love the game so far - nice mix of DOP/DC (maybe a little Drox too).

My feedback so far:
1. The morale system is cool - I see it mentioned it may be tweaked. I hope those tweaks would include:
a) The rate of morale loss/recovery. Once its in the negatives it takes awhile to recover fully even when I just stop the party in one place and wait. That's not so bad, but maybe there can be ways to speed it up like giving the party member a certain potion or even food (simulate making camp). I don't want an instant recovery but just some ways to increase it's recovery rate a bit.

b) A more visible way to see the morale state of the character. So far I only know you have to initiate a dialog with the character to see the morale level. This is difficult if enemies are around. Maybe another bar on top of the party member health bar to show it?

I do like the system in place and was surprised when one of my party members went insane and turned on us - nice.... Just a few tweaks should make it better

2) I'm not quite following the research messages - or what they mean to me in game terms - about Zombie resistances or understanding -if its random or some event - when zombie parasite materialize in my clan base when i'm there. If i'm just missing something obvious plz point me in the direction to get the info ... but some other kind of indication as to what these mechanics mean or how they are caused in game would help.

3) Is there a way to repair clan doors? Once they are broken I only can replace them by finding them as drop loot from monsters. That seems .. odd.. that a monster is walking around with a whole door.. lol...
Am I missing another way of repairing/upgrading these doors?

4) Money for skills. This has been in every previous game. I believe the money given for quests in this game is lower than previous ones - so it makes levelling up skills increasingly difficult. I see mentioned the money will be removed in a patch - if you want to keep it, maybe just reduce the costs of the skill. I always felt that money was to pay a trainer to teach your character the new skill.

5) Traps and ambushes are late to spawn. You get the message and the audible "click" sound but the actual trap goes off much later - long enough that you can almost move off screen before it triggers.. makes them a bit useless.

6) I liked the secret missions in Drox. I know its late in the game development now, but would it be possible to generate a few "large quests", and maybe have one randomly assigned to each clan as their "secret" quest? If its completed it counts towards victory. Already I see one way to win listed in the game is having a certain amount of food gathered. Maybe others could be added like:
Economic win - amount of gold
Prestige - number of bosses killed
Relic - finds multiple parts of an ancient relic scattered across the maps/dungeons and put it together(maybe spend money to do the crafting of the final relic)
...others...


Great game :-) Looking forward to the updates you have in store for it

I found the fort of a clan. They had a "Town under siege" quest, which I accepted. The towers shooting fire had labels like "Deadly siege tower" and "Opulent Siege Tower", but as I was destroying them, I was getting a count down about zombie scavengers or something. I do not remember exactly, and it was not in the log, but it wasn't towers, and it didn't make sense.

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[Stronghold],[People], and [Items] in the Power comparisons still have tooltips about planets, ships, etc... ;)


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Crude light gates and flimsy light gates have the same stats.

I propose a change in the default minimapzoom from 8 to around 16. The reason is that with so much stuff going on, the minimap is much more important than it was in Din's or DoP. You need to be able to see gates, telaporters, allies, etc. on the minimap. It would also be great if the map and minimap could be displayed in a higher and clearer resolution (instead of the pixel-y art they currently have) but I realize this is probably impossible.

I also propose a change in the default r_viewFarDist to somewhere around 840. People have complained about the zoom limits in this thread, and I think a little more zoom out (even 800, or 775) helps.

One thing I just thought of Shadow, will the crafting that you do for the improvement of armor/weapons ever increase damage or armor class?

I think that if you increase an already maxed out armor or weapon durability 5 times, it would be awesome if the damage or armor class could go up by 1. This would give more reason to improve items past their durability maximum point.

Just an idea.

It actually already works kind of like that. If you try to repair a non-damaged weapon or armor, there is a good chance it will improve the max durability, but there is also a small chance that it will improve the damage, armor, or defense (depending on type of item of course).

Has anyone else noticed that some of the amorphs spawn ridiculously powerful and higher level versions of themselves.

I had fought a lvl7 amorph champion, only to defeat it and from that corpse spawn a lvl 9 amorph. Naturally I died after defeating a few more of those creatures but is that supposed to happen or is it just random?

I also noticed that sometimes NPCs change their names. They are walking around the map named "Bob", once they are recruited, their name changes to "Joe". This also happens when they go insane/berserk or are revealed to be enemies.