Initial Thoughts

[corfe83]

First of all, I love the game so far. It feels like the best parts of Depths of Peril, Din's Curse, and Drox Operative, with some of its own uniqueness.

Questions:
1) Am I supposed to be able to activate travel gates found in the middle of another clan's town? I walked into another clan's town and was able to use the gate to teleport back to my town, and then I couldn't teleport back, to get to the other town again I had to walk. Bug, or do I have to have a certain treaty with them?
2) Money seems hard to come by. Am I supposed to find a merchant to let me sell extra inventory?

General Feedback:
1) Exiting the game is somewhat confusing with the feedback dialog (the one with the "visit forums" button) - in order to actually exit the game, you have to ignore the dialog and click exit again. I think most users would expect buttons behind the dialog (such as "exit") to be unclickable until the dialog is dismissed (by clicking "back to game"), making it feel like a puzzle ("how do I exit? Am I forced to visit the forums to get out?"). At least I did at first.
2) This game is slightly reminiscent of the game "Hinterland" (but Zombasite is so much deeper than that game). Gates are a great start, but I wish one could actually construct buildings such as farms or weaponsmiths. Consider branching out into some base building in a future game or expansion? Also similar to the game "Beyond Sol", another great recent release.
3) I remember from other Soldak games, some quest types must be accepted before solving them, or no reward would be given (or the quest will be unsolvable). Other quest types never have to be accepted, completing them without acceptance would still grant a reward (such as killing bosses). This encourages advanced players to metagame the system and only accept quests that require acceptance to complete, other quests you just keep in the back of your mind (kill monster X). I honestly wish there were no need to accept quests for your own clan at all before doing them. I wish the Q window had a section for "quests for your clan" that had unlimited slots. Quest slots might still be useful when accepting quests for other clans (to allow punishment for failure of a quest you accepted).
4) Some of the traits look really interesting, such as "Shared Life", "Mana Shield", and "Pet". Really looking forward to trying these.
5) I like that buying skills automatically binds numbers for them. I don't remember that happening in prior games.
6) I was slightly disappointed that the classes and skills are so similar to Din's Curse. The new supporting skills do help a bit with this.
7) Took me a bit to figure out how to equip town gates for defense. I tried right-clicking on them from inventory in town as one would equip a sword. I'd suggest the error message when a user does that should tell them to go to the Pedestal.

[ScrObot]

Originally Posted by corfe83

1) Am I supposed to be able to activate travel gates found in the middle of another clan's town? I walked into another clan's town and was able to use the gate to teleport back to my town, and then I couldn't teleport back, to get to the other town again I had to walk. Bug, or do I have to have a certain treaty with them?
2) Money seems hard to come by. Am I supposed to find a merchant to let me sell extra inventory?

1. Yes, you have to have a certain level of treaty to be able to use another clan's town gate. (I don't recall offhand if it's Mutual Protection Pact or Alliance.) I suggested putting some sort of warning or note when using another clan's town gate that you won't be able to come back through unless you have the appropriate level treaty with them.

2. Merchants are certainly few and far between in my (and seemingly most people's) experience thus far. You can trade your items with another clan (though they are finicky about whether or not they will accept items at all), or salvage them at the crafting table, which I think is the desired mechanic. The crafting table is now the only place to repair your items (and apparently potentially upgrade them as well), so having lots of crafting materials seems important.

At this point, I bring an inventory full of items back to town, filter them through the Clan Armory to see if anyone needs them, put very high value items in my stash (for future clan trading or when I find a merchant) and salvage the rest.

(Also, skills no longer cost money in 0.901, so money should theoretically be less tight going forward.)

[Zengrath]

I been doing same as scrobot, bringing items back to clan first then salvaging. I was selling items through other factions and i had enough money for my skills so for up to level 12ish but now they patched to not have skills cost money so i think the money issue is a non issue... Probably mostly for buying items from other clans now or merchants.

My biggest complaint so far with item handling is how when you give items to your clan, not only does space bar not work at this time to quickly move items from your inventory to clan equip area, but items that get replaced or they don't need get dropped on ground. Any chance that it can check for room in our inventory first before dropping to the ground?

I was briefly confused first 5 seconds trying to exit but figured it out, thinking only thing may make it better is to just put exit button in middle of screen and put other info away from middle of screen instead, right now you hit exit, see a bunch of stuff, then like what? then you find exit button below that.

I didn't know how gates worked as well trying to drop gate item onto gates but then i see a description somewhere saying gates are installed by the pedestal, not sure if it was one of help topics or on tooltip of gate, probably was a help topic that popped up when i first found a gate or i looked up in game help to figure it out, i'm sure people will get it in short time by looking at pedestals or reading the help topics or looking up the manual. Long term solution may be to make a button next to gate or something that is clickable just like pedestals and allow you to access the same screen as clicking on pedestals, but i'm fine with way it is currently.

[ScrObot]

Space bar works for me to transfer items into the Clan Armory, but only from the Crafting Table window. If you do it via the Clan NPC screen, it does not work, despite the tooltip saying it should.

Hopefully putting non-used items directly back into your inventory is something Shadow is going to implement, because it's definitely needlessly messy right now. Or, alternately when you're in the Clan NPC screen or Crafting table, there could be an icon denoting which items would be equipped by a clan member, so there isn't any guesswork or need to filter them all through the Clan Armory. (I like this a lot better, but I don't know if it's feasible.)

I've also suggested having additional hotbar-like buttons show up only when you're in your town, which would have buttons for the Crafting Table, Bulletin Board, and Town Defenses (and maybe the two stashes as well). I feel having these as buttons together would make it much less confusing for new players, as well as much more convenient so you didn't have to do quite as much running back and forth between the objects (which admittedly aren't THAT far apart, but why not streamline it?).

[Zengrath]

Originally Posted by ScrObot

Space bar works for me to transfer items into the Clan Armory, but only from the Crafting Table window. If you do it via the Clan NPC screen, it does not work, despite the tooltip saying it should.

No way!! that's going to make it so much easier for me, Thanks!