How was your first trip to A Valley Without Wind?

[Echo35]

Definitely adding more content, and more background into the world, and more bosses, and more enemies, and more room decorations, and more everything!

I expect traps and hazards to building exploration!

[tigersfan]

Definitely adding more content, and more background into the world, and more bosses, and more enemies, and more room decorations, and more everything!

I expect traps and hazards to building exploration!

Good ideas, do you mind dropping them in Mantis?

[stblr]

I posted this in the comments section of the latest RPS article on AVWW, reposting it here. I actually mentioned some of these complaints in another thread here but this thread feels like a good place to put it all out there, the good and the bad. I'll add what I can to Mantis.

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I played it for a few hours last night. The fact that I was that absorbed is a good sign because, honestly, there were a few things that were immediately offputting. Feeling like I have to cycle through 35 tutorial tooltips was one of those things. There also wasn’t a whole lot of direction in terms of what I should be doing next, so eventually I just set out to kill the local bosses that showed up in the region map. Hopefully that’s what I’m supposed to be doing but I don’t know for certain.

The UI needs some work. The crafting menus are especially cumbersome; having to drill down through each starting material just to see what recipes are available gets old very fast.

Movement and combat feel pretty good. It’s somewhat floaty but things have a nice “weight” to them, which in this type of game is crucial. Feedback needs a lot of work, though, both on receiving damage and dishing it out. One of the spells I made is the fireball spell, which has shown up a lot in the promotional videos for AVWW. It’s a good offensive spell but it’s very difficult to visually track its point of impact. It’s just a mass of particles and I found myself spamming it at these bouncing spark enemies because 1) I couldn’t tell where my fireball’s actual bounding box or point was exactly, and 2) the spark enemy itself is also just a mass of particles, compounding the problem.

My biggest gripe is that the game gives no incentive for killing regular enemies. You get xp only for bosses, apparently, so most of the time it’s just easier to avoid enemies entirely. The regular enemies just felt like a hassle rather than a challenge to be overcome. It also slightly discourages exploration, which so far is one of this game’s strengths and something they should play up more.

And I absolutely hate the enemy respawn points. There’s something satisfying about clearing out an entire room of enemies but this game doesn’t allow that to happen unless you spam an exorbitantly costly spell to stop each point from spawning new enemies for 5 minutes. With multiple spawns per floor, and sometimes dozens of floors per building, the spell didn’t even feel worth casting. I just did my best to avoid the enemies as easily as I could. I apparently killed a boss because I leveled up, but I’m not even sure who that boss was or when it happened. it must have looked and acted like a regular enemy, and I didn’t get any notification that I had leveled. Small issues but notable.

All that said, they NAILED exploration (the complaints above notwithstanding). Exploring a local region was rewarding in and of itself . The items are sparse but coming across them felt good. I explored 4 buildings and their layouts made sense and were varied enough to keep things interesting. I don’t know if this will stay true over the long term, but this is one building type in one type of region, so I have high hopes.

Arcen needs to iron some things out over the course of the beta, but otherwise, the outline is in place for this game to become something really special.

[tigersfan]

Thanks for your feedback. A few points in response:

This should help with the "What am I supposed to do next?" -  http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/09/valley-without-wind-getting-started.html

We've updated the crafting interface a good bit recently. It may not be complete, but its a big improvement. My question for you is, what specifically could we do to make it better?

Spells definitely need some balancing, but I think the plan is to add more in first so that they can balance more at once.

Monster Spawners/regular enemies. There is a lot of discussion about those. There are some changes coming to the monster spawners soon that may also help with frustration about the enemies.

Glad you like the exploring. I do too. We hope to make it even MORE varied as time goes on. Definitely not less.

[stblr]

Thanks for your feedback. A few points in response:

This should help with the "What am I supposed to do next?" -  http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/09/valley-without-wind-getting-started.html

Thanks, I did read that before starting, and I read through all of the green stone tooltips before setting out proper. I'm pretty much your archetypal "explorer" type when it comes to my gaming habits, so I think my issue wasn't that I had no idea where to go next, it's that I had too many options vying for my attention and no way of knowing how to prioritize them yet. That will of course come with time and experience. If I had to make a suggestion, it would be to include some sort of optional tutorial quest, a concrete reason to get you out into the world. Even as something as simple as a fetch quest would do the job.

We've updated the crafting interface a good bit recently. It may not be complete, but its a big improvement. My question for you is, what specifically could we do to make it better?

When I brought this up in another thread, Chris seemed to think I was implying I thought a talent tree structure would be better, which is not the case. The problem I see is twofold:

1) If I want to know all of what I can make, I have to click down through each initial ingredient, which gets tedious very quickly. Directly comparing spells (say, their damage output) almost requires having a pencil and paper handy.

2) Having to "learn" a recipe seems like an arbitrary restriction when I can see all recipes currently available at my civ level. I'm not saying the player shouldn't have to learn the recipe, I'm saying the UI makes the distinction all too clear. It doesn't quite make sense. It begs the player ask themselves, "Why can't I make that spell when I can see the ingredients right there?" Some way to toggle between recipes I can currently make and recipes I could eventually learn at my current civ level have would go a long way.

I'm not sure I have a specific solution, but I think working away from an ingredient-centric UI and moving toward a known recipe-centric UI is a potential solution. Organize craftable recipes in some way so if I want, say, a ranged spell, I can click that type of spell, see I have a few options available, read the tooltips, decide on fireball, click it, and know exactly what ingredients it requires and how close I am to being able to make it.

Spells definitely need some balancing, but I think the plan is to add more in first so that they can balance more at once.

Well, it's not so much a balance thing as it is a matter of confusing visual elements. But I see your point in any case.

Monster Spawners/regular enemies. There is a lot of discussion about those. There are some changes coming to the monster spawners soon that may also help with frustration about the enemies.

Yeah, I've been reading the discussions around the forum and on RPS. I'm not sure removing spawners altogether is the right solution (and you guys seem against doing that anyway), but I think the crux of the issue is that the game is pushing the player toward exploring the world while the enemies feel like pure hindrance instead of a rewarding challenge. Removing spawners or making enemy placement more static might potentially make the game more boring, I understand that side of the argument. But why would I want to return to an area I've explored anyway unless I want to experience my own impact on the world? Don't I WANT to create a world that is free of annoying enemies? Don't I always have the option of exploring a new area with new enemies anyway? What is the harm in letting the player have a lasting impact on the number and/or frequency of enemy spawns in a region they've already explored?

Glad you like the exploring. I do too. We hope to make it even MORE varied as time goes on. Definitely not less.

As someone who's seen the element of exploration almost completely fall out of vogue in modern games, thanks.

[tigersfan]

Ill send your comments about the crafting to Keith, and we'll see what others think too, but, I understand your frustration.

As for the spawners, we're definitely not removing them altogether, but, we are changing them a bit. I'm not sure if Chris has decided how just yet, but he's aware that a change needs to be made.

[zebramatt]

I'm inclined to agree that crafting is currently a little, um, blinkered?

[stblr]

A few more asides as I've sat here thinking about it...

• On the topic of spawners, I think there is a solution that could handle this as well as handling (read: not necessarily implementing) the suggestion to have all enemies give xp. I'm not sure what that solution looks like, but what I'm saying is I think they're both symptoms of the same thing.
• I love the idea of the spell that stops spawners, but I think they either need to last longer, be cheaper to cast, or work on an entire floor. At the very least, a visual cue of its range would be nice because right now I'm not sure how close I need to drop it near a spawner for it take take effect.
• In the beginning I wasn't a huge fan of AVWW's art style, but having now played it and seen it in action, it's actually quite pretty at times. I still think the game suffers from a lack of composition in that everything is a little too busy and the eye wanders around the screen for lack of anything to focus on specifically.
• This is kind of out there, but I think people might be more willing to accept the art style if the game was a little more light-hearted in tone. I'm loathe to make the comparison because it's the easiest to make, but what would Team Fortress 2 look like today if it had kept the serious tone of TFC? Would they have been able to justify all the weird design decisions? Say what you want about TF2, but I think by opening up the tone to humor and absurdity, Valve opened up a lot of design opportunities for themselves. You're asking a lot of the player to suspend their disbelief in believing a world that is a patchwork of various time periods that's inhabited by robots and dragons and people shooting fireballs, and the art style (at least that of the characters) is realistic to the point where the player is forced to consider that these things are meant to be taken seriously. Even people who are used to suspending their disbelief might feel the two elements are somewhat... at odds. I guess what I'm saying is that people's dislike of the art style might be a case of setting up expectations--or people coming in with preconceived notions about what the game is--and having that clash with the reality that the game has a serious tone about it.

[zebramatt]

One thing struck me as I was playing on my 700 pixels of window height: whoever made that comment on RPS about the ground taking up too much vertical space a lot of the time was on to something.

[Fiskbit]

The spawners are almost like the respawn behavior of enemies in older games that didn't have the ability to remember what you had killed, but they come across to me as more frustrating. At least in older games, killing an enemy meant it was gone until you brought it back, either by moving its spawn point off the screen or leaving the room (the latter is more applicable in this style of game). You got a real benefit from killing enemies, which was that there would be no more enemies until you brought them back by leaving.

I think that spawners would be much more interesting as a rare thing that gets players moving through a particular area more quickly, and perhaps to augment boss battles; right now, spawners are everywhere, which makes them frustrating and normal. Then, I'd suggest that new areas be automatically populated with enemies when you enter them, and the game remember the enemy when you leave if the enemy is still alive. When entering old areas, the game could decide to place new enemies there based on the amount of time you've been away; the longer the time, the greater the quantity and the more likely there are to be enemies there at all.

With this, killing enemies would get you an immediate benefit of relief, and you'd be free to explore the area as you'd like without further hindrance. There would still be enemies later, so the game would remain interesting when returning to previously visited areas. There would also be spawners in some places, which would be an interesting feature of the terrain that players would have to make decisions about. I think this would go a long way to combating the notion that enemies are currently just attrition; players need to think that killing enemies actually does something for them.

[tigersfan]

Chris has a plan for the spawners. I'm not even sure what it is, but, he's planning to have it released tonight.

[Wingsofdomain]

I am just going to post my first impressions from the game like the title asks me for and not discuss whatever you are discussing..

I didn't like the tutorial cause I simply didn't understand it. I picked up some random books, unlocked some random spells and craft som other random stuff. After that I just went around picking up stuff I thought was usefull to craft more spells but it turns out that I only could use them when in civlvl 6. Before I found those tower thingis with loads of bosses I actually justt ran around trying to figure out what to do. The game was mentioning that ther ewere a lot of stuff to do .... IN HIGHER CIVLVL which I had no idea how to imrpove! Once I found about the towers...the only thing I've been doing is trying to raid them.

The game is much about just running. Since there's no reason to kill mobs inside doungeons (houses and whatever) I just run and jump to next door. Mods outside, in "the wild" could have just as well not be there cause they only do dmg if they are like 4 lvls higher than you. So I usually just hold down A and Space and come out with 2 hits from the skelebots. The game would be unplayable without warpscrolls...

Edit: oh... ehm... I forgot to say that even if I mostly talked about bad points... I found it amusing at the end anyway. But I don't really know what I am doing. :S
However except from exploring the game seems to be like an action game.... Once you've found a casual, realistic, standard boss (like that flying waterdrop that sends deadly water waves in all directions) it's about dodging it's attacks and hit yours. I really didn't expect the game to be like that but I definitely found I amusing . It's fun climbing around on your platforms to try to get to the enemy. But...boss battles tend to be pretty long aswell....