Constructive Criticism

[x4000]

Listen Chris, I didn't mean to cause you such anguish and I certainly didn't intend to sound as harsh as I must have. Our relationship is inherently asymmetric here -- for me, AVWW is another game, while for you it's not only your livelihood, it's also your creative child that you put your everything into. I get that.

Yeah, and I know you didn't mean it that way.  That's part of what makes it particularly hard to hear, actually, because when someone who clearly hates you and everything you're about is shouting at you, it's easy to just write them off as a random nut (plenty of those on the Internet!).  Anyhow, creative types often get too attached to their "creative children" and start equating the thing-being-created with themselves.  That's something I try to avoid, as it makes any sort of feedback really hard, but to some extent I guess it's unavoidable in a small way.

It reminds me of Jeff Vogel's Bottom Feeder post where he advises Indies not to venture into the forums because the criticism is so painful.

I read Jeff's blog as well, and think a lot of a lot of what he says.  I don't agree with a lot of what he says, though, and this is a particular example of something I couldn't disagree with more.  I feel like hiding from interaction with players/fans/antagonists is not really a good thing to do in the long run, despite the emotional turmoil that can result from it.  I'm no stranger to the sort of pitfalls that he was warning against, but I still keep running back into the breach despite it.

I think I also better understand the game design methodology that Arcen uses. In effect, what you're doing is more creative research than game development. It sounds like most things are fluid at this point as far as the game is concerned, and I mean that in a really good way.

Yeah, that's really an excellent way of describing it.  We're developing out new creative concepts, and trying things out, while we also develop out an unusual engine that can do stuff that most other similar engines can't.  Similar to what we did with AI War and even Tidalis.  But it's all very exploratory, we have a lot of ideas but it's always something that takes time to explore in a way that you distill the really best experience out of it.

Perhaps it would be better to call this an alpha rather than a beta, just for comparison's sake. It sounds like your games spend most of their time in what could be termed a semi-alpha stage, even after they're released. Again, I think that's a very positive thing. It just makes it that much harder for us as consumers. I have to figure out if this is a game I want to buy, and I can only do that by comparing the experience here to other experiences I get from other games calling themselves beta. This is not a personal thing limited to myself -- this is what pretty much everyone does, and I think that my post does express the sentiments of other people, so despite the fact that it was painful to deal with, it's something that needed to be clarified.

Yeah, that's fair enough.  It's possible that we should have stuck with the label of Alpha, but from our standpoint the core engine and the core mechanics of the actual action-adventure gameplay were polished enough to call beta.  All the other larger stuff layers on top of that, and that includes even things like game flow and larger game goals.  But I guess part of our problem is that the exploratory process never stops, even after 1.0 as you noted, so in terms of being "feature complete" we never really hit that point until the game hits end of life (which only Tidalis remotely has so far).  It's a tricky sort of thing from our end as well, because we need the exposure, and the distributor partnerships, etc, and the Alpha label is troubling from that standpoint.  The core of the game is really solid and a lot of people seem to be finding it really fun in an FPS-style sort of way, so that makes classifying that even harder.  If Half Life 2 had the source engine done, and you could run around and fight with maybe 10% of their enemies in some arenas, but the larger level design and story parts weren't done yet... how would you classify that?  It would be really hard to say if that was alpha or beta in a lot of respects.


Anyhow, there's not much we can do about the alpha/beta terminology this time around, but hopefully as the game matures it will become more interesting to people who aren't grabbed by the core mechanics without some larger context and more interesting exploration.

[Hearteater]

I for one really enjoy how you guys at Arcen do your thing, and really like the results this brought for AI Wars.  So I have no doubt AVWW will turn out great even if I've got issues with it now.  It's actually silly to think people shouldn't be having issues right now.  Getting things perfect this early is like winning the lottery.  I'm confident enough in Arcen that I bought AVWW based on their dedication to turning out an excellent game experience even if the exact details of this one are still up in the air.

But I think the reason Arcen's betas work so well at producing excellent "final" products is because they are willing to actually make radical changes to their games.  Looking at other studios and you see them getting tons of beta feedback about some broken mechanic and they fiddle with a damage number 3 months later at release with no time for feedback on the change.  Not that the change even addressed the problem to begin with.  That's actually the most frustrating part of beta testing for most companies: if the problem is big you are just screaming into the void.  With Arcen there is no void.  If the game isn't working as PVP, fine, single player+coop it is!  I honestly can't name another studio that would make a change like that in a beta.

So kudos Arcen and take heart.  You're doing a great job and after looking at some of the health and mana thread, I'm certain you'll overcome all AVWW's rough edges and make another extremely fun game.

[Cyborg]

Happy Thanksgiving guys. Honestly, you have been successful for a couple years now. You have a product that makes money every single time you drop an extension. You tried to expand into other genres and generally enjoy yourselves, so there's no use feeling regret now, or whatever this is. At the end of the day, you are going to be just fine, because even if Valley doesn't do well, your original IP has plenty of fans to keep the lights on.

In regards to the original post, is there some redundancy? Is there some repetitiveness? Yeah, there is, and to some extent, it feels like you run out of treasure and surprises. But you know this. You've acknowledged it all along. So I don't know why this hurts your feelings now.

I think one of the criticisms you have had now for almost a year is that people do not understand what the point is, what the goal is. If it's the dungeon crawling, exploration, procedurally generated world, you have that and you are delivering to the folks that want that. As far as story, as far as feeling anything about the world, there isn't any of that. Every dungeon I crawl is marked by a number, and to this end, it does begin to feel like repeating yourself over and over. This has been going on long time. I don't know if you are waiting for an epiphany (you have said you are, but then again you have acknowledged for many months that this is expected). I'm not sure it matters, because you do have a game that you can sell, and it does offer plenty of content as it is right now.

Is it a great game? It's not even close to AI war. Even now, people continue to find surprises in AI war. Folks are continually challenged. Every game feels different. A constant stream of content keeps things fresh. I have played it for hundreds of hours. In regards to Valley, I have maybe 12 hours. Maybe. And I don't feel myself wanting to come back to it because it does feel like I'm repeating myself. I load up AI war with much more frequency. I think this is a sign.

If you want to cater to your current audience, you need to find a way to make the experience able to be affected by our own skill level. You need to have some level of intellectual challenge. You need to have some depth with the meta-game. All of these three things you just don't have right now.

I will certainly keep my eye on Valley, continue to bug test, continue to contribute and will play the finished product. I just don't know if it's even close to your original opus; it isn't for me. Personally speaking, have a little perspective; you have both been successful doing this, you have families, you have plenty of things going for you collectively, I think that Valley is very small compared to your life achievements in all categories.

[superking]

I agree with the above post.

In many respects the gameplay is comparable to diabolo, but where diabolo turns monsters into somthing comparable to a slot machine that occasionally gives a massive jackpot (which is what makes the grind so addictive), here it is just a form of health/mana attrition. Because Level gain does not change player stats,, levelling up quickly begins to feel pointless, even negative. Because we are given a small pool of preset characters to choose from, with no customisation and no equipment, its hard to feel remotely invested in the player avatar that I had no part in shaping and have no ability to improve (and who can be instantly replaced with minimal penalty when he dies). The game currently makes me feel like time - and my willingness to expend it - is the most important resource.

[zebramatt]

I agree with the above post.

As do I.

[Underfot]

 ...Because we are given a small pool of preset characters to choose from, with no customisation and no equipment, its hard to feel remotely invested in the player avatar that I had no part in shaping and have no ability to improve (and who can be instantly replaced with minimal penalty when he dies)...

Agreed on this point.  I added an issue in mantis regarding this- http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=5215
Basically, allowing limited buffing of a specific character as levels advance combined with the option to use glyph transfers to store that buffed character in a relatively safe settlement.

[KDR_11k]

Am I the only person who's never felt the need to destroy monster nests just because I could? I mean sure I've attempted it but then my brain told me it wasn't worth the trouble and that I could just avoid enemies instead.  It sounds you all have some serious nest stomping issues.

I'm still in the mindset that was promoted around 0.500 that destroying nests is something you only do when you really need to get rid of those monster spawns. There's practically no reward for breaking them and it's fairly tedious to do. I only smash them in the entrance area of chunks near my towns where I expect to regularly fight rampaging monsters. I found it odd that the tutorial actually told you to destroy the nests.

[KDR_11k]

I think it's just extremely hard to evaluate features in AVWW right now, anything that's not fun could be because it's not a good idea or simply because the content isn't there yet. Not knowing which is which really hurts our ability to point out things that need to be smoothed out.

[zespri]

my hope is that folks who feel disillusioned will still give the product a go when it's closer to finished. 

When do you think approximately it's closer to finished?

[TechSY730]

my hope is that folks who feel disillusioned will still give the product a go when it's closer to finished. 

When do you think approximately it's closer to finished?

I of course cannot give you a date or even a rough time estimation, but I would give another chance every time they bump up a minor version number (like .5xx to .6xx), or when they declare a new version series. Those tend to be good milestones.

In terms of getting of when it is near done, maybe once they get to the .8s or .9s.

Of course, when they bump up a major version number (0.xxx to 1.000), that will be release.

[x4000]

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, if you were in the US and it was that holiday for you.

In terms of "when is it likely to be done," right now my best guess is that we'll have something where it's a complete experience in the February-March timeframe.  Or thereabouts.  There will be a period near the end of actually getting to release 1.0 where it's all polish and last content additions, but right now we're still adding major subsystems and that makes things out of balance in terms of trying to evaluate the overall pool of features the game has.

For one example, folks have mentioned above the desire to be able to improve specific characters in certain ways: well, actually, the "personas" feature we've been hinting about for a few weeks has that as a major aspect, along with the storytelling aspects.

For another example, some sort of more structured missions/quests structure has always been planned and that sort of thing would address a lot of the other concerns that were most prevalent here, but the hopes/needs implementation that we tried during alpha was not really very good.  By the time the private alpha testing came about, there was only the lat vestiges of that system even remaining in the game.  With the work I've recently done on the intro mission, my plans for how to do interesting missions/quests have really evolved a lot.  The goal here is to do something that feels a lot more natural and organic, not like a clone of WoW or other MMOs like is so common in adventure games these days.  I really hate that structure.

And therein lies a lot of the problem for us with communicating what is coming down the pike -- so much of it is exploratory, and so much of it is "what if we did it this way instead of the genre-standard way that is over-trodden?"  That it's hard to explain in advance without posting lengthy design specs, and we don't even know for sure that would be the final design since we tend to make changes at the last second as we're actually implementing something into the game, since some clarity on the design emerges right at that 11th hour.  And even then sometimes it just isn't fun or balanced and needs to be swapped out completely, etc.

Anyway, that doesn't help with the communication challenges, because we also don't want to get roped into having "promised" some future feature that turns out not to really fit with the game, or which we have to really re-engineer.

[zespri]

I'd like to offer a word of support by saying, that even if a game does not pan out to be what expected (and at this moment no one can say this about AVWW, since it's not finished yet), it does not mean the end of the world. For example I followed development of Startdock's Elemental game that promised oh-so-much. It turned out to be boring and mediocre. But that's fine. We all know that the great ideas on paper sometimes turns out for not so great games.

For the developer this is always painful, when this happens, but they do what they can do - persevere when the road have not walked to the end yet and move on when they've done the best they could. Chris, you set out for making another great game. It's only natural, that many people have their doubts about the end result until they saw it. There were too many examples in the game industry when these doubts were justified. You do  not doubt yourself though, and this is what matters.

I'm quite sure, that you've thought about all this many times yourself. I'm writing it here, mostly to let you know, that players write these sort of things as OP not to depress you but because they worried about what the game might look like when finished.  We do this with best intentions and I'm sorry if you get hurt by this. I often say to my developers things like "and don't forget that when you AJAX call fails you need to display a meaningful error message instead of just letting it fail silently leaving users in doubt what happened" and they tell me "yes, yes I know, I just have not finished this part yet", but I keep telling things like this, because it's better that I mention this now, than it gets overlooked and not caught by testers and end up like this in production, providing bad user experience.

Best of luck!

[Dizzard]

I'm writing it here, mostly to let you know, that players write these sort of things as OP not to depress you but because they worried about what the game might look like when finished.  We do this with best intentions and I'm sorry if you get hurt by this.

A thousand times this, if I didn't see potential in the game I wouldn't be bothered typing out long (probably waffling  ) posts about what I like and don't like about the game.

Getting negative feedback is way better than getting no feedback at all. At least then you have something to work with.

[Mánagarmr]

I'm one more of those "bought the beta, but aren't playing" people right now, mostly because I find the game rather boring. I've killed my first Overlord and explored everything nearby and left unpleasantly hollow by the achievement. I've been studying the brainstorming and development forum and there's a lot in there that are much more likely to spark my interest, such as missions. It'll turn AVWW into a progressive game rather than a very big, very empty sandbox (and this is of course due to the aforementioned beta status) that you'll deplete very fast and then get stuck repeating until you throw up.

Terraria, believe it or not, suffered very much from the same thing pre 1.1. You'd kill all the bosses, get the best gear and then what? I can't speak for 1.1 since I haven't honestly had time to play through it yet, but you get the idea. The difference between AVWW and Terraria though is that in Terraria it feels like you are actually improving. In AVWW you are more fighting to stay competetive as your spells get progressively useless as you level up.

I'm definately looking forward to see where AVWW goes, but at this precise moment, it's on the shelf for me. Do I say this because I think it's a bad game? No. I say it because at this very moment, the gameplay doesn't attract me in the long run. I still think the game has great potential, however.

[Dizzard]

I'm in a similar boat really. At the moment I've sort of stalled around lv 140 in my single player game.

When it comes to deciding what game I'll play, AVWW is increasingly losing it's competitive edge against other games I'm yet to finish. I think the main problem is the game does start feeling very formulaic and "and again and again and again" after a while.

The multiplayer has helped a lot though.