Locales And Enemies

[tigersfan]

It's ok now though, my newest adventurer is called Elini Mate, so that's even better. In my head she's named after a dyslexic and slightly confused Dalek.

GROAN. It took me a minute to get that one, but, I audibly groaned once I did. You are a punny guy, Nice Save, punny guy.

[Nenad]

Difficulty levels? Really? Wasn't it all supposed to be about region levels?

I hate difficulty levels. I never can decide which one to take.

[tigersfan]

I'm really good at avoiding enemy attacks, so that's the experience that I personally like, but there's a lot of gradations below (and a few above) that.

How do you manage to avoid attacks from Dwarf Skelebots? Those things are just plain mean!

[Admiral]

At the difficulty I play most enemies don't land a shot on me very often, but when they do hit me it's often a one-hit kill.  So if two of those happen in a span of 20 seconds... well, that's curtains for me.

How does auto-potion heal work with what would otherwise be one-shot kill?

Say you have 2,000 HP, and an enemy does 4,000 HP damage.  Your potion that you have cures 1,200. Does this mean after you're hit you're at 1,200 - or are you at -800 and dead despite auto-heal?

Cheers!

[Nalgas]

I'm really good at avoiding enemy attacks, so that's the experience that I personally like, but there's a lot of gradations below (and a few above) that.

How do you manage to avoid attacks from Dwarf Skelebots? Those things are just plain mean!

Against equal or lower level ones, it's not actually so bad, because you can provoke them into using their attack before they're quite in range of you.  The lower their level relative to you, the easier.  You just have to move past their range at a close tangent or quickly approach it and back away, and they'll attempt to hit you but fail.  The higher level they are compared to you, the more difficult that becomes, because their accuracy improves, but you can still do it.  You can of course just shoot them before they get close enough, too.

Something else fun that you can do with them is triggering their attack, and then during the cooldown, you can get inside their range so they're unable to hit you, because they have a fairly high minimum range.  Then you can just punch them in the face with impunity.  That was even easier to pull off when they actively chased the player around instead of moving more randomly, because as long as you managed to dodge one attack, they'd just sit there humping your leg, and you were effectively immune to them after evading the first attack.  Heh.

[tigersfan]

Against equal or lower level ones, it's not actually so bad, because you can provoke them into using their attack before they're quite in range of you.  The lower their level relative to you, the easier.  You just have to move past their range at a close tangent or quickly approach it and back away, and they'll attempt to hit you but fail.  The higher level they are compared to you, the more difficult that becomes, because their accuracy improves, but you can still do it.  You can of course just shoot them before they get close enough, too.

Something else fun that you can do with them is triggering their attack, and then during the cooldown, you can get inside their range so they're unable to hit you, because they have a fairly high minimum range.  Then you can just punch them in the face with impunity.  That was even easier to pull off when they actively chased the player around instead of moving more randomly, because as long as you managed to dodge one attack, they'd just sit there humping your leg, and you were effectively immune to them after evading the first attack.  Heh.

I find it difficult to get them to pop their spell far enough away to be safe.

As for them not chasing you anymore, yeah, I remember that, I'm pretty sure Chris changed that on the account of, at least partially, my feedback....

[Nalgas]

I find it difficult to get them to pop their spell far enough away to be safe.

It is risky, especially the higher level/more accurate they are.  You start having to cut it pretty close, and at some point it might not even really work anymore.  When I'm playing within the level range that everything else isn't killing me outright, though, I can usually do fairly well jumping toward them and making mid-air adjustments, or hopping back as they approach me.  Really anything that moves you as close as possible to perpendicular to their attack range (the circle around them they can hit, that is) as quickly as possible at the moment you're closest to it would be ideal, just so you're at maximum speed when "dodging", which is why I keep wanting to hit the L button on my GBA to backdash like in Aria of Sorrow, but jumping will have to do instead.  It at least lets you accelerate vertically while you're stuck semi-slowly decelerating and regaining speed in the other direction, getting you more movement all at once.  It took a bunch of running through buildings infested with them to get the hang of it, though.

As for them not chasing you anymore, yeah, I remember that, I'm pretty sure Chris changed that on the account of, at least partially, my feedback....

Yeah, if you also commented on that, then we both probably said pretty much the same thing to him.  He said something at one point about how roughly 60% of what each tester said overlapped with what other people were saying, and the other 40% was unique, when I asked how they managed to keep up with so much being dumped on them constantly, because that was before Mantis was public and we could see for ourselves.  Not too surprising that that particular enemy behavior/difficulty got similar comments from more than one person, because others did many, many times, like with amoebas and espers and bosses and...

[x4000]

Difficulty levels? Really? Wasn't it all supposed to be about region levels?

I hate difficulty levels. I never can decide which one to take.

Mostly it still is, but the fact remains that players have wildly different skill levels and in alpha testing the addition of difficulty settings in addition to the region-based stuff quickly became apparent.  I would get balance reports in the same day from multiple people thinking an enemy was incredibly too hard, and others thinking it was incredibly too easy.  No joke.

On the bright side, you're in luck in terms of not having to make a tough choice here.  It starts you out on the middling 3/4 difficulty.  If that works out for you, you never have to change it.  If you are finding it too easy or too hard, then in any settlement you can change it.  Every time you die, your character also respawns right by the Difficulty Shrine, which helps even more.

I'm really good at avoiding enemy attacks, so that's the experience that I personally like, but there's a lot of gradations below (and a few above) that.

How do you manage to avoid attacks from Dwarf Skelebots? Those things are just plain mean!

It depends.  If there is open air, you can avoid them by jumping at just the right angle.  If you time it right, they'll attack just wrongly and miss you.  Alternatively, of course, you can just snipe them before they get in range, assuming you aren't on a maze interior with lots of small passages, etc.  I'll confess I haven't spent a lot of time playing in the maze rooms, and what time I have spent in them I've taken a lot more hits than usual.

At the difficulty I play most enemies don't land a shot on me very often, but when they do hit me it's often a one-hit kill.  So if two of those happen in a span of 20 seconds... well, that's curtains for me.

How does auto-potion heal work with what would otherwise be one-shot kill?

Say you have 2,000 HP, and an enemy does 4,000 HP damage.  Your potion that you have cures 1,200. Does this mean after you're hit you're at 1,200 - or are you at -800 and dead despite auto-heal?

Cheers!

It's on the kind side -- it leaves you with 1,200 no matter what the incoming damage was.  I may need to change that at some point, come to think.

[x4000]

As for them not chasing you anymore, yeah, I remember that, I'm pretty sure Chris changed that on the account of, at least partially, my feedback....

Yeah, if you also commented on that, then we both probably said pretty much the same thing to him.  He said something at one point about how roughly 60% of what each tester said overlapped with what other people were saying, and the other 40% was unique, when I asked how they managed to keep up with so much being dumped on them constantly, because that was before Mantis was public and we could see for ourselves.  Not too surprising that that particular enemy behavior/difficulty got similar comments from more than one person, because others did many, many times, like with amoebas and espers and bosses and...

Yeah, I recall you both mentioning it.  I think that c4sc4 might also have mentioned that one, but I have trouble keeping it straight.  During the early days it was hugely helpful to us to keep the testers all isolated from one another, even though it was more work for us because of all the duplication.  That way we got a dozen plus sets of individual feedback, rather than one group's collective feedback.  Thus we got the "hey this occurred to me" comments rather than "ooh, I agree with what he/she said, though I didn't think of it until it was mentioned" ones.  Not that the latter aren't helpful also, but seeing where there was blind overlap let us really quickly identify the issues that were most bugging people.

I wouldn't do that long term, because having that community cross-talk discussion is generally far more valuable than having isolated sets of feedback, but it was genuinely helpful during that first week.  By the time that week was up, the duplicative feedback from testers was down into the 5% or less range, which is more consistent with a more mature game like AI War.  Now I'm super happy to have mantis being used to track all this stuff, because it's so much cleaner for everyone now that that first period is past.

The "everyone in isolation" thing was a bit of a new experiment for us with regard to testing, but I think it worked well.  We paired it with bringing in only about 4 testers at a time after the initial 7, and staggering them such that each batch of testers got the revised new-to-the-game experience.  Since that was the thing we were most trying to refine, that turned out to be a successful way to do it.  I'd do it again in the future with another game, though only right at the start.

Anyway, thought you might find that interesting as background on why we did it the way we did it.

[c4sc4]

The "everyone in isolation" thing was a bit of a new experiment for us with regard to testing, but I think it worked well.  We paired it with bringing in only about 4 testers at a time after the initial 7, and staggering them such that each batch of testers got the revised new-to-the-game experience.  Since that was the thing we were most trying to refine, that turned out to be a successful way to do it.  I'd do it again in the future with another game, though only right at the start.

Anyway, thought you might find that interesting as background on why we did it the way we did it.

Well, I have to say I think it worked out quite well seeing how different the game is from what I originally got my hands on. It definitely is a lot more friendly to new players now with the adviser stone and such.

It was definitely interesting to read about why and how you did the alpha testing.

[Teal_Blue]

Both Nice Save and C4sc4 mention you can choose a character to play from different time periods, and I think Nice Save even mentions 'abandoning' your character if you want another character before you die.

I suppose i will find out soon enough, but was wondering, since i was seeing Chris's different characters all named Terrance Crow, if that meant we could 'rename' our characters?

Or if it meant something different, like Chris 'jumped' into different NPC's using the same character name? 

Or perhaps that this was all 'different' games and Chris was just renaming his characters to keep track of them for the screen shots?

   Was it Nice Save that said he would miss having another character with the name of Kizzee Street?
I must admit, that is a rather cool name.   

Anyway, also, just as a last quick thought before we get into beta on Monday, if we can rename our characters, perhaps i could 'unofficially' make families, like Heather Bliss, Garrett Bliss, Caitlin Bliss, etc...    Mother, Husband, Daughter... as i trace my characters across the history of the world. 

Just my rather wishful thinking,    But it would be nice to have a choice of one or the other, because not everyone will care to do that. 

Thanks for listening,

-Teal

Chris was using dev tools to change his character without dying and selecting another, at least that's how I read it.

I don't know if you can change your own characters' names, but you can change the names of NPCs in the settlements, so you can give them all the same second name if you want to simulate your characters family. Just bear in mind that your adventurer will almost certainly end up dead eventually, so their 'family' will be left without them.

   Thank you for the clarification,    good info to know, will have to try it today and let you know how it works, 

Take care,

-Teal

[Teal_Blue]

Nice Save said ...

QUOTE-
Yeah, that was me. It's ok now though, my newest adventurer is called Elini Mate, so that's even better. In my head she's named after a dyslexic and slightly confused Dalek.
-QUOTE




Well, glad you got a new cool name.   


-Teal