Hi Kron,
Thanks for stopping by, and having such a constructive thread. I think it's a great thing. Normally I'm
not one for critiques because of all the baggage that goes with that, and in this case I'll confess I've not yet had the time to play Achron -- it looks solid, and like a cool concept, but my perception has been that it's not my sort of game anymore than Starcraft, Dawn of War, or similar are.
All that said, based on my experiences with player feedback on AI War, and based off of my
perception of Achron from having watched a number of your videos and having seen AI War fans talking about the game here on the forums, here are a few thoughts that hopefully are useful -- but big grains of salt, as I've not played the game (though, in some senses, that makes my feedback valuable in a different sense, as I can tell you from experience sometimes half the battle comes from just getting people to try the demo). So, the thoughts:
1. It does look like Starcraft to me, for whatever reason. Actually, I never played Starcraft either, but I played loads of Warcraft I and II back in the day. In those games you have a small number of units, and you're tasked with out-clicking your opponent all over the place. It was fun when I was a teenager, but I lost interest in that as an adult. I'm not sure exactly why Achron makes me feel this way, the videos are certainly slow enough, but I guess it's the whole "I beat you / no, wait, you went back in time and beat me / haha, I went further back actually" cycle that makes it seem that way.
2. I'm a
huge fan of time travel stuff. Back to the Future (the whole trilogy), the Doomsday Book (and the rest of that series), and Chrono Trigger are amongst my favorite things. However, Achron doesn't really grab me in the same way as them, and I think the reason is that it's not very exciting time travel to go back in time thirty minutes, or an hour. That's more like the Omega 13 device that lets you correct a mistake, rather than true time travel. And I did really enjoy the rewind feature in Prince of Persia (the Sands of Time one only), but I don't think of it as time travel. Achron strikes me as arming both sides with a fancy rewind/undo function. I could be completely wrong, but that's my perception, and I think that plays into the "it will take a lot of fast-clicking to win," because it makes me feel like not only do I have to beat my opponent, I have to do so repeatedly and so thoroughly that they are out of "undos."
3. That brings me to my next point, which is this: the fun thing about time travel, and indeed about the rewind feature in PoP, is that YOU have it. If your enemies can undo, then it starts to feel grindy: "how many times do I have to kill you!?!?" The very idea of engaging in group combat in such an environment is just exhausting to me, personally. Now, on the other hand, if I were facing a superior force that I could only cut down to size by using MY rewind/time-travel abilities, then that could be interesting. Each time I killed part of the force, I'd feel like I accomplished something permanent and lasting.
4. And I guess that brings me to my last point: one of the big things with AI War, specifically, has been permanence. Players really like it when they can affect the galaxy in a way that leaves a lasting mark, throughout the rest of their campaign. It scares them (and scares away some players) when the AI does the same in reverse to them, so that's done in moderation only and we even have some features in there (like data centers) specifically to ease those fears so that they feel like they get a bit of an undo if they make a mistake or two. But certain other things where the players couldn't kill certain enemies (like astro trains, which could only be diverted) turned out to be overwhelmingly unpopular except to a niche of players. So much so that in the 4.0 version, I demoted the trains to optional-only. When it comes to Achron, I guess you can see where I'm going: I feel like I'd be killing the same unit dozens of times to make sure it feels like it really stays dead. That removes all satisfaction of killing the unit the first 11 times, and makes me wary/relieved as the primary emotions on the 12th. Or, that's the expectation that I have in my head, I'm of course wildly speculating. But having played certain enemies in games like FFIV or FFVI where they would regenerate body parts or regenerate allies, those were always the most frustrating battles for me by far. Seems like every Square RPG has one of those bosses at least, and it's always something I'm glad to get past.
5. Unrelated to the rest of the notes above, I have to say that the idea of the "Time Credits" (if that's what they were called, I forget) scares me a bit, too. It seems like I'd be worried about running out of those, and wanting to make sure that the opponent moved first so that I could be sure to go further back than him. This is an example of that kind of paralysis that I've had to combat in a few ways with "AI Progress" in AI War, by providing Data Centers and other things that were difficult to get, but which could give that crucial undo. And I guess that's where the Achron mechanics really worry me: I feel like it's a game about my opponent and I getting a certain number of undos, but no more, and whoever uses the last undo the most successfully is probably the winner. In the meantime, we both need to run around in such a way that I don't get killed and am in a position to use the last undo to win.
None of this implies that I think the game is faulty or bad, but those are the reasons I think it's not for me, based on some of those perceptions. And those perceptions could be entirely wrong -- but don't tell
me about it, that's not worth your time. If those perceptions are wrong, and you think others might have a similar perception, then it's something you want to address in your videos, marketing text, and so forth. Communicating what AI War is and why it's unique has been the greatest challenge for me, as "it has the best AI" is a claim a lot of people make. With Achron, you have the benefit of an awesome high concept that excites people in general, but that still doesn't mean you won't have problems with them accepting or understanding the actual execution of the "it has time travel" concept.
I think you guys could be headed to a lot of success, but I think at the moment your design or your marketing materials (I'm not sure which) are going to make the Starcraft/C&C/etc players your go-to group, whereas that's an entirely different market from the AI War one (which trades more in the Civ/GalCiv/Supcom groups). And that's totally cool, but it's something to be aware of one way or the other. In a lot of respects, I think the Starcraft/C&C groups are actually substantially more mainstream, so that's happy for you. But if you want to have a better chance of attracting more my crowd, the points above are what I see as the major sticking points, anyway.
Hope it's useful! And best of luck to you.
