One Coyote's Feedback: Indignant Koala

So been play testing the patch and I've gotten past what looks like Chucklefish has really worked on so far. Before I start I'd just like to say thank you Chucklefish for making a really fun and enjoyable game. Each patch you do makes the game more fun and it feels like you've really got an eye on what's causing problems and what isn't working.

I'm going to apologize for not being able to comment on Beta quadrant scaling due to using the super steel weapon at the time and one shotting the boss. It was then that I realized that the weapons weren't right and there was a problem.

Alpha Quadrant
The ores now seem fine, damage values seemed well placed, the amount of damage I was taking versus the armor I had felt a little off but that was before the special attacks rework so I'm guessing that since it feels good in a 5th level world, it feels right in a first level. The first boss is still a bit at odds with me, but I'll get to that in the boss section.

Beta Quadrant
I came here with everything unbalanced so I'll make it brief, for everything wrong with the game when the latest character wiping patch came out. I did love finding uranium in a couple of beta worlds it really helped.

Gamma Quadrant
after I saw that, no steel weapons weren't balanced, this is where I stopped and found that yes a new patch was made to fix weapons. I played through this area with the deadly birds and special attacks, the first world I came to had ant eaters that could one shot me with their air cutter/sonic boom attack this is where I found out that yes armor is balanced, but special attacks weren't. Found my first gun here but I'll get to that in it's own section.

Delta Sector (just realized they're called sectors whoops)
this is where fall damage, special attacks, and birds were patched. Everything seemed pretty well balanced. I had to look up some coordinates for mater blocks but even in that it was very cool and felt like I connected with the community by doing so. Also there was no durasteel weapons, I'll cover that in the weapons section.

Melee weapons
So I've been through all different ways of melee in this patch, from not being able to make new ones, to ones so over powered they can one shot anything. when I got to Delta Sector and found that I had no weapons to make I was actually kinda shocked, my titanium weapon was doing decent so I kept it till I found some place (an Avian tower) that could drop level 5 weapons. I picked up a spear which is rarely ever my go to weapon because of it's terrible attack range in anything that isn't right in front of you.

Over all I'd say that the reward of finding a new weapon on a Delta planet out weighed the feeling of crafting a weapon at the start of a sector and having it carry me through the entire sector. We craft green level weapons. It means that there are only two tiers of weapons in a sector that will even come close to making us switch out our weapon. The ones we craft are the perfect balance of damage and speed they don't have a special ability like poison, flame, etc but they don't need them. And weapons we find with those qualities often have lower base numbers to balance out the special quality making them pretty much junk.

What I would like to see in melee weapons is patterns. Because that feeling of finding a weapon when I couldn't craft one is really nice. I'd like to see a middle ground between crafting your own and finding something better maybe the ability to make a grey quality level weapon for when we get to a new sector and searching for a village or merchant that has our green quality recipe. The problem with that right now is the Hylotl who through the entire time I've been playing the game I've seen all of two of their race. But it is something I'd like to see, give me more of a reason to explore a sector before moving onto the next.

Ranged weapons (or the lack there of)
So I finally found guns, the look of my floran holding two pistols made me smile in glee. Now if only the damage they did reflected that. for the first two sectors we have bows, and this is especially good because the first boss flies making it so you can only solidly hit him with thrown weapons and bows.

Bows feel clunky, but I'm not saying that's bad, drawing them back, aiming, firing that's a bow. It's a stone age weapon in a game about space travel. It should feel like the worst idea for ranged combat, especially when the other guy has a sniper rifle and is taking shots at you from the roof.

Though after getting my hands on all the types of guns I hate to say that it's the most balanced in the game. guns nuke your energy bar, often for damage that just can't compare to if I had just run up and hit it with my melee weapon. Out of all of the guns I used the sniper rifle was the only weapon that felt remotely balanced for it's energy to damage ratio. Shotguns are a joke, often taking all of your energy for four shots in a spread, while this sounds good, most creatures are only hit by one of the bullets and they have pitiful knock back. Pistols do little damage and little knock back but can be dual wielded. The problem being again their energy; dual wielding pistols sucks your energy and with how much enemies move you'll be missing half your shots. On average by the time I ran out of energy I had only dealt 25% of their health at best. Assault rifles are the middle ground between snipers and pistols, they almost feel good but enemies often move around so much that you'll run out of energy long before you actually kill the thing your fighting. There needs to be a serious look into fire arm balancing to make them worth while otherwise I'll stick to melee.

Thrown weapons on the other hand are in their own bizarre balance problem. On the one hand against normal enemies they're pretty solid. Against bosses though thrown weapons are vastly over powered. It takes 5 bombs to kill the Alpha sector boss. My theory being that normal enemies are often knocked backed before they can take the multiple hit effect that most thrown weapons have. Bosses don't have knock back so they take the full effect of the weapon. I dropped Gamma sector's boss with like ten plasma grenades after I tried to melee him because I needed my energy to use my double jump to avoid his fire attack.

Bosses
are cool as hell, awesome to summon/make and very well done. Even though thrown weapons are over powered on them it is a lot of fun to explore worlds to find those thrown weapons and cheer a little when I do knowing I'm a step closer to killing the sector boss. Keep up the good work

Exploration/travel
Ore was balanced a little better and the wood to coal thing helped out a lot but this section is really going to be about coal in general and my thoughts on it.

Coal is the most valuable resource in the game, through the ENTIRE game there is never a time you don't want to mine coal. Coal is a fuel source, it is the best way to travel underground due to it's penetration through soil allowing you to see farther, and every other sector it is needed to make the new crafting metal. And this is its biggest problem. Coal is too useful but if you make a mistake it can strand you on a world with little chance for escape. If you find yourself in a situation where you've flown to a solar system with few planets, mined the surface coal, used it, and then realized you don't have enough fuel to get to the next system the game has stopped for you. YOU MUST either dig into the ground to find more coal or you have to hope your planet has enough trees to get you off world. If you got yourself trapped on a snow or arid planet where there are few trees then mining might be your only option.

Mining presents it's own problems in a stranded scenario you have to burn coal to find coal. Every two torches that are made is one more coal you have to find making every torch you own, again the light source with the most ground penetration, a valuable resource. So either you have to make torches in the hope that you'll find more coal then torches you make, or you have to take your torches down and wonder around mostly in the dark.

I went through most of the first 5 sectors of the game straddling 200 -500 fuel. it wasn't till I got to sector X that fuel became laughable. Because uranium, plutonium, solarium and the like became readily available. You have multiple fuel sources in the game, make them more wide spread. Give alternatives to coal torches, like tar or raw animal meat. Coal on metals is a great idea and I love it because it means I can get a jump on that sector's armor making it an easier time to progress through.

Crafting Technology and the Sector
things that make exploration easier should be introduced earlier otherwise a random tech that you find will completely replace them. The grappling hook is really cool but by the time I get it I've most likely found a world that gave me butterfly/bubble boost or the teleport tech making it pretty obsolete. Tech is an awesome thing in the game but other then the early pulse boost and dash is pretty lack luster compared to the later powerful techs like the boosts, and teleports. It's good to have that progression with techs but when pulse jump pretty much is gravity bubble but better, faster working, and less energy intensive I'm not going to use gravity bubble.

Healing(let me just edit this in)
There needs to be more of it. As of this patch it's only bandages, health kits, red stim packs, and beds. Beds are your home safety healing, they're good for when you have to get a snack or use the rest room. There is a bug right now where after you die you come back with your health, not your bonus health from gear. So you die, you hop in a bed and then you go on your way. Bandages are great sector 1-3 healing but after that you start scarfing these things down, at the fifth sector I needed 10 bandages to go from one to full bars of health. Health kits are fast healing, but they heal very little and unless you found a doctor spawner, are very far apart. Red stim pacts are the most solid form of healing, and the only on the ground healing that is good through the entire game.

What I'd like to see in the future
more patterns. It's a cool system that I feel isn't getting a lot of credit to it. We're storming Apex facilities, ancient Avian crypts, and the like. I'd like to see more craftable things from it, like legendary weapons, bizarre quests, etc. I know more biomes are being made like the ocean biome but if it's not on the wall I want to see a city biome a place that makes it look like all the races aren't blasted back to the dark ages with all these little places here and there, and instead we see why these races are space faring and able to explore the galaxy with major cities.

That's my feedback on Indignant Koala thank you again for all of your hard work making the game all of you at Chucklefish. I hope this information helped.

 

wow this forum goes decently fast, going to kick this back up to page 1.

 

I would like to see multiple tiers of each crafting metal. Maybe the first takes a small to moderate amount of ore and is enough to get by on in the sector. The more elite weapons for that metal should take 3-4 times as much ore and be able to carry you through the sector. Found weapons should vary across that spectrum and increase in damage concurrent with rarity. I think this would reward those who explore events looking for weapons as well as those that choose to play the game by mining deep. Either way, you won't just be able to craft a weapon at the beginning and it allow you to manage the sector with ease, which i agree is rather boring. The armor should work the same way.

 

going to kick this again, see if I can get more people to comment. Going to be my last kick.

 

Agreeing with most of Kayote here. One of the major meh's for me is finding weapons and not using them because I made the Iron/Steel/Titanium/what-have-you sword and it's pretty decently powerful so I never use weapons from enemy drops or the long chests scattered about. So I immediately trash them because they take up space. Game's trying to be Borderlands 2 and failing because every findable weapon is crap if you didn't make it yourself.

Also healing does need tweaking bad. Bandages are easy to make but with the current armor patterns falls off past sector 3. Red Stim Packs are the best healing in the game and are pretty rare/expensive.

 

Great review, couldn't have said better or clearer.

 

Have you tried cooking? Most of the food that you make at the cooking table provides healing, and some of it is very good healing. It's one of the major incentives for farming. The best food provides a bunch of healing, warmth, and a speed boost.

Maybe the tutorial should have you make a cooking table when it's explaining food. I can see how people could miss it and assume that plants are only good for the small amount of hunger they deal with raw.

 

I've actually been working on it, testing it out.