Hello, I bought the game today (a family pack no less, hoping this might be a great game to play with my siblings) and I wanted to share my first impressions of the game (playing alone).
I know first impressions are usually considered valuable since developers can derive things to improve from them, so I'll be sharing mine.
Throughout my 1-2 hour play session, I wrote down my thoughts as I went. I only had the better ruins mod installed, since I wanted to settle a ruin for a base.
I'll be structuring this post from most to least valuable. Starting with outright suggestions which I consider sensible, though in general I prefer to share the problem or experience itself and let the reader decide for themselves what the solution to my problem may be or what I am trying to suggest. If a comment is in quotations, then that is [mostly] a straight copy and paste from my notes, which may be less professionally written but might better convey the immediate thoughts a player may have.
In addition, here is a follow-up set of impressions/suggestions/etc from my subsequent play session.
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Suggestions (& Bugs)
It would be nice to be able to save world generation presets for future use.
The UI button prompts are not entirely dynamic (assuming they are supposed to be).
Both the tutorial and the world UI show control + right click for knapping, but I had re-binded the keys to swap the functions of control and shift, which did to reflect in the UI.
There should be holstering functionality by selecting the currently selected item to de-select it. Which would be useful to avoid wasting tools on early resource collection.
That is to say, if I have a spear in slot 3 and I am currently on slot 3, then pressing 3 on my keyboard should bring me back to my firsts.
This one isn't a big deal, since I can just select a random junk item in my inventory, but I think it would make for a nice QoL addition.
Support for windowed full-screen would be very welcome. Being able to click on my other monitor without the game minimizing would be nice, as would be being able to use an external recording or screenshot tool without the window freaking out.
For what it's worth, the full-screen feels good. I've seen games that had full-screen implementations that put the fear of god into you whenever you alt-tabbed, this one isn't one of them.
I think certain animals (wolves come to mind) should have a "cautious" state where they keep their distance and attack only if they see an opportunity. Smart animals like wolves would generally think twice about attacking an armed human or one holding a touch, unless they were either really desperate or had the numbers for it.
I make this suggestion because in the early game it would be nice to keep wolves at bay with a touch, not necessarily being able to defeat them or trespass in their territory, but just be able to get started without constant harassment and the possibility of losing all progress.
Positive Thoughts
"I used the experimental immersive first person. It is AWESOME!"
The weather effects are very impressive, I was surprised by how powerful distant thunder seemed.
"The variety of instrument voices is a wonderful touch. Does it do like animal crossing and make noises when I type in chat? If not, it should!"
Using screenshake for feedback in certain actions (like starting a fire) is very welcome, as it let me know that something was happening when I tried to start a fire in a pitch dark cave.
Without it, I might have thought nothing was happening and given up.
I'm unsure if this would be a problem for balance, but being able to sleep on the ground (or on a stack of dry grass) would be nice. I didn't have much to do during the first night except keeping the fire lit and getting killed by wolf packs. In the early game, when one is under equipped, I doubt inexperienced players will want to brave out the night.
Knapping feels surprisingly good. I can hold down my mouse to avoid carpal tunnel, and I can cut away at the edges to avoid having to do every voxel. It feels like it respects my time, which I didn't expect from when I was first faced with the process.
There is a button to select the last customization selection for a character, it would be nice to build on that by being able to save and load characters.
Negative Thoughts
"I closed the trader's first dialogue to open the tutorial. This caused two issues:
1. It flung my camera back, this is repeatable
2. It made me lose out on the initial dialogue now I won't know what he meant by 'you just woke up' "
Point number one may be due to the immersive camera. Either way, it was weird for my character to physically do a 180 every time I closed the dialogue menu.
"Waypoints do not work. I tried creating two, they show up as 0 and 1 on the text chat, but I don't see them on the map..."
This seems to be a bug: "I was only able to see the waypoints after I respawned, probably a bug?"
The game asked me to look for cat tails, but I spawned in a biome without them.
While I knew where to search, it would be nice if the tutorial outright stated to seek out lakes with soil around them.
I was killed by wolves, and then they guarded my corpse, which ended my play session. My starting location was awful (granite and gravel), so it made more sense to outright make a new world than to struggle on and re-make all my tools. I'm unsure if there is a solution here other than cheating, but being faced with either re-starting with a fresh world, or doing it all over again in the same world except the countdown to the next temporal storm is now closer (and it's nighttime) made the potentially un-fun choice of starting a new world the natural one, when it could have perhaps been more fun to live with my mistakes.
To quote: "GOT KILLED BY THE SAME WOLVES! I guess my loot is lost, and with that, any attachment to that world. I don't want to start all over again from zero in a [bad] spawn like that AT NIGHT, [away with] that."
Misc Thoughts
"Are drifters supposed to be animals? They seem to be according to the hostility stuff."
Perhaps they should be separated?
"I think this game has mechanical power, I found a waterfall. Can I make a water wheel?"
No. Which makes sense since it would be easy to cheat, but damn.
"As a cave man, I went to put my fire in a cave to protect it from the rain. BAD IDEA!"
This one is pointless, but I thought it would be funny to share.
"I RESPAWNED AT NIGHT. AHH, HOW DO I SEE NOW? Wait, I have a... holy light? To protect me? Thanks jesus!?"
Being bioluminescent is an admittedly crude but welcome solution to spawning in the pitch dark of night.
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I lied when I said they were sorted in order of usefulness. I placed positive feedback (which offers a direction to develop in, but is otherwise much less valuable than negative feedback) above negative feedback to avoid this post feeling like I'm punching down on a game that I actually like.
Right now, I'm about to start my second play session, I'll update this post with thoughts from it too (while denominating them as second play session comments).
I hope this is of some marginal use to the developers. Wolves aside, I'm really enjoying myself so far.
Kind regards,
Hugo Cortell
