After playing MC to death over the last decade I was very excited to try this game, so me and my friends started a server and learned the game together. I thought I'd write a review based on our general experience and hope it generates some useful feedback and suggestions.
First Impressions:
-Minecraft gives a lot more guidance for new players, telling you to start punching trees and guiding you through making your first tools and shelter. The initial learning curve for the game is very steep and I can imagine some people just giving up from the lack of guidance or intuitive interface. I nearly wrote the game off after my first hour thinking the crafting system was far too obtuse. The game's guide was filled with vague information. So many items and processes lack any sort of detailed instructions on how to work with them or what they are for. So many more tooltips are needed, and existing descriptions need more practical details. The in-game guide is pretty useless really, we constantly had to check the wiki (which is only marginally better) and really had to watch lots of youtube videos to learn nearly every process in the game. There was always some big "ah ha!" moment when watching a youtube because the guide and wiki always skip over important details. They'll always say something like "just knap the stones" but never explain what knapping means or most important what combination of keys you must press to start the process.
-The game is gorgeous. I could max out visibility and graphics settings without any issue and the game always runs so smoothly. The great visuals and terrain that were always calling me to explore really kept us interested, which kept us from giving up on the game and putting in the effort to learn it despite the not so great new-player experience.
-The constant deaths are demoralizing. We spawned in what seemed like a pretty forest, but we were constantly being killed by wolves, respawning, and being killed again. We later learned this was just "bad luck" for spawning in a forest, but if forest spawns are such a death sentence why inflict that on new players as a first impression? I actually love when the early "hobo phase" of a game is tough, but I was hoping the difficulty would come from finding food and building shelter and generally surviving, not having to deal with constant swarms of wolves that seemed to re-spawn every few min. The whole "every place on the map with trees is filled with super dangerous wolves" mechanic isn't fun at all. Scary dangerous dire wolves? Sure, as a rare enemy perhaps in specific dark forest biomes, but not everywhere. We got a mob that makes wolves still dangerous, but generally more rare and life has become so much better.
-The warp storms or whatever are really cool, reminds me of the blowouts in Stalker. They last a little too long and after the first few it just becomes a boring chore to have to hide in a closet for a while, interrupting whatever you were doing. I'd love to see these storms be shorter, but more intense with more effects on the world. Perhaps have these storms be the only time new monsters re-spawn in caves and such?
-Terrain is really neat in the game, the more realistic climate zones are great. The lack of rivers or "continents" though does tend to produce fairly samey terrain though, and the default world settings also create biomes that are so huge you really have to walk for a solid real life hour to see truly different terrain. All these settings are changeable of course, but perhaps the default should be smaller so new players don't just think the game is endlessly temperate forests and lakes. In weeks of play I've yet to see a desert or a tropical area, I know they are down there but I just don't actually have the time in-game to get down there on the default map size settings.
-Lack of map sharing really killed cooperative exploration. A communal server map option would be very nice, or an in-game way for players to trade maps and share waypoints would be nice.
-Mob spawning isn't great. We've always hated how in minecraft mobs just kind of randomly spawn around in the dark, even right inside your base. What's the point of any sort of fortifications or village wall when monsters randomly spawn in your bedroom? I constantly get mobs spawning right behind me while clearing out a cave, sometimes even spawning faster than I can kill them. Maybe some people like this sort of gameplay, but I'd love a system where you never really see monsters spawning in. If you discover a cave, you should be able to "clear" the cave out and it will stay clear for days, perhaps until the next temporal storm. Situations where mobs just keep spawning in every direction ~10m away just isn't fun.
-Food should not go bad in my inventory while I'm logged out! I don't know why anyone this this is a fair or good mechanic, but it would be very nice to be able to turn this off as an option. Not everyone has the free time to play the game continuously for hours, I quite often have to play in short bursts and it's really awful when you try to log back in to finish exploring that cave or finish that big exploration only to find all your food you packed has rotted away while you were offline. My character and its inventory should be frozen in amber while I'm offline.
-I love how minerals work in the game, it really encourages exploration because you can't just reliably get every single resource in the game by randomly digging down anywhere on the map. If anything, I'd run with this. Make deposits even more rare, but bigger. Make it so deposits can be so huge, players actually are encouraged to set up a little local mine-base since they'll be coming back there for weeks. Some upgrades to prospecting would be nice though too, there's some real bottleneck resources that can't even be prospected and can force players to run around for hours or even days to find them to progress. RNG situations like that can really kill the fun. Some players will find a bottleneck resource right away, others will waste hours desperately searching. Would love to see some other items to aid prospecting, perhaps some sort of more short ranged detector that can tell you there's a deposit within 10m of you.
-Clothing! There's a whole character page with so many slots, but so few options to fill them with. What a perfect system for all sorts of useful and cosmetic clothing options to further customize our characters, just need the content to fill them with. Let us craft all sorts of stuff, and right from the start.
-The water physics are... bad. They somehow manage to be even worse than minecraft's horrible water. I'd love to see something closer to Dwarf Fortress's water system with actual flows and movement of water rather than the whole silly minecraft "source block" system where a single block of water and produce unlimited liquid. I understand on a huge open world this could be quite the performance challenge, but a better system would be so worth it.
-After you get out of the hobo-phase and have a nice little village with a food supply going, the game starts to really lose steam and direction. We all have iron tools, we're working on getting to steel, but there's no sense of a big goal to achieve or challenge to overcome. The game could really provide a bit more of a sense of progression in terms of challenges in the world. Difficult dungeons you really need good gear to overcome, rare sites that are hard to stumble upon but easier to find with later-game tools, perhaps even entire areas of the map that are soft-locked until players can craft special protective items or tools. Perhaps some regions of the map have special sort of temporal instability and are too dangerous to really enter, until you've crafted a special item that reduces temporal effects, stuff like that.
-I'd love a goal of being able to attract NPC survivors and merchants to our village, something like the minecraft villager system but better would be so nice to create a sense of life and activity. I just love taking care of villagers, building them pretty houses, watching them grow.
The game is off to such a great start and even has a great modding community already. Our server already has about a dozen mods, which is nice, but also a bit of a red-flag. The vanilla game shouldn't need 8 little interface tweak and quality of life mods, if tons of people are using a quality of life mod then perhaps that should be part of the vanilla game? If tons of people are resorting to mods to re-balance enemies or spawn rates, perhaps the default system needs another pass?
