Disappointed with game direction

Heya. I haven't posted in a while, but I just logged in to take a stroll around all the updates. When it came out in Alpha I immediately installed it and tried it. I pushed through the myriad of bugs and what not, often laughing at little glitches and bemusing at units not being able to get off the construction platform.

But now we're in Beta. I redownloaded it and gave it a spin. It's the same thing with bugs fixed.

This post is going to sound negative but please see it as critical. I played TA for years, much like many of you probably here, so I hope I can find some camaraderie or maybe some insight from you guys.


I don't like the style of the graphics

This is more personal opinion than anything but something I was extremely wowed by back in TA were the graphics. We're talking about a 640x480 game looking so gorgeous your eyes popped out of your head. This game looks like it was thrown together in a matter of a few hours with some basic shaders and minimal texturing. The texturing in TA made the units and it most certainly defined the landscape. Painted desert with the old dig sites looked alive. Lush areas were brought to life with towering ferns and bushes. Rocks were mottled and organic. Texturing gave TA attitude and it made the map come to life. The minimalist color flags on TA units were apparent yet not overwhelming. In this game the units are solid colors of your flag and they don't have a techy look to them because of it.


Planet always spinning round, round, round

While the shadows add some depth to the game, seeing them spin in a dizzying array of ground rocks and building shadows causes visual distraction. Further the sun (while nicely textured) is so large on the maps I have tried that when you zoom out it detracts from the planet you're currently on. The satellites are also pretty quick, or static. Something I've not liked is accidentally clicking on satellites while issuing commands, that's frustrating.


Where is the UI?

This may sound nit-picky, but I always hated the SupCom interface. It was minimalist and I don't felt it offered me enough information.

Somehow PA has managed to make SupCom's interface look like it had a full suite of information.

When you selected units I am not sure I needed the information it then threw at me. Honestly if I'm going to create units I'd like to see a more responsive UI. In TA we were greeted with buttons that reacted to clicks (they were just like 3-4 graphics with different shadings on them depending on how the button was pressed) but in this game we get some chirpy noise and a briefer-than-brief flash. Plus the noise could sound more like a button than a squawk. It's annoying and I don't like it. Also the lack of information in general on the screen is real disheartening. There are no nicely laid out HUD lines and I am looking all over the place for information rather than at one location. In TA you had units and enemy units in the bottom box area. It'd tell you what you have selected, what it was doing, what it was producing/using and if it was targeting anything its target's information. PA has none of that. You click something and it just puts a giant ugly square around it. If you hold shift you can see what it's doing but you don't get a detailed list of what the unit is doing. Also the Energy/Metal display is hard to read. Because of how transparent the UI is in general it's difficult to take a glance at my +/- and figure out what's up. I have to actually look at it for about a solid second. Make those numbers bigger. The production net is neat but I feel the +/- is equally - if not more - important.

Something else I don't like is how we get color info boxes to the right but factories and units in the build area are greyscale with the exception fo construction units. That's not something I'm a fan of.

And to complicate things more...


Where is the map?

So I heard this was an RTS. More often than not we have maps to tell us where things are. If you zoom in to do something with your units it destroys your immediate awareness. The one thing I do actually like is the return of unit icons from SupCom, this was a good addition to PA. If I zoom out far enough there are indicators of what units are where, so that's great! But we don't have a map for general information. This I believe is a design flaw because of how the maps are generated -- planets are round and very small. Honestly this seems extremely cartoony and unrealistic. I *LIKE* the land but the planets are just so round it's annoying. I don't like the style.


One faction?

I loved Core. Everyone hated it but I loved it and I loved the fact that everyone hated it. Nothing felt better than a swarm of Levelers one-shotting Solars and Mex and completely laying waste to Defender farms. But PA? No variety. I backed for $150 and I don't have the option to pick a race/faction? Come on guys. This is cutting to the heart of what makes a great TA-style RTS. SupCom made a FEW races and the neat thing about that was each race had strengths and weaknesses and for the most part they were balanced. They suited different playstyles. I'd really like to see that come, but I'm sure this has been beaten to a dead horse already.


Aircraft feel clunky, vehicles bump each other around

Vtol in this game act weird. They sort of float around and bob and weave in place. In TA/SupCom they were a bit less 'fluid' and acted exactly the way you wanted. Click to fly them somewhere, they go and then they stop right there. In this game it's possible for you to overshoot an area with a vtol because for some insane reason the coding says "let's make aircraft LOOK nice instead of act like we want them to!" Dude. No. I want aircraft to expedite to their location then STOP and land. Also it'd be nice to see a stay-in-place air command so an aircraft can still offer air intelligence in place if it wants to without having to set a patrol in the same place.

Further, when aircraft go in for an attack they just die. It's hard to tell what's actually shooting them and there's no romance to the fights. You fly an aircraft or a fleet of aircraft over an enemy base and instead of seeing a flurry of missiles, flak and lasers you just see this bloom of explosions EVERYWHERE. Every single weapon looks the same and I can't discern what's actually going on. The swirling missiles make things even worse. It's visually noisy and intuitive. Also everything sounds the same in air fights. Remember Hurricanes? Those were some distinctive aircraft. You'd be babysitting something in your base then you'd hear this shrill scream of light laser fire from the incoming Adv Bombers and a second or two later you'd hear the deployment of all the bombs which was followed by the loud crunch of whatever the bombs were smashing to pieces. This game DOESN'T HAVE ANY OF THAT. They go in they drop their bombs and everything just turns red. It's so... flat. They also don't fan out in their attack runs which makes things real bad -- one unit gets attacked and they all seem to just poof.

Vehicles are another thing. I don't like how they bump into each other like they're on free wheels or something. They don't have mass and they don't feel like they can actually block areas. Just doesn't feel right.


Unit and factory placement is yucky

I don't like the thick anti-aliased outlines of buildings. Looks kinda gross. When they're building it looks nice but seeing this yucky wireframe just has me :S. Either go for a transparent image or do it how TA did it and just have boxes on the ground. That, by the way, would help with placement. I note that the bounding box and the actual area taken up in this game differ, unlike in TA where the bounding box and the area taken up was the same. Units here plop down well anywhere but I still like making little farm areas of things. Just a personal preference, anyway.


Explosions are more smoke than fire

Come on guys, let's see the vivaciousness of those explosions and then see some smoke effects linger. Right now it's .5 second of explosion and 6 seconds of smoke. I'd love to see 2 seconds of explosion, 3-4 seconds of smoke.


I miss the rips and roars of the explosions and effects

TA had dozens of sounds for every class of unit.

PA has like three.

Fights sounded intense and deep in TA. Fights in PA sound flat and uninteresting.


Navigating the map is a pain when it should be easy

I hate using the arrow keys to rotate the map. If there's a setting for this I missed it, but I don't like having my hand span the entire keyboard to move around the map. This is made worse by a lack of map and inability to click to get somewhere fast. I know everyone has to deal with it but imagine a serious fight taking place and I have to micro something in my base. No hotkeys and no map. No fun.


Man there are so many more things but this is just a basic list of gripes and complaints. I want to see PA become something I want to love but right now it's a visual mess. I'd like to see it cleaner and easier to follow. I am sorry if I offend you guys with this but I played TA forever, built lots of maps and units and it was like I had a relationship with that game. I feel real strongly about this, being the first thing I wanted to back because I was so excited about it and now I'm so disappointed with it.

The polish that was TA is missing from PA. From something as aesthetic as unit info boxes (the old F1) to something as functional as a static map there are many things missing from the TA genre.

Thanks for your time.

The graphics have to be this way, with the amount of stuff that Uber have planned, they can't afford to waste computer resources on 'swaying trees' and 'realistic oceans!'

The game would grind to a halt.

But this is 2013, not 2008. I want progress and advances in detail, not regression!

The first thing I'm going to say is beta. Much of what you're saying is in effect because the game is still not complete.

The second thing I'm going to say is search. Much of what you're saying has been talked about already on the forums.

The style of the graphics is very much a personal thing. Uber is striving to make the graphics as similar to the kickstarter as possible. Some other people have said they don't like the graphics. Some people have said they love the graphics. It's a personal preference and Uber can't please everyone. Also. Uber is going for more simplistic graphics for resource reasons, in addition to style. If the graphics were photo realistic, the game would be confined to a single square – instead of multi planet action across an entire universe with astroid belts and smashing planets and everything. Uber also still hasn't fully finished the graphics. They will be improving them drastically as time goes on.

Yes. Planets are always spinning. Because we're playing on a sphere that orbits around the sun. Unlike other games that are static, square, and flat. Do you have any other ideas for having a spherical map on a multi planet system?

Some nice feedback on the UI. Again – beta. I do know they have some plans to improve some of the things you suggested. Some I don't know about.

Planets are so round it's annoying? Are you suggesting a cube planet? Or are you suggesting a flat square map with boundaries? The whole point of Planetary Annihilation is that we're playing on multiple planets across a solar system. Playing on a sphere is much more challenging than playing on a square with boundaries. Planetary Annihilation is played on a sphere. That's the whole point of the game.

Yes. One faction. This has been discussed many times and was even discussed before the game was funded. Uber's philosophy is that in competitive play, players always find what the best faction is and stick to it. So while there may be three factions, most everyone sticks to one faction anyways. So why build multiple factions that are weaker than others when everyone would use the same one anyways? Another reason being cost. Making multiple faction and properly balancing all of them takes lots of time and money – which Uber is limited on because this is a kickstarted game.

Pathing is an ongoing issue that Uber is improving with nearly every patch. Beta my friend. Beta. Things like vehicles bumping into each other will be improved with time.

As you stated and as I mentioned earlier. Personal preference. Some people like the way factories are built – some don't. Can't please everyone.

Explosions are still being worked on. It's beta, and there are still many improvements to be made.

Right now most of the sounds are placeholders. They will be adding more sounds into the game. But since we're still in beta, they're working harder on adding more units, bug fixes, and overall functionality rather than more superficial things like sounds. The same also goes for projectiles. There's only... four? projectiles in the game if I remember correctly. They will be adding more as time goes on, but again, Beta.

For navigating, if you click the middle mouse button and drag, you can navigate that way. I believe you can navigate by moving your mouse to the edge of the screen when you're in fullscreen mode as well. You can also change they keyboard navigations in the settings if you so choose.

Hope that answered all of your questions.

It's hardly regression, they are just sacrificing graphics for gameplay. Too many games have fantastic graphics, but lack gameplay.

It's also not really regression, but a style.

Just like Team Fortress 2 graphics aren't "bad" – they're just a certain style.

PA's graphics are how they are because they are a certain style.

Having looked up screenshots of TA, I'm about 80% sure you're just trolling here, but I just want to point out that you can't always advance graphics while advancing gameplay.

There is a limit whereby you have to sacrifice one for the other. In a game as scalable as PA, graphical detail is sacrificed for game scale.

The good thing is the game can be modded, which means as gaming PCs and servers increase in performance capabilities, shoving in more detailed models and textures is perfectly doable.

Oh. As for your UI suggestions.

You may want to check out this thread: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/unofficial-official-gui-discussion-thread.52055/

Of course, but if they tried to go into massive detail, leaves blowing in the wind etc.. they would cripple themselves.

Just going to reiterate much of what Brian has said and hopefully lay your fears to rest by saying this is beta. Yes! This means much of the final game isn't in there. It is a very early beta, and in many games would likely be considered an alpha build, if it was released at all.
Your complaints about explosive effects, sound effects, limited projectile graphics, pathfinding, unit movement and the lack of a UI are all things that will be hugely improved upon by the time of release, they're just not Uber's priorities right now (although I think they said UI improvements would be coming soon in a recent livestream?).

As for your other complaints, many are due to the ambitious scale of the project and the small funds they have to implement it with. They originally said they'd make this game for $900,000. By necessity, the graphics style was simplistic and they've stuck with that, even as they've got more funding. The same goes for the single faction: they always said they'd rather have a unit pool of 200 for one faction than four unit pools of 50, and I agree that it's the best choice they could have made, especially seeing as they've recently announced there will be 'lore factions'.

In terms of your complaints about map navigation, I haven't found it a problem. If you check the settings there are many different options available to you: edge scroll, pole lock, arrow buttons, middle mouse button, both for scrolling and click-dragging. You can also set fixed camera points and then recall them with a hotkey (I don't use it though so can't remember the hotkey). Personally, I do all my navigation with the scroll wheel and after a few hours play had adapted completely to multi-planetary combat.

Your complaints about rotating planets I can't assuage, but that's because it's a key part of the gameplay. Spherical, orbiting maps make the game more dynamic, more varied and more complicated. Don't let your nostalgia influence you too much

I hope the game becomes more to your liking as it progresses, I think over the next month or two many of your complaints will disappear and you'll find PA a worthy successor to TA.

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I think the issue is not that it is impossible to do a PA with Crysis 3 like graphics. It's more that the work that you would have to put into it to make it actually work would probably cost dozens of millions of Dollars. Uber has to set priorities and it's clear that gameplay is more important than shiny graphics.

Blatant troll thread. Nobody would back PA for $150 not knowing that the planets were going to be spherical. Either that or this guy thinks that the planets were always going to be spherical, and wants them to be "less round" somehow.

I think he just wants the spheres to be bigger and worded it poorly?
Sounded to me like he didn't want the curvature of the surface to affect gameplay too much.

There's a lot of nostalgia influencing my post yeah, and to reply to some points all at once I am happy there's a modding community here. I'd really like to see some stuff come from this.

As to why I probably feel nostalgic it's because I see PA as a direct sequel to TA/SC/FA. This is coming from pretty much the same roots so I have been expecting to see something extremely similar.

As to the roundness of planets this isn't a troll post. It's just not anything conventional in the TA world.

That's because the game is not TA. It is a different game, with a much more varied and dynamic stage. If you want to play TA, then by all means do, it is an excellent game, but it is not the same as PA.
Even in this beta stage, I am already enjoying this game far more than I ever enjoyed SC/FA, it is closer to TA than either of those already in my opinion.

Fun Fact: The sound effects are from Monday Night Combat and Super MNC. So they are defiantly placeholders and so is the music.

Okay, I'll bite.

• The style of the graphics is designed to reduce the burden that rendering each unit places on computers. As has already been answered above, this game is meant to scale massively. Having units as detailed as SupCom on this scale would cripple all but the most expensive and powerful machines.
  Also, there is still a lot of work still to do on the rendering pipeline, which will improve the look of things without affecting performance too much.
• Planets orbit things. This is in fact a crucial component of gameplay, as it heavily influences orbital gameplay. If the moving shadows are distracting, they can be disabled. PA has always been sold, since the concept video, as being played on orbiting planets. You presumably made your pledge after having watched the pitch video - I don't feel you have grounds to complain on that front. On orbital units, the UI and control procedures are far from complete. Don't forget we are still in early Beta here. We still have several months before release.
• The UI is personal preference. The overwhelming majority of opinion, at least on this forum, is that the more simple the UI, the better, as it allows you to focus on the actual game better. Of course UI mods will be plentiful after release and you will be able to download and run one which you find easier to use. They will probably be readily available within the PA launcher itself.
• Mapping is a tricky one, because of the difficulty of projecting a spherical object onto a 2-dimensional display. You may find this an interesting read. There's also a relevant XKCD.
• We are limited to a single faction due to the relatively tiny budget this game is being made on. There will be mods with additional factions. I know of several people who are actively working on designing and making unit sets as we speak. This has been discussed at great length on these forums over the last few months.
• Aircraft are still WIP. Again, early Beta. The flight mechanics, the balance, everything.
• You also touched on pathing issues. This is in active development at the moment and is something uber are working hard on.
• The above two points apply to unit and factory placement too.
• And explosions
• And sounds
• There are hotkeys - see here

Honestly, this whole thing reads as though you're expecting a finished game, when in reality we are months away from something that even resembles a finished product. This is a real Beta. There are patches being released daily - this is a living, breathing project. We are privileged to be invited to watch it unfold, expand and improve.

I didn't write this post to criticise you - the tone in which you wrote it was not aggressive or demanding, you were stating your opinion. I'm not saying that your opinion is wrong, but I don't think you have taken into consideration exactly what stage this game is at. It's buggy, it's broken in places, it's missing bits. We know that and Uber know that. I simply suggest that you don't allow yourself to be disappointed just yet. There's much more to come yet.

TL;DR - Read it, I spent a lot of time typing it. Don't be so lazy.

EDIT: and in fact I spent so long doing so I've been pipped to the post by quite some margin. Bugger.

I highly doubt that. Dont base that on the current game, its a beta lacking most optimizations. Games like FA look a lot more detailed and better overall, hardware advanced a huge lot and there is certainly much more to come in terms of performance. As long as an Uber-low option for low end systems exists, no harm done in upping the bar for higher end machines.
Better looks mean more manhours have to go in there. That directly translates to cost.

The real sad thing is that, to me at least, TA really felt quite a bit better, and looked so too. I cant even exactly explain why. Maybe it was because everything just fit together better. The environment and its details, the scale of buildings and units, the soundscape,.. just a lot of things were right on.

Dont understand the problem with that. Highest settings should IMHO be for the top 1-2% of rigs out there. Id already be happy if PA wouldnt cripple my machine to 1/2 or even 1/4 of its power.

Dont use TF2 as an example of something positive. It stands for everything I hope PA will not become.

Give a huge planet that has less noticeable curvature a try. The very small size 2 planets need some time to get used to when coming from flat maps.

Why not let the users do the actual mapping on the sphere? Of course its much harder to do, user- and backend, than a flat "classical" map, but it would be a great loss if there was no chance of real custom made maps.

The unit variety, sounds, pathfinding,... will (hopefully) be close to perfected at release. But currently, its a beta. This isnt a finished game, dont expect too much out of it. Its a grand concept and after a long time the first title that truly has the chance to become a real successor to TA.