BETA First Impressions

I just downloaded the BETA and played my first match. I'm a backer but I never followed the live streams or watched the alpha. So this was really my first contact with this game after seeing the initial trailer.

I must say I'm quite disappointed. These are my impressions:

- Overall, the game feels unresponsive and laggy, its not always clear if an action took place or not sometimes.
- VFX, explosions, and particles effects look very very bad. Looks like they were made in Unity in a couple of hours by a beginner artist. And Im not complaining about the cartoon look, its a matter of quality.
- I only tried the metal planet, and the unit navigation was clearly *broken* units got stuck all the time and moved in circles or not at all, and ruined the overall game experience.

Being a programmer myself, Im ok with the crashes, bugs and performance issues because its BETA. What Im really worried about is how the game feels at this point, which is the whole point of doing the public beta. Im new to the forum so I dont know how many times some of these issues were discussed, but I just wanted to give my first impression.

What are your graphical settings and specs? I suspect that the issue is with the pc.

stop replying like this. The game has some performance issues, it's not a pc issue.

I have some serious lag problems too, even while browsing the menu of the game. When I type the password the chars * appears after some milliseconds, just to name one.

Currently, I don't care about this performance issue because I think they will get fixed. What I am more disappointed is the graphic of the game. The kickstarter trailer graphic was very different. I hope they will fix this too.

Pathfinding gets regular updates, and the problems specific to metal planets are known.

I'm fine with the environment graphics for the most part. Uber is still tuning those constantly so what few issues with those should be fixed by release.

The one that is concerning me right now is the explosions. Frankly, they are pretty lame. I want FIRE, lots and lots of FIRE, bright flashes, obvious destruction and awesomeness.

Right now it looks like a bunch of units tossing firecrackers around.

I'm taking hope in that if they don't fix this at least a modder will.

I'll be totally ok with this if the game were in the alpha stage. But to me beta means feature-complete, and from now on it should be bugfixing and optimizations. I feel most of what I dislike of the experience (not the game mechanics or game design) is not related to bugs.

I believe this game will start to look really good 6 months from now.

My first impression is that there's too much metal. Part of the challenge with previous games of this ilk is the relative scarcity of metal and the fight for strategic expansion. The sheer quantity of metal makes expansion unnecessary.

Second, extremely laggy and pixelated.

Third, when you bring your mouse to the side of the screen your view does not change. In order to change where I'm looking I zoomed out and then back into the point where I wanted to see.

Not sure if this is related to the lag, but the commander move speed is very slow.

Looks and feels (esp. in early game) VERY much like a TA clone. This is good, to a point, but I'd like to see some differentiation aside from the multiple planets aspect. Give me something new, sexy, and unique. That said, I think the game is going to be a lot of fun and can't wait to keep playing it.

I have set everything to "uber" quality.

My specs are : Core i5 3570k with nvidia GTX 670, 8GB Ram Windows 8.1 64 bits.

Metal is still being reworked for balance and such.

I'm pretty sure you can turn on screen edge panning.

and arrow keys also work (this is what I use)

I've noticed this too. Its not as sharp as I would say , SC2 units are in response. I would like an improvement in this at least a little bit.

So what is the maximum quality the game should be trying to achieve in a cartoon look? [a Picture or trailer of what you expect the effects to look like would help]

metal planets are littered with awkward chokepoints with sharp corners that make it hard for units to move around. I'll agree on your point for that.

Valid concern, most people with first impressions (other then you ) have voiced this same one.. How do you think they can improve the "Feel". Its hard for me to answer in my terms since i've been in beta longer. [since Sept]

Game performance is being worked on, many things are being changed to improve performance such as unit model instancing and other things.
The shaders and game engine are being rewritten constantly to work with as many video cards as possible, when thats finished more improvements on performance will come too.
Graphical Polishing (things like extra effects and better explosions) is a last/final priority in game development, making the game and bug fixing is the first priority, then polishing up the graphic's and stuff and extra graphical content is done last just before release.
Unit pathing has been constantly worked on, each planet type seems to need different pathing work as each is generated quite differently.
The kind of planets and how much water will affect performance too, at the moment planets with water level at 0 eat up soo much ram they make the game a little unresponsive on some systems.

i have a stickied thread in the beta forum about improving perfomance if you want to reveiw that, im also working on Performance boost mod to remove all post-processing. (i know your not worried about performance but some of the advice i give there does help improve the overall quality of gameplay)

Hopefully that helps clear thigs up for you

Beta doesn't mean feature complete!
What gives you that idea?
Beta means "In Development!"

OK
Alpha = First pass development
Beta = Bug fixing and feature implementation

I think it's better to say "Beta doesn't ONLY mean feature complete!"

Mike

People are really complaining about the graphics not looking similar to the prerendered gameplay visualization in the kickstarter trailer? I think the game looks really good as it is now, very close to the original vision, especially in free cam mode where it really shines.

Yeah, it's surprise to many how of a difference a simple change in camera angle can make. The Free-cam is has a surprising amount of flexibility;


Mike

I work in the game industry too. Beta means feature complete.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta

"Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. It generally begins when the software is feature complete"

wow, Kabam kept dragons of Atlantis in beta for 2 years,
and almost every week or fortnight they added new features,
so it obviosly only means what the developers want it to mean, not the meaning we decide to give to it

I think that may be your problem. Turn the graphics down.

It generally begins

I'm a software engineer myself and for us beta means at least core feature complete. If there is the slightest chance that you will change your software's core features in any way it's alpha and not beta. The gaming industry however doesn't like that concept, cos it doesn't allow them to have long buy in beta periods.

However, I think PA is core feature complete and therefor a real beta. Basically just units, gas giants and the Galactic War metagame are missing. The core features are all in even thou some are not optimized and have some issues.