Hi, As I just got early access, I thought I would pass on my first impressions from someone who's first experience was this build. I am probably going to hit a few well known low priority issues, just though as part of early access, you guys would be interested in feedback from a first timer as a litmus test to how it's all going. Login: Binding my account to Steam was quick & painless. Main Menu: The first Tutorial Video that is recommended to view said it was not available on youtube. No idea what this video was, only that I wasn't able to see it. Clicking on the tutorial link worked for me however, and the video started as expected. I watched a few videos linked from the main menu, a great idea for this game. Not having the playback controls accessible was a bit annoying, but I got over it. After watching a few videos I found that I could not click on the menu items to the left. No mouse over animation on the buttons, Alt-tabbed to kill the app, and was greeted with this Coherant UI Error. imgur.com/4XaIcPq (Sorry I can't link as a new user) The error not getting focus was a bit annoying as I was trapped in a broken app. I only manged to reproduce this error only since by clicking on an Youtube link and closing it rather quickly. Looked around a few menus, and the social & armoury windows have this weird square in the bottom right. I only mention it as i though it was to exit the page, as it looked the square that closes the youtube windows, that is until I saw the proper back button in the upper left. I know this is terribly insignificant, and if that the worst I cant find it says a lot for what does work well, but just not sure if its a bug or a design choice. Restarted, and skipped the youtube stuff, and went to get into the game. Starting Game: Went start to create game, to nervous to get into multiplayer for my first time. Not iced the use AI button, all good. However selecting my Race(?) it just felt a bit glitchy. It seemed like it would only change sometime when I would click. It also just didn't feel responsive, after playing with it I found that it was due to 2 issues. The race changes on mouse up, not mouse down, and if you mouse down on the race, move the mouse off, then mouse up, the next mouse click does not register. Horrible pedantic i know, but small things like that make me start to look for more bugs. I played a game, and was all good, honestly can't complain, I'm sure I could rant on about design choices, but it just worked, was intuitive, and I won a game on easy, then a game on normal. Post Game: Final 2 issues was that after the game, the states were all at 0 for units and units destroyed etc... obviously soemthing not done in the current satge of development, no big deal. The final issue,. and the one that bother me the most (even more than the UI crash) was loading the game browser after finishing the game. I kept getting game browser error, returning to main menu (or something to that effect). This was the most annoying issue as I didn't want to browse games, I wanted to create a new game vs AI. However because if internet connectivity issues (or whatever) I was locked out of a single player game. Obviously you can see how this is a bit infuriating, though obviously a work round to get the game browser working, and once that underlying issue is addressed it should be all good. I kept trying anyway, and after no more than 4 or 5 goes the game browser loaded & I got the ability to start a new game Anyways, if that the worst gaming experience (esp. for an early access game) I had this week you guys are still going a kickass job, hope you find me feedback useful.
Nice first post, new user experiences are fairly important I would say, especially when they are constructive such as yours. As for the commander selection (race), I noticed this too, and this appears to be where you don't own certain commanders in the armoury list. If you click to change your commander, and the next one in the list is one you don't own then nothing appears to happen, but it does at least advance the pointer in the background and you can keep clicking until you get to ones you do own. I expect this will be a trivial fix that will come in time.
Extra things i'll point out to you since your new to PA to help improve game if it's unresponsive in lobby or game.... Use a cabled connection to your modem if your using wifi. ping is essential in this game, on wifi i find the game very un-responsive but it has been improving greatly with development. The lobby has always been hard to select commander, i think in this new gamma release you can pre-select your commander in the armory (note, all commanders have the same units, there is no tailored unit sets per commander like starcraft and TA) I have a thread at the top of the gamma bug's and issue's section of the forum with tip's on improving game performance too if you wan't tip's.
As @puppeh said, thanks very much for this. It's well laid-out and informative. As the game inches closer to release, Uber will absolutely want to nail the first-time-user experience down and talk-throughs like this are exactly the sort of feedback they need
Hi Puppeh, you are right, same amount of unresponsive clicks after each commander. Looks like I was way over analyzing it, and agree, it's sure to be cleaned up once the more serious show stopping bugs are resolved. Greets Max, you make a good point. while I am on a wired connection, since I was not planning to play online, its very possible that I had my work VPN up, and god knows what other downloads occurring at the time, obviously conditions that a typical multi-player gamer would keep a closer eye on. No other performance issues yet, though only played vs 1 other AI so far. However, thanks for the heads up on the thread, I'll check it out should things start to get sluggish once I bring a few more enemies and planets into the mix.
Keep in mind that, for now, even games versus the AI take place on the Ubernet servers. So there is not actually a difference between online multi-player or single player against an AI. That is because the server side of PA hasn't been released yet. It is just easier for Uber like that right now because it helps with squashing bugs. Glad to hear that regardless of being on a work VPN and multiple downloads in the background, the actual game still went smooth for you.
