So, after playing a couple rounds with lots of people I’ve found a few issues that I want to address in a patch.
#Tail whip sucks
When the dragon whips the knights, currently it only pushes them back and they can easily continue to press the button without much effort.
My fix for this issue is to implement stunning for Knights. On top of being pushed back, the Knight (or Knights) whipped will be stunned for 2-3 seconds. While stunned, they cannot press the button.
The challenge with this feature fix would be to display to the Knight that they are stunned in a simple way. One way could be changing the crosshair or putting “stunned” text like the Dragon has when he get stunned by Birb.
The stunning will give those few seconds for the Dragon to get away from the Knights, thus making tail whip actually useful.
#Biting is good, but not perfect
This is an issue with the bite radius and I believe that adjusting and fine tuning it will solve this weird behavior.
#Not everyone can be Dragon
We currently randomize who gets Dragon and since it’s completely random, it could pick a player 3 times during the match and ignore other players completely. A fix could be to pick a player who has not played the Dragon until every player has played the Dragon at least one time - then select random players after that.
#Ragdolls are cool
Persistent ragdolls should definitely be a feature. If the Knight ragdolls stay for the entire round, the Dragon (and Ghosts) and see the devastation first hand.
#Feedback please!
I’m really interested in getting feedback during this beta, so please let me know how you feel about controls and balancing!
Biting has been the number one issue for me so far as it’s just usually so unfair that it guarantees the dragons death if people surround it.
I’d like to not have it be seen as “16 players is just too much” because UCH originally had servers with 32 slots and it managed fine, the dragon is just way too weak.
One VERY annoying thing is people pressing the button when they are underneath you, it’s happened to me a few times and I’ve seen it countless times.
Not sure if this one is possible to be fixed but I’ve noticed knights clip into the dragon an awful lot so it creates confusion on how big the dragons hitbox really is.
A minor complaint too is that ghosts bob up and down way too much and makes it rather difficult to control.
To add on to how adding ragdolls could show the devestation, the Dragon should also be able to bite up and smash furniture when ran over, and should leave peices all over the ground for even better effect.
I’ve encountered almost all the issues listed in Prodigalist’s post. From the button being pressed when knights being below you to the dragon’s bite range.
I have also ran into some more issues like jumping onto the dragon’s button not (ever) killing the dragon. Whenever the dragon bites players, it almost seems as if players being locked in place is random. Of course it’s not, although it just doesn’t seem reliable to me.
When you bite someone its supposed to lock them in place since you killed them but half the time it seems like they can run through the bite or just not get affected by it
The speed at which the knights run at while in scare mode seems a bit unfair. You can’t really outrun the dragon like you could in UCH unless you do some crafty maneuvering. I could only manage to outrun the dragon in the map with the bridge because I was able to jump to safety before the dragon could react.
Played for a good while now (about an hour or two) and beyond what’s been already written on the topic which I think everyone agrees on, there are some extra opinions I have regarding some tweak here or there:
First off all, what @Arctiq has already said regarding being scared. For someone that’s technically scared, it’s feels more like you are stunned. If the goal is to make the crusaders disperse more, I would suggest increasing the scared movement speed, as well as the animation speed, which felt a bit slow compared to all the other animations.
I think there should be some kind of feedback when you can actually press the dragon’s button. While you could argue its strategic to know where exactly when to press the button, for people with some server lag it isn’t always obvious. For them, some small indication would be nice.
As much as I want to agree with @prodigalist regarding having 16 players on a game at once, it is a bit underwhelming for whoever is playing as the dragon at the moment. The only real time we felt it was really fair for the dragon was when playing with 6 players. I hope that, given the dragon a buff, the game becomes playable with more people.
This is more of a personal and some friends opinion, really but I feel 15 rounds might be a bit much for some players taste. I always felt coming from UCH, but when the game is actually somewhat balanced, the game can take a good chunk of time and become repetitive. I would personally lower it down to 10 rounds.
This might have been just for testing, but the intermission time was a bit to fast when compared to other game modes. Very few seconds to read the scoreboard.
I think these cover some personal opinions. I personally want to refrain from suggesting mechanics/concepts or repeating what other people have already said, so I think that covers it.
Regarding pluses, give a raise to @MrSunabouzu (I think people mentioned he was the one who did most the textures for UCH but kudos to everyone involved as well). The texture art style of the Game World looks amazing and really consistent. The music is also great and I have to highlight that doing a Public Beta was a great move before getting the game world in (and allowing people to test something new without having to wait for the new engine version).
As more of a foot-note suggestion, and given the more of a unique look to the main menu of the public beta, I would really like to see the Game World menus changing background and music when you click on them on the main game. I think Mac mentioned he wanted to do this a while before the early access version but was never able to get around doing it. It’s really just a neat touch I would like to see.
Andy designed and created the characters. Lifeless and Matt did a lot of texture work for the majority of the maps as well. It was not just MrSunabouzu, is my point here. All our artists worked hard on the textures.
