Current problems with the game

[nianeyna]

I like this game a lot and left a good review some time ago but there are some issues that I think need to be addressed before 1.0

1.

PERFORMANCE

Look, I'm a programmer, and I KNOW how hard it is to deal with performance issues. It sucks. But for the love of god. This is just painful!

The recent "black screen" fix was very much appreciated, and finally made the game playable on my steam deck. However... problems remain. Frankly, I don't play this game as much as I would like purely because sometimes, randomly, it will cause my entire computer to lock up in a way that is unrecoverable from without a *hard reset of the system using the power button*. That is... insane. I know Linux isn't officially supported but... come on, man. Losing save progress is one thing, but having to dead-stop my whole computer???

Also, as I mentioned I haven't been able to play on my steam deck for long, but the small amount I've been able to play has revealed some serious issues with the controller controls. For example, some slots in the inventory are intermittently inaccessible via controller. That's pretty bad.

2. Jumping

Guys... please either improve jumping, or stop adding jumping puzzles to the game. Jumping in this game is just... it's clumsy, it's imprecise, it's overall a terrible experience. Surely we have better jumping technology available in this day and age. Please make it better, I beg you.

3. Railroading

Actually, this has gotten a lot better in recent updates, so kudos for that. But I think there's still an issue. At any stage of the game I should feel free to roam around, exploring the world and expanding my airship at leisure. Currently... I feel very constrained to do the main quest as quickly as possible. I worry that by going to extraneous locations I'll go backward in progression rather than forward. This feels stressful and overall not good.

4. Sparseness

This isn't as big of a deal as the rest of the issues I've listed. It's ok. But, I think the world could use some more life and variety. It's a bit dim and samey at the moment.

That's all I've got. I really think this game has a lot of potential and I'm rooting for you guys. But, it's not quite ready for prime time yet, I think. To the devs, please take your time and make sure your 1.0 product is the best it can be. I'd rather wait longer for a full release than have an incomplete, buggy game to recommend to my friends.

[Phoenix Cat]

Ok first off, if you are having this much of an issue have you made an official bug report?
You are correct it does not show Linux support nor Steam Deck support. So your first complaint is moot. Controller issues? Have you tried to adjust the key bindings? I Have no issues with the jumping. If you know how and when to run, there are no issues. Next...They have made it to where you have to explore more to get BP's. Next, they are adding stuff to the game all the time. More things are in the works. Lastly the game is not coming out until sometime in 2025. If you had kept up on news of the game or bothered to check Discord you would know what is going on. The Devs are very responsive to issues and bugs when reported. But since your's are not bugs but opinions and moot points that are not currently supported I can see why you have not made a bug report. As a Programmer yourself you should understand all this. Not the opposite. If you would like Steam Deck Support and or Linux Support. You can always check the suggestion page and upvote if already there or suggest it and let the community vote on it. That way they can see that there is interest in this. Buggy mess it is not. Those that pop up are usually fixed pretty quickly. They are one of the few Devs that list out what they know of as still wrong with the game on the updates information. Cheers. This is IMO of the game.

[nianeyna]

Yes, these are my opinions. Well spotted.

[Arkhne]

The inventory slot issue is actually because of interference from the mouse cursor, which is hidden, but not prevented from interaction, during controller use. It's got nothing to do with bindings or anything, and nothing the player can do changes this behind the scenes interaction. It wont help on Steam deck, but on computer, you can move the mouse to a different area of the screen to help prevent this issue, but it's still something that should be fixed.

I actually have had almost zero issues (beyond insanely bad peformance) running the game on Linux, and am always surprised when people are reporting bigger issues running this game in Linux. Some games just seem to not like Linux one bit, but this one always seemed to do pretty well for me, so it never even occurred to me that there would be issues.

I wholeheartedly agree with the jumping being terrible.

I'm surprised that you find the game less railroading now than before, I feel like it's gotten much worse. I *should* feel free to explore at my leisure whenever I want, but instead I feel like I have to play The One True Path, all the time, without deviation. It feels so bad right now, that I feel like I'm strapped in a corridor. FF13 felt less linear.

As to the world being empty and lifeless, it never felt that way to me, but then, I'm happy to not have NPCs everywhere. Some games just work well feeling alone in the world. The theme of this game makes feeling alone in the world feel natural, so it never bothered me. I can, however, see this being a problem for others. I'm not a social animal IRL, so I never felt the compulsion to always be around people there, but encountered it enough to understand some people need that, so it's not strange to me that some people need that in games, too. Given that most living things in this world seem more or less hostile to the PC, I'm quite happy not having everywhere be a heart-pouding sprint for survival.

[nianeyna]

That's actually a really helpful tip about the mouse cursor, thanks! Since steam deck lets you rebind things it's possible I can just add "mouse" to one of the trackpads and fix it that way. I'm going to give it a shot.

On the railroading... yeah, I would definitely say it's worse now than when I started playing, it's just better now than it was a couple months ago. There was a period of time where I was literally afraid to explore because if you landed somewhere and couldn't get ALL of the scannables on that single trip, well, good luck, because you'll never find that location again. Which was a big problem because a lot of the places you would discover had something locked behind the knife or the extractor etc. So you were screwed. In the new update I feel like that happens less... maybe I've just been lucky.

By empty I meant more that there isn't a lot of variety in the scenery, particularly interactable objects - like it's the same 5 lockers everywhere - not that I think there should be npcs or enemies everywhere, haha. god no, we're in agreement on that I think.

[Philtre]

Originally posted by nianeyna:

On the railroading... yeah, I would definitely say it's worse now than when I started playing, it's just better now than it was a couple months ago. There was a period of time where I was literally afraid to explore because if you landed somewhere and couldn't get ALL of the scannables on that single trip, well, good luck, because you'll never find that location again.

I have been playing since the demo-only days, and this was never true. If you missed a blueprint, you have *always* been able to go find another instance of the same tower type to get it, you just need to fly far enough to spawn one in. Most resources are shared across towers in a category (radio towers, wind farms, etc.), so if you couldn't find a thing or you forgot to pick it up, you don't even need to find the same type of tower, just one in the same category. The current bugs with the regular vs filtering auto-extractor and the raincatcher are the only ones I can recall that made it actually impossible to get a blueprint (and the auto-extractor one seems to be fixed).

[nianeyna]

Do you want a gold star for being good at finding things?

[Philtre]

Originally posted by nianeyna:

Do you want a gold star for being good at finding things?

No? But your comment made it sound like it the game made it actually impossible to find a blueprint item again if you did not scan it on the first encounter, which is not the case. "Railroading" implies that you are *forced* to do things in a certain order, not just that it is more convenient to do them in the intended order.