Quick Demo Review

[docmars]

Overall impressions

I don't think I've seen a first-person fantasy game with a map that feels this large in scale. There's something really special about the environments feeling so humongous. You really have something going here. There's a lot of opportunities to hide secrets, carve out hidden caves, and really draw players into to explore -- a lot like Skyrim and Tears of the Kingdom do with their geography.

Other thoughts

Bear with me here, I'm going to nit-pick a lot, but I really do think you have something with amazing potential here.

1. Visuals are pretty, use of Nanite for texturing surfaces looks amazing.
   
2. Music feels somewhat appropriate. It's good, but doesn't leave a huge impression. Something that goes along with the scale of the environments would do wonders!
   
3. Movement feels too slow overall, and the limited sprinting gets annoying really fast with environments this big.
   
4. HUD on the bow is an amazing idea, but glancing at it doesn't give me a good read on what's going on, especially when I'm in the middle of a fight. Being able to read it quickly is going to be really important for longer play sessions. It feels like I have to decipher it pretty carefully.
   
5. Hub area was pretty quick to pick up on. Ironically reminded me what VOIN is doing with theirs. You guys working together? ;)
   
6. Enemy movement on the uneven terrain looks a bit silly since their feet rarely ever connect with the ground, so oftentimes they appear to be floating. It may help to use a plugin that adjusts character skeletons/bones used for adapting to stairways and other geometry you see in a lot of other games.
   
7. Enemies were landing attacks on me when I don't think they should have. They would appear to be 6-10ft away from me, but harming me still. Getting head-butt by a ram dude this would happen often, so it always felt like I was never at a proper distance to stay safe. Sometimes they would land attacks while facing away from me. All somewhat immersion-breaking.
   
8. Arrow-shooting mechanics feel great!
   
9. Stabbing feels great!
   
10. Magic was confusing, I wasn't 100% sure what it was even doing
    
11. Using journal entries to describe game mechanics in more detail is a clever way of doing things, but if I hadn't stumbled on the right spot in the hub area, I probably wouldn't have seen this anywhere else, unless by accident.
    
12. Overall performance was okay on an RTX 4080. Even with frame-generation, things didn't feel quite right even at 70-90fps. Hard to explain.
    
13. The game's slow movement overall made the game feel like there was a high latency to it, despite using NVIDIA Reflex. The snappy camera movement and attacks don't really pair well with the slow movement.
    
14. Despite being on rough, uneven terrain, it feels like the character is sort of floating across it. It didn't feel convincing that I was navigating rocky terrain. This creates a disconnect with feeling confident in my character's actions in relationship to the environment.

I'm excited to see where this goes, but hopefully some of these details will lead to a more solid-feeling game. It really does deserve to be fleshed out more because it's mixing a lot of familiar mechanics with a unique world in ways I've never seen before!

Cheers!

[Just Purkey Games]

Thanks for the feedback, here's a few responses:
-You can level up your stats to sprint for much longer and recover your heart rate much faster. As you get it leveled up it's far less of an issue.

-What information are you trying to read in a fight on the bow? The only thing you really need to read actively at any given time is the noise meter (not that useful in a fight) or the health meter on the hand.

-I've never heard of VOIN so nope, not working together haha, glad someone else is doing something similar though. I think it's a more fun way to visualize progress than menu bars

-So you're right about the creatures floating and the player also sometimes as well. Basically, as you move through the world Unreal loads things in chunks. Instead of setting up all the collision over time, it does it ALL AT ONCE. Which is really really bad and if the collision is detailed, it causes massive hitches. I used to have it much more refined but basically had to cut it WAY back because of this. I'm really hoping they fix this and if they ever do I'd make collision easily 30x more accurate than it is now. It's a really unfortunate part of the engine that honestly is way above what I could fix as a solo dev.

-Are you using frame generation? Reflex (especially with boost) can help with it but if you're feeling latency, it's probably due to that. Frame generation is nice, but it absolutely causes input latency just due to the nature of how that works. If you are bothered by it, I'd recommend not using it and just adjusting the graphics options instead to get a framerate you like. I personally don't use it because I'm very sensitive to latency.

Thanks for the feedback!

[docmars]

Originally posted by Just Purkey Games:

Are you using frame generation? Reflex (especially with boost) can help with it but if you're feeling latency, it's probably due to that. Frame generation is nice, but it absolutely causes input latency just due to the nature of how that works. If you are bothered by it, I'd recommend not using it and just adjusting the graphics options instead to get a framerate you like. I personally don't use it because I'm very sensitive to latency.

I am using frame gen, but I didn't word that very well earlier.

I'm not talking about input latency typically introduced by frame gen — the controls feel snappy and fast with Reflex on. Although, there's a common issue with rubberbanding with frame-gen. Sometimes it feels like the character is taking 3 steps forward and 1 step back on a very subtle level in just a few frames. I'm not sure if this is something you can tweak to optimize frame-gen a little more, but it feels like an artifact of it. This feels odd with the game achieving 70-90fps with it enabled. It's especially noticeable on the edges of the screen where artifacts are introduced.

In CP2077, I never really experienced the same issue while getting roughly the same frame rate.

It could have to do with the general slowness to movement. Without sprinting, the character feels like he's walking or doing a slow jog. For maps of this scale, it feels very punishing to move around in general. Maybe frame gen artifacts are more pronounced with slower movements? This also means the scenery in the periphery / edges of the screen is moving very slowly past your field of view, so artifacts are easier to see.

This doesn't pair very well with the quick, snappy camera movement and combat, if that makes sense. Games that feel *really good* strike a good balance between movement speed and action, and this feels unbalanced to me, is all I'm saying. :)

Take another example: in boomer shooters, characters move way too fast for the small environments they offer, so they routinely feel unbalanced as well, on the opposite end if that makes sense.