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... if it were, it would be better.
That said, in your opinion, is there anything that could be done about the gameplay, or do you think it's beyond redemption?
First and foremost let me say I admire honest devs approaches like the one you had here. I play a number of EA/indie titles where -sadly - sometimes the devs wouldn’t care to take feedback or when they do it is generally in a defensive passive-aggressive way. Even though OM is one of my fav games, I don’t think the “highlander way” of there can be only one and bombing away any new take on that (oh my, a highlander reference gives my age away… but still). Congrats on that.
As I said up there, I think one thing the game really does well is the sci-fi story premises, at least for me. If you keep it unfolding interestingly (I haven’t played the demo for tooo long) should be one of the upsides of this title. In OM even though I enjoy that game a lot, I didn’t care for the story tbh. It’s passable.
Don’t think it’s beyond redemption, no, but to give more specific feedback on the controls I would have to play the demo again. If my memory serves me well, the problem was in the “flow” of issuing commands to the machine… it was more of a shore than a “discovery thing”? Maybe the tutorial text was not very clear on which parts did what and combined with that it kinda discouraged trial and error.
I’ll see if I can play the demo again and provide more useful feedback. Until there, keep up that attitude!!👊🏻
I think we'll soon have an updated version of the demo up, again, at the very least to allow players to form their own impression despite all the (so far) negative reviews.
Many of the issues I keep hearing about aren't that hard to solve, I must say. Controls can be improved, as can the Tutorial. It's an unfortunate thing, that one - as a developer - often loses a feeling for the actual "fun" their game creates, because after playing the same thing for the 234893409'st time it sure can't be helped to feel like a chore anyway :) . We had a number of testers involved in the project, but rather late and they didn't question the fun of it, so maybe we prematurely expected it to be fun for the right niche / audience.
Looking for the updated demo 👍🏻
I'll soon talk to the others and the publisher about what we can do!
Thanks, again!
I, and I expect a great many of the purchasers, were interested in this game BECAUSE it was clearly similar to Opus Magnum. As in, the spirit of "It's not meant to take anything away from OM and Zachtronics, but to offer more content for people that enjoyed OM." was well understood.
My snark above was the result of disappointment in this regard. Not that it fails to be identical to OM, but rather that the experience of the game seems so unpolished, both in comparison to OM and in general.
Absolutely. It is certainly not beyond redemption.
As I see it, Velone has issues at every level of the experience, but none of them are in and of themselves ruinous or even, by themselves, dealbreakers.
The main one is that the interface is confusing, and this is the point on which the comparison to Opus Magnum is both most unavoidable and most damning. Out of all the places to emulate Zachtronics' designs as closely as possible, this would be the most important one: they are extremely good at creating a clean and relatively intuitive interface for what can be quite complicated puzzles. The playfields in Velone are covered in artistic loops and whorls, which mostly seem to mean nothing and serve only the alien aesthetic; this is in stark contrast to the OM playfields which are (outside particular challenges, and even then within the challenge playable areas) plain fields of hex grid with the barest decoration. I can understand the urge to try to differentiate here, but that becomes unintuitive because now the area where we are placing our devices are covered in 'information' that wasn't there before, most of which is meaningless but SOME of which is important, and the difference is not obvious. Another important thing is that there are no labels on the devices or reference for what they do. What is the difference between the several kinds of arm, especially the one with the (seemingly?) sucker in the middle, and the one with the ring? The tutorial does not clearly explain any of this, and the actual tool palette is completely obtuse.
The programming panel is also a problem, in that it is much too small and some of the icons are seemingly nonsensical. The latter we will get used to quickly enough, but the former actually makes the game harder to play: it's harder to precisely place an operation tile, it's harder to read the placed ones, and even the act of placing them is strange. The latter is because the copy-paste operation is missing (note: missing and expected because of OM, rather than simply not present and not noticed), dragging does not work, and the choice of buttons for the keyboard shortcuts feels very strange indeed. Consider that the function keys are usually expected in most software to do something 'out of band', i.e. not part of the standard operational flow: call for help, take a screenshot, summon a menu, etc. OM used letter keys for the programming shortcuts because that feels like the normal operation; Velone using the F-keys instead (and leaving the keyboard mostly unused?) feels weird, and it's made all the weirder by how that choice is not conistent – I was getting used to the rows of operations being F-1-2-3-4, F-5-6-7-8... but then the last one is F9 F10 F11 R. Just flat out don't do that: interfaces must operate on the principle of least surprise, so if you establish a 1-to-1 pattern, don't suddenly throw a swerve in it. In this case it throws the whole keyboard choice into question: if it's okay to use R, why was it not okay to use Q, W, E, etc? It really makes the choice seem like it was made solely to not work like OM, but then slammed into the fact the Steam overlay uses F12 and instead of rethinking the whole pattern shrugged and threw in one normal key.
Finally the immersion is an issue. This is much more subjective than the preceding, but... Zachtronics rarely uses voice acting; the story is always presented in text. This melds well with the aesthetics of the puzzles, allowing them to take center stage. It is by no means necessary to do it this way, but the story in Velone is... odd... to say the least, and the voice acting is incredibly distracting, because it pulls attention from the game itself, it reminds us of the Odd story that just serves to explain the confusing "alien" aesthetic, and... it isn't very good, I'm afraid. I found myself being frustrated trying to work out what all the bits on the board were for, and being forcibly interrupted in this by chatter and setting nonsense absolutely did not help.
There are other issues but these are the big ones, as far as the gameplay goes.
One other thing worth mentioning: This game has ads in it.
That is bad. VERY bad. I am sure I am not alone in finding it outright insulting that something I paid money for thinks it has the right to insert advertising thrown at me. Had I know those were in the game, no matter if everything else was perfect, I never would have bought it. They made me angry every time I saw them, feeling insulted that their presence seemingly proved that the company that made this game had no desire at all to deliver an enjoyable game experience, rather it merely wanted to slam home yet another channel to shove ads in my face to try to scam out more money.
How’s the progress on this title? Curious…