Bugs and feedback

[Top Marx]

I ran through a lot of the demo. I'm excited to see where it goes, but I hope this still has more time in development before we see early access and I hope the bug reports you're getting from this demo will be put to good use.

My notes from my time with the demo:

the intro cutscene is bad and the game would be much better served if you cut damn near the whole thing. it's soooo much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ exposition that I was wondering if this was a sequel to a game I hadn't played, or that the segment of game I was playing was in the second or third act of the story. if you intend to ship this cutscene with the final game then you need to slash and burn. break down every individual piece of information in that intro cutscene and ask why you're telling the player this in a cutscene before they've played anything? Why is it better in a little video that half your audience is going to skip or ignore instead of writing it into the actual game?

food degrades so quickly that there's barely a point to interacting with that system at all. Berries expire so quickly that I had to literally race the timer back to town to complete the Foraging Camp quest. I sprinted the whole way back to the carpenter and the first ones I picked from near the bandit camp were one or two ticks away from disappearing. what is the point of this? what user experience goal is this meant to serve? once I saw how fast food degrades I didn't touch that system ever again, I'd just grab some berries or mushrooms and eat them raw when I passed by them and was hungry.

since food and cooking feels so bad I never bothered with villager recruitment and felt like I was missing like half the game.

you need to figure out building placement on non-flat surfaces. it's extremely buggy, the vast majority of locations are invalid for any sort of placement, and even slight slopes break functionality. I have to add wood to the campfire from one particular direction or my character walks into the fire and takes damage.

object interactions feel bad. they take forever, but that wouldn't be such a problem if the tactile feeling of selecting and crafting felt good. right now it's just fiddle with the mouse until you finally target where you want, click, then watch as your character figures out how to snap into the right animation, not align with anything correctly to actually match that animation, then snap back into movement mode while the game plays a little fx indicator that you did a thing. since this is the primary thing you're doing in the game, this *needs* to feel good or it'll create a lot of negative friction with the player. gathering wild plants in Red Dead feels bad but you're hardly ever doing it and it doesn't last that long.

building a structure bit by bit is a better part of this, but since it's so hard to select which object you're trying to interact with you just end up standing in the middle and spamming your clicks and watching things happen around you fully outside of your control. it's nice seeing things go up bit by bit, but it absolutely does not feel like you as the player are building this thing.

crafting menus don't take inventory from the stockpiles literally built into the same structure. the tent crafting bench has the stockpile not even two feet to the right of it. feels bad and like you're going to have to patch in a fix for this eventually.

why can't I sleep during the day? if you have a design reason for this, then why can't I skip time? I often found myself just standing around waiting for time to pass so I could continue playing the game.

I'm definitely the only person in this entire world that needs to sleep, everyone else is fine standing and milling around 24/7.

If you have a codex that tracks recipes then it needs to display the recipe. I shouldn't need to run all the way back home just to press F on a bench and see what I needed back when I was still out in the wild

The map is basically nonfunctional right now. The compass is useful, the map not so much. If you're not going to give me a way to find where the hell harvestables are in the world then I should be able to leave myself a note in the map or set a waypoint or something.

The map is misaligned. When I'm standing on the road it shows me standing off to its left.

Wolves are an absolute nightmare to fight. They're weak and don't hit hard but I literally can't hit them in melee bc of how clunky the swings are.

Navigating around most terrain rigid bodies feels bad. I'm constantly getting stuck on collision bc of tiny little corners of big rocks.

I can't hear a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing anyone is saying. the voices are super muddled and accents are wild and all over the place. half the voice actors are doing a Swedish Chef impression and the other half are doing Kermit the Frog doing a Swedish Chef impression.

something is up with your postprocessing bc motion is extremely blurry for all models and fx. it leaves an extremely visible trail of ghosting. I've turned off as much fx as I can but this is an issue with your renderer.

don't give me an option to turn the postprocessing down low, give me options about each particular effect and let me turn that ♥♥♥♥ off entirely. nobody likes this stuff anymore, it was just a way for AAA to pretty up graphics that were forcibly constrained by aging console hardware and to use stuff like blur to conceal the places where that age was showing. so many people turn it all off right away.

[fodder]

so i felled a tree near the npc village. it went down in their direction and the part of the felled tree that's now within their borders belongs to them and the part outside their borders can be chopped and hauled away by me.

[davidalex]

Originally posted by Top Marx:

something is up with your postprocessing bc motion is extremely blurry for all models and fx. it leaves an extremely visible trail of ghosting. I've turned off as much fx as I can but this is an issue with your renderer.

don't give me an option to turn the postprocessing down low, give me options about each particular effect and let me turn that ♥♥♥♥ off entirely. nobody likes this stuff anymore, it was just a way for AAA to pretty up graphics that were forcibly constrained by aging console hardware and to use stuff like blur to conceal the places where that age was showing. so many people turn it all off right away.

+++
Still an issue up to this day, Unreal Engine 5 is just straight up garbage.
Ghosting when swinging a weapon, FSR and TAA are horrible.
Most of the settings cannot be turned off.
Make it an option to off the settings, to turn the graphics into potato graphics, so the game could run smooth on older pc's.