Overgrowth feels incomplete.

[Spudbar]

I started this off as a response to another thread. Though since the response got so long I'm turning it into it's own post.

Note: I don't have many hours logged into the Steam version since I played the main campaigns in offline mode, and the rest of my hours were spent playing the standalone version. The hours I currently have logged are from me playing around with mods from the workshop.

With that, these are my thoughts on the game currently, mostly to due with the main campaign.

The story felt lackluster and rushed. There really wasn't any worldbuilding or pacing. In the Overgrowth campaign, your character shows up, they mention a bunch of things about the gods and making offerings (which never get explained in any amount of depth throughout the game), then you immediately hop into a battle which spirals into a long, gigantic crusade.
During the loading screens you get random quotes which sometimes seem to not have any relevance to the previous or oncoming scenario you're being dropped into, and the quote will sometimes be from a character you've never (and will never) see during the whole game. Apparently they're important though because they hold some title in a clan you'll never hear about outside the end of that quote.
I don't know if there's some kind of rich lore or backstory to the game's environment. It seems like there must be, but it doesn't seem like it's something you could learn about at all by playing the game. It's a really bad idea to keep this information seperate from the game and just assume the player will know about everything going into the game.

I didn't feel any connection to any of the characters. They didn't have enough time to be recognizable or build any kind of personality. The dialogue wasn't terrible but there definitely wasn't enough there for me to call it a "story". It's more like a story in summary, covering only the major bits to reach each level.
So when I learned that a character named "Cloud" had died and eventually had to fight some friendly characters from the early parts of the game who I barely recognized, I didn't care at all. I feel like I should have, or at least enough to understand how that affected Turner, but I really didn't. I don't even feel like the spoiler tag is needed, but since it's already there I won't remove it. Learning that Cloud was also in the Lugaru campaign didn't really change that much.
Story just felt shoddy to me. It felt rushed, like it was just quickly slapped together and had some levels thrown onto it.

Speaking of which, the levels were really quick and basic even on the standard difficulty. Parts of the platforming didn't play very well. There were several instances where the game expected you to jump onto a wall, wallrun on it, and then jump off the wall again to reach a distant platform, only for Turner to stop wallrunning beyond a random point, making the jump require really precise timing. Only you never really know when the timing was right unless you died enough or got a lucky guess.
Even the combat tutorial didn't really cover much other than the very basics, which left me unprepared once I encountered one of the first dogs wielding a 1-shot sword. Since I was never told anything about armed combat other than how to disarm an opponent (which does not work on some enemies/weapons, and might not work if you are armed yourself), I had to beat those sections through trial and error (which led to me discovering how OP the jumping attack is).
The game would have been really frustrating otherwise since you're not really given any proper tools to deal with situations when you're outnumbered. Enemies will all spam attacks at you all at once, and unless they're a significantly weaker race than you (and unarmed), you won't be able to handle all those attacks. There's no crowd control attacks, no lock-on system to let you focus on a certain enemy, and enemies will attempt to swarm you at every turn. Since you're pretty much equal to all your opponents, when you get swarmed by 2-3 (or even more) enemies, you're left with a challenge that feels artificial.

I backed this game I think around 2011-2012 or so. Back when the only thing available were the sandbox levels and some basic functionality for creating your own level, spawning enemies and weapons and such. I stopped following the game around the time arenas were added in and level triggers were being added for people to start making levels with an actual "win" state. I would have probably forgotten about the game if I hadn't seen a news update for the Beta 6 announced on my feed.

But even with so much time having passed, I just don't see a lot to show for it. Better AI and animations maybe, more character types and variants, new weapons and levels... All great stuff and all, but the game is still really lacking in terms of content. The main campaign took me maybe 2 hours to complete and it wasn't really enjoyable. It felt more like something I'd expect to download off the workshop...

...Though surprisingly, Therium-2 from the workshop felt a lot more interesting to me. Each level had a decent length, with much better pacing storywise, and there were optional books and notes for more backstory and lore. I honestly was much more interested in Therium-2 then I was either of the official storylines.

I don't mean to slam the devs or their creation. There's a lot I'm impressed with and plenty of good to talk about. This game has a lot of potential. Though I'm worried that this potential isn't going to be met, and that the game is going to flop because of it. I've seen this happen with a lot of games and I hope that Overgrowth will be one that manages to pull through somehow. This is just my honest criticism and I hope that it might help the developers somehow.

[Alltagskrieger]

That's exactly what I though after playing the campain. The "story" feels more like a chain of arena fights, hoping to get the first kill so you can deal with the other enemies.

I will have to look into Therium-2, haven't played any workshop yet.

[White Male]

I must agree in most part as well.. Therium is awesome and has alot of what i would like to see in the rest of the Overgrowth stories, so what I really miss is to have multiple outcomes possible - then unlocking new paths through the game.
*SPOILER*
Like after the magma arena fight in Overgrowth campaign, the one where you need to jump the pillars in the lava area -

You should have the oportunity to run away after you get the plant, or just run away before that (I have found a way but it had invisble walls to cut me off.

Or you could just kill the dogs?? they are only 2? ;)

Or you could just do what they tell you to do like you have to now...

I wish for a story were dependented on what path you take, people live or die, alliances are forged and broken, families destroyed and the very essence of your soul is depicted in a battle for the good or evil ;)

You should be able to go through the entire campaign only with ko´s and therefor not have killed anyone ;)

Then every story would be somewhat different levels, at least you would take different sides etc etc and give the game alot of replayabillity ;)

[Spudbar]

Branching paths and/or different choices would definitely be interesting. Turner might end up somewhere different in the end or end up as a different person (I didn't really connect to the "unstoppable war hero" character he is presented as). Though if the devs didn't plan for that then they probably shouldn't do it. Not everybody likes the abitrary "Morality system" in games or the fact that most games with multiple endings have a "True ending".

What they really need to do is slow the pacing down. A lot. Add more dialogue, more characters, even if they're just on the side for the area you're in. Again, it seems like Overgrowth has a detailed and complicated world, it's just never explored in the game. Add some optional books and notes, maybe some side-tasks that can be explored. Small details like this really made Therium-2 fun to explore and made for a much more engaging experience than what I had with the Overgrowth campaign.

It'd also help a lot to make the levels bigger in general, give them more detail. Some take maybe 2 minutes to burst through, where you run into one small area that doesn't look very realisticly setup or seem very interesting, kill some people, then have another loading screen. Meanwhile this is all taking place on a gigantic map with a lot of space to explore... A lot of these levels could simply be stitched together on the same map, with cutscenes inbetween each section. The amount of load screens you go through is a bit much.

They should probably have an optional tutorial in the starting area where Turner goes up against an eager, though untrained rabbit in sparring matches, teaching that rabbit some of his skills while also teaching the player how to play. This would be a great way to introduce the more complicated aspects of combat and/or movement without interrupting actual gameplay. Having a safe way to practice skills that are vital in the later parts of the game would help tremendously.

What would be great is if Turner spent the first day in the village uninterrupted. Let the player explore, talk to people, and choose when to stop exploring by going to sleep. The next morning, Turner would see the bandit he normally encounters right off the bat and the story then continues from there. There's really no sections like this throughout the whole story, and it could add a lot.

Right now the story is just:

- Start game.
- Talk a little.
- Fight a dude.
- Talk a bit.
- Fight some more dudes.
- Talk to self.
- Fight a LOT of dudes.
- Meet a friendly face.
Friendly: "Boy there sure are a lot of guys down there, what should we do?"
Protagonist: "DESTROY. DESTROY."
- Fight an entire war.
- Think about talking.
- Platforming section.

[White Male]

+Spudbar - well you pretty much nailed the story ;) and i agree with you on the whole going from map to map, instead of just leaving the area and have a new dialog another place on THE SAME MAP and only change once the player does something to activate the next level ;)

and the lore is not rally explained which is a shame, since I think it is pretty big and you only get random and unrelated inputs doing the loading screens.. I would like books, scrolls, secret npc´s, old writing on cave walls etc etc ;)

[Xargock]

Originally posted by Spudbar:

The story felt lackluster and rushed. There really wasn't any worldbuilding or pacing. ...
I don't know if there's some kind of rich lore or backstory to the game's environment. It seems like there must be, but it doesn't seem like it's something you could learn about at all by playing the game. It's a really bad idea to keep this information seperate from the game and just assume the player will know about everything going into the game.

There is a comic, and a wiki page that exists for the game world that explores it a bit, but you are not wrong. I think a lot of the pieces are there, it's just not so easy to string them all together. If you play through Lugaru, then OG, you can get a good sense of the world through implication and things that are alluded to, but not really expanded upon.. I don't think this really makes actual gameplay problematic, but it doesn't do much on its own to expand the game. It does, however, leave a lot of room for mod development and future expansions.

Originally posted by Spudbar:

I didn't feel any connection to any of the characters. They didn't have enough time to be recognizable or build any kind of personality. The dialogue wasn't terrible but there definitely wasn't enough there for me to call it a "story". It's more like a story in summary, covering only the major bits to reach each level.
So when ... I barely recognized [characters from earlier], I didn't care at all. I feel like I should have, or at least enough to understand how that affected Turner, but I really didn't. I don't even feel like the spoiler tag is needed, but since it's already there I won't remove it. Learning that Cloud was also in the Lugaru campaign didn't really change that much.
Story just felt shoddy to me. It felt rushed, like it was just quickly slapped together and had some levels thrown onto it.

I do agree that a lot of the characters don't really have meaningful depth; I'm hoping mod campaigns can maybe fill in some of the blanks and add depth there. There's definitely room for it to grow.

Originally posted by Spudbar:

Even the combat tutorial didn't really cover much other than the very basics, which left me unprepared once I encountered one of the first dogs wielding a 1-shot sword. Since I was never told anything about armed combat other than how to disarm an opponent (which does not work on some enemies/weapons, and might not work if you are armed yourself), I had to beat those sections through trial and error (which led to me discovering how OP the jumping attack is).
The game would have been really frustrating otherwise since you're not really given any proper tools to deal with situations when you're outnumbered. Enemies will all spam attacks at you all at once, and unless they're a significantly weaker race than you (and unarmed), you won't be able to handle all those attacks. There's no crowd control attacks, no lock-on system to let you focus on a certain enemy, and enemies will attempt to swarm you at every turn. Since you're pretty much equal to all your opponents, when you get swarmed by 2-3 (or even more) enemies, you're left with a challenge that feels artificial.

This I think is one of the most glaring issues with the current game - the in-game tutorial, and even the stand-alone tutorial that used to come pre-loaded just didn't prepare you for a whole slew of situations - the lack of ability to practice I think is what makes it kind of frustrating. Like you said - you come to a guy with a sword, but you don't really have a good sense of sword fighting... so you die before you can even practice anything. This too, I'm hoping can be corrected by mods. I have some ideas on this one, just need more time in the day :(

Originally posted by Spudbar:

I backed this game I think around 2011-2012 or so...
But even with so much time having passed, I just don't see a lot to show for it.... really lacking in terms of content. The main campaign took me maybe 2 hours to complete and it wasn't really enjoyable. It felt more like something I'd expect to download off the workshop...

...Though surprisingly, Therium-2 from the workshop felt a lot more interesting to me. Each level had a decent length, with much better pacing storywise, and there were optional books and notes for more backstory and lore. I honestly was much more interested in Therium-2 then I was either of the official storylines.

I don't mean to slam the devs or their creation. There's a lot I'm impressed with and plenty of good to talk about. This game has a lot of potential. Though I'm worried that this potential isn't going to be met, and that the game is going to flop because of it. I've seen this happen with a lot of games and I hope that Overgrowth will be one that manages to pull through somehow. This is just my honest criticism and I hope that it might help the developers somehow.

This latter point, I think is where I think the game needs to be advertised a little differently than it is; I sometimes say to people that what you're really buying is the Phoenix engine, not just a collection of levels. There's a community around the game that's developing mods and ideas, and it's Wolfire's Phoenix engine that allows them to do it - ultimately all of the game's shortfalls can be made up through community and modding, and Wolfire seems to have a pretty solid dedication to making this all possible. I'm hoping that making mods gets easier and easier, with more documentation, videos, etc etc. More dev-made content would also be good - I think it's reasonable to expect more on that end. Even if the game came out as is right now with no hope for future updates, though, there'd definitely still be hope for more good things to come.

[Xargock]

Originally posted by White Male:

Like after the magma arena fight in Overgrowth campaign, the one where you need to jump the pillars in the lava area -

You should have the oportunity to run away after you get the plant, or just run away before that (I have found a way but it had invisble walls to cut me off.

Or you could just kill the dogs?? they are only 2? ;)

There are actually 4 more at the back of the cave, by the entrance, and they are all very armed :P I had that thought, too, and mentioned it to the devs... they agreed and did that to make it more believable :P

[Spudbar]

Originally posted by Xargock:

-snip-

I have some issues with the notion of "Let's hope the modding community can help."

If you want a thriving community that's able to produce content and improvements like the ones we're hoping for, you have to be able to sell the game to people first. There needs to be something about the game that will captivate an audience and keep them playing.

Assuming I just bought the game off Steam, downloaded it, then went to play through the main campaign - I would have refunded it by the time I was done. I like the engine and the way the game plays, but there's just not a lot of game to actually play. I'm not going to buy the game just because I like the engine. I mean, the Crysis engine is nice, but I wouldn't buy Crysis if it didn't have a campaign to play through.

So without ample content in the base game to get people interested, people aren't going to stick around. Some of the workshop content is nice but you can't just assume people will look there if they weren't already interested. Especially, it's dangerous to assume that enough people will be interested enough to learn how to make content and keep the game breathing.

I'm assuming this game already has a fairly sparse community (probably with plenty of people that had backed this game in the past, but long since forgotten about it) and so things seem worrying to me. The Overgrowth story is the official, main campaign of the game. To most people that means that it is "the game" they are paying for. If they don't like it, they'll refund and leave. That means the game won't get a very big community, and therefore not a lot of modders and creators, so the game will probably be forgotten again as soon as it's released.

If the devs strive to improve and expand upon the main campaign, maybe add some new campaigns to the mix, then this might not be such a big problem. I'm really hoping this is just the first iteration of the Overgrowth campaign and that they will be making major improvements and additions to it before release. People aren't going to be nice or give the benefit of a doubt if they buy this game and find it lacking in both content and quality. Bad reviews are going to lead to bad sales.

[White Male]

Originally posted by Xargock:

Originally posted by White Male:

Like after the magma arena fight in Overgrowth campaign, the one where you need to jump the pillars in the lava area -

You should have the oportunity to run away after you get the plant, or just run away before that (I have found a way but it had invisble walls to cut me off.

Or you could just kill the dogs?? they are only 2? ;)

There are actually 4 more at the back of the cave, by the entrance, and they are all very armed :P I had that thought, too, and mentioned it to the devs... they agreed and did that to make it more believable :P

Still, I would have taken the fight with the dogs ;) Or used the "escape routes" if they had made that option instead of putting up invisible walls! ;)

[Cajunvoodoo]

Maybe something like Witcher dialogue where you could end up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ over yourself in some way. Like making the game miles more difficult by leaving someone alive or falling into a trap that the enemy is leading you to. That would be great. Though in the games like therium it's meh at most. You follow a story yeah but sometimes you feel punished for you actions. In games like witcher 3 you don't feel punished besides your ending. Though even those have a bit to be imagined. Those kinda mechanics would be amazing!

[R-Bull™ _P-Omen]

It would be cool if your actions somehow weighed in on the story...i have 2 examples in mind.

SPOILER WARNING

1) Its right at the start where you're stealing that ship. You have the option to fight everyone in the city, or keep the casualties to a minimum and sneak your way thru. It'd be nice for your option to be at least aknowledged in some dialog or something...like "Where did you come from?" (sneak) vs "So, you're the one wreaking havoc in my city" (chaos)

2) After you fight Jade, it would be cool to have 2 endings...one where you spare Amethyst, another where you don't. Also, another thing in the same level is Saphire...to my surprise you can actually kill her after the fight. Same idea, would be interesting to have some consequences for sparing Saphire vs killing her...

Ps: I had other suggestions, is this the thread to post them?

[Good Golly It's Toppy]

Agreed with everything except the combat. Because you're about as powerful as everyone else, getting ganged up on and losing doesn't feel artificial at all, it's exactly what you'd expect to happen. I think this game has some of the best combat I've ever seen. I've beaten 2-on-1 fights by tripping one enemy and then kicking his friend into him as he tries to stand up, knocking the both of them unconscious.


But everything else? I agree. I didn't like the writing or plot of Therium, but the lore notes and the branching story and the levels themselves were all fantastic ideas.

Personally, I am extremely interested in the world that the developers have built. The geography is beautiful, the different cultures are only vaguely talked about, but very intriguing, and the hints of history we get are great too. But it's a shame they decided to tell such a simplistic, rather boring story with it. At least in Lugaru I had the sense of righteous revenge for the murder of my family, but Overgrowth, I feel exactly how the main character is portrayed; Bored, idly roaming from fight to fight just because I want to punch more things. The ending was abrupt and an obvious cliffhanger, and even with that, I can't even muster the emotion to be annoyed that I won't see the end of his story yet, because I just don't care.

I love this fighting engine, but where is the game to go with it? I want to see more. I want to see the other races fleshed out so that they have unique mechanics as well. Rabbits can jump vastly higher than other races, wolves are huge and their unarmed attacks are as lethal as broadswords, but play as a dog or a cat or a rat and all you are is a worse version of a rabbit with no interesting mechanics to make up for it. I want to see other parts of the world, from other perspectives.

Imagine if this game had a real campaign. If I were in charge of the direction of the next game, I would put Turner in as an important part of the rabbits' Guerrilla war against the felines and their allies. There would be a hub, a home base where you could speak with your allies and crew between each mission. Then, you go to a map table and take on a mission from a list, anything from assassinating a target, to stealing supplies, to slaughtering an outpost, to rescuing other resistance members. Something like the campaign for Jedi Knight:Jedi Academy, once enough missions are completed, you trigger a story mission to advance the plot, and then get a whole new list of missions afterwards.


I mean, that's just off the top of my head, but my point is that there are a lot of ways to help flesh out the campaign and make it feel like the player has more agency than just walking along a trail, pausing for a quick slaughter or platforming section every now and then.

[Spudbar]

Originally posted by R-Bull™ _Paradoxical-(8)-Omen:

Ps: I had other suggestions, is this the thread to post them?

Sure thing, go ahead. It'd be good to hear what people think about the campaign and what they think would improve it.

Originally posted by Toppy:

-snip-

You're probably a better judge of the combat than me since I really haven't played this game very much. I remember the very basics and was taught the very basics. I did try to learn the more in-depth mechanics when I first played through the game and when I needed to during this campaign, but it ended up being too frustrating and results were inconclusive.
Sometimes failure resulted in instant death, and times that it didn't meant I didn't really have any time to recover and try again. Even when I did do something right, it wasn't really clear what I did. Sometimes I can block attacks, sometimes I can't, or sometimes the weapon will get knocked out of my grasp.
I'm sure that it's possible to handle multiple enemies once you know what to do, but as a newer player the game doesn't let you breathe enough to get a good handle on how to do so. It also doesn't teach you how to do that, among other things. Another game I played called Absolver never taught me how to fight multiple enemies either, but it taught me enough about the mechanics that I was able to experiment and learn on my own.
In fact, I did try doing what you did a few times during the campaign, but I never felt like I had the opportunity to attack. I would trip one enemy then try to attack the other, only for the second enemy to hit me since they were already attacking. If I tried to throw them as well, the first enemy would already be recovered and wailing on me. I'll have to keep experimenting on my own, but hopefully it's an area of the game the devs will be able to improve, even if all that means is adding a detailed tutorial.

Having gameplay from a hub-world would be very interesting. I'm wondering how that would be possible though, since I think the engine might not be capable of that just yet. It seems like everything is split into specific levels that need to be loaded, and whenever they are, they are loaded from scratch. If this is true then that means there would need to be a lot of different "Hub" levels.
Say if I made a hub world with 3 missions, and I wanted the player to do each of them in an unspecified order. If I wanted the player to return to the hub each time with their progress being tracked and consistent, I would need 8 different levels for the hub alone. Here's what I mean:

Hub 1: No missions completed
Hub 2: Mission A completed
Hub 3: Mission B completed
Hub 4: Mission C completed
Hub 5: Mission A & B completed
Hub 6: Mission A & C completed
Hub 7: Mission B & C completed
Hub 8: All missions complete

Especially depending on the depth of the campaign, this might be a hassle for the creator to manage, and if you want to use a detailed/large hub world, the file size of your campaign would be really large. That's just to change a few states and dialogue boxes on some characters, so that they recognize what you did for them. It'd still be possible to make a world like this but it wouldn't be very well optimized. Maybe that's something the devs look into and add support for it.

[Spudbar]

Apparently Overgrowth is getting released in the 16th this month. That's the final date they've set.

The game has been in EA development for a long time, but I feel like this isn't a great state to launch in. Might be better than waiting even longer, but still. Probably going to be a rough launch. I guess we'll have to see and hope it goes over well.

[White Male]

Originally posted by Spudbar:

Apparently Overgrowth is getting released in the 16th this month. That's the final date they've set.

The game has been in EA development for a long time, but I feel like this isn't a great state to launch in. Might be better than waiting even longer, but still. Probably going to be a rough launch. I guess we'll have to see and hope it goes over well.

In times like this it is hard to sell any game that does not have online coop/mp, so it is good they have a never surrendering fan base that goes far back (me included)..

But at least Overgrowth went old school with the split screen coop, me and my friend enjoys that alot ;) maybe even more than we would had we just played online ;) but still, both would be best, since not many people like complicated sp games anymore :)

[jabberwok]

I'm not very far yet. I think I agree that the story mostly feels like a chain of fights, but I actually like the underexplained references to things, like the comment about offerings in the first level, or the loading screen quotes. That's the sort of flavor that can make the setting feel more expansive than it actually is. Which is what the game needs, imo....

As far as the chain of fights thing, it's basically a fighting game, so the story is probably always going to feel like that. Maybe if they allowed the player to roam more freely, and make more choices about where to go, or what enemies to fight, it would help with that, even if the story remains completely linear. Basically, I want it to feel more like an open world game. It already benefits from expansive environments, since movement is so much fun.

Right now, the campaign seems to automatically take you between story beats, just ending the level and moving you on to the next important bit. A better approach might be to just let us make our own way to the next objective. Of course, this would mean having to make a LOT more environments to pad out the world, but it'd probably be worth it, in the end. They could lay out the levels in relation to each other, and let us transition between them ourselves, then kick into the next cinematic when we enter the right area.