Beta Feedback

[c3sk]

General feedback from beta all collected and sorted under one roof!

[Benedict]

Wow - getting very good

I periodically play Noct - Im really impressed by the current build, its got a really nice "flow", and all the gameplay issues from prev builds have gone away - I was engrossed.

Sadly I eventually hit an end (no more quests/objectives after the restart of the generator, happy to supply my save file if this is unexpected/ie a bug) but I had a superb time until then. I especially like the dialogue between "the satellite" (?) and the survivors. Noct has gone from "really promising" to "delivering" - excellent work, thanks.

Current (hopefully constructive) feedback:
I still dont understand the food/water mechanics (why collect this, do we get hungry/thirsty? And why bother to collect it given death results in a new survivor anyway who presumably isnt hungry/thirsty?)
I dont think enough info is given to the player around weapons - when we reload does it waste the partially filled clip (my clumsy testing of firing a bullet and reloading indicates it does! I wouldnt do this as a survivor, at the very least Id pick up the half empty clip later). How much ammo do we have for other weapons other than the current? Etc
It really would be good to allow visibility through doorways... (although I havent had any trapped in building syndrome in last play through).

[c3sk]

Originally posted by Benedict:

I periodically play Noct - Im really impressed by the current build, its got a really nice "flow", and all the gameplay issues from prev builds have gone away - I was engrossed.

Sadly I eventually hit an end (no more quests/objectives after the restart of the generator, happy to supply my save file if this is unexpected/ie a bug) but I had a superb time until then. I especially like the dialogue between "the satellite" (?) and the survivors. Noct has gone from "really promising" to "delivering" - excellent work, thanks.

Current (hopefully constructive) feedback:
I still dont understand the food/water mechanics (why collect this, do we get hungry/thirsty? And why bother to collect it given death results in a new survivor anyway who presumably isnt hungry/thirsty?)
I dont think enough info is given to the player around weapons - when we reload does it waste the partially filled clip (my clumsy testing of firing a bullet and reloading indicates it does! I wouldnt do this as a survivor, at the very least Id pick up the half empty clip later). How much ammo do we have for other weapons other than the current? Etc
It really would be good to allow visibility through doorways... (although I havent had any trapped in building syndrome in last play through).

Hey Benedict,

I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the current beta build.
Yes, the cut off after the Act 1 stuff is intentional. However you can expect the exact same objective/quest flow for the Singleplayer stuff through Act 2 and 3 at release.

Currently Food and Water are useless item pickups as I turned off the old system. The new system will involve water being collected and used for a "sprint boost" which can be used to temporarily evade enemies/players, or dart quickly into combat situations. Sprint can't be used while firing, and has a short cooldown after being used.

Food will be directly tied to health. Every now and then you will need to keep your food level up to maintain your 100 health. If your food runs out your hunger will begin to strip away your health. This is the only passive upkeep your character will require.

With the new system you will be able to share food/water with survivors the same way you can now share ammo. You can bring up a radial drop menu by holding "F" or "left shoulder" on the Xbox controllers. This menu will also tell you exactly how many mags you have if you want to take the time to get a more accurate count. As for rounds per magazine, you will have to keep track of that per bullet as you would in real life. In combat you can't strip rounds out of magazines effectively, you could retain your magazines however, but that would make your reloads a lot slower. (We may add this as an option down the road) Like, holding "R" will retain a half capacity mag instead of discarding the magazine at the time of a reload.

Ammo depends on the mag capacity, so certain weapons will have higher capacity mags available.

We've really worked hard to improve the AI in certain building situations. It is still incredibly dangerous to enter into buildings, especially alone, however that is the risk vs reward gameplay of Noct. :)

-c3sk

[Benedict]

Hey c3sk, thanks for the reply

Sprinting - sounds great, and using water as a limiter on this sounds good.

Out of curiosity, whats the purpose of the food mechanic and decreasing health (ie, what behaviour are you rtying to get the players to have?) Increase in tension? I didnt really realise I had health (enemies tend to insta-kill me). Does having food allow your health to increase? If we die from stavation, dont we just get a new satiated survivor anyway? This brings me to a new curiousity based question: does the game do any dynamic item generation based on the players needs? Ie, if we need ammo, does it place more ammo? Does it place food if we are hungry etc? How does the item placement algorithm work?

REALLY looking fwd to the new inventory system.

Having a slow reload to retain the mag sounds good - can you add another option which is if you quickly reload, you drop the partially filled mag to the floor and it can be picked up later after combat (thats what I meant by "at the very least Id pick up the half empty clip later").

The work youve done to improve AI aorund buildings shows - I havent seen any weird behaviour from enemies. I actually havent had a death in a building in my last couple of play throughs since the weekend... which is fine by me since I always patrol the surrounding area first.

[c3sk]

Originally posted by Benedict:

Hey c3sk, thanks for the reply

Sprinting - sounds great, and using water as a limiter on this sounds good.

Out of curiosity, whats the purpose of the food mechanic and decreasing health (ie, what behaviour are you rtying to get the players to have?) Increase in tension? I didnt really realise I had health (enemies tend to insta-kill me). Does having food allow your health to increase? If we die from stavation, dont we just get a new satiated survivor anyway? This brings me to a new curiousity based question: does the game do any dynamic item generation based on the players needs? Ie, if we need ammo, does it place more ammo? Does it place food if we are hungry etc? How does the item placement algorithm work?

REALLY looking fwd to the new inventory system.

Having a slow reload to retain the mag sounds good - can you add another option which is if you quickly reload, you drop the partially filled mag to the floor and it can be picked up later after combat (thats what I meant by "at the very least Id pick up the half empty clip later").

The work youve done to improve AI aorund buildings shows - I havent seen any weird behaviour from enemies. I actually havent had a death in a building in my last couple of play throughs since the weekend... which is fine by me since I always patrol the surrounding area first.

Health is more for survivor vs survivor or friendly fire situations. Monsters are left as the ultimate game world equalizer. That way they are constantly the main threat for survivors, encouraging players to work together. Having food will allow for health regeneration, when you run out of food your health will slowly degenerate as you starve, so overtime you will want to upkeep your survivors food level to make sure that doesn't happen.

Loot is completely RNG based.

New inventory system is already in, hold "F" to access it after you've picked up some items. :)

Mark and I worked hard at improving the enemy AI. The new system is much more robust when handling multiple players and structure environments. Monsters can break through some walls to get to you in buildings, but you also do have the ability to evade them. Sprint will help with this also giving the survivor another chance to possibly escape being eaten.

-c3sk

[Benedict]

Oh, I havent done any MP games, its just been me playing locally. Will pay attention to the time of the next playtest. I didnt realise there would be PvP.

I like the inventory system, didnt realise I was carrying so much SMG ammo!

AI and buildings: I found a big (slug) enemy and kited it to follow me to a building. I waited for it to crash through the wall, and instead after about 10 sec had a small slug and spider come through two seperate doors simultaneously. Like a SWAT team. I gasped with horror in the instant before I died as my expectations were shattered, and then laughed - I never had a chance and shouldnt have tempted fate.

Im guessing the building enemy AI is doing something like on a timer randomly spawn an enemy in the doorway? (Not sure how else to explain the simultaneous dual entry).

[c3sk]

Originally posted by Benedict:

Oh, I havent done any MP games, its just been me playing locally. Will pay attention to the time of the next playtest. I didnt realise there would be PvP.

I like the inventory system, didnt realise I was carrying so much SMG ammo!

AI and buildings: I found a big (slug) enemy and kited it to follow me to a building. I waited for it to crash through the wall, and instead after about 10 sec had a small slug and spider come through two seperate doors simultaneously. Like a SWAT team. I gasped with horror in the instant before I died as my expectations were shattered, and then laughed - I never had a chance and shouldnt have tempted fate.

Im guessing the building enemy AI is doing something like on a timer randomly spawn an enemy in the doorway? (Not sure how else to explain the simultaneous dual entry).

Enemies will never spawn in doorways, so what you experienced was just procedural randomness. :)

[Benedict]

Wow, getting SWATted like that must be super rare then, awesome :)

[krassell]

Some feedback

After getting to play this neat game I feel obliged to leave some feedback.
First of all, I was keeping an eye on this game since one of first previews, mainly due it's fantastic atmosphere of desolation and hopelessness. FLIR-style GUI really hits home for me in terms of creating dark and moody setting, and music compliments that flawlessly.
The game's plot is interesting, so interesting for me that I, in fact, will probably neglect multiplayer mode in favour of singleplayer just to savour atmospheric storytelling, until I complete the game at least several times.

On the first run I tried to be very careful, so I managed to survive through the ship encounter, which cannot be said for some of my subsequent runs, as I sometimes used too much ammunition dealing with random encounters, or got bad drops (like 2 pistols, and no ammo). Grenades don't seem to be particularly powerful/useful outside certain rare situations when you know where and when enemies are going to come from. I'm also yet to find actual use for melee, it's not like it would be fit for last-ditch-effort weapon versus monsters any of which instantly kills you when it gets close. I can see it being useful to smack other players in multiplayer, but in singleplayer I couldn't squeeze any use of it.

Strangely enough, despite 2 boxes of rifle ammo I picked up, MAG never moved from LOW, is that intended? And yes, I was holding rifle at the moment.

There's also this little thing that does not sit well with me. Corpses disappear after you leave screen. I fully understand that it is an optimisation measure and everything, but that kinda ruins the immersion, especially with bigger monsters. I'd suggest raising radius for complete deletion of the corpses, and make them
fade out from white to gray(They're cooling down after all). You may also make changes to them when no-one sees them. I'd find it particularly creepy to kill giant blob, leave room for some supplies, then go back and encounter same corpse, but now eviscerated and partially eaten, with pools of blood all around and no enemy in sight. Who knows what else lurks in darkness?

I'm not a very perfect-run man myself, but somehow I felt compelled to complete the game(or to be precise, first act) without any deaths.
I kinda found it disappointing that there are no bonus points to iron-man run, or at least differences in dialogue, person guiding you sounded too shady in the end of my first successive run, taking in account that I managed to die in the last chase(It could use some more warning time, by the way), so all I did was walking up to some corpse, grabbing items and running away from sudden monsters. Yeah, that makes me special, suuuuuure...
That ending dialogue only feels true if you completed it without dying, in a single continuous adrenaline-laden run, with your heart beating in nearest vicinity of your throat(Which I did next, praise 'erase survivor' button!).
Speaking of which, in the end of first act last node is a tad too close to penultimate one, so if player hightails it out of dam like I did, he'll miss out on some dialogue.

I found it really annoying that pause(ESC) in singleplayer doesn't actually pause the game, as it has gotten
me killed several times, which is extra-annoying when trying to maintain 'no-death' status. I understand that it's probably a multiplayer counterpart relic, but that is both annoying and ruins the atmosphere. Praise the 'Erase survivor' button again!

I can't wait for full release.

[☆ Acacia ☆ - for Tiffany <3]

my 2 cent feedback

- Monsters are too hard. And you can't hide from them. Can't run from them. As a fanatic survival gamer (who likes to run and hide all the time) that's a bit disappointing. The monsters kind of "pop up" suddenly and then it's fight or die. Not run, hide, and hoping it didn't see me, which is what I would've liked.
- Mutliplayer not working, port forwarding information is missing, so couldn't try out the co-op. Can't join any servers, it's stuck on connecting...
- Interface for weapon / ammo is a bit difficult to read. The idea to use words for everything adds to the atmosphere but it's not helping the gameplay. I really prefer # of ammo rounds left instead of "high / low" so I can anticipate on that, save my ammo, count my ammo so I can switch my weapon right on time.
- First 5 minutes started out great and I laughed hard when I was playing with the 2nd survivor and the voice said "eh, i couldn't save the last survivor but I'll try to save you.... and don't make this any more awkward than it is". That was great. I thought the high difficulty was on purpose and that I had a great story awaiting in front of me.
But then it was a bit dissappointing that I just kept dying and dying and those text dialogues just looped. That took away the fun and the mystique of "wtf is going on here".

Final verdict:
Never heard of this game before so it was a nice surprise but in its current state not really playable for me.

[c3sk]

Great feedback!
Thank you very much for posting and giving it a try!

Few notes:

melee is used for smaller monsters quite effectively.

grenades do bounce off walls and go hand in hand with sprinting.

The singleplayer is actually always mulyiplayer (even if nobody joins your session) thus the non existent pause.
If you wanted to pause your game, I would recommend just escaping to the main menu, and hitting start again when you're ready, it will pickup exactly where you left off. :)

-c3sk

[c3sk]

Thank you for your feedback Acacia, appreciate you taking the time to playtest and write this up! :)

-c3sk

[krassell]

Originally posted by c3sk:

melee is used for smaller monsters quite effectively.

I just spent small game session figuring out exaclty how to do it. Amount of kiting and precision reaches hotline miami levels. Not that it's a bad thing.

Originally posted by c3sk:

The singleplayer is actually always mulyiplayer (even if nobody joins your session) thus the non existent pause.

So it is possible for other people to join my game in singleplayer mode? If yes, that would be such an immersion-breaker at times... Time to block ALL THE PORTS!
Still, if you don't plan on implementing actual game pausing then maybe 'pause' menu should contain some hint that game is actually not paused?

[c3sk]

Originally posted by FTXen0morph Ò_ό ☣:

Originally posted by c3sk:

melee is used for smaller monsters quite effectively.

I just spent small game session figuring out exaclty how to do it. Amount of kiting and precision reaches hotline miami levels. Not that it's a bad thing.

Originally posted by c3sk:

The singleplayer is actually always mulyiplayer (even if nobody joins your session) thus the non existent pause.

So it is possible for other people to join my game in singleplayer mode? If yes, that would be such an immersion-breaker at times... Time to block ALL THE PORTS!
Still, if you don't plan on implementing actual game pausing then maybe 'pause' menu should contain some hint that game is actually not paused?

Players will be able to specify if they want to keep their session private, or public when starting a game, however the game will obviously encourage players to keep their sessions open as that is part of the social experience of Noct's multiplayer.

The pause menu currently states "disconnect" as the exit option. I'll try to think of a few ways we can reinforce the notion that your game is not paused. :)

-c3sk

[krassell]

Originally posted by c3sk:

The pause menu currently states "disconnect" as the exit option. I'll try to think of a few ways we can reinforce the notion that your game is not paused. :)

In fact, I thought that was part of game stylistic, going in theme with FLIR and drone/satellite connection. Thanks for elaboration though.

[MetroAndroid]

In the ship, there was a giant monster that appear, blocking the way back. I came back 5 times and moved the item I was supposed to pick up a few character lengths each time, but I was just moving it back further into the ship. I couldn't outrun the monster and only had enough time to shoot him a few times, so it was basically unwinnable. I would pick up the item and instantly die, even while knowing it would immediately come and running immediately after picking up the item. After my fifth attempt or so, I was set back halfway across the map, and just gave up.

I never saw a prompt on how to throw grenades. Picked up some and tried G or F, but nothing. I also couldn't figure out how to satiate thirst.