Initial Feedback

[Harlequin565]

Hi folks. I'm 10 hours in now and just thought I'd add my voice before your early access release. Haven't read the forums yet, so apologies if anything here is duplicated. Just ignore me

I downloaded the beta as soon as I was able, but didn't have the brains to figure out what to do. I thought I'd give it a proper go again just recently and have some feedback...

First, I have quite a lot of hours in Firaxcom, and no hours in the original game or Xenonauts, so that's where I'm coming from. I'm currently at 10 hours played, campaign attempt number 5. Not got past the first terror mission.

Tutorial.

Apologies if any of this is included in the tutorial and I missed it. These points were lightbulb moments for me when I figured them out, and were mostly obtained from watching letsplays. But I only tend to do that when I want to persevere with a game. 

1. Cover, LOS & Time Units: Cover is well explained, but most of the guided actions involve "move then shoot". This reinforces the belief that shooting is turn ending. I know it isn't, but it's ingrained in me to press space after shooting even if I have TU left. I also thought I could shoot round high cover, which I obviously can't. I think a tutorial action that involves you taking high cover, then using TU to step out, fire, and step back would be a great way to illustrate that you can do stuff after shooting as well as explain that you can't shoot round adjacent high cover. This aspect of the game is what sets it apart from the other titles for me, and is what makes it really engaging.

2. Friendly Fire is a real hazard, and also something I think should be included in the tutorial so people know about it, even if it's during the enemy turn, rather than making the player click through it. Also, grenades can miss quite easily which I found out the hard way.

3. Inventory isn't mentioned in the tutorial. I didn't even know it could be accessed from the tactical map until I saw it on YouTube. Maybe have a soldier pick something up or switch out a secondary weapon for a medkit? Picking up a corpse to return it for evac could also illustrate that hidden "10% chance not to die", which is a great feature I knew nothing about. Still don't know whether you need to take the corpse on missions where you evac (mission 2).

4. Right clicking to open doors, get USBs out of computers etc should also be in there. Had to watch a letsplay for mission 2.

5. Turning has a use. It's kinda covered as an aside in the tutorial, but it's not until you get to the tac map when you make that quarter turn to see an alien standing ten feet away in plain sight that you realise just how important it is to be aware of your surroundings by turning your soldiers. I'm now forever turning and scanning to see what's around me. Project Zomboid hat is firmly on.

6. Right click on a shot type makes it go orange (without having a target selected). I had no idea what this meant until I figured out that it restricts your movement to allow you enough TU to move and fire. Should be in the tutorial.

General.

On the soldier management screen, having a tooltip over each of the soldier attributes, reminding the player what they're useful for would be helpful. I still don't know what Reflexes are used for, so this would be useful for people that didn't absorb themselves fully in the tutorial.

A smoother camera rotation would be better than the janky rotation in place now. I have mine set to 30 degrees so I have fine control, so pressing Q or E a couple of times in succession is a bit jarring to the eyes.

Nice To Haves

It would be really good if Soldier "classes" could be saved to disk rather than the gamesave. For mugs like me, starting a new game as frequently as I do means having to re-organise how I want my loadouts to appear repeatedly. Similar to how Factorio does blueprints.

That's all I have right now. I think the game is very playable for early access. My only real concerns were over the tutorial. My first few games were a disaster as I learned those points. It's not a bad tutorial, it just leaves a few things out that Firaxcom players might rage over.

Good luck with EA and with the future of the game!

[Chris]

31 minutes ago, Harlequin565 said:

Hi folks. I'm 10 hours in now and just thought I'd add my voice before your early access release. Haven't read the forums yet, so apologies if anything here is duplicated. Just ignore me

I downloaded the beta as soon as I was able, but didn't have the brains to figure out what to do. I thought I'd give it a proper go again just recently and have some feedback...

First, I have quite a lot of hours in Firaxcom, and no hours in the original game or Xenonauts, so that's where I'm coming from. I'm currently at 10 hours played, campaign attempt number 5. Not got past the first terror mission.

Tutorial.

Apologies if any of this is included in the tutorial and I missed it. These points were lightbulb moments for me when I figured them out, and were mostly obtained from watching letsplays. But I only tend to do that when I want to persevere with a game. 

1. Cover, LOS & Time Units: Cover is well explained, but most of the guided actions involve "move then shoot". This reinforces the belief that shooting is turn ending. I know it isn't, but it's ingrained in me to press space after shooting even if I have TU left. I also thought I could shoot round high cover, which I obviously can't. I think a tutorial action that involves you taking high cover, then using TU to step out, fire, and step back would be a great way to illustrate that you can do stuff after shooting as well as explain that you can't shoot round adjacent high cover. This aspect of the game is what sets it apart from the other titles for me, and is what makes it really engaging.

2. Friendly Fire is a real hazard, and also something I think should be included in the tutorial so people know about it, even if it's during the enemy turn, rather than making the player click through it. Also, grenades can miss quite easily which I found out the hard way.

3. Inventory isn't mentioned in the tutorial. I didn't even know it could be accessed from the tactical map until I saw it on YouTube. Maybe have a soldier pick something up or switch out a secondary weapon for a medkit? Picking up a corpse to return it for evac could also illustrate that hidden "10% chance not to die", which is a great feature I knew nothing about. Still don't know whether you need to take the corpse on missions where you evac (mission 2).

4. Right clicking to open doors, get USBs out of computers etc should also be in there. Had to watch a letsplay for mission 2.

5. Turning has a use. It's kinda covered as an aside in the tutorial, but it's not until you get to the tac map when you make that quarter turn to see an alien standing ten feet away in plain sight that you realise just how important it is to be aware of your surroundings by turning your soldiers. I'm now forever turning and scanning to see what's around me. Project Zomboid hat is firmly on.

6. Right click on a shot type makes it go orange (without having a target selected). I had no idea what this meant until I figured out that it restricts your movement to allow you enough TU to move and fire. Should be in the tutorial.

General.

On the soldier management screen, having a tooltip over each of the soldier attributes, reminding the player what they're useful for would be helpful. I still don't know what Reflexes are used for, so this would be useful for people that didn't absorb themselves fully in the tutorial.

A smoother camera rotation would be better than the janky rotation in place now. I have mine set to 30 degrees so I have fine control, so pressing Q or E a couple of times in succession is a bit jarring to the eyes.

Nice To Haves

It would be really good if Soldier "classes" could be saved to disk rather than the gamesave. For mugs like me, starting a new game as frequently as I do means having to re-organise how I want my loadouts to appear repeatedly. Similar to how Factorio does blueprints.

That's all I have right now. I think the game is very playable for early access. My only real concerns were over the tutorial. My first few games were a disaster as I learned those points. It's not a bad tutorial, it just leaves a few things out that Firaxcom players might rage over.

Good luck with EA and with the future of the game!

Perfect, thanks for writing all this out. As a developer it's really helpful to get feedback like this, especially from a player who is completely new to classic X-Com style games.

I do have a few questions to help me understand better:

• Out of curiosity, what difficulty did you decide to play the game on given you have a lot of XCOM experience?
• Where were you trying to get the tooltips for the soldier stats? As of about a week ago the column headers on the Soldier screen now have explanatory tooltips, and the stat rows on the Soldier Equip screen do too. Were you hovering over the numbers themselves on the Soldier screen?
• Did you get the little popup windows when playing that explain game mechanics? The "RMB to open doors" should have been on one of those. Possibly you missed it if you were busy with your first tactical combat mission?

I think you make some interesting suggestions for the tutorial. It never even occurred to me that people might think their turn was over after shooting, but now you point it out I can definitely see it being a thing. I also hadn't really thought about how new players might not realise how important turning was if they'd come from XCOM.

I'm a little less sure about some of the other ideas. There's certainly a lot of things that could be in the tutorial - the inventory, bleeding wounds, reserving TU, the various parts of the strategy layer, etc. But my concern is that people will get bored if you make the tutorial too long. So maybe I need to consider how to get that extra information to people who want it without forcing everyone to go through it.

Food for thought, anyway! Oh, and yes, you do need to bring the corpses with you to get the survival chance if it's a mission that requires evac. And the loadout export / save feature is much requested; maybe that's something we'll finally get round to implementing during Early Access.

[Harlequin565]

Thanks for the reply Chris. 

- I was playing on the lowest difficulty with a modification to the alien numbers to make them "normal". I wanted the same amount of loot . I'm the sort who plays on easy to figure out how everything works, and then moves up once I've got the hang of things.

- Hah. I was trying to do it on the Soldier Recruit screen. That's where I actually started paying attention to the numbers. You're right, the tip is there in the manage soldier screen. My bad.

- I'm not sure. Could easily have missed it. I think the thing when you're just starting is that there is quite a bit to try and remember. The UI has a lot of info on screen (which is a good thing IMO) so popups can get dismissed while I concentrate on something else. It's all second nature now, and nice & intuitive. I think the problem was that I played the tutorial on the 1st game. Wiped in mission 2, and restarted without the tutorial. Do the popups appear if you have the tutorial off?

Agree with making it too long. I managed to figure all this out eventually, and once EA gets underway there are likely to be lots of "beginner guide" type videos that will cover it. I have just read a few reddit posts and other places complaining about difficulty, which didn't feel fair. I appreciate I'm on the lowest diff, but mission 2 (which I've now done 4 times) is a breeze now that I a) take the right soldiers, b) remember to turn and c) manage my TU to make sure I've got time to dip into cover after an action. Firaxcom playstyles won't work here and if a lot of your players come from that ethos, they might get grumpy. Maybe you need to do a separate tutorial for "People coming from New XCOM" :)