Beta Feedback/First Playthrough Journal(Ah how far it's come..)

[badgerdrool]

Who is?

Hello I'm Badger. I haven't been around since way back when the game first started taking preorders. I followed the project quite heavily back then. Due to assorted reasons, including an admitted desire to ignore the project until it was more feature complete, I have not been paying much attention sense. Merely biding my time with every intention to enjoy myself later.

Thus, I think I can provide some interesting feedback. My perspective includes dim memories of feature discussions and expectations. While my present contains what is in front of me in the build. I will be posting my thoughts as they come to me during this initial playthrough of Xenonauts.

Initial Impressions of Menus and Music

Xenonauts has some nice strong ambient music and I really like the menu system in person. It looks a little less awesome in screenshot or youtube form. In play it loads fast, has good visual direction, and is pleasant to work with.

I'm not having too much problem locating what I want to find initially. Stuff to purchase/hire to tweak my initial set up!

I started in North America and hired an extra 5 rookies. I then bought an extra plane. The manual indicated 3 can fly together and I figure I'd be best off maxing that out ASAP.

Continuing to mess with the Aircraft menu I hit the dropship button. Once I was on this screen it was immediatly obvious what I could do! Tweaking the formation of my soldiers was easy and I appear to have all the information I need. My set up includes 2 Soldiers to sweep out the sides, 2 soldiers on the corners of the front, and 2 soldiers making a Y with the front corners as response to any of the three directions.

Thus far my only complaint was on the soldier hire screen. The color difference between different grades of stats is very minor and it's a bit hard to read. It takes a little while to process who in the hireable pool has good stats and who does not. Besides that I feel that the color choices for menus is solid and readable. It's only when comparing those stats is important that it was noticeable.

The base layout itself somewhat surprised me as I did not fully realize it was going to be an external base rather then underground.

The load time on tooltips seems a bit slow. I'd like to see them load 50% faster. As I am still learning what each ammo box or grenade is meant to be this is noticeable. Though it's generally easy to tell what each equipment is based on picture.

Noticed the soldier past experience stuff. It's a nice touch. I think it helps offset some of the simplicity in other areas of the visual design. Imply something more complex that can't be fully shown. The soldiers themselves have a good variety to face/skin color though for obvious reasons they have the same body type.

Happy to see female soldiers made it in. I expect they fully have the same model as their male counterparts which is fine.

The icons for each part of the base menu are sensible but not guessable. Not an issue since you can just click on them. Pretty easy to remember IMO.

Game Options menu could be more robust. Key Bindings could stand being supcategoried. Even if it's just having a bold bit between groups to denote "Geoscape Hotkeys" "Aircraft Hotkeys" ETC.

I would like to see a game option to tweak menu colors. Likely complicated to hook up but this would allow players to solve many/most color related issues themselves. Good for any color blind users.

Happy to see cancel current movement hotkey. Knowing that's an option is quite neat.

Saves are not as robust as I wish they where. Playing through the newer Xcom I noted that their save system was annoying to work with in extended careful games where trying to sort through multiple save files could get annoying. I'm happy to see that Xenonauts saves can be named but, the current character limit would require shorthand to explain the save state. Allowing a "Note" sub field in Saves to attach a tooltip to a save file would likely skirt the issue by allowing players to maintain a more robust explanation of their saves.

I am happy that Xenonauts saves provide info on the time/date of save in game and out of game alongside funds. I somewhat wish there was more relevant information automatically displayed but cannot think of anything to suggest.

Xenopedia seems to need more art assets. I hope there will be a general Xenopedia splash to fill in for categories (Xenonaut Aircraft, Xenonaut Aircraft Weapons, ETC). Custom splashes for categories showing, say, a bunch of aircraft weapons next to eachother, would be nice but, I can see them as a luxury.

Xenopedia menu is a little hard to work through. I wish the selection area was larger and each entry had more vertical height.

I think there is a double space in the condor entry. "This has been used to give the Condor a reinforced airframe"..

Hahaha if I lose my transport I get to yell "Charlie Down!" and it sounds like a good thing.

Xenopedia seems to be a major WIP area. Though I like the direction of it.

-------------------

Getting the ball rolling. Speed up time!

UFO appears and a very familiar looking screen shows up.

Feedback on Interceptor selection - While what is selected and isn't changes colors. The highlight color does not. I have to remove my mouse from an aircraft to see if it's been enabled for the sortie. The feedback on selecting an aircraft is thus a bit delayed. For polish reasons this could stand a tweak. I'd also say that it isn't immediately obvious if highlighted means going or not. A small checkbox field on top of the highlight would be really clear.

Noticed the "tail until overland" option but couldn't see the interception. Immediately tried to drag the window...and it worked! Excellent.

Condor 1 is my #2 plane and Condor 2 is my #1 plane. Well that was a confusing couple of seconds. I'll be taking the time to rename my planes from now on but, this seems to be a bur worth smoothing. I'd suggest adjusting the labeling of interceptors within air combat. With only three values A, B, C instead of 1, 2, 3 seems an easy fix.

Light scout was easily destroyed...though it appears he was over the sea! I suppose that's why the option to tail until over land was there. If that's the only feedback on the target being over water it might be worth considering adjustment to make it more clear. A mistake I'll attempt to avoid moving forward but, a mistake made due to poor UI feedback is never good.

First Research and more Xenopedia

Finished my first research. I wish there was a button to blow up a section of this interface. I'd really like to increase the size of the text entree when I'm reading it.

While assigning my research I found another area worth polishing. One thing I noticed (after quite some time not realizing it was possible) in Xcom EU was that while highlighting a Grey Market field for selling I could use arrow keys to increase or decrease the amount. The click and hold interface in xenonauts is fine but it could be amplified by allowing arrowkeys to adjust values too. Who knows, maybe someone will expect it?

Back to intercepting

Two UFOs at once? Lovely...

I have now noticed that below the UFO itself it says the terrain. This is getting covered by the white text under my interceptors and isn't readable. Now that I know to look for it I see what's going on. If they are over sea the "Tail until over land" option is available but, when over land it is greyed out. This really isn't immediately obvious. If a minor a minor tweak could raise clarity it could help the new player experience. I'd suggest changing "Tail until over land" to "Tail until not over water" when they are over water and also modify the text to read "Target over land" when it is greyed out due to target being over land.

No pause button available in Geoscape mode. I have to enter a base or hit Esc. Seems like there should be one.

One Geoscape issue I see is that zooming in with scroll wheel zooms in on the center of my screen. Instead of where my mouse is. My personal preference is for it to zoom on mouse.

More aircombat

Tool tip for evasive roll has a misspelled roll as role.

Again tooltips feel like they pop up sluggishly.

I feel like the right mouse button is under used in air combat. Just a general feeling since it doesn't do anything. I also cannot currently tell if adjusting aircraft speed overwrites an AI thing and if so, how to make it auto again.

Edited April 27, 2013 by badgerdrool

[Methois]

As another fairly new player to this "Alpha/Beta", I'd just like to add to the list the one bug I've had the most trouble with. Loading ground missions, and the loss of all points for capturing the UFO. I don't mind taking grievious wounds to my soldiers left and right, I counted a mission where I had 4 below 30% still a success. But having to iron man all the ground missions means if you make a mistake and lose a couple of your squad your left with doing the whole mission over, or losing out on the 100 points for the UFO.. and since everything else is worth so few points it makes it really matter.

[badgerdrool]

Going to a Crash Landing. Bringing picnic baskets and pain.

Finished my first turn. The chopper is so much nicer to deploy out of then ye old Xcom starter. I rather like it.

I wasn't expecting soldier movement to look so good. In person it's super sexy and stand up/kneel is very smooth looking. The environments look gorgeous.

Honestly, I'm not sure I'd be willing to say Xcom:EU is better looking. Sure, Xenonauts isn't true 3d but, it's got a great stylized art style. I don't think it's as simple as one looking better. Instead I find that I appreciate Xenonauts approach. I recall all the trouble surrounding it but so far it looks great.

OMG BUTTON TO TURN OFF AND ON ROOFTOPS OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG

Exploring the menu I just love it. Quick reload and quick grenade are great ideas and a surprise to me. Good design idea. TU reserve menu and weapon menu is clear. The movement provides good feedback as well.

I can't say it'll be super obvious what it all does for a new player sadly. Fact is this is a complicated game and the combat menu is a major area that would suffer from simplification.

Aiming is a bit unintuitive. Noting scrollwheel and rightclick are making adjustments but unsure what the adjustments are at present. I believe scrollwheel is aim and maybe rightclick is adjusting fire time. Will keep messing around.

Not fully clear if left clicking will fire or clear aim without hitting 1 to select another soldier.

I believe the full release would greatly benefit from a pre-packaged tutorial. Something to walk the player through the interface one element at a time. For now I'll just have to figure it out the hard/fun way.

I got shot!

Medkits feel really really weird. Had a reaction shot nick one of my guys. Applying a medkit to him was immediately immersion breaking. The hand grenade toss animation might be a placeholder but the actual mechanics are kind of awkward. It seems odd to click back to the medkit over and over to "throw" healing at the target a little at a time.

The mechanics themselves may be placeholder but, I feel a pop up menu to an adjustable slider for how many TU of healing to use would be appropriate for the current system.

I must admit that I expected medkits to also use up TU on the injured soldier. I also didn't expect the supplies to be burnt through so quickly or for them to be so "health pot" style. I expected more detail such that injuries would be tracked per hit and healed per hit. Something like "Soldier has 3 bullet wounds. Bullet Wound 1 requires X supplies and Y TU to heal".

AI isn't taking the bait and running around the corner into the waiting reaction fire of my soldiers. Oh well. Time to huck a flash and rush ET.

....and I flashed my own soldiers. Fantastic. 1 Tile wall and it didn't go over it. Well time to test if there are grenade arcs with a frag then load the mission when I kill my soldiers.

Appears to be some arc as the frag went over the wall after I was no longer adjacent to it. Not a ton of feedback on where the Grenade is going to go ahead of time. Be nice to see a throwing arc or something. I'll have to mess with them more to learn how they work.

Huzzah I can vault over chest high walls!

Well grenades didn't work. Had to move up and clench the buttcheeks. Shot some of my own guys and it took two turns but he's dead. No soldiers down but a couple of them are pissed at me.

I note that combat is pretty quick which is nice in some ways. It's not as long or drawn out as ye olde Xcom shooting. However, it seems easy to miss details. I'm still unsure of a couple of those shots and whether I hit a friendly or not. It makes me wish for a combat log or something to alert me of major combat events. Simply so the combat can be fast paced without missing things being a problem.

The shooting has some very lovely designs. I particularly like the bar stretching to the target which shows probability and range. I do feel that combat is occuring at a hard to deal with distance for my xenonauts though. The soldiers with scoped rifles feel like they should be able to engage targets that they have very poor hit chance against.

Part of that may be AI though. The initial enemies are simply fighting me at a range that's disadvantageous to me. Instead of TU going to fire it has to go to movement to have a halfway decent shot at hitting.

It certainly reminds me of old Xcom but, it seems a major gap at first blush. Haven't read any of the other threads discussing the AI but I believe there's still work to do on them.

One movement issue is that I have to two part janky movement. Not a huge issue but, it could be nice to be able to plot out diagonal movement better.

Gonna clean up this site then post again.

Edited April 28, 2013 by badgerdrool

[badgerdrool]

As another fairly new player to this "Alpha/Beta", I'd just like to add to the list the one bug I've had the most trouble with. Loading ground missions, and the loss of all points for capturing the UFO. I don't mind taking grievious wounds to my soldiers left and right, I counted a mission where I had 4 below 30% still a success. But having to iron man all the ground missions means if you make a mistake and lose a couple of your squad your left with doing the whole mission over, or losing out on the 100 points for the UFO.. and since everything else is worth so few points it makes it really matter.

That sounds annoying.

More feedback.

I was able to figure out the combat enough as I went along to clear my first crash without an actual causality. Granted, I am an Xcom veteran and as such many systems felt familiar. Still a little confused about some of the stuff surrounding aiming and I suspect I'll need to read up on them to get them.

I did note that accuracy was acceptable when a target was not within cover. 30%-40% seems low but, was workable with the quantity of fire I was capable of.

Post game screen is interesting. Makes me remember that Xenonauts was intended to have you develop your own human style weapons instead of OSP being a thing. So the autosale makes sense.

I feel like 1 surviving citizen should be worth more then a +1.

Soldier development screen tells a lot but, still misses a bit. I'm basically guessing that whatever stat is shown is what the soldier has increased due to the mission. Be nice to see the previous stat to compare how much development happened.

I do find it strange how injury appears to work though. I have one guy that I healed back up with the med kit that has my least injury time to heal. He was reduced down to 1 health! Other soldiers whom took less devastating injuries are taking more time to heal because I didn't first aid them. That sounds appropriate until I think about what it'll do in the future.

I basically don't want the last alien alive to die until I've had a chance to med kit up. Rushing a final kill to end the mission is a disincentive as a result. It also seems odd that my soldiers couldn't heal up with all the medical equipment post combat. They have to do it mid combat to receive any benefit.

It feels like injuries is, overall, a system that could stand to be more robust and nuanced. The health system itself seems fine, but the healing part is weak.

Caesan's are awesome and I shall enjoy murdering them.

So from start to post first combat. Pretty good experience. I was pretty confident in this project and I'm happy to see it wasn't misplaced. Clearly it's coming along quite well and I look forward to seeing the progress going forward.

Bit out of time tonight so I won't be continuing.

Edited April 28, 2013 by badgerdrool

[Sathra]

You can increase the amount you heal with a medikit the same way as aiming (right-click for me). More efficient that way, I think.

[badgerdrool]

You can increase the amount you heal with a medikit the same way as aiming (right-click for me). More efficient that way, I think.

Ah well then. That's...really...really...not obvious at all. My big goal was to see how many little polish details I could spot. Stuff that'd throw off a new player's experience. Quirks that vets may already be used to. I don't want just vets playing Xenonauts when it releases. I want a whole new crowd to graduate from EU2012 to this!

Still, that'll be easier for me to work with now though.

[Belmakor]

You can increase the amount you heal with a medikit the same way as aiming (right-click for me). More efficient that way, I think.

WHAAAAAT!?! All this time I have been applying it 5 TUs at a time *dolt*

[crusherven]

Ah well then. That's...really...really...not obvious at all. My big goal was to see how many little polish details I could spot. Stuff that'd throw off a new player's experience. Quirks that vets may already be used to. I don't want just vets playing Xenonauts when it releases. I want a whole new crowd to graduate from EU2012 to this!

Still, that'll be easier for me to work with now though.

I agree that it's really not very obvious. I had no idea until someone told me as well (and then I forgot how to do it). The problem for me is that it works just like a gun, but I don't think of medikits and guns as the same at all. You make some good points about healing your troops mid-mission.

[thothkins]

I'd have thought that after sustaining a serious injury that you could only be healed back up to a certain point,. as shown by the grey bars when using the medi kit.

Also, perhaps at the end of the mission all soldiers are healed back up to the maximum of those grey bars, showing the first aid treatment en route back to base, over a much longer period than the combat.

After that's done, then the recovery time is calculated.

Medi kits are awkward. Both in how to actually use it, and in the way I never know quite how much to use. Actually, the second point may be intentional. Why would I know just how much first aid to use down to the last bit of health?

[erutan]

@thotkins QFT

[Bansheedragon]

Just a little tip in case you havent noticed it.

I discovered it myself by accident when healing one of my soldiers.

You can use the mouse scroll wheel to determine how much you want to heal your soldier, just as you use it to change aim mode when targeting aliens.

[Chris]

Thanks for the thoughts. I'll look into the end of mission healing stuff; recovery time should be based only on the soldier's adjusted maximum health rather than their actual health.

The accuracy stuff and the AI does still need some work. Perhaps a combat log would be a good idea.

I'm surprised so many people struggle with medikits, given the right click aim for guns is generally seen as reasonably intuitive. Perhaps we'll look into that again too.

[crusherven]

I'm surprised so many people struggle with medikits, given the right click aim for guns is generally seen as reasonably intuitive. Perhaps we'll look into that again too.

I think the problem is that although guns have different aim levels and fire modes listed, there's no reason to think you can adjust the number of TUs a medikit uses. I don't really think about applying a medikit more accurately. Probably if there were some visible indication that the TU use is adjustable for medikits, right-click/scroll would make more sense.

[Sathra]

Could have them heal a percentage (or fixed amount, though I like percentage) with a fixed TU cost. More in line with most healing in games.

[StellarRat]

Could have them heal a percentage (or fixed amount, though I like percentage) with a fixed TU cost. More in line with most healing in games.

To me it seems like all they should do is prevent further HP loss from bleeding and maybe give you back X % of your "pre-hit" HP. I don't think they should ever be able to completely "heal" a soldier back to normal no matter how many times use the Medi-kit on the same soldier.

[Sathra]

They can't heal to full atm anyways (except with the bug).