hi, a bit of newbie perspective for you straight from the horse's mouth!
-There's not much of a front page (understatement!), although I guess that's more of a deterrent to would-be players than new players. Not sure what'd be suitable, I doubt some big full-page splash graphic would be necessary but ISTR it was a bit empty and short on info.
-Game is quite interesting from a sort of wander-about-and-explore sort of perspective, although I get the impression I've found 90% of the locations by now? Maybe I haven't, but if so then that factor's gonna run out of steam for me pretty soon I expect.
-UI isn't so great- not that I want more graphics or anything (I don't), but some of the controls are kinda meh, eg many clickable bits of v.small text (fiddly and awkward) instead of larger areas (eg small icons perhaps 16-24px across or something like that for the sewer controls- ok strictly that'd be "graphics" but not in the way many peope would mean), or the behaviour of boxes of NPC dialogue at the start which seems kinda awkward somehow (hard to describe)
-Another annoyance with the controls is the lagginess and lack of feedback for them: eg "loading" type feedback graphic appears way off in the top-right corner of the screen when you try to move, when it might be better showing it on the actual map, say in the square you're moving to, or else at least
near the map. A much worse case IMO is how when you're fighting, the character display generally doesn't seem to update for some time after the round is described; I've learnt to sit and wait for about 10 seconds or so after either side does any damage, to see what the actual results are. As another example of limited feedback, it's also sometimes hard to tell whether you've made a new attack if the text is identical to last turn (eg if nobody hit) except by checking the stats to see if those changed- but I dunno what could actually be done about that. Yet another example of bad feedback and lagginess is when you BUY stuff. Seriously,
this one sucks, please sort it out if nothing else! You fill in how many items you want, click "purchase", sit about a few moments, and a subliminal white "buying success" message suddenly flashes past. What was that? Was it the "LAG 1500 MS" message? I didn't notice. I must not have clicked it properly, I'll do it again. So I now have TWO butterknives, well at least they're not expensive. But surely the feedback should stick around on the dialogue where you can see it.
-Lack of info. For instance, if I click the "examine" button, for MOST items it just says exactly the same thing as on the pop-up for the item, which I already had to click in the first place. Yes it shows more for equipment at least, but for instance many items I have no idea what they'd do (Angel tears?) and don't want to waste them, and many foods it'd be nice to have a clue how much nutrition I'd get without trial and error. Lack of info on monsters is somewhat more frustrating, yes ok it may be realistic to not have stats viewable for your enemies but the same would go for the equipment IRL.Seeing as we have the weird trading cards (which don't appear to have ANY other purpose??) showing descriptions of the monsters, that might seem to be a good place to list some of the stats? Hell, even if there ARE otherr purposes for them it sounds good, if you don't want to show them on the monsters themselves. Perhaps each card might only show one or two stats, until you've collected several of them, or something, to make it a bit more challenging, and give more for players to do.
-Other things without quite enough info include the STATS. I can see that my Stamina increases my HP as the stat level goes up. I presume the Strength level increases the damage I can do with close combat. Intelligence I presume has something to do wth spells, which I haven't got any of yet. Willpower? Perception? Dunno! Do any of these things protect from EG cherub faces or evangelist rants? Agility? For that matter I don't actually know if half of these even have
any effects.
-It's also in some cases a bit hard to tell which monsters class as what; I really wouldn't want it to be spelt out eg "Killing this monster will upset the Inquisitors but please the Followers!", but having seen the text for all the societies I still find myself wondering "Does that monster count as being from *this* plane or not?" and "Does that guy count as mentally ill?" and "Where do these animals fit in?" and "Would the Beezlebros like these people or not?". Again, don't go spelling it out or anything boring but I still think some of it could be a little clearer somehow, whether in the monster descriptions or the cards or the society HQ blurbs. Even if you do decide to do that, there's probably still nothing wrong with leaving us to a certain amount of guesswork and trial and error on this though.
-On the question of whether it's too hard, it doesn't feel like there's very many low-to-medium power enemies around, or where there
are, they're all in a group with 50 others in the same room so I decide not to attack them in case I have to fight too many things at once- because there's no point wasting my vitality and HP and money fighting more than I can deal with and getting killed or having to run away, which results in me getting no loot and IIRC no favour either (OTOH at least it gets me XP so that's something). Not sure what the answer to the lots-of-monsters-together problem is, maybe it'd be less of an issue if we could find out the stats of some of them, as mentioned above. Or a limit to how many monsters can stay in a room, or how many you have to fight at once (if there is one already, info on this would be very handy). But limiting the number of monsters in a room/fight might make it a bit boring, especially for higher-level players. An alternative might be to ensure that there's always somewhere (not the same place all the time!) at any moment where there's smaller numbers of monsters, but this seems to be the case anyway- it's just that tiny groups also usually seem to feature a powerful enemy.
PHEW! Ok sorry I went on so much, but you DID ask, and maybe some of my views reflect the experience of some of the players who give up quickly. I at least intend to keep playing for a few days longer currently. Good luck!
