So I’ve just spent a little over 4 hours playing the game (solo player in this instance) and I’ve been having a blast, but I have noticed a bunch of things that I thought were worth bringing up. I didn’t want to post a giant wall of text in the discord so I’ve made this post and will link to it in the discord instead.
I imagine some of this is probably already known, some may not be.
So the biggest issue I’ve run into myself is that I have been using the scout rifle and often the collision with the bullets in the world just isn’t very good. I’ll often perch up on a ridge or look down over a cliff, and go to fire on a dino and it will hit an invisible collision that can sometimes be anywhere up to what looks like half a meter from the rock. Its pretty consistent in a lot of spots, but is most noticeable when you are trying to snipe from cliffs and such. That said - it has happened mid-fight when trying to use rocks and the terrain as cover. Some work definitely needs to be done on getting the collision models to more closely resemble the visual ones IMO.
Another issue that seems to happen a lot while sniping at distance only occurs when dealing with Alphas. Basically when you snipe them they go into a short stun animation. During this period, if you try to snipe them again from certain angles, the bullets just won’t connect. It will go straight through the dino and you sometimes will even see particles of it hitting something behind them. Its pretty frustrating.
Finally, another issue that I noticed a lot when sniping is that sometimes enemies will just get angry at you, then stand there doing nothing until you put them out their misery. Pretty sure it has to do with the AI navigation when you are sniping them from an area they “can’t get to” or something, but sometimes the area between me and them is just a bit of a hill, so it seems like it would be good, if they can’t or won’t run down/up the hill, to at least have them run away so that t hey break line of sight and aren’t sitting ducks. I haven’t really noticed this when fighting up close but I assume this is probably because there’s less navigation calculations needed there.
Moving on from the distant sniping, there’s a few other small issues I’ve noticed:
- Sometimes when you melee an enemy, there is no interaction. Either they take damage and don’t show it/react/make any noise, or they aren’t taking damage and the melee is just “missing” them despite the fact that it should be a clear hit
- Sometimes when you complete objectives quickly, Sarah won’t give you a “hey you did that” audio line and nothing will pop up on screen, so its hard to know whether it registered or not. The easiest way to reproduce this is to run up to a radar tower and hit the level before Sarah is even half way through the original “Hey there’s a radar could you go…” voice line. She will finish that line and then nothing. I assume it is completing, but its helpful to KNOW it is registering obviously
- When you look at the ammo counter, the secondary weapon always says 0/64 (or whatever the second number is) regardless of whether that gun is loaded or not
- Throwing an ammo pack on the ground feels very clunky and slow. Not only does it take along time from it hitting the ground and stopping to be able to interact with it, there is a period where it actually disappears for a second while it switches from the thrown actor to the actual interactive actor
Outside of the issues above, I have some suggestions that I think would improve the flow of the game as well:
- Give the option to disable tutorials/hints. They keep popping up even on the 4th mission in and they are really annoying!
- Give options in video settings to lower the quality, count or even turn off particle effects. There is noticeable framerate dips when there are a lot of particle effects going on.
- Make half-completed optional objectives disappear from the screen when you move away. I did 4/8 gas ganisters for the gas canister objective - Sarah even told me to only do as many as I thought I could do - so I stopped half way, but for the rest of the hour long mission I did it remained on the screen telling me I had only done 4/8. I’d say just make that objective disappear when you get a certain distance from the objective, and make it pop up again if you return back there
- Please give us a way to check the score mid-mission. As someone who likes to do as much as I can in a mission, it would be useful to have the option to either have the score there all the time, or even just the ability to hold Tab to show the score at any point. I found that everytime it was visible was while doing things, which usually meant I couldn’t really check it out haha
- A flashlight would be great in caves/mines
- For Ortega, her dodge ability is great. Its particularly great that you can dodge while reloading - but why can’t you dodge while healing? Both actions seems equal in terms of how much they should limit your character. I would love to be able to dodge while healing, even if it cancelled the heal - because at the moment I feel like its a little sluggish to cancel the heal personally.
Looking forward to putting a lot more time into the game and seeing where you guys take it! Hope some of that is helpful 