Meloette Wells
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(Pre-Ashfall) AQ3D Impressions
So the other day in Yulgar’s inn, I was talking to a player. They happened to chimed in when someone mentioned Adventure Quest 3D, or AQ3D for short. The player said, “AQ3D is trash! It’ll lag horribly.” and etc. etc. Then another person asked this player if they actually played the game. It was a legit question, because AQ3D have had a good deal of backlash from players. They just kept going on using vague things like “It’s trash”, “It looks ugly,” and then he got to the root of his problem. “It sucks cause it was member only.” Which if you was following the development of the game, you’ll know it been in open beta for a few months now. We pointed this fact out to the player and he just got all quiet, then he just said he had to go. We realized the guy was upset at the game just because he couldn’t play it; he didn’t have an actual reason to dislike the game because of something the game did. I, on the other hand, have a decent amount of experience throughout the alpha, and closed beta phases of the game before I’ve temporarily dropped the game. With my experience and impressions on the game, I want to give this game a closer analysis of why people would be turned off by the game itself.
The first issue with the game would be it’s basic appearance for player characters. A lot of people simply dislike these characters due to the standard that artists like Dage, Miltonius, and even Tomix set for the company as a whole. Sure, it’s Artix Entertainment’s first departure into the land of three-dimensions but, they uses graphic assets of armors and weapons that would be more suited on something like a Playstation 2 than a modern PC game. Which is where the issue is. AQ3D is designed to be a multiple platform game for PCs and Mobile phones. This wide a scope come with some limitations, like how some older phones might have the physical ability to emulate a Play Station 2 era game but nothing even close to a modern game. The basic art used in the game is for those lowest possible systems running the game, however the game play don’t agree with this lowest denominator of systems requirements for graphics. (The game play is another issue entirely compared to the graphic design though.) In regards to this graphical limitation, it can’t be helped, but the bare minimal design for a game’s graphic are set the tone for all the graphics to be the bare minimal.
Moving from the look of the characters to the GUI (the Graphic User Interfaces), we can see one of the bigger issues a lot of people have with the game. To begin this topic, a little explanation of GUI elements is in order. Graphic User Interfaces are the icons and menus a user, or in aq3d’s case the player, would use to interface with a computer program. The alpha version of the game used some simple buttons consisting of a circle with some kind of icon inside of said circle. This icons vary from three horizontal lines that represent the game’s menu, another icon is of a potion bottle that represent the game’s quick access use item menu. Another element of the GUI is the class’ skills, where they been clustered as a circle in the bottom right corner of the game’s screen, so someone could have easy access to using a thumb to activate that class’s combat skills. As of more recent updates, like the recent Frostvale or Ashfall updates, the PC version of the game been more optimized for it’s platform. This PC version have the deployment of new menus and buttons to replace the bare bones of the mobile’s GUI elements. One such example of the PC optimization is how the skill buttons been laid out around the bottom middle of the game screen in a way akin to Adventure Quest World’s own skill menu. This optimization for the PC version is a way that game was made to work better for PC players, since the mobile controls was too bare for what a lot of PC players expect from a PC game. (Although the usage of white icon are hard to read when in white maps like Frostvale.) The issue that PC players had with the controls being too bare, is just another drawback to the previous bare, or even minimalist, icons the game uses. As the original GUI layout for the game is simply too small to operate the game in a reasonable manner. Recalling back to the class’s skills being clustered in a corner of the screen, in the opposite corner on the left side is the movement “circle pad” icon. This icon works a lot like the circle pad on a game controller, but it does do the job of allowing the player to move. The issue with having these two central GUI elements to the game in two separate corners is where a player’s hand is big enough to cover the screen or the phone they’re playing on is too small for the tiny icons. This issue can cause players who are affected by either or both of these issues to find the game un-wieldy to use. Once the controls prove too difficult to handle, then the player would probably never return to the game. An opinion that once there will define that player’s opinion of the game from there onward.
Now having to defined the issues caused by the game’s graphical elements, the issues of the game play can be explored. The first issue with the game play is the Artix Entertainment’s insistence to stick with their tried and true method of accretion design. Accretion game design is a philosophy that focus on making new content. It don’t matter if your content have a problem, because you can just make something new to fix or replace it. For example how AQW introduced the first nuking class with stun in the form of Vindicator of They. When people complained about that in pvp (player vs player), they made Pyromancer to one-up Vindicator of They’s nuke by reflecting that huge chunk of damage back at the person with Vindicator. Then, they had to deal with there not being a counter for Pyromancer, so the cycle of a new class being by definition either a counter or improvement of an older class became a familiar cycle for class releases. The folks over at the youtube channel Extra Credits do a more in-depth look at accretion on their youtube channel, however let’s return to AQ3D and how accretion is present in it. If you played the alpha, you might’ve reached around level ten or so. This would placed you roughly around the starting area for Doomwood. You would have experienced the Greenguard caves’ monsters with incredibly wide argo, or aggression, range. Argo range is the specific range a monster have to automatically lock on and attack your character. You probably learned how to stick to the walls or move at the very Edge of this range to avoid getting targeted by monsters in that cave. The caves is the most horrid example of this argo range though, as a lot of the pre-dungeons’ release maps, like Greenguard forest or Doomwood, have this issue with using aggressive monster AI in small spaces. The maps released after the dungeons, or at least the seasonal dungeons, however have monsters more widely spread and/or a smaller range for that map’s monster argo. This change (or in hindsight being high level enough to disable the aggression of monsters) makes the game miles more navigable. This change shows that they realize the issue that the huge range for monster argo have for mobile users. This is good that they are learning from their previous mistakes, but with the early stage that AQ3D in, the accretion method is throwing new player’s into those old problems that the staff have already fixed in later releases. The new players are experiencing these long term issues firsthand, or even in a worse state due to the mobile platform that AQ3D is also aiming for. This argo range needs to be shrunk for these earlier levels, so users with less precise controls. Like how players trying to walk around while covering half the screen with your hand are forced to fight monsters while they’re walking around. So, the continued usage of their accretion is decent for a game design philosophy, but with such a young game they need to go back and deport their more impactful changes to earlier zones in the game.
An issue with AQ3D that I’ll touch upon is it’s expectation for players to endure grinding. I know. I know, it’s a MMO. You’re suppose to do countless grinding! Which is all well and good- For a PC MMO, but not a mobile MMO. A PC MMO is in a stationary setting, where you can sit down at a computer and you expect to sit there for hours at a time just to keep playing. For mobile games though, you’re not going to often spend these long sessions of doing the same task over and over without a break or breather. If you look at Artix Entertainment’s other mobile game, Battle Gems, you can see the puzzle based aspect of the battles won’t maintain your attention for nothing more than a lunch break or so if one was to continuously play until they used up their stamina for a time period. Battle Gems don’t demand you to grind for long hours to continue playing the game, either. It just ask you to beat a specific puzzle match, and then it lets you on your way. While this design speaks more for it’s casual focus, this needs to be noted that this is true for Mobile Games as a given. With the amount of grinding, especially the level grinding, it expects you to do. This expectation gives players more reason to play the game on PC, but (with the gui and monster argo range issues) discourages them from playing on mobile.
One final issue to mention, is the implementation of the chat feature for mobile AQ3D. Due to how the typing interfaces work for mobile, it opens a text window covers the game entirely while someone is typing. This can block someone from using skills in a battle. It can prevent said player from seeing any future messages that was sent while the player was busy typing out their own messages. This flaw in mobile typing for apps just mentally encourage people to not communicate at all. Which is normal for a lot of mmos, especially when someone is trying to rush through a dungeon or boss fight. The problem with this however is how AQ3D is trying to be designed for interpersonal communication while playing. It is built upon an expectation for players to be able to group up from in the same room or even across the world and communicate while they’re fighting. (Artix Entertainment isn’t even adding a healer class, while which the implementation of would make the game easier it also would encourage players to actually work together or try to help each other beyond a single mutually needed boss. Otherwise it’s a case of “No way, that boss is too hard. Find someone else to help you.”) This chat issue makes events like the infamous Frostvale event even harder, when someone can just run in and solo the first boss (THAT WAS A RANDOM SPAWN FOR GOD’S STAKE) without Anyone else in that room. Apologies for letting a tad bit upset with this issue, but that’s just what this chat issue can cause in a game focused on team work. When people can’t communicate, folks get left out of the end goal or just ignore everyone else while looking out for themselves.
The impressions stops here, but I still have some suggestions for the staff when they further test the game.
1) Get People Who Did Not Develop This Game Or Actively Followed It To Test It.
You will not believe the amount of problems someone who never even experienced the game can discover when they haven’t adjusted to playing the game. I get that the developers need to test the content first, then they’ll let the staff/volunteer testers to test said content. The issue with how it being Handled right now is like how someone worked on a paper for so long that they don’t notice the problems or mistakes until that person is reading the paper the next day.
2) Find out why someone have a problem with an aspect of the game.
Anyone can point out they don’t like something, but not everyone’s opinion of not liking something is clear or concise. Sure, you have people on the forums that are willing to sit down and type out long spiels of constructive feedback, but not everyone is like that. Heck, there are people that are quitting AQW over the matter of the servers being silently removed without a word about why. There are people that won’t even Step on the rewrite servers, because they feel like it’s not their job to test AE’s prototypes. So whenever you do find someone with an issue, try to cox into giving some definable issue to whatever their issue is. I know you try this already, but press for this feedback. Heck, even make a sticky note of that person and their initial comment just so you can try to talk to them about it later.
3) Stay In Separate Rooms, When You Test The Game. Do Not Speak To Each Other At All, Verbally.
With the final paragraph of my first impressions, I talked about how cumbersome the in-chat tool is to use. While/If you try to implement solutions to this problem, I suggest refraining from talking to each other. This is so you can experience the game as if you was on separate sides of the world without the ability to talk to someone about what you all need to do.
edit1:
Reading over and making some grammar corrections and word omittions. I forgot to give some solutions to some issues given. Like how I suggested in a later post the idea of a gui scaling option for the mobile version of the game, so players can resize the gui elements to their phone size/hand size.
Also, other people brought up the fact that the grinding is because of the few levels in the game. I can respect the reasoning to drag out gameplay, but after a certain point you will either 1) give up trying to grind and wait for content around your level or 2) grind your little heart out against some high level monsters with a crowd of fellow low level players as you try to get experience to access new content (like the lv15 volcano area content). This idea to stretch out the grinding shrinks the early player base to a lot of the players willing to grind to that high level and/or have to time to grind there.
Sooooo in regards to the grinding, I wish you luck in redesigning the combat to make folks want to grind.
< Message edited by Meloette Wells -- 3/30/2017 13:54:26 >
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