Hey team,
I think you crafted a cool town with lots of character. However, I think you’ve let art get in the way of gameplay here.
Yes, various people will flame me because they love it and it’s the best, skill issue and blablabla, but I strongly doubt I’m the only one that finds the town confusing, too time intensive, and after a while straight up annoying.
For all I care you keep the infrastructure exactly the same but please:
- Put a stash in every relevant corner of town (eg at marketplace)
- Make the staircase not broken, ever
- Instead of broken stairs (which is something you want to use), break the entrances to the sections that aren’t needed at the start. I’m not saying to make it perfectly and exclusively linear, just make it super intuitive to run in the right direction the first few times people get into town. For example: why do we immediately have access to the entire bottom right section (which we don’t need) but not to the staircase?
- Please improve the clarity on the town map. I find the current map isn’t helpful at all. Perhaps add height layers, resize the NPC icons, add function to NPC names (like “Danos the Builder”, and “Grinnich, the Merchant”)
- We have a map, but we don’t have an overlay map. Please add an overlay map so I don’t have to open the map menu every 10 seconds
- Preferably, the entire town map is available when you walk into town, rather than it all being blacked out.
- Have clearer road signs to the stuff we need for quests. I understand you don’t want quest markers, but god, I must’ve spent an hour trying to find the girl in prison and understanding that I needed to talk with someone at the fountain. I think I ended up finding it on YouTube rather than being guided by the game.
- Put the fireplace right next to Grinnich, not offscreen on top a staircase from him. Even if you keep it as-is, remove the torch that’s in front of it, making it look like 3 torches instead of 1 fireplace + 2 static visuals.
Aside from that, some stuff that ideally gets adjusted:
- Make the purchasable/purchased houses more visible compared to other houses
- Distinguish useful NPCs from voice line NPCs. Example: Whittacker & Eleanor look equally unimportant as the guard that walks between them. Maybe add an explanation mark above their heads, or put a clearer indicator that they are merchants
- Put NPCs that only have voice lines slightly further away from the optimal walking path, so it’s more obvious we don’t need to talk with them
- Zoom out the camera while we’re in town. Eg the town square is confusing simply because you can’t see the whole thing at once
- Have Danos sell building materials (at a small premium compared to the vendor in the market area). You can add an explainer/scene setting line like “he can help you procure items from the market if you’d like, but will charge you a small service fee”. This reduces running around quite a bit.
- Overhaul the bountie/challenge NPC UI, it’s everything but intuitive. I’m really wondering if the meme is true here: did a backend developer make this UI?
- Make the prison MUCH more visible and generally bigger. It’s not realistic that it’s this small but also makes it unnecessarily difficult to find.
- Don’t hide basic QoL behind buying a house
- On the town map, when clicking on the whisper, I expected to teleport there (not just an audio cue for nothing)
That’s probably enough town related feedback for now 