kaiserlich Alpha Playtest Feedback

[kaiserlich]

First i want to says thanks to the developers! Great work. Great game. Nice that the community gets heared and issues getting fixed so fast. I don't remember when i have been feeling the same for any other game or software. Please keep this up that way!

I have played about 70 hours now and i want to share with you my thougths and my opinion. It's mixed with wishes, balancing and not to change things. Latest version i played is 1.66. And my appologies for the length of that post. If you don't want to read - jump to my personal ranking for proposed changes at the end of my post.

1. Start

The start is very hard, but it's ok like it is as the you can still restart quickly. At the beginning it says that i have crashed with a plane. So i would expect to find a crashed plane near to where i start, with some stuff already to loot but with low health.

2. Map / Houses

I like the mix of villages, houses, forest, frozen lakes, train and street. To walk from Mystery to Coastal feels like a real adventure. I would like to see more different houses and interiors including basement. I would like to look outside the house from near the roof to see if there are any wolves near the house before leaving it. I would also like to find more different things like broken cars (with loot in trunk), wood pile, fireplace (bit saver from wind) etc. I would love to be able to use my own tent and a warm sleeping bag. I use the map overview crafted by users to choose where to go first and what route can be best to survive. The community maps are great. Don't put much effort to create an ingame map. Add more maps, which directly adds a lot of more hours of gameplay.

3. Animals

- Wolf, still need to be rebalanced. Bare handed should be 50-50 to survive. Knife is ok i think. If i hit a wolf with a hatchet, i'm pretty sure that the wolf won't like it and would run with the first full hit already. Currently the wolf survives 3 hits with a hatchet with full power. Hatchet should be more like a knife. I would also like the possibility to hit the wolf with a hatchet before it bites me. At the same time i think the wolves are just too many. A little bit less wolves could help make the game more fun. Generally i think in reality i would show the wolf one arm to bite into, so i guess until that arm would recover, it would take me 10 days, not 10 hours where i then could only get eg. max 90% of health and slowly recovers day to day by 1% more max. And because i know that there are so many wolves, i would definitely use some protection against them - like bracer made out of leather or even with some metal parts where the wolf could bite into.

- Deers, are currently very hard to hunt. Normally i would look to shoot the chest to kill it with a heart or lung shot. And i would love to create traps for the animals with rope or cage. And i would expect to hunt them with bow and arrow (which i could craft myself somehow).

- Rabbit, are currently too expensive to use a snare for. I would expect rabbit food does have more calories then 450 per kilogram - in reality 1kg has about 1750 calories.

- Fish, looks great but currently buggy as it disappears very fast. Rope gets broken too fast. Not yet usable.

- I miss following animals: Bears - very very rarely of course with a 99% chance to die. Fox, snow grouse, moose (30 kg of meat but very hard to kill and strong too but peacefully), eagle, rat/mouse & mouse traps...

- I would also like to through stones or snowballs towards an animal to either get it potentially run away or hurt a little (stone).

4. Loot / Items

Generally already now the loot works fine. I think there should be more loot to be found in dead bodies, whenever i died so far i would have left a lot of stuff behind. Not used aid, materials, tools, food... Currently i barely find stuff in dead bodies. As mentionned in 2. Maps there could be more different places to find loot. To get loot makes it fun to explore and search. Rare items could also make it mandatory to look for stuff - like better/stronger versions of knife/hatchet. I would love to see a shovel in the game to build your own shelter or traps. I also think to melt snow, i should use some bucket or pan that could be found in almost every house.

5. Food

First of all: poisoning by food is currently my killer number two (after the wolves) and my most hated one, as i barely can do anything then die if i don't have the right medicine. It feels like a random killer and this is no fun. I would like some kind of "hint" to avoid to eat bacteria-infected food by looking at it, or smell (could tell that it smells a bit) and i would like to be able to heat it until the bacteria are killed after eg. 30 minutes of cooking or simply through it away.

I would love to be able to cook soup or make hot water that i could take with me and that could keep me also warm a bit, like up to 6 hours. That i then could drink or eat when i'm getting freezed to warm me up and survive longer in the cold.

6. Cloth

Condition of Clothes needs to be rebalanced. Within one day my cloth have lost 50% of its condition. This should not be possible. I was outside cooking at a fire until blown out by the wind. I don't like to take off my clothes when i do a fire just to prevent them to loose condition. The wind should not make clothes loosing it's condition. Just time should make it loose conditions (very little) and if really needed then when i do something (workbench, cutting trees, cooking) could loose condition a little bit higher then just walking but not much. Please remove that wind - cloth relation. Sweating could impact the ability of cloth to keep warm and the need of getting them put on a rope to dry them or just lie them on the floor near a fire. Like said under 4. rare items in this case clothes that are better then others could be fun to search and find them.

My personal ranking (priorities):

1. One new map for christmas (i love to explore at the same time as testing the new features and balancing of gameplay)

2. Do something around food poisoning that it's not a random game killer

3. Continue rebalancing the use of conditions at clothes (rebalance or remove wind impact)

4. Make fishing usable (fixing fish disappearing, balancing when tools get broken - less)

5. Continue rebalancing wolves (make hatchet more usefully, respawn time when killed a wolf, less is more eg. coastal townsite)

6. Make rabbits worth to catch (balancing)

7. Make the dead bodies worth looking for (balancing)

8. All the wishes for new stuff and features described above like rare items, shovel, tent and more various animals and places

For me it makes most fun to create my personal "save place" with all i need to survive in combination with explore the great looking landscape, find new items, harvest some meat and feel like in a real (immersive) environment. Keep up the great work! Thank you.

If somebody has "really" read my post, please reply what you think i missed or got wrong or not explained well. Thanks you.