Tree of Savior Forum

My feedback for iCBT

Gameplay Feedback
#1

Hi! I’d like to leave my feedback before this forum section is closed =)
I played iCBT as archer -> quarrel shooter -> sapper. But my feedback will mostly touch upon general impressions, not class or skill specifics as they are constantly adjusted.

  • I experienced difficulties with understanding the passability of some areas. It was way more an issue than I expected (especially in Klaipeda, it’s minimap confuses me all the time). Also I’ve noticed a few level-design “mistakes” like invisible walls in the middle of a seemingly passable wide field. As for me, this all harms feeling of a magical journey created by truly epic artstyle.

  • Way too many boss fights. At some point I stopped to consider bosses as something significant: just another fat mob with lame reward. I liked the idea of party events (though I’d like to see a few bosses to choose from with scaling difficulty, so party members could discuss if they are able to kill tougher ones before setting off), also I liked randomly spawned field bosses. But please SIGNIFICANTLY reduce the amount of bosses players fight by quest. Current quantities kill all the taste of victory over strong opponent for me =/

  • I didn’t like at all the fact that any new area threw a new set of monsters at me, noticeably stronger ones by the way. It created salty feeling of game being too linear, feeling of mobs being stronger copies of one another, so the game felt a bit “cheap” and inconsistent. If mobs inhabited game world in some natural way, like fractal distribution among many areas, this would reduce quantity of monster types needed to inhabit all the world. And people would recall those mobs, remember them, which leads to stronger emotional bind to game. I personally don’t enjoy “passing” content and never seeing it again.

  • Feedback from my wife: bosses and monsters felt too generic and similar. Though she could’t explain clearly what is wrong. By her words bosses are just bigger copies of regular monsters, they have no “charm” and “atmosphere”. Regular monsters suffer from many problems too: they are just some moving objects you need to kill, they have no feelings and “taste”, they move in the same pattern with the same speed, they don’t stand out enough from the surrounding and they are too “blurred”, there’s no need to look for mobs and they just respawn at your sight leeding to feeling of “objects to kill”. My wife is hardcore RO fan, so her opinion might be heavily affected by that game. Though I agree with all her points.

  • Soundtrack while being good by itself doesn’t always work as “glue” to other parts of game. Almost all the mobs in ToS are slow as hell, while music is usually quite energetic. Taking into account grind-oriented nature of ToS this might be not a big issue, but I expect some more connection between what I hear and what I see.

  • Overall I didn’t like quests: 1) they felt too similar, like “go kill X monsters or boss”, and 2) hiding them didn’t improve exploration a lot. In my opinion ToS needs more quests which are about doing something different from core gameplay, like playing detective or digging diamonds. Also if quest is “hidden” I don’t want exact location to be shown on map (it ruins feeling of accomplishment).

  • Attack speed seemed to be heavily dependent on lag. There’s a lot written about this issue on forum, so I won’t repeat it here.

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#2

I would have liked something that made it clear where there are walls, and where there are differences in terrain. Something like a darker color on the map to show buildings and such, that would be enough for me. It’s confusing in Klaipeda, as you said, because there are buildings you can walk on top of, but you can’t jump over from the ground.

#3

First of all, wow! That was a lot of concise, thorough and well written feedback! I also think it’s great that you were playing with your wife :smile: I will be starting iCBT2 next week so I wanted to learn a little more about the feedback other testers have given but I was sort of expecting a lot of criticizing instead of helpful stuff like this! Here’s some feedback related to your feedback, it’s numbered in the order of your bullet points :wink:

  1. I love that jumping and height is good for combat in this game, that already is very unique from other MMOs where jumping is just aesthetic. I would hope that jumping is also good for exploration, maybe certain dungeons or puzzles where you need to jump precisely would be really cool, if the engine allows it. Currently the maps look a bit flat so it would be nice if little things were added here and there where you needed to jump to get to. I think the biggest perpetrator into making the game look flat is the minimap though; I like that it was made simple but right now it makes all the zones that were supposed to be on different heights look like they are in the same level, and associating this back to the map makes it look flat also. I would suggest using gradients in colors to show height in the minimap; high areas being lighter colored and lower areas being darker colored. It would keep things simple while making the maps as epic as they were intended to be :smiley:

  2. That’s interesting, maybe dividing the bosses into mini-mvp and mvp would make sure the player doesn’t belittle all bosses because he fights a couple of weak ones? That way you can keep all the fun bosses around but let the player know that a real victory only comes with real MVPs :sunglasses:

  3. Hehe I had never heard someone complain there is too much variety in monsters in an MMO x) Usually MMOs have the opposite problem but yeah it does sound like a good idea to sprinkle a few weak monsters between the strong ones to make everything feel more natural!

  4. Maybe it would help to give some more monsters decent skills or ranged attacks? Maybe relating to the previous suggestion sprinkle in a few monsters with unique abilities among the reckless ones.

  5. Sounds like the game should be stepped up just a little to match up with the BGM and maybe help the previous concern. Hopefully this is not too hard to do in the current engine.

  6. I would hope that the more polished quests should be available when the game comes out in full as to avoid spoiling the story for everyone :open_mouth: It might just be a problem of MMOs in general that interesting quests are hard to come by. Well at least this game is said to provide good gameplay both for people who like to do quests and for people who prefer to make their own story :grin:

  7. Hopefully lag will be less since this a stress test. And hopefully full game comes out soon so we can play this game indefinitely :sunny:

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