So I got into the beta today, and here is my experience:
Only Rush is available. It's possible Clash unlocks with player level, but I couldn't see an actual list of rewards besides the next one when you level up
Some heroes are locked, and Fortunes/Player level can grant Hero Tickets to unlock them. Seems weird, but okay.
Heroes have their personal fortunes, and some skins are locked behind those whereas the others are behind the Crowns currency
Rush sets everyone at level ten, has only one tower per side (the spring healing trees, upgraded), and three points have nothing built. Each team has a point near their point with their tower, so it's easier to defend, and one middle point. These points have no towers, and cannot have anything summoned on them to defend. They charge up energy, at which point a player can channel to get the standard bar filled to initiate a Guardian attack. It seems like once a point has been drained, all points reset. The middle point charges the fastest, then the two team points. You CAN destroy the enemy tower, but this is so difficult to manage that I haven't seen it happen yet. Best I could do was get one to half health during the tutorial bot match.
It looks like you can add custom builds to Rush, but queues were slow and I didn't find the build creator until after my one match. There are two you can choose from, but as far as I can tell the best you can do is bring in a custom build. You can't pick your skills individually at the start of a match.
You can change characters AND build during Rush matches.
Crossplay can be toggled, but I think it make limit you to platform than simply hardware. With Crossplay off I couldn't get a game, but with it on I could. And I think only Steam and Arc have active testing, so take from that as you will.
Current Cosmetics: Hero Skins, Weapon Skins, VFX trail for when you leave the airship, Player Avatars, Player Titles
Still a bit rough. There's not sound for the menus, so it feels weird leveling up and it's all silent. In-game the music, voice acting, and SFX are all present so not the end of the world. Game still punts you from a match if a player disconnects while forming the match, and I had a weird bug where queuing kept kicking me back to the main menu and dropping me from queue. Logging out fixed it, and the game claimed there was a match I could rejoin (I had taken an good hour break after logging out). Nothing they can't fix before April, though. Seems to be mostly just the game updated to modern systems and expectations.
Also, Clash is unlocked at level 9, but outside of the tutorial cannot be played. I assume they want to focus on the new game mode since Clash was already a proven formula.
Gotta say, still pretty happy with how everything is. T-Mat might need a balance pass, and if they actually add Roland back in, he's gonna need something changed from the last time he was playable, but overall the game still feels incredibly good.
And throwing people off the map will never not be hilarious.
I'm glad Clash still exists at least and wasn't outright replaced with Rush, because I got bored of the new mode pretty quick in the original opened-shortly event.
Woo picked it up, can't try it till tonight but seeing how my 4070ti acting up and had to go back to my 1070ti, a nice artistic game that isn't overreliant on graphics is great.
When the game originally released I remember the game getting bad Steam reviews for needing 6GB RAM... nothing changes, this time the complaint is the 60fps cap.
This caught my eye and is giving Monday Night Combat vibes. Is that a fair comparison?
I'd say so, there's less pushing lanes as the only minions are the ones you summon at points, the rest is you fighting it out IIRC
Been awhile, my memory is fuzzy
If teams are new, what happens a lot is like, people mill about in an Overwatch match for a while and then suddenly the titled Gigantics appear and force the issue.
Rush, in which everyone starts at max level with all your skills unlocked in a minimized arena with only a few summons and no ability to bring in more.
Clash, the classic game mode with larger maps, where players decide the summons on control points, and a larger map that will shrink after a certain number of powered up Rampages, or one Guardian has been wounded twice.
In both game modes, you are trying to power up your Guardian by killing opponents and collecting power orbs at the control points. In the first half of Clash you can only collect orbs on points your minions are on. That used to be the case for the second phase of the game as well (the titular Clash phase), however in the Rush mode the points that generate power orbs don't have summons now, and I haven't unlocked Clash yet to see if that has changed.
The game is way less about pushing lanes and more about picking good team fights on objectives, and finding good times to pick off a kill here or there without trading to get a power advantage.
I only got to play a VERY small bit of this before it was canned before and I was glad to see it coming back.
I have only played a few matches so far. The hero design is excellent, really liking the designs and kits of the chars I've played. The 'feel' is a little off for some things, especially a few of the ult abilities. Hopefully stuff that will be tweaked as they go along. I found upgrades to be a little overwhelming but I'm sure comfort with that will come with time and learning the chars. Eager to play more.
Oh - yeah one thing I will 100% recommend is everyone changes their Ult to "Toggle" mode instead of hold. Toggle basically is "one keypress to select, a second to fire it", versus holding for a solid second to second and a half.
With a lot of the ults, being able to double tap to fire it near instantly is a major difference between it landing or not.
Well servers are fubar at the moment. Updates/Announcements are through the Official Discord: https://discord.gg/pb5KEHEP
No real ETA at the moment, said about 40 minutes ago things were taking longer than expected and would share a time frame when they had one basically. Games up to the servers dying were pretty fun though!
Game is thoroughly toast. Besides server issues, the matchmaking doesn't do anything if you return after a player drops from your previous queue (and they WILL drop), so you have to bail from the queue and requeue. Then you have a chance of getting a dozen party error messages, of which you will have to click okay on every last one. Had to go through 20 of them. Game doesn't seem to recognize clearing the tutorials for the related fortunes, but you can buy the related emotes for free...even though they say they cost 9999 of some unknown currency. You can also buy unlockable emotes? Like, the game gave me Sven's thumbs up emote for completing a challenge for him, but all the other heroes have the same emote for 750 crowns. I guess not buggy, just weird as I got the emote in one match so it doesn't seem worth the crowns! Oh, and some cosmetics reference a bundle, but there's no in-game shop for bundles. So could very well be the artifact of a 2016 release shop item that they just forgot to remove. Again, weird. Only bright spot is my match went fine...it just takes forever to actually get into one.
Definitely a not great first impression for most folks. Kinda odd because everything worked fine for the first 3-4 hours (I got in maybe 12-15 matches?), and then matchmaking and the servers basically fell apart. I don't know if they hit a critical mass and things spiraled or what.
But some of the weird in game UI shit and the CTD's are still persistent from the playtests, so it's definitely disappointing to see them still around. I know some of them are going to be a function of the server responses failing and whatnot, and a lot of that is forgivable if you get into a match...but as of noon PST, you basically can't (I managed to claw my way into about 4 since then).
Hopefully things clear up by tomorrow and it can mostly be written off to the usual day one server bug that seems to bite every release these days. But absolutely falling short of what I had hoped for for the return.
Game capped at 5K concurrent on Steam, so I have to assume they had rock bottom expectations for the game if this kind of server load is giving them grief.
For those that got in, what's the deal with getting/unlocking characters? The trailer from a week ago mentioned getting currency to unlock them and that feels bizarre for a paid game.
For those that got in, what's the deal with getting/unlocking characters? The trailer from a week ago mentioned getting currency to unlock them and that feels bizarre for a paid game.
You get a "ticket" each in game level that unlocks another character slot. That's the whole deal.
Game capped at 5K concurrent on Steam, so I have to assume they had rock bottom expectations for the game if this kind of server load is giving them grief.
I don't think it was the raw player count per say, the other play tests supposedly had 25-30k concurrent players at points. But something definitely broke. I was able to just insta join a game, but as of 9pm their Discord did say that stuff wasn't fully fixed yet, so we will see how stable things are today.
My concern wasn't so much money (you don't need to pay money to unlock champions in League either), it was why they were locked to begin with. If it's not a grind then fine, I was just worried we'd be hit with a shop item 30 days after the review cycle was done that gave you the "choice" to pay money to skip the grind they'd put in.
My concern wasn't so much money (you don't need to pay money to unlock champions in League either), it was why they were locked to begin with. If it's not a grind then fine, I was just worried we'd be hit with a shop item 30 days after the review cycle was done that gave you the "choice" to pay money to skip the grind they'd put in.
Half the cast is unlocked initially and you can unlock anyone you want instantly.
First of all, thank you very much for your patience as we’re working on resolving the ongoing server issues. We appreciate your feedback, and it helps us find solutions quicker.
We’re preparing some server updates that should be rolling out later today, we’ll have further announcements here and on our social media channels then to keep you updated. Additionally, we’re preparing a compensation package for all players to make up for all the troubles and lost time, which we’re looking to roll out after these updates.
Things like memory leaks can be hard to track. Generic stress tests won't show anything, while small-scale real tests might not leak enough to be noticible, but enough to destabilize the system when run massively in parallel. Even a public stress test can miss things if the server code is updated between then and launch.
is there any interest in having a discord or spreadsheet for teaming up, randoms are...not great
edit: nevermind matchmaking is still scuffed i'm going to leave the game for at least a month until they resolve issues, i guess
This isn't to discount your issues, but what sort of problems are you having? I haven't had any matchmaking problems the last two days at all. There is a channel on the official discord to report connection issues, as well.
I don't know if I'm having issues! I queue up and hit the accept button and then it gives the 'Player had declined' message and requeues and that continually reoccurs for awhile. Also have gotten a few bugs where I'll load into the hero select screen and be the only person there, the timer doesn't go down, and then, I get kicked out saying 'Player has declined' again.
Are people queuing up and getting abducted by aliens? Attacked by ghosts?
I don't know what's happening but it seems like only 1 in 4 'Match Found' prompts actually get me into a match.
Posts
Still a bit rough. There's not sound for the menus, so it feels weird leveling up and it's all silent. In-game the music, voice acting, and SFX are all present so not the end of the world. Game still punts you from a match if a player disconnects while forming the match, and I had a weird bug where queuing kept kicking me back to the main menu and dropping me from queue. Logging out fixed it, and the game claimed there was a match I could rejoin (I had taken an good hour break after logging out). Nothing they can't fix before April, though. Seems to be mostly just the game updated to modern systems and expectations.
But I really hope they have something in mind to fix that one person leaves, everybody leaves thing!
And throwing people off the map will never not be hilarious.
I'd say so, there's less pushing lanes as the only minions are the ones you summon at points, the rest is you fighting it out IIRC
Been awhile, my memory is fuzzy
If teams are new, what happens a lot is like, people mill about in an Overwatch match for a while and then suddenly the titled Gigantics appear and force the issue.
I haven't played a game of not new people, so.
In both game modes, you are trying to power up your Guardian by killing opponents and collecting power orbs at the control points. In the first half of Clash you can only collect orbs on points your minions are on. That used to be the case for the second phase of the game as well (the titular Clash phase), however in the Rush mode the points that generate power orbs don't have summons now, and I haven't unlocked Clash yet to see if that has changed.
The game is way less about pushing lanes and more about picking good team fights on objectives, and finding good times to pick off a kill here or there without trading to get a power advantage.
I have only played a few matches so far. The hero design is excellent, really liking the designs and kits of the chars I've played. The 'feel' is a little off for some things, especially a few of the ult abilities. Hopefully stuff that will be tweaked as they go along. I found upgrades to be a little overwhelming but I'm sure comfort with that will come with time and learning the chars. Eager to play more.
With a lot of the ults, being able to double tap to fire it near instantly is a major difference between it landing or not.
https://discord.gg/pb5KEHEP
No real ETA at the moment, said about 40 minutes ago things were taking longer than expected and would share a time frame when they had one basically. Games up to the servers dying were pretty fun though!
The main menu music did take me back though.
But some of the weird in game UI shit and the CTD's are still persistent from the playtests, so it's definitely disappointing to see them still around. I know some of them are going to be a function of the server responses failing and whatnot, and a lot of that is forgivable if you get into a match...but as of noon PST, you basically can't (I managed to claw my way into about 4 since then).
Hopefully things clear up by tomorrow and it can mostly be written off to the usual day one server bug that seems to bite every release these days. But absolutely falling short of what I had hoped for for the return.
You get a "ticket" each in game level that unlocks another character slot. That's the whole deal.
Edit: I don't think it was the raw player count per say, the other play tests supposedly had 25-30k concurrent players at points. But something definitely broke. I was able to just insta join a game, but as of 9pm their Discord did say that stuff wasn't fully fixed yet, so we will see how stable things are today.
Half the cast is unlocked initially and you can unlock anyone you want instantly.
edit: also got a crash to desktop so...not a great launch so far
feels like something they shoulda spent a lot of time making sure to avoid
Actually one of the original Motiga workers said this happened on their launch too and not to sweat it.
He also complains about woke people and quotes Tim Pool, so I will not be posting the tweet here.
edit: nevermind matchmaking is still scuffed i'm going to leave the game for at least a month until they resolve issues, i guess
This isn't to discount your issues, but what sort of problems are you having? I haven't had any matchmaking problems the last two days at all. There is a channel on the official discord to report connection issues, as well.
https://discord.gg/gogigantic
Are people queuing up and getting abducted by aliens? Attacked by ghosts?
I don't know what's happening but it seems like only 1 in 4 'Match Found' prompts actually get me into a match.