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General Discussion / Feedback after finally giving the game a chance after all these years
« on: December 12, 2020, 08:27:11 am »
I first found out about this game in around 2010 or 2011 when I was fooling around with Ubuntu and was trying to migrate to Linux, but still being a kid, I needed games to play, so I stumbled upon PlaneShift, installed it, fired it up and probably 10 seconds later I uninstalled it, because it looked so bad.
I forgot about it for years.
Recently I was on the hunt for small, indie, obscure and underappreciated MMOs to give them a try. One of them was PlaneShift and I remembered I once tried it, but never really gave it a chance.
So today I installed it again, created my character and entered the world. I passed through the tutorial and went to the main city. I walked around, trying to find the exit so I can go outside of town and kill some monsters, but I was unable to. What I found though was some hole to the sewers where I found some "Diseased Rats". Tried to kill one, died and then kinda gave up on the game once again and uninstalled it.
What I found this time to deter me from staying with the game is as follows:
- the UI is awfully unfunctional and unhelpful. I'm not talking about how beautiful or ugly it is, but how hard it makes it to ease someone into the game. Lots of elements are obscure, ones that you need are missing and so on.
- the controls of the character are also pretty awful. Using A, or D, Q or E, rotating with middle click (I know right click has another purpose, but using middle click constantly can break your mouse pretty fast). Walking, jumping, jumping through fences and other objects is really janky and clunky.
What amazes me is that this game has been around since 2002 and the developers never had a chance to improve those aspects one bit... unless I'm wrong and they were actually dramatically worse than they are today.
Anyway, point is, the UI can be an ugly flat panel without even a texture, but to have the needed functionality and user-friendliness needed to help a player (especially a new one) to get into the game, because when the UI is actually working against you, rather than for you, then you have a bigger problem to worry about.
If only these two aspects were a lot better, I'd probably stay with the game, despite its low population, but I don't count on them being changed anytime soon. I see the developers are working on UE4 version of the game, so hopefully when that is complete, the controls and UI will more up to standards, otherwise I see it as as wasted effort.
I forgot about it for years.
Recently I was on the hunt for small, indie, obscure and underappreciated MMOs to give them a try. One of them was PlaneShift and I remembered I once tried it, but never really gave it a chance.
So today I installed it again, created my character and entered the world. I passed through the tutorial and went to the main city. I walked around, trying to find the exit so I can go outside of town and kill some monsters, but I was unable to. What I found though was some hole to the sewers where I found some "Diseased Rats". Tried to kill one, died and then kinda gave up on the game once again and uninstalled it.
What I found this time to deter me from staying with the game is as follows:
- the UI is awfully unfunctional and unhelpful. I'm not talking about how beautiful or ugly it is, but how hard it makes it to ease someone into the game. Lots of elements are obscure, ones that you need are missing and so on.
- the controls of the character are also pretty awful. Using A, or D, Q or E, rotating with middle click (I know right click has another purpose, but using middle click constantly can break your mouse pretty fast). Walking, jumping, jumping through fences and other objects is really janky and clunky.
What amazes me is that this game has been around since 2002 and the developers never had a chance to improve those aspects one bit... unless I'm wrong and they were actually dramatically worse than they are today.
Anyway, point is, the UI can be an ugly flat panel without even a texture, but to have the needed functionality and user-friendliness needed to help a player (especially a new one) to get into the game, because when the UI is actually working against you, rather than for you, then you have a bigger problem to worry about.
If only these two aspects were a lot better, I'd probably stay with the game, despite its low population, but I don't count on them being changed anytime soon. I see the developers are working on UE4 version of the game, so hopefully when that is complete, the controls and UI will more up to standards, otherwise I see it as as wasted effort.