Hunters of the Ocean Review

Morris_y_gwynt

Team Member

My feelings towards this dungeon are rather negative. It is filled with problems, some minor, but some very major that can’t be fixed without a major redesign. My main problems with the dungeon stem from its incredible buggyness and overall unfriendly feel to the end user.

My problems exist right from the first room. The NPC you talk to upon entering the dungeon takes forever to say what could easily be said in one maybe two lines. It wouldn’t be so bad if say I could leave immediately and continue with the dungeon, but every time you enter its the same grinding mutter that you just tune out. It isn’t even that well written, using «literally» for emphasis like a teenage girl which creates a strange juxtaposition with the hardy sailor that is ment to be portrayed. After spending forever in your bunkroom you’re dumped into one of the worst rooms in the dungeon: the ship’s corridor.

Ahead of you are 6 pirates that you must kill before you can leave, usually having to fight them in pairs. This corridor is way to small to fight them in groups as you have no room to manoeuvre around them without getting hurt forcing you to spam moves at them to try and prevent them for getting close. The small space is particularly bad for airbenders as all of the AoE attacks rely on falldamage which is almost nullified by the low ceiling. The zombies also have a strange hitbox to their attacks which reaches much further than you would expect for a zombie, or much further than it should reach. It even ignores walls, allowing you to get hit through them. These zombies won’t attack you until you come close enough. This, under normal circumstances, would allow you to attack them from afar, giving you another strategy that is far better than attacking them head on. However the corridor is dotted with small plants that block your sight. Even if these didn’t exist or you could find an angle, the mobs ignore all moves until you go up to them and «activate their AI». The best method I’ve found to tackle this room is to exploit the dodgy path finding ai and activate them one at a time, kill them while getting the hell scratched out of you, and then healing up a bit before tackling the next mob. While this kind of strategic thinking might work in a game like Dark Souls where the game is purposefully hard and you need any advantage you can get, it just doesn’t work with a system like bending which works more in giving as many strategic options as possible.

Now finally getting out of the bowels of the ship (i don’t make that metaphor lightly) you come to the a small opening with crates all around you. You could explore the ship a little. You could kill some of the mobs treating the sign posts like ladders and mysteriously floating up the boxes. Or you could ignore this entirely like the dungeon more or less expects you to do and go through a slightly hard to spot door and go the the «command centre», ignoring everything in your way of course.

The mobs chasing you inside the ship will take small bites out of your ankles, but it doesn’t matter as they’ll abandon the chase after going up the stairs. They serve less as a challenge and more as an annoyance. Infact that’s how I would describe every part of the ship other than the corridor: an annoyance.
Speaking of annoyances we come to the miniboss: the pirate captain. Is he a challenge? I don’t know because within two seconds i worked out the best strategy was to just spam airspear at him from a range. I’m sure he’s just like the normal mobs but with much more health, but i can’t really confirm that as all i do is just click for 5 mins until he’s dead. He isn’t a challenge in the slightest… until he bugs out. Well its less him bugging out and more the room itself as this morning while playing through the dungeon his room was filled to the brim with extra zombies. It didn’t change my strategy much as all i had to do was jump on a ledge and spam from there, but it was unusual at least and very broken.

After defeating the boss you get teleported to a submarine (a very abrupt change) and get another exposition dump. After listening to the most forgettable lines of all time save for one, which just sounds psychopathic; that being «No mercy». It weirdly brings up the question of «is beating the shit out of these pirates really ethical». Its a very strange question to come up in what should be a dungeon about beating up a load of pirates. I mean what have the pirates actually done wrong? They boarded the ship and use their magic powers to claw at you if you get too close sure, but is that really worth being so merciless?

Ethical considerations aside you spawn on the ship and immediately take a hit because of dodgy enemy/teleport placement. This is something that could be fixed so easily i wonder how it hadn’t been picked up in the beta testing phase (assuming it existed). After getting a second round of clawing while either trying to kill the enemies on your first try because the dungeon is really vague on where you’re meant to go or run straight past them on repeat attempts you come to what is probably the best part of the dungeon: the four engine rooms. The first one most would try is probably the air room and while it is plain it probably provides the one battle in the entire dungeon that isn’t ruined by awful room design. Some of the scenery does get in your way but you can still fight the three mobs in the room with as many different tactics as you like, from sniping them from a ledge to kiting them around the room or even the guns a blazin’ tactic. It isn’t the most interesting room in the dungeon, but it works for what it is meant to do. The fire room is also rather probable to be selected first and is probably my favourite simply because it has a pool of lava in it. Its somewhat hard to get the mobs in there with out the relevant moves, but if/when you do it is very satisfying. Even if you can’t get them in there you still have all the strategic choices as in the air room. The earth room is also fairly simple in its design, but the dividing wall in the centre means you can just fight the mobs one on one. Blocking off the top of this room feels fairly artificial but still it works for the same reason the air room works. Its just simple. The water room offers streams of water coming down from the ceiling that you can kite and trap enemies in for a short time. Its also a small addition but still makes the room feel more fun. The only other problem i have with these rooms taken as a whole is that they’re rather abstract, representing less engine rooms and more arenas to fight in. It could be fixed by putting an engine shaped object behind a window or something similar to that and still keep their design and shape.

Finally we come to the boss. Did you like the buggy zombies? Well here’s one with more health and runs around like a bee on speed! The move that disables bending for a few seconds is an interesting choice, but since the player now has no way to escape it just leads to the enemy getting a few extra free hits. I still have no idea who this boss is meant to be since we supposedly killed their captain back as the miniboss. Either way he isn’t really a challenge since if you die his health doesn’t reset. He does tend to get some extra cheep hits in once he dies since he doesn’t even wait for you to leave to respawn.

Either way the boss is like the dungeon: very annoying and kind of unfair. Sure there are good bits to the dungeon and aesthetically its good, but it is let down by poor level and enemy design. Bugfixing might fix some of my issues with the dungeon, but not everything. Some of the issues with the dungeon are deeply embedded within the design choices and it would take a complete overhaul to fix them. The dungeon also exclusively focuses on combat with absolutely no difference in kind. There is negative possibility space everywhere with no reward for going around and exploring the ships a little, ultimately making the majority of the ships useless. Overall it is a poor dungeon that feels very rushed and could definitely have done with some more time for testing and feedback.

Details

Created At:
7 years ago
Updated At:
7 years ago

By FireLordZuko [Administrator] At 7 years ago Report Reply 0

In response to your comment

Below are my responses to parts of your comment, please read the TL;DR section at the end to see what our changes are going to be with regards to your post.

My problems exist right from the first room. The NPC you talk to upon entering the dungeon takes forever to say what could easily be said in one maybe two lines. It wouldn’t be so bad if say I could leave immediately and continue with the dungeon, but every time you enter its the same grinding mutter that you just tune out.

I can agree with this. I’ll get in touch with Porky to allow the player to exit the room before the Crew Member is done talking.

It isn’t even that well written, using «literally» for emphasis like a teenage girl which creates a strange juxtaposition with the hardy sailor that is ment to be portrayed.

It isn’t a hardy sailor though. This is a scared Crew Member who needs your help.

Ahead of you are 6 pirates that you must kill before you can leave, usually having to fight them in pairs. This corridor is way to small to fight them in groups as you have no room to manoeuvre around them without getting hurt forcing you to spam moves at them to try and prevent them for getting close. The small space is particularly bad for airbenders as all of the AoE attacks rely on falldamage which is almost nullified by the low ceiling.

I disagree with this segment. Fights should not always take place in large scaled locations. We don’t want to limit our builds & our mechanics to merely suit airbenders. You have plenty of space on the deck & plenty of room to «stay invulnerable» by jumping on top of the crates, which gives you a bigger advantage too.

I therefore disagree with re-designing the rooms. The plants are also there to allow waterbenders to use their poisoning effects on mobs if they desire to do so.

The zombies also have a strange hitbox to their attacks which reaches much further than you would expect for a zombie, or much further than it should reach. It even ignores walls, allowing you to get hit through them.

That indeed is something that shouldn’t really happen, I need to look into the radius for that.

Even if these didn’t exist or you could find an angle, the mobs ignore all moves until you go up to them and «activate their AI».

That is also something that shouldn’t happen. We’ll look into that as well.

The best method I’ve found to tackle this room is to exploit the dodgy path finding ai and activate them one at a time, kill them while getting the hell scratched out of you, and then healing up a bit before tackling the next mob. While this kind of strategic thinking might work in a game like Dark Souls where the game is purposefully hard and you need any advantage you can get, it just doesn’t work with a system like bending which works more in giving as many strategic options as possible.

The best method is to actually meet the dungeon requirements, which indicates 2 people doing this dungeon. We have tested this regularly with many different elemental combinations and have to yet experience the issues that you mentioned having 2 players in there.

I understand that some of the mechanics of the monsters make the room harder, so we’ll iterate with those values later to find out how the room feels after that.

Now finally getting out of the bowels of the ship (i don’t make that metaphor lightly) you come to the a small opening with crates all around you. You could explore the ship a little. You could kill some of the mobs treating the sign posts like ladders and mysteriously floating up the boxes.

That bug should be fixed soon.

Or you could ignore this entirely like the dungeon more or less expects you to do and go through a slightly hard to spot door and go the the «command centre», ignoring everything in your way of course. The mobs chasing you inside the ship will take small bites out of your ankles, but it doesn’t matter as they’ll abandon the chase after going up the stairs. They serve less as a challenge and more as an annoyance. Infact that’s how I would describe every part of the ship other than the corridor: an annoyance.

From what I can see, you’re describing a more stepping plan procedure (do X -> do Y -> enter area Z), so that the player only has one single option to go for. With this dungeon, we tried to replicate an actual war scene, something to indicate that this was a continuous battle between the pirates and the trading ship. The dialogues & messages inside the dungeon were written to specifically trigger this reaction to players who would be going through this dungeon.

Now I am not defending ourselves here; however I think that the source of the issue does not lie necessarily in what you can do, more in how we approach and communicate to the player what he or she should be doing. This was an issue we found during testing too, so we did our best to negate these effects as much as possible. We have implemented a few solutions (ordered by clarity of communication) to this, I’m not sure whether you have found most of these or not and whether they were helpful: - We set up a hologram for where a player should be going. - We communicated to players through chat that there is a certain action required, so they don’t just mindlessly grind the monsters & understand that they need to proceed. - After a certain amount of time (I think after 2 minutes?), the players on the deck get teleported into the corresponding tower where they can press the button in order to go to the miniboss.

So if all else fails, we do still force the players to proceed so they don’t get stuck on a certain aspect of the dungeon. However, I feel that the mobs feel too strong and do not provide enough of a reward (xp/spirit essences), so we’ll probably have to tweak those.

Speaking of annoyances we come to the miniboss: the pirate captain. Is he a challenge? I don’t know because within two seconds i worked out the best strategy was to just spam airspear at him from a range. I’m sure he’s just like the normal mobs but with much more health, but i can’t really confirm that as all i do is just click for 5 mins until he’s dead. He isn’t a challenge in the slightest… until he bugs out. Well its less him bugging out and more the room itself as this morning while playing through the dungeon his room was filled to the brim with extra zombies. It didn’t change my strategy much as all i had to do was jump on a ledge and spam from there, but it was unusual at least and very broken.

That is somehow a long term bug that keeps persisting with other dungeons too, we have been looking into that, but I think we’ll need to revise & create a custom plugin for handling our own NPCs/Mobs (a rewrite of the plugins we are using) in order to really have that fixed (which will take a lot of time and is not at the highest points of our priority right now).

However, from this I can understand that you’d rather have stronger/faster mobs running spawning & running to you in order to defend the miniboss (am I correct on this?)

After defeating the boss you get teleported to a submarine (a very abrupt change) and get another exposition dump. After listening to the most forgettable lines of all time save for one, which just sounds psychopathic; that being «No mercy». It weirdly brings up the question of «is beating the shit out of these pirates really ethical». Its a very strange question to come up in what should be a dungeon about beating up a load of pirates. I mean what have the pirates actually done wrong? They boarded the ship and use their magic powers to claw at you if you get too close sure, but is that really worth being so merciless?

There should be waits between these explaining what’s about to happen.

Lore-wise, we tried to present this as the first segment of a longer storyline. The story of this dungeon’s TL;DR is as follows: you meet a captain in RC, who asks you to help him out because pirates are raiding his ship. You get teleported to the ship and awake in the middle of the night when pirates strike again. However, during your fight you realize that the stories of the pirates and the stories of the crew members & captain are different and especially at the final boss, even after you had showed no mercy and destroyed his ship, the boss presents you with a peaceful option. On its own, the story probably won’t make much sense, but keep an eye out for future dungeons. ;)

Ethical considerations aside you spawn on the ship and immediately take a hit because of dodgy enemy/teleport placement. This is something that could be fixed so easily i wonder how it hadn’t been picked up in the beta testing phase (assuming it existed).

We did not have time for putting this dungeon through our QA Team, sorry. We have merely tested this dungeon on balance aspects and not that much on player interaction (which is definitely very important, I agree with you on this).

After getting a second round of clawing while either trying to kill the enemies on your first try because the dungeon is really vague on where you’re meant to go or run straight past them on repeat attempts you come to what is probably the best part of the dungeon: the four engine rooms.

As mentioned before, we want the player to consciously make this decision so that is where we again meet up with pushing the player further into the progress. I’d love to have some suggestions from you on how to improve these layers or add more types of communications, as we literally show «Go here» right in front of the player, in his chat and teleport him to the destination if he failed to figure it out after a while. :P

The first one most would try is probably the air room and while it is plain it probably provides the one battle in the entire dungeon that isn’t ruined by awful room design. Some of the scenery does get in your way but you can still fight the three mobs in the room with as many different tactics as you like, from sniping them from a ledge to kiting them around the room or even the guns a blazin’ tactic. It isn’t the most interesting room in the dungeon, but it works for what it is meant to do. The fire room is also rather probable to be selected first and is probably my favourite simply because it has a pool of lava in it. Its somewhat hard to get the mobs in there with out the relevant moves, but if/when you do it is very satisfying. Even if you can’t get them in there you still have all the strategic choices as in the air room. The earth room is also fairly simple in its design, but the dividing wall in the centre means you can just fight the mobs one on one. Blocking off the top of this room feels fairly artificial but still it works for the same reason the air room works. Its just simple. The water room offers streams of water coming down from the ceiling that you can kite and trap enemies in for a short time. Its also a small addition but still makes the room feel more fun.

Thank you for your compliments (even though your comments about the other sections being «awful» is kiiiiiiiiiiiinda up for discussion, haha).

The only other problem i have with these rooms taken as a whole is that they’re rather abstract, representing less engine rooms and more arenas to fight in. It could be fixed by putting an engine shaped object behind a window or something similar to that and still keep their design and shape.

Possibly? I’ll see what we can do on that.

Finally we come to the boss. Did you like the buggy zombies? Well here’s one with more health and runs around like a bee on speed! The move that disables bending for a few seconds is an interesting choice, but since the player now has no way to escape it just leads to the enemy getting a few extra free hits.

You should not be able to solo this dungeon. You have to do this dungeon as a 2 player squad. If you don’t, you either should choose for the cheap option to not fight him or be a godlike bender and somehow manage to solo him. We are also soon implementing a reset when if everyone dies, the boss is reset; in order to really not make this boss solo-able.

no idea who this boss is meant to be since we supposedly killed their captain back as the miniboss. Either way he isn’t really a challenge since if you die his health doesn’t reset. He does tend to get some extra cheep hits in

He is the mercenary, the subleader of the pirates. You can compare him to The Lieutenant of the equalists. Someone who tries to play into your emotions to make you understand that this isn’t all black and white.

once he dies since he doesn’t even wait for you to leave to respawn.

That’s a bug, we’ll also work on fixing that.

Either way the boss is like the dungeon: very annoying and kind of unfair. Sure there are good bits to the dungeon and aesthetically its good, but it is let down by poor level and enemy design. Bugfixing might fix some of my issues with the dungeon, but not everything. Some of the issues with the dungeon are deeply embedded within the design choices and it would take a complete overhaul to fix them. The dungeon also exclusively focuses on combat with absolutely no difference in kind. There is negative possibility space everywhere with no reward for going around and exploring the ships a little, ultimately making the majority of the ships useless. Overall it is a poor dungeon that feels very rushed and could definitely have done with some more time for testing and feedback.

I hope my responses gave you some more insight on what triggered our choices and why we did things the ways we did it. I disagree with the dungeon needing a complete overhaul or rework and am interested to see your opinion on my response.

TL;DR

We will be:

  • Allowing players to exit the entrance asap.
  • Fixing some bugs related to the attack range & activation range of the pirates.
  • Having a fix for monsters climbing up on signs.
  • Buff rewards for killing separate pirates & place some possible rewards here and there for exploring the dungeon further.
  • More clearly communicating the levers being there for the purpose of turning off the engines.
  • Making sure the final boss doesn’t respawn before players leave the room.

By lemur68 At 7 years ago Report Reply 0

I really appreciate the feedback you guys give

By lemur68 At 7 years ago Report Reply 0

I definitely agree with you on the dialogue and the uselessness of a lot of the ships. Maybe they could put loot, such as gold, diamonds, and rarely tea leaves, in the useless areas to encourage exploring.

Also try separating your ideas better. Reading a wall of text is pretty stupid.

By FredlyDaMoose At 7 years ago Report Reply 0

i’ve never seen this many words in one place in my entire life