We're pretty happy with the current state of the game, it's stable and well balanced. But as always, there's room for improvement. We have worked over the past week on making the game easier to get into for new players. What are the problems that new players encounter?
Our game is very different from all the other games in the genre on the market, so it can be quite alien to people booting up Might is Right for the first time. From what we have seen and been told so far, the problems are:
- Lack of understanding of what the game is doing, especially during AI's turn
- Lack of understanding of what's going on with your own squad. Things like health, dying units and unit placements are confusing to new players
- Feature overload. Quite a few people become confused by the sheer number of items, talents and effects in the game.
Taking this into account, we have developed a roadmap for the next few weeks to address this and make the game more clear and intuitive. Today we offer a few of these improvements, along with an overall performance improvement.
Performance
Lets talk about performance first. The game has been optimized for early to mid game, after the release we noticed that the game would run below 30 FPS on some devices during combat, when there is a large number of effects and particles. After a couple of days of hard work - I managed to resolve this entirely, if this was affecting you - you should expect up-to 100% improvement in your FPS. FPS was never really an issue, but we want to offer butter-smooth performance for the largest number of people possible. This latest change will help with that.
Understanding and communication.
Most of the problems with respect to understanding of the game can be traced to communication, if you as a player don't understand something about the game - we can usually fix that on our end by communicating better.
For example, your unit has a certain amount of health, we show you a health bad and numeric values of your health to communicate how much more punishment you can expect your character to be able to endure.
Here are 3 improvements we have implemented to communicate better.
Squad problems
Whenever your unit is low on health, or is dead - you will see a badge reminding you about that. You can hover over the badge to get an explanation and a suggestion on how to resolve the problem.
Questionable unit placement
Some new players place their melee units in the back line by mistake. There are cases when this can be a valid strategy, but it's an advanced placement. We wanted to preserve the ability to place your units however you wish, but we added a warning indicator to remind you that it's probably not something you want to do.
Killing action
A while ago, before the game was released, we implemented an overlay system that shows the player predicted outcome of their unit's action in combat. When the overlay system would detect a death as an outcome - it would add a red tint to the information frame, this was not very clear, so we added a nice large skull next to that to make it easier to notice.
That's all for now, we'll keep rolling these out as we go. Let us know what you think, your feedback is always helpful to us.
Other changes:
- Removed "Medusa's Mirror" item from Godspeed to avoid accidental usage by new players, you can still find them in other places in the world
- Removed visual effect from "Punisher" talent, it was a bit confusing since the visual effect was too intense compared to actual impact of the talent
- Re-worked "Lucky" trait of the enemies, changed Ability Power bonus from "+5% and +25" to "+7% and +7" to feel more "lucky" and be less unfair at the start of the game.
Changed files in this update