Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Retropunch]

Urgh, online only kills this for me. Diablo 3 managed it through sheer force of Blizzard marketing, but I won't be encouraging other companies with it.

Their reasons for it are pretty rubbish as well (https://steamcommunity.com/app/527430/discussions/0/1473095965291684995/) - whilst none of the reasons given make even remotely compelling arguments, the most annoying thing is that they won't admit it's mostly just DRM.

It's probably something I'll get 3-4 years from now when it's on a big sale, but I would have been an early purchaser without online only. 

[Folly]

I really wanted to like this game, simply because it's been so long since I played a decent ARPG.

But browsing through the Steam forums, I'm seeing a lot of complaints about situations where the developers seem to have prioritized their 'vision' over what is practical, and what is fun. This impression is reinforced by the fact that they have completely rebooted multiple core systems many times over during their long development process; it's like they have no idea what will make an effective and satisfying gameplay experience, so they are just trying things that sound interesting, realizing those things don't work still without understanding why, and then moving on to whatever idea jumps into their heads next. I've seen far too many promising games go down this path, and it never ends well.

I'm going to wait until after launch to read some reviews of the finished product, but this is very likely to be a pass for me.

[nenjin]

I AM a little concerned, now that I've put a good 10+ hours in to game, about the state of some things.

When half your crafting menus aren't accessible, but you're demoing what is essentially a big complicated story campaign mission one-off thing, that's troubling.

When half your cutscenes are still in raw format, and you're doing this other stuff, that's concerning.

When your campaign is only half finished, and all the work seems to have been done on the first half with nothing hooked up to the second half, that's concerning.

Still, I am enjoying myself enough to want to come home and play it asap. Combat continues to get more and more challenging, even as the gap between my power level and the missions I'm undertaking shrinks. The first hour of the game you just steam roll pretty much everything, taking little to no damage. Now, at level 10, there are single packs of, say, 4 Chaos Warriors, 8 Chaos Spawn, two sorcerers and a commander that can take me two to three minutes to safely take apart.

It's not an unfun level of difficulty, yet. But it's making me wonder if the difficulty continues to ramp up like this, because it could totally get to the point where it's no longer fun.

That said, it has a lot to do with the weapons you attack any given foe with. The difference between armored and unarmored, and which weapons are specifically good against both types, makes a huge difference.

[nenjin]

Double post but based on the comments here I decided to do some skimming in the Steam forum.

The release is now June 5th.

There is a fresh beta build coming May 21st. Apparently this build is fairly old and hasn't been updated in a while.

Characters will be wiped at release. Gar. Wish I'd known that. Still, I'm ok getting ahead of the game in learning the ins and outs of it; there's a lot to learn.

So yeah, now is probably not the time to buy unless you have a burning, unquenchable desire to purge heretic scum in His name.

[nenjin]

The update to the beta client has dropped.....the evening before I have to leave town for the rest of the week. ><

I'll post some thoughts after I've had some time with it.

[nenjin]

So I've had my time with the beta client.

The game releases on PC in about a week. (They just announced another month's delay for consoles.)

You can probably guess what that means. TLDR: The game is going to have a variety of issues at release, and possibly have unfinished content. The PC release needs more time to cook and it's not going to get it, so expect a game that is getting fixed and completed post-launch.

All in all, I do like the game. It's an aRPG trying to do its own thing, trying stuff that's a little off the beaten path for aRPGs. It's slower paced, a little more tactical, and has uncommon elements like a cover system, and the game mechanics are fairly elaborate. Stylistically it's very nerdy in a way only a 40k game can be.

But it's not going to be pretty at release. Not at all.

There is so much to the game that as of the build they just gave us that either isn't finished or has bugs, that I don't see how they can address all of it in a week. Not unless they have some super magical, complete build they didn't deign to share.

Where to start.....

-We've got like 3/5ths of the campaign now. And of the new parts that weren't finished in the last build, we have the basics of the mission, a lot of written but unvoiced content and some bugs in the voice overs we did get. Some of the animations in previous campaign content actually managed to look worse. If this stuff wasn't done in the build they gave us, I can't see how it's going to suddenly be done in a week. As of this build, there are still cutscenes and animatics marked "WIP" or are clearly works in progress. I suspect they will simply pull the WIP tag from some of these cutscenes rather than improve on them further.

-Performance is great until it's not. The gameplay is smoother than the previous build overall, but now the jarring slowdown you experience between being in combat and not in combat is even more noticeable. I've got everything dialed up to 11 on my system, so maybe it'd play a little better with stuff turned down a bit. But right now there is still a noticeable drop in performance when you start exploding a whole room full of enemies.

-New graphical bugs were introduced in this beta build, that was delayed because "they got shaders and improvements that were worth waiting for." So right now some levels strobe, some doors display incorrectly, and my personal favorite, which I'm not sure is a bug or feature....some attacks in some levels literally blast the texture away to nothing. It's kind of disconcerting on the air or sea levels to completely destroy the visuals of the walk ways or islands and be running around on open air or sea. A lot of these problems seem to vary with people's graphic cards and drivers.

-Typos and poor grammar in much of the written word. This hurts me especially because this stuff should be incredibly easy to catch. Neocore isn't an English studio so I forgive some of the grammar. But it feels like two different people are writing this stuff sometimes, for the difference in quality and execution. When you see 85% of it written correctly and competently, it makes the other hastily written 15% that much more galling to read.

-So many game systems not quite finished. The crafting system has a lot of elements to it, from making gear, to optimizing the making of gear, to reforging items, to changing their appearance, to buffing up legendary items you've earned. Only about half of that appears to be working right now in the beta build. You craft gear and optimize the crafting process, and upgrade your legendaries. The rest I don't think is done, and if it is done by the PC release, probably is going to have issues.

-The Morality system (being a radical or puritan inquisitor) went in this build. And it's essentially two additional, small skill trees on top of the 14 they already have. But the tab for exploring the morality system remains locked, there are no icons for the perks you buy, no way to earn the points for it and I have seen no where in missions where you make choices that dictate your morality. 

-So much locked game out there. The game map is designed like a 40k star map. There's planets where the missions take place. These planets are part of a system, which roughly organizes the challenge level of missions. Systems exist in subsectors, which further organize challenge levels. Multiple subsectors exist in a sector, which is the Caligari Sector in Martyr. So far, all of the content has been in one subsector of the game, the Tenebra subsector. It covers Challenge Levels from 1 to 1500, which is the cap that everyone has come up against. It ha 6 like systems with about 5 planets each. But that's like...1/10th of the proposed content. You can zoom the game map out to the sector level and see there are...8? more subsectors on the map. If each has 5 systems, and each system has 5 planets....that's a shit load of content that I can't even begin to believe is done. Or if it is done, is literally just copy/pasted gameplay from the previous areas.

-There are plenty of weird, wonky, broken things in the character system and with specific classes. For example, earning achievements unlocks perks for you to equip to your character, access to new skill trees to spend skill points on, attribute points to spend, and so on. It's a cool system I think, but there's many bugs right now where there are duplicate perks that are unlocked in various ways, some unlocks don't display as unlocked, a few seem to ignore their level restrictions....it can lead to a lot of confusion to see this nice big reward window saying you got something, and then being unable to find it or equip it.

-Many tooltips on abilities and such do not update correctly. And I'm talking, literally abilities and stuff on the same menu, where one ability will display its correctly modified cooldown time, for example, while the one next to it will not. In some instances, you can confirm that the thing is actually correctly modified when it game. But people have found many instances where they're not working, or correctly modified. Because there are SO MANY THINGS that might change abilities or cooldowns or damage output.....as a player you start looking askance at everything and wondering how much of it doesn't actually work.

-The way you equip usable abilities on your character is through the weapons you equip. Psykers are even more special in that they can either equip abilities flowing from weapons or their psychic powers. How many psychic powers you can equip vs. what abilities you get from items is based on a few different things, and the end result is kind of confusion where certain combinations leave you with fewer abilities or ability slots than you should get. For example, if I use the thing that turns my armor power in to a slot for a spell, and the equippable item that turns my utility slot in to another spell slot, and I choose to use a warp rod and a force sword in either hand.....I get one fewer spell slot than if I dual wielded two warp rods. Confusing? Yes. And more than likely buggy.

-Many balance points between weapon traits, or stuff purchased from your skill trees, remain. For example, there's two traits for armor penetration. The skill trait "Armor Penetration" ignores 100% of armor on an enemy. "Armor Breaking" ignores 50%. And on one of the Psyker skill trees, you can buy these traits and attach them directly to your pskyer powers. The first one you can buy is....armor pen. Followed immediately by armor breaking. That's just one obvious example of logical inconsistencies in progression/effectiveness.

-New crashes were introduced in the beta build that have made some mission types completely unplayable. "Fate" missions are randomly generated missions you have to spend in game currency to play. They tend to have better rewards and loot. And in this build, about half of people just crash as soon as they enter them or load them, losing them the currency and one of the more effective ways to level and get gear.

I'm sure there's more I've missed. While there was new, improved, touched up stuff in the beta build...this close to release it didn't do nearly enough to distract from how much is left to finish. This felt like the kind of build you'd get a couple months before release. Not a week or two.

Martyr is NOT a bad game in my opinion. It's just a game that has done too much, too fast and wracked up sizable technical debt because of it. Everything in the game that is more or less finished still needs that 10% polish. If that were the only thing Neocore had to do they'd be fine. But there are large swathes of unfinished WIP content. I really want to believe that content is just being held back from beta but then I see the caliber of what was released to us and don't have much hope. If it's done already it's probably buggy. If it's not done it's going to be rushed to completion and will be bare bones, and probably buggy. I don't doubt that with time Martyr will patch itself to where it needs to be. But for a game that sold itself strictly through its own website for several years, before making its way to Steam Early Access, and now apparently is going to limp to release.....that sucks. That's a lot of time and money invested to not really have a fully finished product ostensibly when you should. And it kind of makes me wonder if there isn't some element of 'the devs lost the hunger because they were already being paid' in this as well, as can happen when you start selling your game in its earliest stages.

[Biowraith]

Thanks for the detailed write-up, nenjin, much appreciated.  This confirms a lot of what I was afraid of from their whole weeks/months out of date beta policy for early access players (but don't worry, the version we're working on internally fixes it all!), along with the rumblings on the Steam forums. 

For myself, I'm definitely still interested in the game, but I'll be giving it a day or five after release before I even consider giving in to the small hyped part of my brain that just wants to play it already, and it sounds like a month or five would be safer especially at the comparatively high asking price.

[LoSboccacc]

ptw

[nenjin]

So.

Martyr has had an.....interesting weekend.

They did an event to coincide with the big 40k game sale that happened. Collect 50 skulls from Black Legion Chaos Space Marines, and come release day you'll have a fancy skull helmet to wear. So what happened after the event had been going for about a day? Their servers went offline for 12 hours right as tons of new people bought the game. :\

That said they were in the steam forums pretty much all night talking to people about it so they clearly cared. There was some issue between their servers, steam and Gamespark where the actual game is hosted from. Apparently it took a while to fix.

So there have been a lot of little patches to the game since the big beta patch that dropped last week. And they've incrementally been fixing some of the bigger and more obvious I've been complaining about. While they're doing this they're also showing off teasers for the Armor appearance customization, which while I've haven't looked at it yet, sounds like it's going to be more than just "pick from one of three color palettes per armor." While I doubt a lot of stuff will be perfect or good by release, I'm a little less fearful that it will be a total shit show come release day.

And to be honest, I'm actually excited to finally be able to, after 80+ hours with the game, start my real characters and start playing for the long haul. Neocore may be doing too much with too little too soon, but at least it's obvious they're working their asses off, they love 40k, and Martyr is playable and fun and interesting, even if the action is a little bland and repetitive at times.

[Biowraith]

After watching some more youtube videos, I caved and bought it with the usual justifications to myself of "I'd end up buying it sooner or later anyway" and "if launch is too rocky I can just shelf it for a little while".  I'm sure the negligible 10% discount did its job there.

Me from 5 days ago would be so disappointed in me today.

[nenjin]

It is better to die for the Emperor than live for yourself.

Release is tomorrow. I expect a fairly massive patch to update the beta, and pray to the Emperor that their servers are prepared this time around.

[LoSboccacc]

caved and bought this after watching some streamers.

it can be shortly described as a diablo II: the warhammer reskin.

I'm liking it in principle, there has been enough variation so far in missions and enemies to shake things up and keep it fresh. level visuals are quite detailed and it's immersive enough. the tidbit of lore are interesting, but the character interaction quite cheesy.

the attack interface is needlessly clunky. I hate not being able to remap abilities to mouse, I hate the unskippable auto reload, I hate the clunkiness of changing weapon in combat, for an action rpg where the action moves fast, the interface and controls are in your way more often than not.

also, but this is of the utmost subjectivity, I don't like any classes other than the crusader. at least you can change specialization by changing armor so you have options without restarting the whole game.

tiered equipment is also weird, seems like the lists are quite small per level, i.e. at level 4 everything the trader has is "thule rare this" and "thule rare that", probably because the list of modifier available for that level is just too small and everything gets generated of this flavor, which highlights that there aren't armor sets to be completed, as in, no explicit bonuses for completing the thule outfit.

[nenjin]

Not gonna lie, release has been kind of a shit show. Apparently character data files were stored on the local drive and people realized they could bump their stats in the config files for an in-game advantage. Neocore patched them out so the serverside values take precedence but some damage was already done. I understand they had to do a character wipe like the day of or the day right after release.

but the character interaction quite cheesy.

I actually kind of like this bit! After sooooo many 40k games where characters are just wooden, I kind of like they there's a little interplay between the Inquisitor and the Rogue Trader. There's some warmth and humanity to their interactions. Caius' voice acting is a train wreck sure but....I dunno. To be honest the slight cheesiness actually endeared me to the story and characters.

the attack interface is needlessly clunky. I hate not being able to remap abilities to mouse, I hate the unskippable auto reload, I hate the clunkiness of changing weapon in combat, for an action rpg where the action moves fast, the interface and controls are in your way more often than not.

No real disagreements here, other than with 80+ hours with the game since beta, I've found the flow and the UI no longer pisses me off. But not being able to remap ability keys is annoying. It's even more annoying for psyker vs. crusader. Crusader's ability line up doesn't change that often, but with Psykers you get new powers fairly often and arranging them on the ability bar is like working a jigsaw puzzle.

also, but this is of the utmost subjectivity, I don't like any classes other than the crusader. at least you can change specialization by changing armor so you have options without restarting the whole game.

I prefer Psyker over Crusader. (Haven't tried Assassin, the directional dodge seems like a pain in the ass to figure out on a M+KB setup.) Psyker has a granularity and customization to abilities that the other classes do not. There's talk of adding a "rune" system to other classes at some point in the future.

tiered equipment is also weird, seems like the lists are quite small per level, i.e. at level 4 everything the trader has is "thule rare this" and "thule rare that", probably because the list of modifier available for that level is just too small and everything gets generated of this flavor, which highlights that there aren't armor sets to be completed, as in, no explicit bonuses for completing the thule outfit.

The issue is two fold:

Weapon variety is limited by level. At lower levels you only get a small selection of the possible weapons you can use. So a lot of items of the same rarity get generated by the vendor at lower levels because the pool is too small. That, and there are no set pieces that I'm aware. Thule vs. Korschei vs. whatever is really about the visual variants, less about the power specifics of an item.

I haven't even restarted my character for release but I'm planning to get around to it this weekend. Too many fucking games to play.

[LoSboccacc]

we should have a bay 12 cabal

[Biowraith]

I've been quite enjoying this, though I'm still a bit concerned about long term replayability due to somewhat limited character progression/customisation. 

So far I've just played Psyker, since it seems to have the most depth to building your character what with the runes and being able to select your skill loadout individually.  I think I'm level 11 or something like that, at the start of chapter 3 of the campaign (which I think means I've unlocked all the game systems like crafting, tarot, etc?).  At the moment I've mostly gone with buffs (warp speed, and whatever the dodge-ranged and +kinetic damage buffs are called) on the basis I'll maybe dip my toes in the co-op random matchmaking and who won't want buffs, but it's working pretty well for solo too.

One thing from the previous posts, I'm maybe misunderstanding but I was able to remap ability keys just fine?  I have 4 mouse buttons for the 4 weapon-derived skills (or psyker powers, in this case), then number key 1 for innoculator, and 2-4 for belt/armour/'world' skills.  It does get a bit clunky if I switch up my weapons from 2h staff to dual wielding (especially since you can't move the weapon attacks to other slots), especially if I do both, one in each set.