Posted December 19, 2020
I love this game, it has it's kinks, but i've seen so many open world game releases in my lifetime, none of them ever released in a state where there was nothing critical left to be fixed.
So in order to give some constructive feedback i compiled a list of mechanics i'd optimize to make this game even more playable than it already is. It's just my personal view, i'm happy if even just one of my suggestions is considered worthy by the devs.
* Minimap: The minimap has to zoom out if you are driving, its nearly impossible to see a turn comming if you are driving even at half speed with most of the cars and bikes. The minimap is missing a zoom in general, that's the most apparent when you are driving faster.
* NPCs blocking pathways: Story NPCs have player colission active when they are on a mission with the player, means they can block a door if they decide to stand there and you can only reload and hope they don't decide to stand there next time. Make them acknowledge e.g. dash-bumps and make them move aside if the player dash-bumps into them.
* Seams: Less populated areas still have some seams on the ground a player can fall through (im not talking about seams in walls or between static entities), have a bot let a player character walk through every alleyway in every region on the map, track every time they suddenly go "below sealevel quickly" when they weren't supposed to, might take forever but you will find even the last one of game breaking seams. And then let an intern just push some polygons to close the seams.
* Steering: Steering seems to me like it's being directly input into the physics engine right now. It desperately needs a buffer, so cars dont suddenly drift or swerve like crazy if you just make a short harsh input. That's not how vehicles work in real life or racing games and is super distracting now that we as players are getting pampered with actual racing simulators being super affordable.
* Input precision slider: We need a way to control a buffer for input or reduce the time where a dash would be tracked ourselves. Right now the time window for a dash by e.g. pressing forward twice, is way too long. And that way you accidentally bump into NPCs all the time, resulting in all commoners just running away screaming. Super distracting and annoying.
* Quest update queue: There seems to be a very reliable quest update queue processing each quest update seperately and not having quest updates cancel each other out. BUT the queue is set to a very low speed, probably to have every update being on the screen for a few seconds so the player can either grab their phone or see their messages. And later on, basically in endgame, there are so many updates at the same time that you have to literally wait for the right notification to pop up. We need a way to straight up filter out sidequest updates and not having them pop up in the UI if we want to, so the main ones always come through immediately. Or just make the main quest updates pause side quest updates until the main quest updates were all displayed.
So, that's basically all bugs and problems adressed that i've encountered. As i said, i hope you can find something of use in this list. And please feel free to post your own suggestions as reply, if you are a player too, reading this. The more feedback the better, no matter if the same point comes up 10 times in replies.
So in order to give some constructive feedback i compiled a list of mechanics i'd optimize to make this game even more playable than it already is. It's just my personal view, i'm happy if even just one of my suggestions is considered worthy by the devs.
* Minimap: The minimap has to zoom out if you are driving, its nearly impossible to see a turn comming if you are driving even at half speed with most of the cars and bikes. The minimap is missing a zoom in general, that's the most apparent when you are driving faster.
* NPCs blocking pathways: Story NPCs have player colission active when they are on a mission with the player, means they can block a door if they decide to stand there and you can only reload and hope they don't decide to stand there next time. Make them acknowledge e.g. dash-bumps and make them move aside if the player dash-bumps into them.
* Seams: Less populated areas still have some seams on the ground a player can fall through (im not talking about seams in walls or between static entities), have a bot let a player character walk through every alleyway in every region on the map, track every time they suddenly go "below sealevel quickly" when they weren't supposed to, might take forever but you will find even the last one of game breaking seams. And then let an intern just push some polygons to close the seams.
* Steering: Steering seems to me like it's being directly input into the physics engine right now. It desperately needs a buffer, so cars dont suddenly drift or swerve like crazy if you just make a short harsh input. That's not how vehicles work in real life or racing games and is super distracting now that we as players are getting pampered with actual racing simulators being super affordable.
* Input precision slider: We need a way to control a buffer for input or reduce the time where a dash would be tracked ourselves. Right now the time window for a dash by e.g. pressing forward twice, is way too long. And that way you accidentally bump into NPCs all the time, resulting in all commoners just running away screaming. Super distracting and annoying.
* Quest update queue: There seems to be a very reliable quest update queue processing each quest update seperately and not having quest updates cancel each other out. BUT the queue is set to a very low speed, probably to have every update being on the screen for a few seconds so the player can either grab their phone or see their messages. And later on, basically in endgame, there are so many updates at the same time that you have to literally wait for the right notification to pop up. We need a way to straight up filter out sidequest updates and not having them pop up in the UI if we want to, so the main ones always come through immediately. Or just make the main quest updates pause side quest updates until the main quest updates were all displayed.
So, that's basically all bugs and problems adressed that i've encountered. As i said, i hope you can find something of use in this list. And please feel free to post your own suggestions as reply, if you are a player too, reading this. The more feedback the better, no matter if the same point comes up 10 times in replies.