Member
I was able to jump into the game for a good 4 hours yesterday and was finally able to test the Friends menu as well. Played as Warden, with short stints as Conqueror, Kensei, Orochi and Berserker.
The Good:
This has been the smoothest Alpha experience for me so far. I had no problem with Controls, but I stuck with my XBOX Controller on PC for now. Did the Practice run and jumped into some Duels vs. AI. Lost my first game against an Orochi, but after that was able to defeat the next enemies, sometimes the matches had to go all the way to Round 5, but I was pleasantly surprised how easily I got back into the game.
Animation, Atmosphere, Presentation that's all still top notch and the reason I keep coming back for more! Love the fighting and enjoyed my playtime.
Customization will also be a menu, where I'll be spending way too much time in. I had to pull myself out of there, because I knew I only have so much time to experience the fights. A friend of mine stayed for another half hour on TS, going through the Customization menu, after he had 'officially' said good bye for the night and left our group.
All in all the Friends system worked quite well. Everybody was able to join the group and we mostly stayed together. I'll mention some things I didn't like further down, but I didn't have any problems accessing it and finding my way around the options.
The Bad:
I had one Network Error that threw me back into the Lobby, which was shortly after the Announcement about Connectivity Issues came up. Did not experience it after the hotfix though.
I had two 'Unable to Migrate Host' Errors, where the match making didn't work out. This was with a party of three and trying to get into Player vs. Player Matches in Dominion. I was able to participate in 2v2 with both of those friends separately without any issue. Player vs. AI Dominion with a fourth human on our side worked also.
There's some graphic glitches happening, when a Round is over in the Duel Modes. The camera will not zoom towards the character correctly and get stuck, showing just a leg or something. With the Conqueror my weapon was flashing after a Duel on Citadel Gate on the left bridge. In Brawl it showed the enemy Warden doing his Victory salute, with my dead Warden suddenly doing the same thing just behind him.
While queuing up for 2v2 Brawl I lost my group mate during the match making phase. He was at that time browsing the Controls -> Key Bindings menu, if that's any help.
I was unable to Quit to Desktop. The game would just not accept my input and I had to kill it with the task manager.
After two or three rounds of Dominion we would often end up in an all Bot match. This happened particulary often, when I was grouped with just one friend of mine.
The Ugly:
Please for the love of every warrior god out there, give us the option to browse the Movesets of the Heroes in between Matches. I fought a couple of 2v2s and had an enemy that was always attacking from the Top. I knew my Warden had a counter move for that, but I didn't know how it worked exactly. I managed to pull it off some times out of luck, but that Moveset would have really helped me.
I was disappointed that there's no way to fight against your friend in 1v1 Duels. It's the perfect location to get to know your characters better and improve your play, test some things, confirm some bugs even
I was surprised to find out that you can not pause the game even when doing a 1v1 Duel against a Bot. Luckily I was able to dispatch the enemy Kensei rather quickly so the postman didn't have to wait too long, but a Pause function would be much appreciated.
When choosing to play against AI, you still end up in queue to look for other human allies. I was playing with two other friends and we had connection issues in Player vs Player and had hoped to be able to start a quick game that way. Maybe make it available in the advanced options somewhere?
Maybe I am imagining things, but I found it harder to leave the Top Stance, while using the Controller. I had the problem while using Mouse and Keyboard before, where you had to make a conscious downward left and downward right movement to not get into the Top Stance with the Mouse. Now I had to make those same movements with the right Stick, just flipping right or left didn't work for me anymore. Are my thumbs just getting rusty or did you change something there?
Looking forward to play some more and thanks again for having me!
Junior Member
