KickStarter Monomyth - A first person action RPG/dungeon crawler - now in Open Backer Beta

[Tom Baker's Arse]

This looks like it has the potential of pure incline. Precisely what Underworld Ascendant should have been, but definitely was not.

 

[RatTower]

Maybe I'm not cool enough but I had registered for a key and didn't receive anything by email (also checked my spam). Maybe I made an error when I registered ?

You made the error of not DMing me your mail address to join the nepotistic web of privileged codex testers

You can still do that. Or wait for another batch of alpha keys and play a patched version of the game.

 

[Nyast]

Here's my feedback after 4 hours of play time.

For of all - CONGRATULATIONS ! Your game is already better and far more interesting than a $5M funded game ( Ultima Ascendant, what a trainwreck ), so that's already an accomplishment. It looks, feels and plays better too.

I'll start with global feedback first. It looks pretty good ( in fact, better than most indy games ) and even if some assets are stock/generic, the art style is coherent and fits together. It's easier said than done. It runs extremely well too on my 6700k + gtx 1070. No slowdown or major technical issue to report, installation was fast, and stability was perfect ( no crash so far ). The screen resolution seems to be fixed to 1080p despite me playing on a 1440p monitor ( I'm unable to cycle through resolutions in the options menu ? ) so I'm getting a bit of aliasing / blurriness due to the upscaling. I'm also forced to switch my locale in english ( I'm french ) as there are currently no ways to rebind keys. The game seems to intercept the mouse focus, even when you alt-tab, therefore I'm unable to switch my locale after the game has been launched. No problem for now as it's an alpha, but for your first public builds this should probably be a priority.

My initial impressions were positive, especially in terms of visuals and ambiance. Controls were straightfoward but I instantly thought that the automatic leaning ( camera roll ) when you strafe left/right was overdone ( + reset too slow ) and might induct motion sickness on a lot of casual players. I'd recommend tuning it down or at least providing an option to disable it. Some negative points related to the coherency of the UI too: escape does not quit the menus / inventory, and when I first read the letter in my inventory, the mouse had disappeared ( until you left-click and it re-appears ) with no easy way to close the UI. I also dislike the context menu that opens up when you click on an inventory item, it's going to get frustrating when you need to do that for many items and requires extra clicks that aren't needed; my suggestion here is to stick to drag & drop on LMB and "use" ( or that contextual menu ) on RMB.

I noticed from the feedback already posted that darkness is going to be controversial. You'll probably want to at least add a gamma slider. On my monitor, it wasn't too bad and I kindda like the "oppression feeling" this puts on the player. There's a minimum natural glow around your character, torches and a lighting spell, so I don't think you need to change all that much. I found myself using the lighting spell frequently, and it does look nice; however it comes a bit later into the game, and the first torch you find seems to run out very quickly ( after 2 or 3 minutes it felt ? ), and I haven't found any torches in the first hour, so my advice here is to add more torches until you get the lighting spell. I found a stack of torches later in a room, but by that time you've already gained the lighting spell so it isn't as critical.

I think the game as it currently stands has a major flaw in terms of difficulty. In fact, I'm a bit confused as to what your goal with this first level is. Is it really supposed to be the introductory level ? Because the difficulity is high enough that it should be a mid or even end-game level, IMO. I'm not just talking about combat ( more on that in a minute ), but the overall experience. The caverns are fine as a tutorial with their tooltips; they slightly overstay their welcome and are a bit on the boring side, which is partially due to the low movement speed. The main issue is that once you start to open-up areas of the level, you get lost and you easily miss out important quest items or keys. The amount of back-tracking is already frustrating me and it's only the first level. Now, if this level was specially made as a vertical slice, and will later be moved to the mid game, it's fine. But if it's representative of what you want as your "real" introductory level for new players, I think you'll have to do many adjustments.

The first major issue is with keys. Keys allow you to open up various areas of the level, but there is currently no way to figure out if you've opened everything or if you've missed something. The lysdandria key is a good example. Without spoiling too much, it's standing on a small bench with candles in an alcove on a wall, and I literrally ran past this area a dozen times without seeing that there was a key here. Keys, in general, are absolutely critical to your progression, but they're small, without a visual indicator / glow, and easily overlooked. That, again, would be fine in itself if this was a level later into the game, but as the first level, I suspect a lot of players are going to miss out on keys just like I did, which will force them to run around corridors for more time than needed, leading to early frustration. IMO, every item that is either a quest item, either an item mandatory for progression, should have some sort of small glow / hint ( it doesn't have to be "in your face", but at least a little something ).

The second major issue is combat and the stamina meter. So far, combat seems to be the most buggy part of the game. Some undeads seem to get stuck, stop reacting / attacking and it even happened to myself a couple times too. In one occasion I was unable to attack, defend or move at all and had to stand here in front of a frozen undead. I forgot how I unstuck myself, but something was definitely bugged. In general, stamina usage seems to cause a lot of strange behaviors. It seems to me it can go negative if you keep attacking for example, so if you do not pay attention, it can take a while before it starts to replenish. In another occasion, after a serie of attacks, and despite standing still and doing nothing, my stamina meter stood at zero for a good minute until it started to replenish again. But those are technical issues; In terms of design, I'm not convinced by that stamina system. I do like that you need to time your attacks / defense carefully, to not exhaust your stamina, but there has been plenty of cases where my stamina was at zero, and I was getting stomped by an undead, so I basically could neither run away nor attack. It was checkmate, but I was still alive, while the undead kept attacking repeatedly without pause; so I could stay alive forever, but unable to run away or to attack back either. Frustrating, and it happened frequently. It felt like a black hole: once you get there, you cannot escape your fate.

Another issue with the combat system is that it seems to me that attacks are modulated by the stamina level. In other words, you do no damage on attacks when your stamina is at zero. My first experiences with combat were very frsutrating as a new player; as I didn't realize that my attacks dealt no damage, I kept attacking and defending myself, but my undead opponent took no damage ( despite the visual feedback ). After 10 minutes, it felt something was off and I wondered if I had missed a more powerful weapon, or if my opponent was really invincible. So at the very least, you need to teach the player how the stamina system works, and I would also recommand increasing the minimum damage you are doing when on low stamina.

The stamina system also ensures that 2-vs-1 is extremely hard, next to impossible; I've died dozens of times so far, and that was often caused by a second enemy joining his mate I was battling. On 2-vs-1, there isn't much you can do, as you can't parry all the time, and there are no openings to attack any of your opponents either. That makes the current demo thrilling (in a good way) as you have to be extremely careful, but emphasizes the issue that it's really bad as the first player experience / introduction to the game.

The third major issue is the save system. I had to double check to be sure I didn't dream it, but no: the enemies reset on saving at altars. This is not cool, at all. I could somehow understand resetting enemies when dying, but that's not even what I'm talking about here: I kill an enemy, go back to an altar to save, and when I come back, that same enemy is back. I'm also losing experience points, and when respawning, it's not a real "reload", so the consumable items I had in my inventory ( and used previously ) remain lost. The consequence of all of this is that you cannot really game the system ( for example by killing enemies one at a time, saving, so that you can ensure minimum progression even if it's too difficult for you ), but in fact that as you keep saving / dying and losing consumables, your chances lower and the difficulty keeps increasing. I'm hoping that in the future you'll implement a true quick save / reload system instead of the current one, which reminds me of Ultima Ascendant ( and which was despised and criticized by almost everybody, if you recall.. ).

Finally, if we except combat, in terms of quests / progression, I also think this level is a bit too frustrating as the intro level for new players. I'm particularly thinking of the gemestone "treasure hunt" which asks you to backtrack to the beginning of the game, and makes you doubt if you have found the right location. It'd be fine in a mid-game level, but in the first level I can imagine that a lot of new players would ge frustrated.

Verdict: a solid alpha with a lot of potential, but I have my doubts about the saving system, the stamina/combat system and overall believe this level isn't a good fit as the introductory level for a casual RPG player.

 

[baud]

Here's my feedback after 4 hours of play time.
I'm also forced to switch my locale in english ( I'm french ) as there are currently no ways to rebind keys. The game seems to intercept the mouse focus, even when you alt-tab, therefore I'm unable to switch my locale after the game has been launched. No problem for now as it's an alpha, but for your first public builds this should probably be a priority.

Note that you can change that setting with Alt+Shift, even while in a game (though I didn't tested with that one), if you got more than one locale available/already configured.

 

[Viata]

Just played 1 hour of the game. I'll play more tomorrow and give my feedback. However, one thing I know is that his games makes me sad. Sad to know that for the whole 2020 I'm not going to play a game as good as this one. 100% my GOTY the year it's going to be released.

 

[Namesake]

Played around an hour this morning, my notes!

Overall
It's astonishing how much you've already got right. The game feel, spacing, lightning, camera work, audio, there's aren't too many obvious sharp edges and it shows you've got a good eye for detail and putting your effort where it's needed. I'm excited!

Minor

• The tilt while strafing is about 50% too exaggerated imo. Feels a bit annoying in the context of a slower paced tight corridor fantasy game. Dark Messiah / Quake used this because their action was fast and they want to encourage speed and movement. Monomyth gives off a more methodical vibe
• Hud elements are a bit too periphery. Have to consciously look at your health rather than sense it
• Consider putting the light from your active torch above or inside your player model. You can clip the light origin through geo in front of you at the moment
• May be controversial, but items / interactable objects may need a shimmer or glow, something subtle but there. I missed two major objects (The big head in a wall that has a socket for eg) until accidentally mousing over it while exploring, and the size and art of many objects blend into the environment too easily. I can't ever recall really having issues seeing items in Arx/Messiah/King's
• Doors that can be lockpicked should probably say "I could lockpick this" or "Locked (Lockpicks jingle sound)" - it was just a bit annoying having to test every door with a lockpick
• For some reason one of the keys I found went into my inventory, and just on a whim I tried it on a nearby door and it unlocked it (Wasn't consumed). It seemed to have been established that there was a keyring system with a previous key, and it would automatically be used if it could be. How come this key needed to be used manually?
• There were quite a few heavily signaled containers and chests that had nothing inside of them. No doubt placeholder, but thought I'd mention in case that was an intentional running theme. Feels so lame haha

Game Flow

• At the start there was a sword, then another sword in the chest, but I only got 1 sword, bit weird
• It was strange getting a sword and there not being any combat for a significant portion. Consider putting the sword before the first intention combat encounter
• Mantle tutorial has no area in which to mantle? Where it's placed now made me feel I was meant to mantle up on the girders to find a secret or something
• There was no reward for defeating the 2 Slimes in the first combat encounter, was disheartening, maybe some health/potions nearby?
• Dropping fish onto the fire was awkward due to the small collider of the fire. It worked but took a few attempts. Perhaps have a snap-top feature for placement of such things? Physics-based interactions are a bit of a meme these days imo, it should be the mechanic behind that interaction that's interesting. If you really want to keep the physics, maybe do something similar to Zelda: BOTW's cooking?
  
• Empty containers/no loot after stealthing past the 2 humanoids was disheartening. At this point I'm feeling the gamespace is quite barren and am losing faith in the game's ability to reward my curiosity/exploration/actions
• The first save point could be placed closer to that shortcut door that you open with the key which leads to the poison area. I died and ended up traveling all the way through the first area before getting back to the shortcut again, by accident
• That area, with the pitch blackness, definitely use this opportunity to tutorialize torches / lighting. I'd already used up my torch and figured I was meant to stumble blindly all around and ended up opening several doors in this area. After backtracking and going a different way there are 4 torches on a table + a light spell, the intention being to go back to that dark area I'd imagine
• It seems every enemy placement has 2 enemies together, even the first ones. It might give players some more confidence to engage in combat if there were a couple of encounters with only 1 enemy, first off

Combat

• Overall the combat definitely needs a lot of work
• Immediately realized you can abuse the AI by holding an attack and forcing them to permanently block, wait for your stamina to charge, then whack 'em on the head, ad nausium. Consider some random decisions (Maybe instead of block they attack? Maybe variable timer on how long they hold block?)
  
• Due to the animation timing and overall slowness, I never felt safe engaging in melee with the enemies, they'd always get in free hits (For large damage). So my playstyle would be either abusing the above, or just walking backwards while charging attacks for free hits. I think your combat would be better served with fast attack animations and maybe being more forgiving with the stamina usage, to encourage staying within melee dance range with enemies. Not 100% sure here
• Arrow guys can be abused by strafing right/left in front of them, then they can never hit you
• Arrow guys shoot a bit too frequently, not giving an opportunity to get attacks in without taking damage
• Arrow guys should try to get away / pull out a knife when cornered, or similar, so they fill a support role but can be easily dispatched in 1v1

You're doing a great job RatTower, keen to see how this all unfolds! The real work begins now, eh?

 

[Nyast]

Oh, some other random thoughts and feedback coming to me:

On combat:

• As I said I think it's a mistake to make the first enemies that difficult for the very first level. I do like the challenge and the thrill of the danger though, so I wouldn't mind this kind of difficulty later into the game. It makes stealth relevant ( unlike Ultima Ascendant, which puts stealth into your face, but since enemies are so dumb and easy to kill anyway, makes it completely a waste of time, unless that's your playstyle ).
• For this first level, things you could consider: nerfing hitpoints on undeads ( making them much easier to kill ? ), making them run slower ( at the moment they're as fast as you.. which I must say, I found quite surprising.. and the fuckers can open doors ! they'll chase you to hell and you better not piss them off ! ). Or maybe use another type of easier monster and reserve undeads for later levels. However, the combat difficulity has ties in to the saving system ( it'll get easier if / after you fix it ) or stamina balance tweaks.
• It's cool that you can find a bow in the game.. but I only found 3 arrows. Needless to say, that play style isn't exactly possible in this first level, especially considering you need to level-up archery before you can use the bow effectively.
• And of course, the weight limit when you equip both the shield and the sword.. maybe the UI should signal you that your combat performance will be negatively impacted, or that your stamina will go down very quickly ? I ended up using the shield + dagger instead.

On UI:

• I didn't like how I had to constantly move my mouse cursor from the left / right panels during conversations, to select sentences to speak ( left ) or topic keywords ( right ). I also felt the font / text style on the left panel was off, although it's hard to explain. Or maybe something to do with the character sizes, or text clustered together. Whatever, I think the text style needs work in conversations. I do like the keyword system though, especially if the idea is that you "learn" new keywords / topics as you discuss with NPCs.
• The raw fish item description says it's better cooked, but how do you cook ? Dropping the fish on a campfire doesn't seem to do anything, the fish item just bounces off it ( I tried repeatedly and as close as possible to it ). The second NPC quest requires me to give him grilled fish, but I ate it earlier in the game so I have no idea how to cook a new fish.
• The bottom-left and right health / mana meters need to be opaque, all the time. And maybe flash or glow when the value changes. It's half transparent and relatively small at the moment, you need to pay attention to it..
• At some point there's a key that.. goes into your inventory as an item and which you need to use manually, instead of the way other keys behave ( by being "intergrated" into the interface and being used automatically when you click on a door, if you see what I mean ). That's not very coherent and a bit confusing

Misc:

• The torch light source's position seems offset forward a little bit in front of your character ( unlike the spell light ). As a consequence if you go too close to a wall, the light source will go inside it and the shadows will flicker / go bad. Same if you get too close to a barrel, table or other physical object. You should probably put the torch light source back to the center of the character.
• I agree with other poster's feedback that more items and interactions in the dungeon would go a long way to make it richer.
• I haven't commented too much on the dungeon layout, but it's pretty good. It feels like a real place, not a random maze, and everything was fairly logical. That adds a lot to immersion ( basically, what was lacking in UA - sorry to refer to that piece of garbage again - which was a bunch of random levels with no cohesion ).
• Screen-space reflections in water have a lot of visual glitches. Might want to either disable it, either improve them. As is, I do not think they look good enough.
• At some point in the caverns, a green blob died right between a wooden gate. Unfortunately, monster corpses are still collidable, and it was right in the spot where jumping over it was difficult ( due to the lower height ). I ended up being able to pass, but it took a few minutes of random jumping / running until I got it. It was scary as I thought I had potentially blocked myself out of the game.

 

[Nyast]

Here's my feedback after 4 hours of play time.
I'm also forced to switch my locale in english ( I'm french ) as there are currently no ways to rebind keys. The game seems to intercept the mouse focus, even when you alt-tab, therefore I'm unable to switch my locale after the game has been launched. No problem for now as it's an alpha, but for your first public builds this should probably be a priority.

Note that you can change that setting with Alt+Shift, even while in a game (though I didn't tested with that one), if you got more than one locale available/already configured.

True, but I think I turned that option off in Windows, as in many games I was accidentely doing that during gameplay and had controls switched.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

The third major issue is the save system. I had to double check to be sure I didn't dream it, but no: the enemies reset on saving at altars. This is not cool, at all. I could somehow understand resetting enemies when dying, but that's not even what I'm talking about here: I kill an enemy, go back to an altar to save, and when I come back, that same enemy is back. I'm also losing experience points, and when respawning, it's not a real "reload", so the consumable items I had in my inventory ( and used previously ) remain lost. The consequence of all of this is that you cannot really game the system ( for example by killing enemies one at a time, saving, so that you can ensure minimum progression even if it's too difficult for you ), but in fact that as you keep saving / dying and losing consumables, your chances lower and the difficulty keeps increasing. I'm hoping that in the future you'll implement a true quick save / reload system instead of the current one, which reminds me of Ultima Ascendant ( and which was despised and criticized by almost everybody, if you recall.. ).

Pretty sure that's a bug at this point. I could've understood if the game followed the same path as King's Field (mobs respawn, bosses & items don't, but you can buy an endless amount of items from stores), but the fact that a large chunk the world state resets when you load a save makes it look like a bug, and if I'm right, I hope that it'll be fixed soon, as I tend to play in 1-2 hour bursts.

I actually liked that the Ashland Warriors are tough, which forced me to sneak around for a good while (and made me really want to kick their asses later for that sweet sweet XP and satisfaction), but in some cases sneaking around them is tricky (need to send another batch of my comments after some extra testing), which reduces the fun of it. Especially in once case, where a certain room felt too tight to sneak past enemies (and apparently they don't return to their patrol routes after losing the player for a while?).

It may be a harsh opening, but I'm enjoying it a lot.

 

[Bad Sector]

All these comments are making me very curious :-P... i think i'll apply for the next round of testing for a raw first gameplay video (i think you already have enough feedback to work on and it might be useful to get fresh looks after any patches - also my monitor resolution is 1366x768 and the hardcoded 1920x1080 wont work here... or it'll work and i'll just get too small and/or blurry UI).

 

[SophosTheWise]

Man, I really wanted to get in on this Alpha but it'd be for selfish reasons -- to play it, not to actually test it.

to those who will support it in proper testing, but fuck me I'm jealous.

edit: given RatTower's approval to broadcast footage, anyone plan to upload a pseudo-LP to youtube or stream it?

If I'm in the next batch of keys as said by RatTower, I'm considering doing an LP/Stream. It'll be great to get the word out.

 

[Stormcrowfleet]

Maybe I'm not cool enough but I had registered for a key and didn't receive anything by email (also checked my spam). Maybe I made an error when I registered ?

You made the error of not DMing me your mail address to join the nepotistic web of privileged codex testers

You can still do that. Or wait for another batch of alpha keys and play a patched version of the game.

Yeah I guess I didn't see this. Sorry ! What's the format of PM you want for us to do this ?

 

[Ivan]

This looks amazing. Looking forward to it.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Is there any settings file I can alter before starting the game? I need to set it to potato.

Zep--

 

[RatTower]

Is there any settings file I can alter before starting the game? I need to set it to potato.

Zep--

Not yet and ingame performance settings are more a placebo at the moment.
Is the issue that it doesn't start at all or just a black screen?

Cause the latter might be a loading issue, which you can possibly just sit out by waiting a while.

Yeah I guess I didn't see this. Sorry ! What's the format of PM you want for us to do this ?

Just send me the mail address you used for your alpha registration. I'll do the rest.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Is the issue that it doesn't start at all or just a black screen?

I see the scrolling story text, enter my name, then a black screen, then after a minute or 2 or 3, dumped back to the desktop. without warning.

Zep--

 

[RatTower]

Is the issue that it doesn't start at all or just a black screen?

I see the scrolling story text, enter my name, then a black screen, then after a minute or 2 or 3, dumped back to the desktop. without warning.

Zep--

Strange. Can you hear some inventory sound before it crashes?

 

[Zep Zepo]

Strange. Can you hear some inventory sound before it crashes?

Wasn't really paying attention at the black screen. I'll give it another shot later today.

Zep--

 

[Zep Zepo]

Ok, further potato testing...

1 minute 30 of black screen after launching from steam tray.

Click New Game and add Name, see video and scrolling text.

starting clock over...
The black screen for 2 minutes...hear a "whooshy click noise one time.

at 2:30 I start to hear something...maybe wind or moaning? Still black screen

at 3:15 minutes moaning/wind stops. still black screen.

at 3:45 windy moaning starts again for a short bit. 5 seconds about.

at 4:00 minutes, crash to desktop with a UE4 error
"An Unreal process has crashed. UE4-Monomyth"
With an error reporting box which I didn't send, as it contained no information as to why it crashed, at all.

Don't worry too much about it, this laptop really is a potato.

Thanks for letting me try.

Zep--

 

[JDR13]

Is this in Beta or still in Alpha? I would love to try it.

 

[Paper]

Will monsters definitely respawn even in the finished version? Maybe this has been talked about in the thread, idk...

don't wanna look forward to something just to have it turn out like Bard's Tale IV

 

[DJOGamer PT]

 

[Valky]

The visual design looks pretty great.
Are there environmental hazards so you can play home alone with the enemies like Dark Messiah?

 

[RatTower]

Will monsters definitely respawn even in the finished version? Maybe this has been talked about in the thread, idk...

don't wanna look forward to something just to have it turn out like Bard's Tale IV

The spawn system will be reworked. I can understand why the current system seems unintuitive (or even bugged).
Luckily it just needs a relatively tiny fix and it will be much less confusing. I'll go into more detail on this tomorrow.

The visual design looks pretty great.
Are there environmental hazards so you can play home alone with the enemies like Dark Messiah?

There are environmental hazards, but they don't play much of a role in combat right now.

 

[SophosTheWise]

I'm livin' like I'm out here on my last adventure
Past the present when you have to mention
This is nothin' for the radio, but they'll still play it though
'Cause it's that new Drizzy Drake, that's just the way it go