Skybuck's First Impression about the beta and feedback/improvement suggestions. 17 april 2013: After having played 1 game 1 v 1 against ai and won ;) :) Good things: 1. Totally loving the graph. 2. World resolution.... love it speeds up the game. 3. I like the gold things for capping and such. 4. I like the paper look. 5. Bottom GUI looks beautifull, bad: top gui icons on top right look cheap. Weird things: 1. I thought the mortar was a bit powerfull... killing troopers fast... will have to test some more and maybe get used to it. Little time to react. 2. The menus/gui is a bit noisy... it does destract the eye somewhat and might create eye strain/tiredness. A crispy/metal shining gui might be preferable... an option for this would be nice... or just a clean gui... without all the fuss. 3. The graphics themselfes also seems very noisy... 4. Commander tree doesn't make much sense to me yet... it kinda feels disconnected... there should be a header above it or something telling you what to do with it... like "make a selection" or "choose your doctrine". 5. The temperature meter looks kinda weird/funny, like is it in their butt ? but for now it can stay. (See improvement 10 for a better idea: aura) Slightly bad things: 1. Too much information going on on left side, and top right... too menu icons, and icons a bit too big... that they are shooting is kinda nice to know... but is it really that important ? time will tell... too big... too much space wasted, messages stay on too long. 2. I wasn't able to spot tank-specific damage in gui ? Maybe my eye didnt catch it ? 3. Explosions seem a bit to loud, though I was playing with volume high to enjoy the sound... but even on low sound explosions a bit loud. 4. Tank fire a bit loud too. 5. The gui seems a bit too big, too big icons, too big text, Bad things: 1. Playback speed limit to 4x, this should at least be 8x. 2. Too much text is displayed when a unit is selected... this text belongs in a hint text in the build menu. The gui should try and show usefull information instead. (Though I am slowly changing my mind... some information is usefull for noobs... but once you know it it s not that usefull anymore.) (perhaps switch gui between noob and expert. noob=unit info expert=usefull battle info. ). 3. The gray/black icons/disabled icons are too dark and should be a bit lighter. 4. The tank icons are too small, makes it hard to differentiate between tanks... these should definetly be larger and show the tank better. 5. The blizzard stop watch looks lame.... perhaps leave this out... or replace with a small warning at the top or in a corner for no-audio players... And use a warning message that a blizzard will soon come... and add a little timer text... the stop watch is waaayyy too big. 6. Overal graphics impression is: BAD. Game looks too dated, even in highest game setting, perhaps even worse than COH1, at least in snow. Shadows might be missing, and polish/anti aliasing or so is missing... something wrong with it ;) :) None the less the first game was kinda fun..... the stuka/rocket tank wasnt too impressive. Improvements: 1. The golden text: "point captured" is cool, but these kinds of floating up texts should remain visible a few seconds longer. It disappears a bit too quickly. 2. Same for red text: engine disabled. 3. Perhaps make real snow go down in a simulation engine and use that to create the graphics offline.... might produce better looking snow... perhaps this is already done ? 4. I would like to know when the blizzard is over.... I know this is kinda weird because we might not know in reality... but I think that might be nice for the game... Perhaps an "difficulty option" or so or think it over ;) :) Though not knowing could be cool too... at least I want an indicator to tell me if a blizzard is going on or not... Not sure if it was visible... a bit weird. 5. Graph should be expanded with more options... 6. Also when mouse on graph should display textual info at that point. 7. Visual effects could be better, like fire, explosions, rockets, smoke trails for rockets. 8. Perhaps a higher level of zoom out might make it look better and play nicer. 9. Soldiers which are cold or frozen should move slower. 10. Soldiers which are cold or frozen should become blue or pale or so... perhaps have a blue aura around them.... like paratroopers on cooldown, or rangers on fire up ;) :) This could replace the temperature meter. Maybe improvements: 3. The welding torch icon for repairing a tank might be cool, but it also looks a bit weird, might be better to replace this with the old simply repair wrench... Right now it kinda looks like a weird blue laser... Bugs: 1. The fog on/off button status is screwed up when starting a new replay. 2. Engineer tried to fix a truck, but another vehicle was kinda in the way... and the engineer started jumping around.... had to manually move other vehicle and tell engineer to repair again. Annoyances: 1. The commander tool tip shows up when navigating with mouse towards map area, this could probably also happen during a real game. This is annoying. Instead make it a button/click/on/off switch, makes it much easier. 2. Soldiers not going towards fire while they were only a few meters away kinda started to annoy me a bit real fast. I can imagine they might not do that if an ambush is near. This could become a frustrating part of the game. Or maybe a fun part of the game too. 3. Changing the volume on x-fi elite makes the screen pop out into windowed mode... this is kinda annoying.