First Impressions

[Ripcord O'Reilly]

Thanks for the comments about huds and damage indicators in the battle view. We discussed this a lot while we made the game. This is one of those infamous "tough call" areas where a risky decision may frustrate some players, especially those who expect certain "standardized" displays to be there.

The mouseover damage indicator is a bit of an experiment, and as you guys point out, it is quite different than SAIS. But I like it for two reasons:

1) It keeps the clutter off of the screen. That way I'm not reminded that "it's a game" all the time. Also, battles just look sweeter, "sort of" like you're watching them on a display monitor, which, of course, you are.

2) The idea is that gameplay in both Weird Worlds and SAIS should be intuitive, or at least based on observation in this way: graphics and sounds give clues too. The difference between the sound of a shield hit or a hull hit. The way a beam looks and sounds so when you see an alien use one that you have used, you know (you intuit) what it is.

[ooheadsoo]

The practical problem I have is that the battles go by so fast, that by the time I actually move into the range of my/the enemy's weapons, there's hardly enough time to employ any strategy or technique to overcome a disadvantage. It's difficult to mouse over a moving ship for more than a split second before it slips away from under the cursor and I don't want to break my immersion and pause the game in order to mouse over all the ships. Maybe a lot of what I'm complaining about stems from the fact that I always play on the hard difficulty and am therefore almost always at a disadvantage, but I really don't think the player should be called to pause the game just to find out if his shield generator has been disabled. It is in this case that I think that a player is being pulled OUT of a game because of the lack of readily available indicators. When I'm fighting 3 or 5 on 1, I know that with the right equipment, I actually do have a fighting chance, but I usually die in this new iteration of Infinite Space because I didn't know I was so close to dying or I didn't know I had already knocked out an enemy's weapons and could better use my time changing targets, etc.

It would be a great to have the indicators as an option, to keep everyone happy.

[ZylonBane]

Ripcord O'Reilly said:
1) It keeps the clutter off of the screen. That way I'm not reminded that "it's a game" all the time. Also, battles just look sweeter, "sort of" like you're watching them on a display monitor, which, of course, you are.

And once again, I must point out that these battles are interactive, not passive. You know what REALLY reminds me that "it's a game"? Seeing the Game Over screen because I got killed because some developer decided it would be "sweet" to obfuscate the status of my ships during combat.