Uberkull

You obviously never played a server based survival game...like ever. What I outlined is today’s basic survival games that have been out for some time. Some for a decade. So, what I provided feedback for is not ‘5 different games’, it’s one game genre. Survival games. Adding a hardcore mode is fine for me, if thats what it would take to make this game more challenging. There will be zero longevity to this game for actual survival game players, it just isn’t challenging survival. And don’t throw ‘game preview’ excuses around, like I stated in my OP, core game design usually won’t change drastically so what you see is pretty much what you will get plus some added features. And early access shouldn’t be excuse for delivering a 15 minute story and no further content other than a robot giving 3 daily quests...all for $30? Yea...no.

On the subject of a survival game that has manual AND auto-saves. This just isn’t a good mechanic for a survival experience. Again, as I outlined in my OP above, you completely bypass any consequences of your decisions with a manual save system. Going in that cave to potentially fight the wolf spider? Oh...let me hit ‘save’ here before I go in, and if I die I can just ‘load’ my last save and I’m good as new. That’s not survival. It’s kinda...well...casual carebear. The auto-save system in other survival games implements the survival experience correctly. Auto-saves are not triggered on time intervals, but on system events in the game. You deposit something in your stash, auto-save. You add a wall to your base, auto-save. You pickup a pebble, auto-save. Here is the important one...you DIE, AUTO-SAVE. That is the example of a proper save mechanic for survival and is whats done in all server based survival games and even No Mans Sky to an extent, which is very similar single player/mp survival game using a auto-save system. The only difference in NMS is that you can create a Save structure, say a beacon, that you can interact with to force a auto-save. Not that simple considering the situation you might be in during the game, you may not have fhe materials to build the save beacon, or you may be in a place you can’t build like a hostile space station or your ship being chased by pirates. You die, you get a auto-save triggered and have to face the consequences of retrieving your stuff. In Grounded being able to Save just requires you to go to the main menu system. Way to easy and convenient, no consequences for your survival actions.

You want to take away the ability for players to build anywhere they want, including on safe, high ground? I never made the request to restrict where a player can build, I said the game has no threat to your base if you build in a smart location like higher ground. All insects should be able to target your base regardless of it’s location.

Confirmed this with Bee armor. If you deconstruct the dummy, the Bee armor will be on floor for you to pickup.

Platform: Xbox One X Issue: Game freezes momentarily, 2-3 seconds, when Auto-Saving Frequency pf the Issue: Every Auto- Save I assume this is a known issue?

Well, I guess devs will be updating the game at the end of the month, August 27th. Had to find this information elsewhere... https://www.pcgamer.com/over-a-million-players-have-tried-grounded-and-the-first-update-is-coming/

Pallets even work? I have no interaction option to do anything on the Grass Plank pallet.

Hmmm...does Obsidian even read these forums? I mean with Discord and Twitter being the norm now for communication...

I was thinking this one over tonight while playing and thought of a game mechanic from another game that might solve this for the player and keep devs happy with dealing with draw distance(blurry). Let our character craft a spyglass, like a pirates ‘telescope’. Looking through it gives you a small, round magnified view of the distance you are looking at. Much like The one used in Sea of Thieves(another MS 1st party dev), you would pull this ‘tool’ out to get a better look at the objects in the distance. I still think the blurry has to be toned down a bunch, but for a compromise, a spyglass would be a cool added tool.

Any smart survival game player builds off the ground or in caves. Using the environment to your advantage against pve AI or in pvp is always the best way to insure against item loss, progression loss, and least waste of time invested. It’s up to the game designer to counter smart builds. As stated, my build is hardly high up. Im on a soda can thats on the ground. Please... I assume bees, wasps (anti-elevated builds) and goldfish, frogs (anti-water builds)will be a thing in Grounded’s backyard. That then will challenge the players smart survival builds.

I have a solution for you that I figured out remapping most of my binds in Options on console. There is a Unmapped bind there that is ‘swap to previous tool’ or something to that effect. I mapped It to Y since Y was mapped to a rather pointless ‘show hide icons’. Now if you equip say a axe first then using the wheel, then select your spear and equip it. Now hit Y and you toggle between axe and spear. Replace any two ‘tools’ you want and you have your swap between the two. Just fyi, it doesn’t remember the swap tools after a load or certain other events, so you may have to reselect the two tools you want for swap to work

Ok, I’ll make this a straightforward feedback and opinion post... Played now for 40+ hours between the demo and this pre-release. I’m a veteran of larger survival games, so my views are based on that experience. This game has so much potential, but it seems even in it’s early state, there are core design decisions that lend itself to a entry level (easy) survival game and that’s all. - There isn’t much here. The story literally takes you 15 minutes to complete if you follow the queues. Then you do dailies to waste your time on building components that shouldn’t require this much effort to get. You don’t get grass floors by default? Cmon... Even as early access, I would have expected at least a full quest line that takes you through the Initial story, at least 10 hours of content for the $30 price tag. You don’t need community feedback from early access to tell the story YOU want to tell. - Where is the threat? Playing on Whoa difficulty, the only pressing thing is the annoying eat/drink cycle. You can outrun or dodge most insects, and spiders path the same routes if you watch them from high up, easily avoided if farming resources. Tunnels and caves? What do I need there to enhance my base or self after one visit? And even if I make my own dangers...I can just Load a prior Save and be fine again....what? (Covered more below) - Bases have zero risk if you place them anywhere above the ground. It doesn’t even need to be high up, a root of the oak tree or on the soda cans is good enough to avoid all danger. What’s the point of the game past the story if your bases have no threat? Why build re-enforced walls? The game has no longevity if it’s not about protecting your base and your possessions. - Retrieving your dead body backpack is far too easy. If you even die In the hardest difficulty, I would expect your backpack to be guarded or even looted by territorial insects. Why did they care to confront or kill you in the first place if they didn’t find you a threat to their territory? And wouldn’t they be interested in your stuff? Food, drink, components for their own nests/homes...all in your backpack. - A survival game with a manual save system? Again...where is the danger or consequences of your survival decisions if you can just load up a past save? The Save option in the menu should be removed and Auto- Save should trigger internally off system events, including death. That way you can’t go back to avoid a bad result or decision. Save and Load = no threat or consequences for your actions. - The enemies. How is it that with all the great AI you have for these insects, all I have to do to avoid their attack is jump on a rock and watch them leave or spear them to death at the right angles? And how is it that I can kill a Spider by spearing them through my partially completed grass wall and yet the spider doesn’t damage the wall at all? Simply build a small hut, 2x2 and leave some of the walls partially done. Then spear through the translucent blue parts...dead spider. Again, I thought these insects were supposed to pose a threat to your base? If there is no threat in a survival game, there is no longevity and it turns into a creative base building lego game. - Dev, please play with a controller and tell me what the purpose of the hotbar is at the bottom of the screen? You can’t quick swap or interact with any of the slots on the fly. The action bar should be removed imo. Also, control flow in the menus and crafting is just off. I spent a lot of time remapping most my controller buttons through the options to try and get to something close to other survival crafting game interfaces that do it correctly. Managing inventory by moving single items(No stack move or pull), no split stacks, armor that stays in your backpack even when its equipped, tools mixed in with weapons in crafting, crafting station that has no storage of it’s own or that can pull from a chest connected to it, etc etc. - Great looking game, nice visuals...until you look into the distance...well, i guess it’s distant. Why is the house and any structure over 20yds away fuzzy and blurry on console? Are we saying we can’t render these assets on Xbox One X? Find that hard to believe given there are plenty of larger survival games on the Unreal Engine render far more. - The HUD needs options to turn off elements. Too much clutter with constant ‘hand popups’ on every environment item. But I already posted A full detail on that In a separate thread. Harsh post somewhat, sure. But all too often game preview or ‘early access’ often becomes an excuse to deliver subpar, inferior games and still charge a significant price for a game that isn’t worth in it’s current state. Early access seems to somehow give a ‘pass’ for developers to deliver no story, broken systems, and bad design....all with the excuse of ‘it’s still early access’. I wouldn’t say Grounded falls in most these categories, but first impressions mean alot. We play early access games, and most the time we play the game through the early access development cycle, become bored or frustrated and never come back to the actual release of the game because of the bad taste the game left us during early access. Just hope a MS 1st party, AAA dev like Obsidian doesn’t end up with the same result.

The hotbar is useless on the intended platform, which is console. No idea how this was overlooked.

On console House is blurred until you get up close. Poles, object, anything distance is blurred. Is this a technical workaround to draw distance or a game feature?

Based on the demo playthrough... For such a beautiful looking game, there would be one request... Allow us to turn off parts of HUD and prompt-UI 1) Once I’m use to the resources in the world’s environment, I don’t need a giant hand and button prompt telling me how to pick something up. Really immersion breaking seeing all the popup UI elements anytime I camera pan over things. Solution: Allow settings to turn off environment UI prompts 2) The SCAB is supposed to be ‘90s sifi watch, yet the HUD in the lower left corner looks like a Crayon art project. I get the art style overall, and like it...but something about my ‘cool’ watch loses it’s appeal looking at that HUD of the SCAB. Maybe more techie looking and add the time into the SCAB HUD, not have it be another radial wheel menu toggle. 3) On controller The Hotbar, action bar...the HUD at the bottom...serves no purpose like a actual action bar. You can’t swap weapons without using the Radial menu popup, you can’t ‘hot’ swap to action bar slot 3 for example...so what’s the purpose of the hotbar? Did I miss a setting that allows you to swap to items in the hotbar? Solution: Allow me to map left/right Dpad to move across Hotbar 4) I guess, to maximize immersion, just let me turn off all HUD elements. Hotbar is pointless and other than SCAB(which i addressed above), I don’t really need the HUD. Again...beautiful game, great concept, just for me...HUD needs work.

Yea...as stated in my op, there is zero purpose on console for the action bar at the bottom. I would prefer to remove it now even more than the demo because it covers our characters legs in third person in the game release. In the demo I was able to adjust the field of view enough so that in third person the action bar would no cover our character's legs. It all comes back to immersion, we need HUD options. Thanks.

In the demo, we had a limited time to explore and survive. Then the game ended and all your progress was lost. Understood and fine for a demo. Now I see there is a auto-save system that you can adjust to expand or limit the amount of saves the system can make at certain intervals. Fine, set it to zero and we have true survival. BUT, I also see there is a manual save feature in the main menu. This reduces the risk in a survival game to ZERO. There are no consequences for taking risks, dieing to a difficult enemy, losing your possessions, losing your base to attack...etc etc....zero consequences because you can just LOAD up a prior save point and you are fully restored like nothing bad ever happened. If the intent is for this to be a kid friendly survival game, ok...ai get it then. But it doesn’t have to be only that. Allow a mode where there is no manual save system, just a auto save that saves based on system events, not time intervals. That way auto save kicks in when you gain items but also when you LOSE ITEMS, yet the player never knows when the save happens. Save systems in survival games removes risk, please consider allowing a mode that has no manual saves.

Xbox platform 1) Can’t turn off subtitles. Even though you select ‘None’ subtitles stay on. 2) Voice seems to stay in the place it originated . If you run after speaking, your voice is projected at the area where you started to speak. As for the forum here...I can only make 4 posts a day? What? It says I’ve reached maximum posts for the day.

Sure is something to be said for a online experience with other players running around, agree. From what we saw in the demo, I would say this game isn’t setup for a 50+ server environment. The map is too small and the biomes are scaled for a few players running around, not 50. Meaning, there isnt alot of dead space for running around from area to area. Like Dayz, the running sim, you have tons of dead space between main poi. I see this game filling some playtime between major survival games.

Done. Copied from my Grounded DemoReddit post and it pasted with black font. Thanks!

Based on the demo playthrough... For such a beautiful looking game, there would be one request... Allow us to turn off parts of HUD and prompt-UI 1) Once I’m use to the resources in the world’s environment, I don’t need a giant hand and button prompt telling me how to pick something up. Really immersion breaking seeing all the popup UI elements anytime I camera pan over things. Solution: Allow settings to turn off environment UI prompts 2) The SCAB is supposed to be ‘90s sifi watch, yet the HUD in the lower left corner looks like a Crayon art project. I get the art style overall, and like it...but something about my ‘cool’ watch loses it’s appeal looking at that HUD of the SCAB. Maybe more techie looking and add the time into the SCAB HUD, not have it be another radial wheel menu toggle. 3) On controller The Hotbar, action bar...the HUD at the bottom...serves no purpose like a actual action bar. You can’t swap weapons without using the Radial menu popup, you can’t ‘hot’ swap to action bar slot 3 for example...so what’s the purpose of the hotbar? Did I miss a setting that allows you to swap to items in the hotbar? Solution: Allow me to map left/right Dpad to move across Hotbar 4) I guess, to maximize immersion, just let me turn off all HUD elements. Hotbar is pointless and other than SCAB(which i addressed above), I don’t really need the HUD. Again...beautiful game, great concept, just for me...HUD needs work.

Don’t think so. This isn’t a game like Ark or Conan Exiles with 50+ players on a server. It’s a co-op, 4 player max game where one person ‘hosts’ a game for their friends to join.