apoisonedgift

I'm happy with the omni tool giving me more inventory space. Having it all combined into one tool is fine. But I do dislike that we aren't choosing to use it and instead just hold down a button. It leads to a lot of issues IMO

Posted this on the steam forums because I couldn't find a good official place... so reposting it here A collection of feedback and bugs I've noticed in my time playing G2 so far (just short of 19 hours)... First off - I am having a great time. Grounded 1 was easily the best survival game ever made (in its 1.0+ state at least) IMO, so I am going to be a lot harsher on Grounded 2 than I would otherwise. But I do want to say that this is a great foundation to build upon. The combat tweaks are great mostly, the story seems pretty interesting so far, there's a lot of the QoL features from G1 that carried over, which is great, the music is incredibly, the overall atmosphere in the game is brilliant (I love how dark nights are for instance), buggies are really fun, and in general its a wonderful early access release. That said I have a lot of issues that I want to voice. But I do want it made clear that overall I think this is a great start. So the issues/feedback in the current state... This is gonna be a long list in no particular order lol... Some more technical stuff first... - Performance. Personally I've had okayish performance. I can get 50+ fps on high settings, with only a jump of a few extra frames if i drop to medium. In some locations it does go up over 100fps, but generally it sits between 50 and 80. That's fine, but I also have a pretty beefy rig with a 9800X3D CPU, 6800XT GPU and 64GB of DDR5 6000 RAM. I know that optimisation is likely to be an ongoing thing throughout development, but I would like to see this get a lot better than it is currently, and its pretty clear from the rest of the steam forums that this is a common issue for other people too. - In line with performance, we absolutely NEED more controls over graphics options. A simple quality dropdown is not enough. I'm sure this is planned to be added, but if not please do consider it. - Input kind of feels laggy. Its kind of weird to explain, and I imagine its not particularly noticeable on a controller, but with mouse and keyboard, jumping between G1 and G2 you can notice that G1 is muuuuch more responsive. Its not terrible, and you do get used to it, but I would like to see the character be a bit more responsive to input as it does detract from the experience, especially on a first impression. - Similarly, the UI is a little iffy. Again, I don't think this would be particularly noticeable on a controller, but often actions such as moving items from your inventory to a chest and such have a slight lag to them which feels very bad IMO. Its not a deal breaker but compared to the UI in G1, its quite a big step backwards. The overall redesign is more or less fine. Though I think showing your hotbar on the inventory screen, adding SCA.B skins, etc. would be a good thing to bring back. But the responsiveness of the UI could do with some work for sure. - The overall lighting of the game is a bit of a step back in my opinion. I'm not a big fan of lumen, and a lot of its issues are on display here, with visual artifacts, slow-to-update reflections, and so on. But all that aside, the general yellowish tone on everything makes it all feel a bit washed out and dull when compared with Grounded 1. I would love an option to apply different colour gradings or LUTs to the game with one bringing it back to the more striking colours from Grounded 1 or something along those lines. I know removing Lumen isn't likely at this point, so I doubt we are going to fix the issues Lumen has without Epic doing some work on that (and I'm not convinced they can fix those at this point)... but giving us an option to bring back the vibrance of the first game would be a massive win for me at least! Some annoyances for me that I feel like could be pretty easily addressed... - The voice lines at the moment are irritating as hell. The quality and writing of the lines themselves is fine, but they repeat WAY too often. I'm sick of willow comparing riding the ant to capitalism and such. We either need a LOT more variety, or they frequency of the lines needs to be turned down to like 10% as common. This one is incredibly annoying to the point where I don't know how this made it through QA tbh. - There are too many bugs in the world. I know this might sound weird, and this may actually be a result of using the buggy to traverse, not sure, but its basically impossible to go from one landmark to another without being "in combat" for like 80% of that time. I don't want it to be a cakewalk, but it would be nice if there were sort of highways that you could utilize to get between locations with relative ease, only running into a small handful of bugs, but then when you got to locations that's where the bugs were. This was much more well designed, IMO, in Grounded 1. I love the music in Grounded 2, but I'm constantly just hearing the few battle themes because of this. Again - this might be because we are moving over more terrain more quickly with the buggy, but something needs to change IMO. Even the starting area around the first ranger station has a very small area of safety before you are constantly pulling aggro which seems weird to me. - A lot of bugs, including the buggy, are constantly under the map or inside rocks. The amount of times I hear an orb weaver and battle music, and can't find it only to then see a leg sticking out of the world and the spider unable to attack me is far too common. This was common in Grounded 1 too, but not to the same extent by any degree. It happens constantly in the current build of Grounded 2. - Audio design needs some work. I am specifically thinking of the noises that play on impacts. When you are cutting down grass, breaking a rock, etc. it feels very uneventful. Its not like it should be a fireworks show or anything, but the volume of these sounds needs to come up so it makes it feel a bit better imo. For an action you do thousands of times, it feels incredibly lacklustre. And a list of other things that are probably a bit harder to resolve... - The omni tool. So I don't like the omni tool that much, but I understand the desire to free up inventory space and I can totally see why that decision was made. I prefer bespoke tools but that aside, the main issue I have here is the 'hold e to <do thing>' approach. I can't speak for first person, because I primarily play in third person, but the amount of times that I'm holding e to cut down grass, only to have my buggy walk over and break the line trace (or whatever you are doing) to stop the interaction is... ridiculous. It can literally happen two or three times while cutting down a single husky weed. Similarly, if I go to pick up a rock next to a blade of grass, its a dice roll as to what action happens, or pick up some plant fibre where a grub is also underground. This is a bad change, imo. I would much rather have the omni tool be a tool we swap to and "use" like we did with axes, shovels, etc. and return that agency to the player. The current version also makes it less fun because you can't be super efficient, being smart in your swing placement to cut own multiple blades at once, etc. I am fine to keep the omni tool over bespoke tools, its grown on me in th at regard and as I said, I definitely understand the decision, but it would be wonderful, even if it was an option, to be able to use it as a dedicated tool, not an interaction prompt. Oh this would also make the omni tool skins a lot more valuable because atm I can't even tell that I've customised mine lol. Its only out for such a brief moment that its just not visible enough. If my player was holding it while I was directing the swings, it would let me see it much more. - Building is much less enjoyable than it was in Grounded 1. Placing buildings and stations is much more finnicky and its much harder to get the location you want to work. Grounded 1 had its quirks, but the building was easily among the best out there. Building here feels like a bit of a step backwards, not a massive one, but it would be nice to have some attention placed on getting it to be more in line with how freeing the building in 1 was IMO. Additionally, I know coziness is coming back in an update - but I do miss it a lot right now as it added a lot of meaning to building. I'm glad it will be coming back but did want to mention it here. - The current map design feels a bit... boring. That's too harsh a word but I don't have a better one. It feels a bit like a procedural level a lot of the time. I miss the feeling of "okay this is the area in which <bug type> lives" and such. Right now everything is very flat, there's a lot of similar style grassy area, and the bugs just feel sort of placed everywhere. Its absolutely possible this is just a result of the map being much bigger and this only being a third of the total world, but I do think some more meaningful landmarks and a bit of work on grouping bugs a bit better would go a long way. - I feel like the character movement has been reduced a bit too much. This might be because of buggies, but whenever I am not using my buggy it feels very slow. I have unlocked natural explorer and that helps a bit, but I think if you increased the player movement speed a little that would be a good change. - There are a LOT of spaces where the different segments of the world join together and you can see holes between them. So like the dirt on one side of a seam will be higher than the other and there's just a hole there. I haven't tried to see if you can fall in them, but the more you move away from the starting area the more common it becomes. Similarly, the further from the starting area, the more you find things like floating grass and such. I've also seen water droplets spawning out of bounds where there is no grass and th ey are just hovering haha.