Very cool vibe and chargen!
Two pieces of feedback as a new player:
- Issue: Being unable to tell NPCs from PCs is really frustrating as a brand-new player and made me nearly bounce off the game.
Without friends nudging me to stay I would probably have just given up the fourth or fifth time I had a moment of social paralysis because “here’s yet another character standing alone in a room or street, and if they’re played by a human I want to pose and interact properly, but if they’re an NPC I’m going to need to use very clear to
commands to trigger dialogue from them, but my character would never just wander up to an actual person and demand their name and job title, but if they’re an NPC there’s no ramping up with smalltalk and I just need to run through the dialogue tree for this NPC to get an idea of their role in the game, but if I guess wrong and use my NPC-greeting routine at a human I’m going to be mortified, and oh my god whatever, I only have an hour of free time tonight, I’m going back to the hotel and logging off and doing something else.”
I know that NPCs being puppeted by storytellers will have a clear flag for that, but for every other NPC in the game there’s absolutely nothing distinguishing them from PCs except that they’ll usually auto-talk at you once you introduce yourself. That doesn’t solve the problem of knowing how to interact with them on first contact, and as someone who already gets pretty overwhelmed when trying a new game and getting into the RP flow of a new character, that was driving me absolutely nuts.
Suggestion: Some kind of indicator for which characters are NPCs would be a huge help. Given that there’s already an automatic flag when NPCs are being puppeted by staff, there clearly isn’t a immersion thing going on where we’re trying to pretend NPCs should be indistinguishable from PCs, they’re just indistinguishable when in actual NPC mode. Making NPCs more easily identifiable will also encourage new players to be more proactive exploring their scripted dialogue, and there’s a lot of fantastic dialogue.
- Issue: The game taking the first character of any unknown command and trying to use it as a direction (what’s
where
? surely you must mean west
) leads to me constantly smacking into walls or walking where I don’t intend to when I forget commands.
Having the game automatically try to parse unknown commands as directions also makes experimenting with commands feel a lot riskier. I saw this was also a major part of @DrQuinn new-character-immediately-gets-organs-harvested-when-offline ordeal, because they typed a command starting with d
that the game didn’t recognize and interpreted as down
, taking the character out of the safety of the hotel room.
Suggestion: Limit the number of unknown commands the game will try to parse as directions. Logic like if command in ['s', 'so', 'sou', 'sout', 'south'], go south
(handwavey placeholder code, I don’t know the codebase) would still allow for half-typed directional commands but not try to fling characters southward whenever the player forgets that scan
or whatever isn’t a command used in the game. This would make experimenting with commands less risky and prevent inadvertent IC movement due to OOC mistakes.
I’m looking forward to exploring the systems and getting into the lore of town!