Q&A
Hello everyone,
First of all, we’d like to thank you. We are humbled with such a passionate reception.
For our first Q&A, we took a bit more time to gather enough data to plan out our course of action.
From now onwards, we will try to answer your concerns as soon as possible.
Checkpoints, Saving & Heals:
On our internal tests, levels took significantly less time to complete. So we didn't feel the need to have many exit points. Now that the game is out, in real player hands, we realize that might not be the case.
We agree that not being able to take breaks when you don't have a lot of time to play isn't great. Having to replay through a whole level, just to get another chance at the last encounter doesn't feel right, either.
The answer is not as simple as restoring your health after every encounter. That won't be any help if you were doing great, and you failed at the last encounter. You will still have to run through the whole level.
Although we are not ready to announce specifics, we are taking steps to fix this issue. We don't want to make any rushed decisions which could hurt the game in other ways.
Hit chance percentages:
You guys wanted to know the reasoning behind these design choices.
Element Space isn't a game just about shooting people behind boxes. Other games have already covered that out pretty well, so we wanted to double down on what makes Element Space special, which is using (and abusing) character skills and party composition to great effect.
Instead of having a complex aiming system that might give the wrong impression that going in guns blazing will get you far, we decided to streamline it to its fundamentals.:
- If there’s a big object between your squaddie and its target, then you will hit the object instead.
- If there’s a small object between your squaddie and its target, then there's a 50-50 chance.
- If there's nothing, well, you earned that shot!
This system makes the battlefield easier to read at glance, and has the added benefit of driving home the necessity to reposition.
Hiding behind boxes isn't a place for action heroes. That's why we built a lot of movement options, and we don't have a "mana" system to restrict their usage.
The data we gathered this week show us a strong correlation between skill usage frequency and combat success rate.
That been said, we are talking some measures to make sure new players interact with the game the way we meant.
Melee Lock and Cover nodes:
We’ve read there is some confusion on to how melee interacts with cover.
- When 2 units clash in melee lock, they are no longer considered in cover.
- Other units have a 50% chance to miss shots at melee locked units.
- If a unit is freed from the lock it will automatically enter cover if it’s standing on top of a cover node.
- Line-of-sight rules still apply. Meaning that if there’s a large object in between shooter and melee locked target, the shot will hit the object.
If any these rules fail to apply, that's a bug!
Combat start positioning:
Encounters are meant to be a puzzle to be solved.
You are presented with a situation that you need to get through with the team that you selected.
Being able to choose your start location it's something we experimented with.
Ultimately we ended up cutting it because they increased the scope way too much to give them proper support.
Story:
Element Space is a branching storyline! The missions that pop up by relating to other companions (loyalty missions) are being developed and will be included in the final release. Although relationships between characters are deep in Element Space’s storyline, there is no romance… yet.
Localization, Character Creation & Voice Over:
For those concerned about the game being available in other languages, yes, localization is in the pipeline. We are still debating which languages
For our first game, we wanted to focus and fully flesh out on Christopher Pietham's story.
Here is an active
thread with our thoughts, on the subject.
Having a prebuilt character set allows us to full voice over for every single one of them.
Yes, voice-overs are coming.
General Feedback:
We are reading all the feedback and bug report you are posting.
There are some really interesting suggestions and issues we agree with and we are working to make improvements (Overwatch preview cone, key bindings, hacking turrets, to name a few).
Please keep in mind that, even we consider all feedback equally, not all of them will make into the game.
For those concerned about ultra-wide screens, we won't be providing support for 21:9 as a game resolution, since it's beyond our scope.
But if you run into any trouble (ie: stretching, crashes...) running the game in such monitors, please, let us know.
Bug Reports:
Lastly, every reported bug has been added to our backlog (QA guys say thank you!).
We are opening a new
thread to concentrate our bug squashing efforts for you to Please try to post your new catches here.
On behalf of the whole team: Thank you for your feedback. Your support means the world to us!!!