Sep 15, 2023

Feedback from the Koronus Expanse 2: Beta survey results

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader - Starrok

Greetings, Lord Captains!

Months ago, during alpha testing, we posted an article about changes brought to the game based on your feedback in the big alpha survey.

Time flies by quickly, and today we are back with the second article of the series, this time to show you how your feedback shaped the game after the beta!

Disclaimer: Same as in the last article, we will not be going over every question in the survey, but will highlight only the most interesting facts. Enjoy the read and watch out for spoilers below!

Overall Score

What could be better than to begin the article with the overall rating you guys gave us?

A total of 5000+ players have taken the survey, and they rated Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader 4.3 out of 5!

This is almost the same result as the last time (alpha was rated 4.35). But considering this time the amount of people taking the survey has increased tenfold, a large number of them way less familiar with the universe, it looks like we’re still going in the right direction. Thank you for the recognition! Of course, this result is not a reason to sit idle, and we’ll discuss why below.

Reactivity and Convictions

One of the most frequent complaints in the survey was the insufficient reactivity of NPCs and companions to the Rogue Trader’s biography, doctrines, and convictions. There were also concerns about the conviction tags often feeling off or missing altogether. Well, that makes sense - a significant chunk of these reactions were not in the game yet! We’re already busy adding these reactions as this article is being written. Same goes for convictions - the tag placement was a draft done shortly before the beta launch, and we’re carefully working on all dialogues to tag them correctly.

We’ve also paid additional attention to scenes where a lot of you wished to see specific reactions. For example, quite a few people really wanted to be able to interrupt some of Idira’s heretical speeches in front of outsiders, and we’ll let you do this now!

Tutorials and Lore Glossary

Over 50% of you found our newly introduced tutorials useful, and the only negative criticism about them was, well, that there’s not enough of them! We are happy that they seem to be working well and will add more tutorials for various aspects of the game as we continue development. Some of them will even receive short explanatory videos.

The lore glossary appears to be quite helpful as well: almost 90% respondents told us they were actively using it! A curious note: these numbers appear the same even for the respondents who claimed to be deeply familiar with the universe. Checking our knowledge of the Lore, are you? :D

Difficulty Curve

There’s a lot of curious data here depending on the choice of difficulty. Overall, it seems that we’re on the right track, although some players on normal difficulty reported that there could be a bit more challenge. We will be carefully tuning the encounters with that in mind, especially in the later acts of the game, where player power may currently grow a bit too quickly.

Doctrines

Among the doctrines available, Marksman was an undisputed leader in all aspects. So much that we are considering lowering its potential a bit. Don’t panic though, we’re not removing the already iconic Shoot on the Run!

Adept, on the other hand, appears to be the least popular, with the most common complaints being lack of visible impact and difficulty in understanding its mechanics. In the beta this doctrine also suffered from a whole spectrum of bugs, which made the abilities even more confusing. We will be fixing these, tweaking some abilities, and reviewing the confusing and unclear descriptions.

The UI seems to overall be well-received both visually and mechanically, with three exceptions:

Levelling UI. We’ve received a lot of feedback that the window was too small, there were way too many options in a single list, no way to compare the skills, and it lacked any sort of recommendation system, which led to massive timesinks every time you needed to level. Lack of respec options was often mentioned too. We will be addressing all of these issues! Here’s a glimpse on one of the menus we are currently working on:
Cargo/Loot UI. In the feedback, we’ve seen an overwhelming demand for proper drag&drop, scrolling, sorting, searching, and categorization. We haven’t been sitting idle and this UI is receiving a significant update. You can have a sneak peek of the changes yourself:
Targeting UI and ability formulas. Crit chance, cover benefits, visibility of the target, and buffs/debuffs were not always obvious. Formulas in ability descriptions and combat logs were confusing, and damage numbers were often way off the expected values. We have fixed these incorrect values, made the formulas shown as values by default, and increased visibility of icons and lines of sight.

When selecting targets for a ranged attack or ability, you can now also press TAB and hover your mouse over the hit chance or buff/debuff icons to get detailed information about them:

Reputation and Profit Factor

We’ve seen a fair share of confusion on profit factor, vendor trade, and reputation systems. A lot of people didn’t figure it out at all throughout their playthrough, and others were confused about how the profit factor value was calculated.

Not only will we be implementing a number of tutorials to help you figure out these systems, but we’ve also put a lot of work into making the UI more clear and self-explanatory. Profit factor will also now be visible in the colony screen:

Cutscenes

Looks like you guys generally enjoy our approach to cutscenes! There were only two significant points of feedback that attracted our attention:

Desynchronized or incomplete/weird-looking animations. All of these problems are being worked on and should be solved by release.
Impossibility to skip cutscenes, which was especially painful when a cutscene would happen just before a difficult fight. We don’t want to make you suffer yet, so we’re adding an option to skip cutscenes!

Ground Combat

Ground combat has received a solid 4.2 out of 5 in the beta, which is up from 3.94 in the alpha. This demonstrates steady progress, and there are only a few things we still would like to look at, such as the frequency of encounters in some zones and certain battles that tend to drag on too much or don’t feel original enough.

Space

For space combat, we are at 3.7 out of 5, up from 3.4 in the alpha. Progress is visible, but there is still a lot to do. A lot of people were frustrated by the lack of tutorials, so of course we’ll be putting that in! We will also fully implement officer post management, which was turned off for the beta, squash some bugs, and put in some additional effort to improve the variety of encounters.

Space exploration was rated 4.1, up from 3.9 in the alpha. It is a good result, and after a bit more polishing, it looks like we’ll be in the right spot. An interesting observation is that an overwhelming amount of players explore everything in the game, no exceptions.

Colony management is at only 3.4 at this point, which is far less than we would like to see. We will be putting in tutorials, improving the UI, tweaking numbers, offering more interesting rewards and adding reactivity to colony events and decisions. We will also remove the necessity to personally visit the colony to claim a reward - it was a quite popular demand.

The global map is at 3.93, which is decent, but it could be a bit better. We will be adding tutorials, upgrading a few visuals, adding more text-based warp encounters (many of you found them repetitive), and tuning the number and frequency of combat warp encounters.

Locations

Overall, it looks like we completely got rid of the ‘not enough grim darkness’ problem reported back in the alpha. It appears that the amount of weariness and despair added to the locations turned out to be just right, and such feedback is almost fully absent in the new survey. In fact, “just the right amount of grim darkness” is a very popular answer in the open feedback section!

The most popular locations (remarkable 4.42 and 4.41 out of 5, accordingly) were the Prologue:

and the Electrodynamic Cenobium:

Other popular locations included Eurac-V:

Inquisition Shipwreck (is this because you guys love papa Nurgle?):

and the Adeptus Administratum Palace:

Locations from the dark city of Commorragh were less popular, hovering around the score of 4. To an extent, it’s to be expected - they were still largely a WIP in the beta. In addition, in the first few days of the beta, there was a bug that allowed you to skip most of Act III by taking the wrong portal, which left many players confused. We will continue polishing and improving those locations as we prepare for release.

Companions and Narrative

Just like the last time, Argenta raked in all the praise, nominations, and awards! Who would have doubted that it would happen?

Unfortunately, same as the last time, the least popular companions are Jae and Idira, although the gap isn’t as big this time. We are already implementing a number of further tweaks and improvements which will make them more interesting and unique both mechanically and narratively.

We’ve also received a lot of feedback about a certain betrayal taking place in Act III, players pointing out that it was unjustified or unexplained.

Partially, it was caused by the fact that some content and reactivity that would make it clearer wasn’t yet in the beta. However, we see a clear urge for a better explanation, so besides adding the missing content, our narrative team is giving that event some additional attention.

Conclusion

And this marks the end of the article! We hope you enjoyed this little insight into the development of the game.

Once again, we thank you kindly for participating in the survey and helping us to shape this game so it can become even more fun, entertaining, and lore-accurate. It is an honor to have such an engaged and passionate community!

And as a final parting gift, here are some interesting stats from the survey:

Sep 15, 2023

The world is alive with the sound of voice acting!

Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call - Robin_TitanRoc

Hiya everyone!

As always, I hope you're having a lovely Friday and have some nice plans for the weekend.

Today I wanted to talk to you all about voice acting in Vahrin's Call.

First of all, I would just like to clarify that while we would love to have areas densely populated with NPCs, each one interactable and with paragraphs of dialogue, that's a massive undertaking for our tiny team. We're all about pushing ourselves as much as we can to ensure the game delivers the best experience possible, but we also have to be realistic and ensure we're always prioritisng quality over quantity.

Anyway! With that being said, what I can guarantee is that almost every character that you meet in the world will be fully voiced.

I'm even more excited than I was before for you guys to meet all these quirky individuals.
The introduction of voice acting has really pushed our characters to the next level, and interacting with them now feels even more interesting and engaging.

So, besides talking with NPCs, is there voice acting anywhere else in the game?

Well I'm glad you asked!

Certain enemies that you encounter throughout the world will make comments in the middle of a fight.
They might threaten you, insult you, say something cocky, or maybe something not so cocky if the battle isn't going their way.

You may also overhear them talking to themselves from time to time. They tend to let their minds wander when they don't realise anyone is nearby..

And finally, there's also your voice!

While your mercenary won't be very vocal when interacting with NPCs, you will be able to choose between a couple of different masculine and feminine voices during character creation.

This voice will change how your character sounds when you jump, attack, take damage and so on!

So, you've heard all about where and how voice acting is used in Vahrin's Call, but you haven't actually heard it. Let's have a listen to what all of the above sounds like in game!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69xx7TPEUg0&ab_channel=ForsakenRealms

Of course, everything is still very much a work in progress and this video isn't a representation of the final, finished game. Many of the talking animations shown are placeholder and you may have also noticed that the characters are a little lacking on the facial expressions side of things..

We'll update you all again once everything is feeling more polished, For now, we just wanted to give you all a little peek into how the characters in Vahrin's Call are feeling, with voice acting making its way into the game.

And that will conclude today's update!

I want to know how you guys feel about voice acting. Is it a deal-breaker for you when a game doesn't have it? Are you more interested in meeting the characters in our fantasty world now that they have voice acting? Let us know!

Either way, have a lovely rest of your week and as always, I will catch you again next Friday.

Au revoir~