Hey! I’ve been developing this RPG, Path of Magic for 2 years now. Tonight I shadow dropped the pre-alpha of the game. This is not the final state of the game, I will add a lot more before the full alpha release.
I’d really appreciate it if you could give it a whirl and let me know what you think! Path of Magic | Play on Roblox
First off, the performance felt awful. I’m playing on a Windows Surface 11 yet can’t keep a consistent 30 FPS.
As for the gameplay, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I did a few of the quests, but I still don’t really get the gameplay loop.
Lastly, the combat felt pretty bad. Every attack has a long animation and a long cooldown. 80% of the “combat” is waiting for your skills to recharge. Not to mention, the mana system is annoying. I don’t like losing my skills mid-fight.
Overall, I was very confused, and between lag + long attack animations, the gameplay did not feel good.
Hey even though your feedback was very negative and somewhat rude i still appreciate you taking the time to write it out. (before you come at me for saying it was rude, the part where you put “combat” in quotes was objectively sarcastic/rude. remember dude - it’s a pre alpha. chill.)
Performance wise, I’ve not run into any of these issues and none of my friends/family are experiencing performance issues, but my VFX artist did say he was stuck at 30fps. It runs fine on my laptop, phone, and my crappy xbox, but I could see the perf not being great on a surface 11 as the engine doesn’t optimize as aggressively for such devices and they’re quite weak. Still, i’ll take it seriously and see what i can do.
The gameplay loop is sort of taught to you by the quests, so if you quit part way through you won’t know what’s going on. Farm enemies → get materials → craft items/roll for classes repeat, that’s the loop. But still, I’ll consider that players may not be interested in learning the loop if the combat feels too bad and/or they’re lagging.
The combat feels pretty bad as a low level, i’ll give you that. The combat gets significantly better as you level up and unlock more spells in your combo - with later spells lasting longer, having a larger AOE, and having more damage ticks. I’m guessing you didn’t even play until level 5, which is a huge power spike. The cooldowns sort of need to keep the player in check, lest the screen become completely covered in everyone’s spells and unreadable. I’ll still probably lower the cooldown on Spell 1 since the early game CDs do feel pretty bad. As for the mana system, they’re pretty ubiquitous in spell-casting games for a reason. It’s another lever for progression and keeps spamming in check. You gain mana flask charges later on which helps with this.
It wouldn’t really be a proper RPG without some sort of progression, the idea is you start out weak and gain power, but noted that maybe the player is too weak to start out. From your feedback, I’ll mostly take away that maybe the early cooldowns are too long and some perf optimization is needed for lower end laptops where the engine doesn’t optimize as aggressively.
Performance is a really big issues here. You seem do be doing a lot with particles. Maybe look into how many particleemitters you have or what youre doing with them.
Thanks for the info! I’ve already done several things to aggressively optimize the performance, including how I handle object pooling VFX, I will monitor stats to see any changes.
I can’t give you feedback, because I couldn’t even load into the game… As others have stated, fix performance issues or atleast let players skip the loading in the beginning.
What device were you trying to play on? I see the error in the logs that caused you to not be able to load in, out of over 500 players this issue only affected you, it was a timeout when requesting streaming around the spawn point. Performance issues have been largely fixed in the last few hours. The loading at the start is unskippable, it’s when the player’s database data is being initialized.
I specifically joined on a lower-end mobile device to test how seamless and optimized the game even for shitty devices is, waited for about 5 minutes and left. Not sure for how long more I would have needed to wait.
And it’s unskippable… Thanks bro.
Is it a game for high-end devices?
I appreciate the time you took to test it out on my behalf, however, I will not engage with such disrespect. Good day
Sorry, good day to you too.
Don’t mind me, optimize the game though.
The game is already showing significantly improved client performance in the stats, looking at the fresh data. If I see any further data that suggests optimization is needed, I will indeed optimize further, but not until then. Either way, thanks for the feedback.
Is it really combat if I never worry about dying or dodging, and 80% of the game is waiting for my skills to get off cooldown? I put it in quotes because on paper it’s combat, but in practice it’s just clicking and waiting.
I did get my character to level 5, and while the new moves are stronger, the core issue still persists. The new abilities aren’t mechanically different, and I’m still just standing around while my skills get off cooldown. I wish I had some kind of M1/basic attack I could use while my skills recharge.
My feedback was negative because my experience was negative.
The combat is designed to be simple, intentionally. It might just not be your cup of tea, which is totally ok! However, I have to set a hard boundary with the disrespect you’re sending my way. It’s fine if you don’t like the game, not everyone will. Plenty of people do though.
That’s totally fine! I’ve had fun in games with simple combat. You don’t need a million stats & in-depth combat for a game to be fun.
With that being said:
Simple combat & engaging combat aren’t mutually exclusive. Right now, more time is spent waiting & standing (passive) than attacking (active).
If you want the game to be a stand-and-wait simulator, then go for it. But as a player, that’s quite boring.
Also, if you want the game to be simpler, I’d also suggest reducing the amount of equipment types. It’s a bit overwhelming as a new player.
Lastly,
What part of his or my reply were rudeness? You asked for feedback then get upset when people give you feedback.
to be honest, i got bored after about 5-10 minutes.
the only progression was, to put it simply, clicking and dashing around to gain more levels. unfortunately, even that progression was genuinely just not fun for me and it felt more like a chore to continue playing. the reason being, there was zero challenge and the scaling was not where it should be over time.
my skill point allocation made very little difference, even though i got to level 10. it was also pretty hard to get any useful amount of gems to roll for classes. the enemies were honestly extremely janky. i mean, they would almost never actually hit me. it felt like fighting training dummies in a way?
the quest for me broke when i had to equip the basic ring (it just never let me equip anything).
i explored the map, fought some enemies, died only once the entire playthrough, and just got bored of clicking. this might also just be me, but it felt extremely linear and isolated?
i will say, the animations and visual effects looked pretty awesome, but the whole experience might’ve felt a tad bit overstimulating at times. although, movement was pretty janky. would’ve felt 10x better if player and camera movement was smoother, especially in terms of combat.
overall, the progression was only clicking to be able to click on enemies with larger health pools. i believe, in terms of combat, you should try to rethink the system into something more strategic. players will appreciate a good mix of strategic ability and simplicity - but this is too simple and unengaging. bit of an extreme comparison, but combat personally felt like a 3d cookie clicker.
i think progression should also be reworked. while i see the what you were aiming for, it’s just not there due to how simple and cliche a lot of the progression mechanics are. the classes seemed like they had a lot of potential but, once again, overshadowed by the lack of engaging progression.
if you can fix all of the aforementioned issues, i think there is 100% potential for a much more fun experience.
fyi, i am not being harsh. this is an honest review of the game from a player’s perspective.
if im being honest like erm you need to change the combat especially how I cant like change where my skill was going to, cuz if the enemy is running at me, and I press the thing, it sucks that I miss my move cuz I cant change where it goes, the vfx looks nice, but the map, this is just a personal preference, but I dont like how the studs look, especially if you paste it everywhere even in walls, and erm, I think it would be better if health bar is in my gui and not above my head, add destruction physics too like jjs cuz it looks cool, especially for ur typa game yk what I mean? but overall the game rn is kinda mid like IM SORRY IF THAT OFFENDS you but most ppl think the same way, but with like more work on it it can be good like yk but errr thats all I have to say
Thank you to everyone who took the time to play the pre-alpha and give me feedback. I really appreciate it.
As a result of the performance feedback, I implemented several optimizations. The average client FPS went from around 25 to 60 FPS on console, 60 FPS on PC, and around 40 FPS on mobile. Your feedback here was highly valuable in helping me track those issues down.
As for the game design feedback, I’m reviewing everything you’ve shared. I have a very specific vision for the game that I want to see through, so while I won’t be fundamentally overhauling the core loop, I am actively looking at your notes to figure out what can be smoothed out versus what comes down to personal preference or mismatched expectations.
I am going heads down now to focus on the Alpha launch in late October, so I won’t be replying to this thread further. Thanks again for testing it out!
Best,
I think the game runs fine and is pretty fun personally, but a few notes:
