I’ve put in about 4-5 solid hours into Backer Build 3 so far, and I mostly enjoyed it. For a demo of the tactical experience it is good, though the performance in a few areas was kinda meh at times, at least in 4k, and while I know it is far from the complete build, I’m hoping to see a few things changed (more on that below the Bugs Found section). It is a significant jump from BB2, and I can in general say that it was a good set of changes, the few caveats mainly being balance (i.e. Miniguns of Death from the Heavy and the PP Grenade Launcher of Doom), or similar.
At one point, I all the AI w/ guns vanished, and were replaced totally by the melee armed w/ grenade launchers; not sure if this was intentional or not, so it’s not labeled in either category below.
Bugs Found:
*Enemies spawning literally right next to troops (I sent in-game bug report for this one in particular)
*Bleed Effects not triggering properly in various circumstances (inconsistent, likely multiple bugs); enemy has about a 50/50% chance of bleeding to death when they should (i.e. 1 bar left); from memory, not necessarily 100% accurate, appears to occur most often when one enemy has already bled out that ‘battle’
*Explosives not destroying terrain or not dealing damage; I know that they stated they intended to reduce the reliable nature of explosives, not sure if this is intentional or a bug; I’d suggest making explosive damage scale based on closeness to center-point
*Invisible Enemies, in particular, when invading the Alien Base with Eggs (no Queen), the Eggs tended to be invisible about 30% of the time, my characters would have an option to shoot at something, but there would be nothing (visibly) there
*Reload bug, during a Haven Mission, when reloading, the new clip only added one bullet (when reloading while at 1 bullet in chamber); this was not a consistent issue, and resolved itself later that mission by continual reloading
*Massive FPS drops in Haven, minor-moderate in Hive (not Lair); I am playing in 4k; FPS drops occur in Geonet and Layouts as well
*Grenade Launcher (PP) does not have a working portrait
*Many non-primary weapons (Pistols, Shotguns) do not work with the Keybind for Overwatch
Gameplay Changes Suggestions:
*General gameplay difficulty revamp, everything should be a lot harder to kill, or otherwise be a lot stronger (without resorting to the grenade spam that did almost take out a soldier, once); other than that single time, I never came close to losing a soldier, and he got full healed the immediate turn after
*Bring back Overwatch Will-Cost, the amount of free-will I had flying around at one point allowed my assault characters to take the equivalence of about 5-6 turns, and that was only for murdering the random enemy standing right next to spawn w/ a shotgun, walking 5 feet past where said enemy was, and sending the heavy up into the tower with his jetpack; I was sitting on like 18 will?
*There were waaaaaaay too many Havens compared to alternative content. I don’t know if the scavenging options are intended to respawn (or spawn over time), but based on BB3, we need to murder a few dozen Havens
*I played enough to be able to hire a new character, I was somewhat disappointed that I could not personally choose the new soldier; we should be able to determine what character to go for next, especially if we will be able to recruit other classes (or class-systems/technologies) from other Havens
*Nerf the miniguns of death from the Heavy, it was oneshotting boss-level opponents, literally, a little ridiculous in raw power.
*Nerf dat Grenade Launcher, like u wot m8, I get 12 Grenades a clip o_0
*If used up, in a mission where we receive a lot of loot, replace the items that we had at the start, out of those that we gather from the mission (i.e. the loot missions), instead of all of them being sent back to base
*Probably intended for a later build, but might as well mention it anyways, clarify the benefits and drawbacks of the different weapons and armors, especially when used outside the ‘proper’ or expected class. I.e. slapping an assault rifle onto my Technician seemed to make them randomly start ‘fumbling’ when using it, messing up Overwatches often in particular.
*Make AI automatically seek out the players, or otherwise having the location of said AI become known, when there is no contact nor visuals for the Player for an extended time period (3+ turns for example). Perhaps put a minimum on it, i.e. must be fewer than 3 enemies left, and then just mark a general location where the closest enemy is. At times I found myself scrounging across the entire map, ultimately finding an enemy after awhile, where he was hiding next to where another enemy had died, but due to the angle-clip I hadn’t seen him, and he never did anything until I found him.
The suggestion for bringing back the Will-Cost to Overwatch, is to keep up the speed of the gameplay, I’d rather not feel particularly compelled to spam out Overwatch every turn; choosing not to do so while having the option for free (except for more limited movement; impedes speed of play significantly though as a result) penalizes you for not, whereas having to take an opportunity cost reinforces the benefits of not doing so based on discretion.
But yes they could omit controlled soldiers. BTW right now when it is not possible to retrieve turret I’m not using them. Snapshot was mentioning that they will be folded and you will be able to relocate them.