The other night I decided to finally do some testing with CU2.0 on a new level 1 character and see how it plays out. Much to my liking I was really impressed with how much of a difference it makes but have some suggestions and comments that need to be addressed to make sure that new players have a better experience.
1. After starting in at Uriah hardline I was wandering how a new player would get his hotbars in place. Which I figured that it would be really confusing to them...especially to fill up 2 bars with differetn abilities. This might be remedied by the new training tutorial 2.0 but thats not out yet to my knowledge and my character was made when it wasn't available.
New players really need to know how to get a sense of arrangement of the hotbar. I really think that the styles should have their own separate UI that is free-floating so that they don't have to put it on the hotbar and take up space. Once a new player gets into using 3+ hotbars full of buttons to push right off the bat...things get really confusing. And for a new player this might be very distracting and not very appealing.
2. OK so next I ran through the contacts figuring out how to use them to gain stuff, which worked out great for a new player to get orientated to doing that sort of thing. But next I had to start killing the mobs to get their unique items for trade...this is where it got really different.
I know that you guys were wanting to make the low levels have a much easier time killing npc's and getting used to the system but I think its a little too easy personally. This is because there is absolutely no way that a player can die in Uriah...even as a level 1 vs. a level 5. NPC's in Uriah only do 1 pt damage to you evertime they hit you while you do 35-50 pts damage to them. I actually tried to see if I could die and ran around shooting the npc's once so that they would start to shoot at me. I got up to 9 people shooting at me while I stood around and watched. I waited about 2 minutes and started killing them. They only took off half of my life and I think my health regen was just too much for them to handle which is odd for a level 2 fighting level 3's.
the npc's should be taking up to 5 pts damage off of the player to make it more of a fight since the npc's don't automatically shoot at you if you run close to them.
3. I finally started to run some missions from tyndall. I decided since the npc's weren't very hard that I'd run all the missions on "hard" difficulty. And not suprisingly the missions were far from hard. within 2 hours I went from level 1 to level 5 because of the easiness of the missions and how much xp you get from hard level missions.
4. after I got to level 5, I decided to check out the new spy tree for lower levels. I really like it but there's some major things that must be addressed.
First off, I went to buy all the abilities on the first screen of the spy tree but one of the can't be bought from the operative vendors. I can't remember the name of the ability but it has the bulldog symbol in red and is on the left side second one down and is a required ability to finish that level of the spy tree. Because you can't buy it, it makes it really hard to get it because you have to code it. This is fine, but new players probably won't be able to figure this out. But if they did, its still really confusing for the new player because once you get to the screen to code it, as a new player I didn't have all the code bits needed to make the ability and the 4 main codes that are needed are red and unable to be coded. There's one problem though, that it doesn't explain what code bits you need to be looking for in order to be able to code those 4 ability codes...you can see how confusing this would be for a new player very quickly. So needless to say I tried farming for the bits for about an hour and still wasn't able to get the bits needed to code the required ability.
5. So while I was farming for the bits I noticed that being a level 5 spy I could kill the blackwood gang members really easily...with just one hit. The blackwoods have 150-250 hp's at level 5 and the sneak attack for spy at level 5 does 250+ damage with one hit. The player can just wait for the re-use timer while activating sneak again and kill them pretty fast. Maybe set the reuse timer up a little higher so that the spys don't use this for every attack and not have to actually fight unless they want to waste time by waiting for the reuse timer. Other than that, I'm really impressed with the low level spy tree. Its really easy to use and very effective.
6. I tried out data miner for a minute and stopped because it was way too time consuming and not worth doing at all. At level 5 I was able to find data nodes but 99% of the time I failed at tapping them. After about 15 attempts and breaking 6+ nodes I was finally successful but only got 300 XP....which was really disapointing. There needs to be better incentive to data mine at lower levels...
7. Not sure if this was a bug or not but I went to the hacker vendor in uriah and was able to unequip and equip abilities from the vendor.
Thats all I've got for now...I'll keep up on the new player experience and the new spy tree.
I hope this helps a little bit.
