Slick Forums

I tryed the game two days ago and it was really cool !

I meet ChickenX and we do some quest together, two instances (i got a nice armor on the last one =p), and i saw that this game have a great potential.

Cons in my opinion :

Combat system should be more dynamic. Maybe some visual effects or something. (I heard that skills are coming and i think it will be really great !)
(A small combat log would be cool too)

Pros :

Oh my god, there is too much ><.
The world map with party members, yourself, quests is awesome !
Showable stuff (don't know how to say that, juste the fact that you see what you're wearing)
Graphics are really cool.
Quest system.
Randomly generated instances !

Well, there is much more but i think you already know that.

Some suggestions :

- Hold backspace to unwrite your message on the chat =p. (you have to press it multiple times actually)
- When you type a long message, you can't see the end.

- Show your amount of cooper when you"re trading with a NPC.
- Drag & drop on the inventory is really cool, but when you drap an item over another it should switch them. (Sorry for my english, tell me if you don't understand)
- Stack items on the inventory. You should at least stack 5 appels on one case, or something like that.
- Maybe more stats on the items (weapons, armors, etc.) and for the player too.
- Shortcut for stats in S, but S is used for moving.


I had a great time testing this game and i think it will be awesome in the future =).

Just a small update. We've been working a lot on skills and making them look pretty nice. I've taken a few screenshots of some of the skills we have done so far. They're not all complete, but better then nothing.

Please excuse the assassin's name.

Thanks to Michael for helping with one of the screenshots.

Poison Gas skill.



Assassin using the spike trap skill.



Using Multi heal on Michael and Myself.



Assassin's stealth abilities. See if you can find my character just a skill I'm testing out.

Ive played now for 30minutes(?) and I like what I see so far. I suppose there are lots of features to come, but Ill just say what I rly want to see upcoming.
Before i give my suggestions, i should say that ive played lots of MMOs. There are some key things that are the same in every mmo, so i have a good idea of what players generally expect.

First things first, the key thing of almost every MMO (even though its my least liked..);
Quests
?, !
The quests should really be marked by ? and !. Not because every other game does it so, but because its something that everyone who has ever played even a single MMO will expect. This is like you intuitively made the healthbar red. You expect it to be red because thats what you generally see. So please change that, for the sake of casual gamers.

Also I generally see the questlog hotkey on L (was the first thing i hit). I had to look at the menu to find out that its q. Now why do I prefer L over Q? Because q is closer to WASD and should do something you need to do quickly. Even if you have nothing to put there, Id prefer the questLog to be on L, because Im used to it from like every MMO that features quests.
A changable hotkeyset would also be nice(but not rly necessary if you go with the standards).

Introducing Quests
I guess you have planned something like this, but I will still point it out.
When I entered the game and looked around I found relatively late the first quest npc (again, I search for "!"s, not for "Q"s). The quest marker was a bit hard to see, it should be moving up and down or blinking or something.
So when I found him and made the library quest I was pretty lost. Because there was no next thing I was supposed to do. An introducing questline should go like this: "Oh hi youre new here (blabla). Do this:" -some quest- "Well done (blabla), now go see that guy" -move to another npc and do his quest-...and so forth.

Interface
Login
Dunno if it is because I played Applet-version, but when you type in your username and password, you should be able to hit enter to login.
When choosing your character to play, you should be able to just doubleclick it to enter the game.
Just to shorten the time you need to finally play the game.

Chat
The chat should go to the bottom left corner. Thats just where it belongs and everyone expects it to be.
It should also be a real window. Means the lines should never ever disappear. You dont want the player to miss a message because hes fighting and then he has to open the chatlog to see what was written there.
It should hold like 5 lines per standard and should be expandable(to the top and to the right).

Something I noticed when typing a message thats too long for the bar to hold: It still takes the characters you put in and writes everything in the chat, but you dont see what you type there because the text doesnt move to the left. There are 2 options I see: limiting chat input to a certain number of characters, or moving the text so that you can always see what ur writing. Ive seen both, and both is valid imo.

Minimap
When the chat goes to the bottom left, where should the minimap go then? To the top right. I guess you know why.

Other little things
The teleporting between maps is a bit awkward...when i was on the the first map(outside the library) and walked up I got teleported, which is ok, but I was stuck behind a tree oO I had to relog to get out of there. I dont know if i like that you are teleported whenever you hit any side of the map, but it surely shouldnt teleport you where you cant get out anymore xD

I had a hard time figuring out the battlesystem. Maybe due to the lack of introduction and animation. But all in all its ok. Nothing more, nothing less.
My suggestion would be to make it like Secret of Mana, if thats not too hard to do.

The stats-hotkey is S. But S is also the key for walking down...i suggest planting that on C (like Character).

One thing I rly liked is that the trees get transparent when you walk behind them. Why not make the same for buildings?

Other Suggestions
Crafting? Always a nice little thing to do, and to earn some money.
Guilds, I expect you alrdy planned something like them.
Families? like player X marrys player Y and they adopt player Z or something. no key feature but always fun to have.


So thats it for my first impression. I woudlve played longer but my suggestions alrdy stockpiled up and I dont want to flood you with them.


Edit: Oh and one little question: Do you want to make just another ORPG or do you wanna try something new?

Thanks for all your valid points. Myself and Benoit will look through them and fix up some / if not all of the things you mentioned.

We've already got the mockup of the new chatbox which is scrollable and what not so you wont need to check any chatlogs anymore.

We're still working on the quest layout and directions for it. We have now implemented the quest locations being shown on the worldmap. So, that makes things a bit easier.

We definitely want to try making something new and we have big plans for FTO. It's just we're trying to get the base stuff down. We already have a crafting system, but it's yet to be fully implemented yet.

Thanks again for your post it's very helpful.

Thanks for all the feedback shiroto! It's well described and you make strong points. Our focus has been a little all over the place so that is why certain feature are not fully polished. We do in fact have over 3 hours of quests! I agree with just about 100% of what you said and hope to address these as we have time.

We do plan on FTO being different, as Chicken mentioned, we are working on getting the base setup first then hope to work more on our unique features.

Ideas revolve around guild operated towns, live events, competitive events, custom guild quests etc..

G'day everyone. Just doing an update post to let anyone who was following FTO know we're still alive and kicking. There's been a lot of updates, fixes and changes since last time we posted.

There's a ton of new skills and now new characters start off with a very basic skill (skill depends on their class) we're still working on ideas and implementing of how players will earn new skills.

Ben has added in PVP now so we'll need to update the skills, but yeah it's quite good. When you PVP your party can verse another party in instanced maps and what not. It's still in it's early stages, but cool none the less and also leads way to Battle Grounds (Which is basically a rip off of DOTA. It will be a mini event / game type thing)

We have updated our forums look so now it feels more FTO styled and have made it possible to link game accounts with forum accounts and somehow we will tie it in so it's possible to actually do some quest type things on the forums and it gives you something in game. e.g Get a post count of 50 and you will receive a bushel of apples.

Ben's added in Cinematic scripting commands so we can now have cinematic events and what not. Which is cool. Also some more quest support in scripting. So, we can now have puzzles in quests as apposed to just Find X object or Kill X enemies.

Anyways enough babbling. Here's a trailer I've put together for FTO. Not the best trailer in the world, but shows some of the new features and old.

FTO Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmciB-Q6cls

Progress thread (please not that this is not all of our progress) :

http://forum.fantasytalesonline.net/ind ... opic=120.0

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