Alright, so I just purchased the game yesterday. At $40 I did have to debate a bit on the purchase but I made the assumption and gave the benefit of the doubt that while it's early access, the concept has great potential. Therefore I went ahead with the decision.
Now, after playing the game I am rather beginning to fall in love. There's just a good atmosphere about the land and the adventure and there's the comforting thought that while not everything is perfect, the game still isn't even finished.
But there are things I would like to see tweaked a bit and I'll list them now:
1. Pouring out soil from inventory - I dislike how I have to equip a specific tool (the shovel) in order to empty something from my inventory. It's rather inconvenient and I see little purpose to this.
2. Death Punishment - This bothers me a fair bit. While I understand the wish to have a serious environment in the game, it's rather disconcerting to peaceful (and new) players to risk losing everything (loot and stat-wise) they've worked for all because a player feels the need to be hostile. For this, I think losing items upon death should depend on a character's alignment. If it's above or below a certain point, then that should dictate the punishments.
While I understand this system is in place for stats, it makes no sense for it not to be in place for loot.
*I understand there was discussion about non-PVP servers being added in, which I like but that brings me to another matter which will be addressed later.*
3. Dueling - Another thing in relation to the death issue I'd like to see placed are duels. I think for those characters.players that wish to have some friendly Pvp dueling would be a good option (it adds a fair amount of Roleplay value as well). Perhaps duels would or wouldn't impact a character's alignment upon victory or defeat (or even issuing a challenge to a duel). There could be various types of dueling such as duels to the death, duels until yielding, etc.
4. Tedious equipment animation - This refers the to five second animation I have to endure while going to equip, say, a pickaxe. Under the attempts of being realistic it makes little sense for it to take so long to equip a hand used item and have a long animation about applying clothing while doing so. Just my thoughts here. Shorten the animation length and change the animation to something more appropriate. It's tedious and bizarre that when I try to equip an axe my character begins to try and wear it all over his body
5. Server-play - This is what I mentioned above in number two. Server-play. I understand that a lot of this game is meant to be played with other players in mind. I do. But I'll be honest, when I purchased the game, I was a little disappointed to see that the only option of single-player I had was hosting my own private server. I had pictured it to be similar to Mount and Blade's singeplayer/multiplayer system. For me to play on a server alone, it's quite an amount of resource for my computer to use (quite an amount of RAM). My computer can run it fine, that's not my issue. I just wish there was a more simple single-player option to help reduce the strain if it doesn't have to be there. (As far as I know, I don't know anything about this being implemented so if it's planned, please don't rip my head off).
6. Night - Night is a fair bit too dark. Half the time it feels like there is no moon. A slight increase of light (not much) would be nice to make it feel a little more realistic. Another matter about night is that I haven't see any stars (maybe I've just been missing them) but it'd be something neat to add. Minuscule detail but a nice one in my mind.
7. Combat - Seems slightly slow and clunky. I think one of the main reasons is the mouse direction movement required for combat. (which can make combat very fast if you increase sensitivity. Though it may also give you nausea).
For this I would suggest, (for those of us who don't like to whip our camera around every which way) have the attack direction rely on the WASD keys. If I'm holding W, I perform and overhead attack (M&B style I suppose). Though another option that would be really fun and to make combos go much smoother would be to allow us to Hotbar each attack direction to a specific key of our choice. (1 is overhead, 2 is stab, etc.) If this is already possible, again don't rip my head off. I'm still trying to figure out the interface a little.
8. Construction - I love being able to build my own crafts, whether it be tables, houses, or furnaces. But one thing I dislike is that when I go to construct something, I don't see the requirements until the sign is made after. When scrolling through the options of what I can construct it would be nice to have the materials needed listed rather than know them afterward. If I go to build a chair, when I select chair, the materials needed would be displayed either beside the word "Chair" or in a separate pop-out box.
It's a minor tweak. I just prefer knowing the required materials and gathering them beforehand as opposed to beginning and then knowing the materials.
9. Snares - I'm not sure about anyone else, but when I go to set a snare, nothing happens. At all. Nothing on the ground is displayed, nothing pops up in the chat box. Nadda. Hell, I don't even know what exact materials are required to make a snare (I assume plant fiber and branches?). My suggestion here would be to let us know the required materials, give us a display sentence in the chatbox about whether we successfully made a snare or not and have a ground model displayed so we can spot the snare to make it easier to check.
10. NPCs and Settlements - I'd love to see large NPC settlements. Especially if a non-server singeplayer is made. So far I've been on my own private server with no one but my lone self. I believe NPCs would do nothing but make the game better, more immersible, fun and entertaining.
These are just some basic suggestions I feel would help gameplay go a bit more smoothly.
I think the two most important for me would be to implement Dueling and to adjust the Death Punishment system to be more reflective of the character's/player's playstyle.
Thanks for reading! Any feedback or discussion is greatly encouraged and welcomed!