» Sat Feb 13, 2016 6:07 pm Awesome game, but a few endgame problems.
- Nice graphics, but maybe a bit too much. The game starts to show problems around 100 dwellers on my iphone 6. It would be nice to provide an option to turn down the graphics. Aside from that, a game that is not necessarily heavy on 3d like a shooter or a racing game should not run into performance problems on a state of the art smartphone such as the iphone 6. Hearthstone has the same problem. It packs too many unnecessary graphical elements at the cost of performance.
- It is particularly hard to understand why the scrolling of the dweller list becomes laggy to unresponsive at 100 dwellers. I can only assume that it is not the list itself that poses performance issues, but the animations of all the little dwellers in the vault. A solution could be to disable the animations of dwellers not currently in the field of view. In the case of the dweller list, a quick performance fix may be to show the list on a filled background, instead of animating the vault in the background. I realize that this choice would break with the current design philosophy that utilizes overlays everywhere, but in terms of usability, the focus of the user is on the dweller list when he pulls it up, and to deliver the information in his focus with best performance should be highest priority.
- To maximize happiness it is important to focus on the low happiness dwellers. Currently you have to scoll down all the way to the bottom, which becomes a pain beyond 80 dwellers (see above). The easiest fix for the moment would be to allow to sort by unhappiest dwellers first.
- At 100 dwellers the rooms are so small, especially on a phone, that it is very hard to tell which rooms are not full. You end up dragging your dwellers back and forth across your vault and half of the time you lose them on the way. Then you have to go back to the dweller list and do the laggy scrolling to find them again. A terrible experience. An easy fix would be to add a graphical indicator to the rooms that show if they are full or not when in dweller drag mode. Even in the normal view, these indicators would instantly tell the user where he needs to improve the vault.
- It would be very helpful to have a list of all weapons and armor, not only the unequipped items. At 100 dwellers it is virtually impossible to find that one weapon again, unless you are willing to click on every single dweller and check them manually. An easy fix would be to add the weapon and gear icons to the dweller list.
- The dragging mechanic just does not work well beyond 100 dwellers, for a few reasons. The contents of the rooms is hard to see, you can't zoom while you drag, you often lose your dwellers, etc. The mechanic works very well for smaller vaults, however. An easy fix could be to show an abstraction of unfilled rooms in the Selected Dweller view, so that the dweller can be selected and then sent to an unfilled training room with one click.
- A "Harvest All" button would be very convenient. Again, this is another endgame problem. When harvesting 10 or 20 rooms (and leveling dwellers along the way) you do this very quickly and end up zooming in on rooms and selecting dwellers. This disrupts the harvesting workflow and is an annoying user experience. A harvest all button to circumvent the clicking would be a quick solution. An even better solution would be if the rooms harvested themselves while the game is open. The challenge of the game should be to create a well functioning vault, rather than having to constantly click on that screen. This constant clicking stress disrupts the thought process of planning your vault and making plans for individual dwellers.
- To keep players engaged beyond the first vault and 100 to 200 dwellers, a competitive mode could go a long way. There are a few options for this. One option would be to challenge players to create a happier vault than their friend's. Another option would be to challenge players to grow quickly while maintaining the highest degree of happiness. Another option is endgame competition, such as a global vault efficiency measure that is introduced once a vault has grown to 200 dwellers, and in which players can compete worldwide for the most happy and efficient vault by training and exchanging dwellers, by building and destructing rooms, by starting more wasteland missions to get better gear, by competing for the best wasteland missions, etc. All these options would help motivate lunchbox sales.
This is just a preliminary anolysis. Bethesda, if you are interested in more in-depth thoughts and suggestions, drop me a line.
