Flatfingers wrote:To be fair to it, I'd like to play some more before rendering any impressions.

Take whatever time you need, Flat.

I only had some minutes time to play it. Enough to run around the first area, talk to some characters and pick some items. So far no crashes, and the only bug I encountered was inability to change resolution.
I was expecting Minecraft like experience - dropped in random place and do whatever you feel like. Actually it starts with real story and feels almost like adventure game. It reminded me first moments of playing Gothic.
Interface is a mixed bag. The windows are animated and work nicely. The beef I have is that sometime it's not very intuitive. For example I found some letter with list of items to find. It said it went to the log, but I can't find it. I'm sure it's there, and once I have time to check controls and find the logs, then all will be nice, but it doesn't seem to be as intuitive as pressing "L" for log (unless it's a bug ). I think those issues are totally fair to have in early access game.
I still didn't do any exploring or crafting or other interesting stuff, so can't really pass any judgement on the game, but so far it looks very interesting. I'll post some screenshots later today when I have more time to play.

Solith wrote:Actually it starts with real story and feels almost like adventure game. It reminded me first moments of playing Gothic.

Well that's good to know as I liked Gothic. Thanks, Solith.

I uploaded couple screens to steam. You should be able to see them in my profile (michal.gloc)

well had a little play,must say rather impressed as it runs rather smoothly thought from Lars posts this would be a trainwreck the only problem I had was getting to my house and having the outer walls invisible and seemingly I was lower in the ground so unable to get to the objective bit of a blocker but hey ho this is alpha.

Also must give kudos to Lars there must not be many early access devs who tell their customers not to buy as a gift only if you want to test the alpha as basically to avoid disappointing someone he ranks up there with Josh on the high morality scale and has gained a few followers from the ensuing comments on Steam as well.

Will give this another good go as not really had time to really test hopefully can get around the invisible house problem next time round.

An early impression on RPS
Tl;dr: could be lots of fun, but needs work.
Also contains setting fire to peoples furniture to battle hypothermia and floating benches

Dinosawer wrote:An early impression on RPS
Tl;dr: could be lots of fun, but needs work.
Also contains setting fire to peoples furniture to battle hypothermia and floating benches

Well, the bearded wonder did give us sufficient warning. It does look rather good though, even the NPC's are looking better than I was expecting.

When I play I don't get the huge problems with food water or teperature. After some 15min of play I ate an apple and was ok after that for quite a while.
On the other hand I had a case of stolen houses. There were pathes of dug up land, and a mailbox with name of the owner of property, but nothing else. Next day the houses were there. Looks like the dev does daily fixes. The pick item up and cant put it away bug is still very much there though. Oh and for the life of me I can't get the game running under linux. Opens as black window and closes after about a minute. I think it's graphics drivers.

The fact that he's been able to accomplish what he has already with such a constrictive tool as Unity is, is pretty amazing. It's horror stories like Lars' development and that of other games using Unity that makes me extremely thankful that Josh was able to create his own engine to suit the task.

So I bought myself an SSD on the weekend and one of the things I've disliked about Frontiers to date is the load times. Not any more!

I had a real good couple of hours play session with the game and I have to say that it's come a long way since the alpha. There's still many bugs but the game is now playable with the main storyline quests functioning (at least to the point I was playing). The optimisation is A LOT better now considering that I was getting much higher FPS without changing the settings I had set from my last play through.

There's still a fair amount of work to go before I'd consider it "release" worthy but it's definitely a lot more playable now.

Looks pretty! May the fortunes let me have the time to play it in the near future

Yeah, it is reasonably "pretty".. world is believable but it's certainly not Skyrim level of detail/fidelity or beauty. I think the game is enjoyable at this time but some of the bugs I did encounter have been there since day one and still not fixed, such as falling through the floors of buildings when transitioning from one room to another. It doesn't happen nearly as much as it did before but when it does, it tends to take two or three minutes for the world to be restored to full functionality. Whatever Lars is using to check to see if the buildings have vanished must only be checking every minute or two.. or something like that... because once the game started reconstructing the buildings, it was finished within a few seconds.

The other big pet peeve I have for the game is lighting. When it's dark at night, it is REALLY dark.. so dark that even on the brightest graphics settings, it is impossible to see anything without a torch/light. That is a good thing right? Very realistic and makes it worthwhile having a light source.... well it would be if the light source radius was more than a couple of feet. I bought a light ball thing from a merchant, which cost more than all the armor and weapons I'd bought combined.. and it felt like it was simply lighting up myself and nothing more. This problem continues as you enter inside dwellings and other buildings, which seem to take on the darkness from the global average. So if it's dark outside, it's dark inside also but if it's light outside then it is also light inside, even in places where there are no windows. In the university section near the beginning of the game, I had to increase my brightness to maximum just to see the shadowy outlines of walls where there were no torches nearby. So yeah.. lighting needs work.

To compound this lighting issue, even though you can sleep through the night, the day/night cycle is exceedingly short right now. Maybe Lars made it short for testing purposes but right now it's about 15 minutes per day and night...

...Still an enjoyable game.. just lots of work to go.

It would be great to see another update from the bearded one. I've read a few scraps over on the forum but Lars does such a good job of informing us of what's good and what's not in the land of Frontiers.

I could be talking to myself again.....nothing unusual there, at least not for me.

I downloaded the just released Frontiers OST by Steve Barnes and after listening to just a few tracks I can honestly say it's a gorgeous addition to my music collection. It's everything I could have hoped for and the compositions are perfect for a game like Frontiers.

Well done Steve.

No OST version on Steam?
I am dissapointed