To begin, the UI seems a bit… unpolished, to say the least. Or lacking, rather. From what I could tell, there’s not a lot of notifications. Hardly any, to be exact. All there seems to be is a brief text and voice line. The text needs to linger for a bit longer, have it pile up just a little if there’s a flood of notifications. The voice line, well, the voice needs to be louder and more clear than it currently is if it’s going to be more than just background noise. Ditch the radioshack walkie-talkie filter. It’s the future, isn’t it? You telling me that voice comms still sound like garbage while there’s holographic AI’s going around on a rampage? Come on, I know it’s for immersion, but leave it to cutscenes and any other genre but RTS. In order for a player to play effectively, or at least to the best of their abilities (and also have good time while doing so) the player must be able to understand what is going on at all times so that they can react and plan accordingly.
The map needs to have more of an onscreen presence as well. Just go ahead and make the box rectangular as well for goodness sake. The map is more important than the tiny bottom left corner of view space. It would also do well to be larger. It doesn’t help to have to try to figure out what dots are your’s and which are your teammates. Give teammates a different color as well, not just a blue in a slightly different hue. If I don’t like it, how are color-blind players gonna like it? Color that shtick right up.
And admittedly, I only played a few matches between my account and a friend’s, so I may not have dug too much into the controls settings, but they need a lot of work too. I’m probably going to purchase this game for pc, but I’m fairly unimpressed with the xbone controls. Give the controller a little more thought. I may be wrong, but the right stick button seems unused, and a good use for it could be to fullscreen the map, so the player can quickly move their cursor to another part, and when they click the right stick again, their screen will have shifted to that point. I say this because, in an rts I play frequently, Company of Heroes 2, you can just move your cursor (with a mouse in this case) to the minimap in the corner of the screen (which has a nice size on the hud) and click on it to move the screen to whichever position has been clicked(This feature is common amongst RTs’s). I’d figure that the suggestion I just made would make for a nice, albeit not perfect, substitute. I noticed that clicking the left stick pings the map wherever the cursor is placed, which is a common features in RTS’s aswell, but it doesn’t grab your eye. I barely noticed it when I was trying to figure out what each button did. It needs a sound to go along with it, and probably a little color to make it pop out more. Just give it a cooldown that activates if a player decides to spam it because they want to be “that guy.” And another idea, when in control of a group of units, an army, maybe it would be useful to have B, when held down, give a dispersion order, so that when a player wants to better micromanage their units, and not have them an easy target for a MAC strike or any other sort of artillery, they’ll be able to pick and order each unit easily.
And the tutorial video could just stand to be a little more in-depth, considering we don’t have a campaign or AI skirmish mode to practice in before flexing on other players. My first match, it took me a minute just to figure out how to send my starting units to capture resources and points. This wasn’t much of an issue anyway considering my opponent (1 dropped out in the 2nd minute of the match) didn’t make a move until after my teammate and I had captured every point on the map. But then again, this is just a beta, only up for a week, and stats aren’t going to stay, yadda yadda yadda, doesn’t matter right now, whatever. It was just a minor inconvenience that could have NOT been.
Anyways, thanks for reading, I’m sure you folks at Creative Assembly know what you’re about more than I do, considering your series of total war games. Developer or fellow player, however, I wanna hear your thoughts.
EDIT: Oh yeah, when my units are engaged in battle, whether or not its on-screen, there needs to be a bit more feedback in that department as well. The dialogue to sound a little more intense than “need support, meh.” For example, Company of Heroes 2, my ruskie infantry are yelling about being under fire and how they’re getting tired of it. Try to give Halo wars 2 a little of that. These are soldiers lives that we’re playing with, right? Marines at that. Give them a little more character.
Thanks for reading.
TLDR; apples to possible oranges, visual and audio feedback needs a bit more work, playing an RTS with a controller requires a bit of a learning curve, possible suggestions from a guy who plays one strategy game in particular from time to time.