DW2 Feedback from from a game designer

[Uhmari]

Hello guys, I wanted to provide some critical feedback to the game. After a few hours of playing, I am not at all happy with the game. The good news is I think a lot of it is largely fixable in simplistic-ish ways.

For starters the sounds and music are insanely annoying, most notable of them is the warp sounds and some of the weapons (beams specifically). A 0.5 second "Swoosh" sound when warping out is all thats needed. Lets just say the beams are horrible and make my ears bleed right along side the not so good sounding music. When it comes to the music you should move more into the direction of "time - hans zimmer", those peaceful music vibes are perfect for a game like this.

The graphics are really sub-par. I feel like I am playing a game from the 90's. I understand as a designer this generally does not make up lots of the more important aspects of gameplay but you guys can really do better. I'd start with highly poly count on the models and better shaders to spice it up. Some planets are far to busy in the atmosphere's.

In regards to the other things that are fixed much easier as i was going through the xml's to play with the stats behind the races, governments etc i noticed a lot of the samething everywhere. You are overdoing a lot of those buffs. Everyone has mining rate buffs, Income, tourism, happiness. If you are blanketing such things largely across the game you may want to look into changing the base values, not adding it to everything. That was a lazy moment. Try limiting the buffs to 1 per a faction, 1 per an government. Some facilities on the planets doing things like -50% Mining rate for 20% Income (tourism) is nonsensical.

Lastly. I would encourage some changes to the way that the calculations are playing out in the backend. Having every colony count values every second or so is extremely taxing and i cringe at the thought of performance issues late game. I hope this helps.