MedievaLands Forums

Never had the opportunity to play this back in the day, so I greatly appreciate the effort to create an accessible remake!

I thought you might be interested to hear some feedback from a new player, so I jotted down some thoughts while playing. I know some of these quirks are probably inherent to the original game experience, but figured it might be good to point them out anyway:

- It's painful that the text input UIs don't allow common editing functions (home/end, ctrl+arrow, shift/mouse select, copy/paste, etc.) - especially as this makes use of password manager generated passwords impractical for logging in

- Item values make no sense; I often encounter items with directly higher stats but lower sale value etc.

- Would be nice to see sale value of items in inventory tooltips; this could also allow the guild hall item sale UI to be replaced with a "sell" drag-n-drop target in the guild hall inventory UI

- It bothers me when RPGs have hidden stats. This one seem sto have hidden resist, armor, power, etc. ones

- Mana costs for some spells in the guild hall spell UI get pushed out of visibility by the description text

- Guild hall inventory UI arranges item slots differently than dungeon inventory UI (I like to keep my backpack organized!)

- Guild hall right-side menu has almost enough space to just replace the next/back buttons with buttons for accessing each screen directly

- Damage spell workings are opaque; why would I ever cast/level-up Lightning instead of Blast, etc.?

- How do I know which keys/lockpicks are useful and which can be discarded? Or can we just get a keyring like a lot of other games so they don't eat valuable inventory space?

- Minimap has trouble with teleport doors (show/hide depending on which side of their walls you last saw); color coding or numbering teleport doors would make the map vastly more useful

- Music stops if I AFK or am in combat for too long, and may not return for a long time (might want to loop it?)

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- Would be awesome if combat action targets could be designated via keyboard shortcuts; maybe put a number over each eligible target's portrait while an action is pending, and then hitting that number selects that target?

- Would be nice if all UI buttons (especially dungeon screen) had a tooltip describing their function and hotkey (I know there's a help screen, but contextual descriptions make learning quicker)

- Equipment and options dungeon UIs don't close on Escape key

- Considering current player counts, it might be good to enhance the "players in" UI to be able to show all players in the game

- The lockpicking skill failure message is ambiguous; I didn't even know if I was doing it right until I finally got a success

- It's a little weird that forum posts are attributed to my player character and not my login, as I'm not intending to post in-character (but I do see there's an RP forum, so I guess it makes sense there)

Edit: Regarding the lockpick message, I just saw "you fail to pick any locks" but I swear I was just seeing something like "the door is locked" when using my lockpick skill before. I'm also confused that there are both colored lockpicks and a lockpicking skill that can be activated.

Edited Sep 17, 2021

Hail Hevanas! Thank you for the time you spent to become so familiar with the game, and your detailed notes here.

Your thought that some of these are not addressable because they derive from the design of the original game is well taken and I agree with you. While I have made some changes to the original mechanics, I have tried to be very careful and only change things that were interfering with the player experience. The exception to this is the new item system, and in my design of that system I tried to create an experience that would supplement instead of supplant the existing Yserbius/Twinion items and statistics.

That said, you've identified many areas of the game - particularly in the UI - where change would benefit the player experience! Thank you for these. Some of these changes would be relatively easy to implement - others would be unexpectedly difficult to bring into the game, or (in the case of the lockpick failure messages and teleport doors) impossible to address without a complete revision of the map data and scripts, which come more or less directly from the original games. But these are all good ideas, and even if they don't make it into the current revision of MedievaLands, they are food for throught for future games built on this service, if that ever comes to pass.

Thanks again for your thoughtfulness and thoroughness - this post is an asset to my work, and I am so pleased that you were inspired to write it! Good luck down in the dungeon!