First Build of Fringe Worlds! Combat Playtest

[Durandal]

Played around with it. The controls were very unintuitive and alien to me. This in and of itself would not be a problem were it not for the lack of a rebind function, which kind of sucked.

I did play around with keys and found some that were unlisted, particularly the cockpit view key (V), but was unable to figure out how to dock with anything, which probably wasn't your intent this early on anyway but I figured I'd mention it.

On to the actual physics - the gameplay is slow. It felt very, very similar to flying a 4.85 pre turretsteer era gunboat in a snub brawl, except that I wasn't packing nearly as heavy a punch. While the physics seem very similar to Freelancer, everything is slowed down to the point of it being frankly kind of frustrating for me. The weapon arcs also frustrated me, as it was very difficult to tell when I was able to shoot something or not. I did notice you implemented a sort of autoaim esque feature similar to Freelancer's, but it only functions on turrets that have an arc on the target, meaning one gun could be shooting at the target and the other off into space, which just feels kinda clumsy and odd.

Before giving this any sort of test run again I see two things as being absolutely essential - the ability to rebind keys, and some kind of sound cues for everything happening. Target locks, gun sounds, engines states, the works. It was very difficult to tell what was happening just by looking at the screen. Audio, even if just a primative test library of noises, is integrally important to determining the feel of a game.

Overall I'm not a huge fan of the way you have things slowed down right now, but I know there are a lot of people who find Freelancer's combat to be too fast paced, so maybe you'll find an audience there. The most important things for you right now are to get some sounds and key rebinds in ASAP.