- can’t use main menu with gamepad
- horse should stop if I press nothing
- accidentally opened horse care radial on 5 occasions at the stone arch
- found it VERY cute seeing the horse eating grass
- loved that the horse has hairs at the nose
- hairs at the nose look too spikey, she’d expect them to be less stiff towards the end and move a bit
- loved the big strech animation a lot
- was a bit weirded out of the wind-like animation of the food/water/mood icons
- found gamepad cursor terrible, “why does it have acceleration?”
- deduced from inventory containers layout, that balancing is important – without recognizing the balance bar & weight display
- pressing touchpad on gamepad should open the map
- “vibration feels like my horse will stumble in a moment”
- “beautiful jump” (of the horse)
- found horse hairs at nose weirdly lit in horse overview
- holding sprint when in trot causes slo-mo
- would love if sprinting from a low gait causes the horse to do some little jumps first to accelerate
- can’t stop with LB, even though gaiting down with LB
- hearing her horses sounds to the left and behind her while riding
- music is good!
- “this feels like driving a car, with the gear shift and all”
- wants to pet horse merchant horses
- horse heads & necks have no collider, could walk through them
- avoided mud area near cartographer during route planning
- frustrated that the horse doesn’t turn as she intended
- cherry icon doesn’t look good
- bandage icon is not vertically centred
- horse got thirsty, found watering place on map (the lake) and rode there
- we had a great laugh when the horse stuck his entire head into the water to drink
- closing most tutorial open horse care radial
- doesn’t like intrusive midge sound
- horse is a white shape in horse overview (it rained, maybe that’s why?)
- didn’t recognize HUD inventory binding as D-Pad
- searched for animal repellant item recipe but couldn’t find it before collecting dung
- found it mean that “we’re leading our horse through the mud and then say ‘eerrggh'”, referring to a specific bark
- found janky cartographer animation hilarious
- found bear encounter weird, couldn’t aim “properly”, projectile bounced off bear, didn’t really had any satisfactory effect
- did craft new pouches, but couldn’t use them immediately because they weren’t auto-selected
- wanted to use bandage from inventory, didn’t understand why she couldn’t
- wanted to use bandage in horse care radial from horseback, didn’t understand why she couldn’t
- figured out she needed to dismount
- fristrated again the horse doesn’t stop
- GPU crash after ~45min.
Conclusions:
- very janky
- missing some basic quality of life features, e.g. closing map with same button as opening
- controlling speed while riding very cumbersome: need to use RB until some stage, then hold, and for braking not allowed to continue pressing forwards
- tutorial boxes x radial interactions were just weird
- would prefer braking with B, horse care radial with X (swap bindings)
- loves horse & animations
- game oughta be much smoother so she would continue playing
- judged the UX to be not good overall
Gregor Sönnichsen 