Fableborne Pre-Alpha Wrap-Up
The exclusive Fableborne Pre-Alpha came and went so fast, in a nick of time it was over. While the team is already back to work, now it’s time to look at your feedback and break it down!
Before we do that, here are some statistics:
- 550 exclusively invited participants
- 31.827 raids completed
- 139.324 buildings/monsters destroyed
The Pre-Alpha Playtest ran over two weekends from October 8th to 9th and from October 15th to October 17th and was only accessible to a small number of selected players from the community, content creators and fellow partners ReadyPlayerDAO, Merit Circle, IndiGG, Promisphere, Metanomy, Coeus Guild, WolvesDAO, and ODA Clan.
We chose to only show one aspect of the game, the raiding. Features like the island base building, character progression and world map, as well as many other features were excluded to focus on this specific aspect of the game.
What does the Fableborne player look like?
Most of our players played on Android, which is not so surprising since the marketshare of Android phones is much higher in South Aisa and South East Asia where a lot of our players came from:
Currently, our community is almost evenly split between Europe, America, and South (East) Asia, which means we are truly global and Fableborne is a game that appeals to many different regions.
A little more unsurprisingly, most players like to play Role–Play and Strategy Games:
Fableborne is essentially a Web3 game with a strong competitive edge, and it’s good to know our community likes to be competitive while having a good understanding of Web3:
Let’s talk about the Pre-Alpha Playtest
The team is very happy to see that the vast majority of players enjoyed the Pre-Alpha Playtest.
We were already blown away by the feedback we received on Discord, but seeing that almost everyone enjoyed the small content of Fableborne that we chose to showcase in numbers reassures that we are on the right tracks to create one of the best mobile experiences.
The vast majority of players liked the visuals a lot, which is also great to see, as a lot of hard work and time went into making sure Fableborne looks the way it does.
To break it even down further, players mostly enjoyed the gameplay, the strategic aspect and difficulty as well as the visuals, which are all our most critical aspects to get right:
Kam, our Founder and CEO says:
“The goal of our Pre-Alpha was to engage with the community, provide them with a fun gaming experience and show a snapshot of our Lunchtime Esports vision. However, the team and I were blown away with the positivity. The event was a huge success, and it was a delight to hear and see how much everyone was enjoying Fableborne. This is just the start, and I’m excited to keep building with the team and our community as we aim to set a new benchmark in the blockchain gaming space.”
But not everything is positive, of course. Players did not like the amount of bugs and issues, the difficulty and the repetitiveness during the Playtest:
This is an important takeaway for us as well. We had a lot of small bugs that impacted the player experience during the second weekend. It’s important to us to have playtests like these to not only find issues in the game, but also create better processes internally to avoid them in the first place. While we cannot guarantee that playtests will be free of issues, going forward we will have much more thorough QA processes in place to identify more issues before we go public.
So, what about the Heroes?
Interestingly, most players either preferred to play Kiara or Avi, but most of the players did not enjoy to play with both equally:
Having a set of diverse Hero characters does not only mean they look different, we also want to nail the gameplay experience. Not every player likes a specific playstyle, and we want to avoid that each of the characters feels and plays the same, so it’s great to see that we were able to diversity playstyles already with two characters from our ever-growing roster of Heroes.
Nikolay, our Game Designer, says:
“Both characters look good to play with. But we’re still looking for one common approach to the character movement/fighting. The question for us right now is if we want to move towards a “bullet hell”-direction or stay mostly with the hack’n’slash gameplay. Kiara was a surprise, her ultimate and the control aspect was rated very high, but we thought our players would rate her DPS the highest. Avi’s rating is as predicted by us, he has good speed and mobility but lacks the crowd control.”
Visually speaking, it looks a bit different, most players found Kiara more appealing than Avi.
Avi’s visual effects were not finished when we launched the Pre-Alpha, which explains the difference a bit, but players also think that Kiara stands out more than Avi.
Stephen, our Art Producer, says:
“We knew going into the Pre-Alpha that Kiara was at a higher standard, but we agreed it was the right time to get both of them into the player’s hands, going forward we will be constantly striving to push the visual quality and bring a more even level of polish to all heroes that we bring to the game, we are so exciting to see how much our amazing community loves our future heroes!”
We also asked what your favourite tower or monster nest was, and most of the players liked the Arrow Tower and Frost Tower the most:
We have two very important takeaways here. Firstly, the Arrow Tower was liked, because it has a very simple design and it’s very readable, meaning, if you look at it, you know exactly what it does — shooting arrows at you.
The Frost Tower was well liked because of its visuals, which means we need to strike a good balance between a cool looking tower (pun not intended) and a tower that is easy to read.
A lot of players also mentioned that the Tremor Tower hit boxes were hard to read, or not working as they should, which is something we will need to look into more. Accessibility is one of our core pillars, and this also means that our players need to be able to understand how a tower works easily.
Besides that, on the point of accessibility, players were able to understand the game well, even without a tutorial:
Most confusing to players though were the controls including the aiming, and as mentioned before towers and hit boxes:
Luckily, most players felt that the controls were working pretty well for them, however we see that there is still room for us to improve on:
Nikolay, our Game Designer, says:
“Most of our players understood how to play and only a few mentioned issues with controls, but this doesn’t mean we don’t need to improve our controls, especially the responsiveness that was mentioned several times. We will continue to work on it. We will also try to implement a new feature that will allow players to interrupt the attack or ability animation.”
Character variety, progression, customizability as well as better controls were the most requested improvements, and we could not agree more. We are not only working on more characters to join the Hero roster at this moment, the development of the upgrade system is in full-swing as well.
Looking at the operational side of things, we believe that the sign-up could have been a much better experience. We encountered no critical issues, but a lot of small issues along the way.
Lukas, Communications Manager, says:
“Our community is absolutely amazing, welcoming, supportive and so engaged. However, during the Pre-Alpha it became clear that we need to improve the onboarding for new players, in game and outside on our own platforms, especially Discord. Customer Support also was not as fast as it should have been. We are still a fairly small team, but we need to ensure faster response times and more staff presence on Discord during critical events like this.”
With more feedback than ever and a clear direction how to improve Fableborne, we’re going ahead with the development. Thanks to you and your positive reception, the team is absolutely hyped, and we could not be more thankful. More Heroes and Towers as well as brand-new features are just on the horizon, so stay tuned!
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Let’s embark on an exciting journey together, let’s #becomefableborne.
THE FABLEBORNE TEAM
