With the Playtest now behind us, we've spent some time going through the data and feedback you gave us. Here's a summary of what we found.
Thanks again to all who played the playtest, especially to those who took the time to give feedback; it helped us to validate what works and what needs some love. Overall, we are happy to see that we are aligned and there were no big "surprises" for us.
Around 18,000 players got access to the playtest, from over 60 countries. At peak, we had over 1,400 daily active players, some of them playing on Steam Deck (about 4% of daily sessions), which we thought was pretty cool, even if it was not supported ːsteammockingː
Over 2,300 filled out our feedback survey. That's a response rate we didn't expect, and we're grateful for every single one. That is gold to us, and we can't thank you enough.
We gathered this data from the feedback survey, and we thought it would be cool to share it with the community:
Over 90% of our playtesters identified as midcore or hardcore gamers.
Nearly 70% of you are in the 26-45 age range.
About 43% had actually played the Starfinder tabletop RPG,
Over 20% said this was their first contact with the Starfinder universe. Welcome aboard.
Over 90% of respondents had played Baldur's Gate III
Nearly 80% had played Divinity: Original Sin
And about 73% had played Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Wrath of the Righteous.
Dialogues and voice acting were the standout. Nearly 70% of players named dialogues as their favorite part of the gameplay. Our narrative team and the incredible voice cast are over the moon.
Character portraits scored a 9.0 out of 10 on average. The overall visual style landed at 8.4, and the intro comic at 8.2. This helped us to validate our 2D style works and people like it.
For the characters: Preach & Larva ran away with it, scoring the highest rating of the cast and chosen as favorite by nearly 60% of respondents. Sterling came in second with strong praise across the board, followed closely by Mama Paca (even if the 3D model was a placeholder).
Don't worry, it's already done:
Every character in the demo was rated positively, which across this many responses felt solid.
The Temple was the most memorable location for nearly half of the players, with Mama Paca's Bar taking second place. We are happy that, overall, the setting and locations are working and players like them. We will keep working to improve them further.
Fun fact about the temple, we decided to go with the "censored" orgy because we had no genitalia in our models (yet), it was fun to see some players complaining about it :D
Camera controls and animations were the most frequent areas of improvement. Those have already been significantly improved in our current development build.
Combat difficulty leaned easy for many players, about 45% found it a bit easy or too easy, while 43% said it was just right. We're adding missing skills and improving AI behavior to give combat more depth and challenge.
We're also working on better navigation tools (map), a smoother onboarding experience, especially for new players, and more settings customization, like key bindings.
UI is also getting a big rework, unifying tooltips and adding in-combat info, like hit chance. The current beta had a very bare bones UI, so that was already in the roadmap.
Average satisfaction scored a 7.5 out of 10, with over 77% of you rating the experience a 7 or above.
What we take home from this demo is that your feedback validated the vision we have for the game and pointed at the same things we already knew needed work, and are already in our development pipeline.
We're heads-down on development, working toward Early Access. We'll share more when there's something real to show. In the meantime, our Discord is always open and we'll keep posting development updates right here on Steam.
Thanks for playing our game, hope you had a good time, and thanks for helping us improve Starfinder: Afterlight.
See you in the Drift 💫
The Epictellers Team
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