Actually... (UPDATED) – Draconius GO: Catch a Dragon! Review

It would be unfair for me to leave the review I gave two months ago. Despite my numerous complaints, I’ve stuck with this game. It has an undeniable draw to it. It’s charming and well-made, and in certain ways, it’s deeper than the game that inspired it. I complained before that some of the creature concepts weren’t particularly inspired, but then I caught more of them and started seeing more interesting designs. I know more will be added, and I look forward to seeing them. The spawn rate is still too low, but there are items you can use to lure creatures to you even if you’re not right up on a Pillar of Abundance. It took me some digging to find these though, so I kind of wish that there was a tutorial that made me aware of them sooner. I still have no idea what algorithm was employed to place in-Game buildings. Is it completely random? It’s not always better than the point-of-interest distribution in Pokémon Go. In cities, it’s much worse. Again, I know that much of the draw here is that rural gamers are less neglected than in Pokémon Go, but having point-of-interest population in cities be inexplicably sparse isn’t really a solution. I complained that hiking trails weren’t marked: this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve since figured out that the map used for Draconius is simply OpenStreetMap, and so the one trail near my house that’s missing has nothing to do with the game developers. However, OpenStreetMap does differentiate between hiking trails and roads for cars, so I still think Draconius Go should much more densely populate known trails with spawns, Pillars, Arenas, Libraries, Portals, Obelisks, et cetera. IMPORTANT: Get rid of the caps. The speed cap is egregious (you can’t be moving more than five miles per hour or the game craps itself) and it should have been dealt with MONTHS ago, but it’s just been left alone to keep being terrible. Why?? Before, I was like “get rid of it and we’ll be Square,” but now it’s gone on so long that I actually want the ability to warp as reparation for the mishandling of this design flaw. (Paraversume handles—and Covens handled—warping particularly well; I encourage the developers to draw inspiration thence. If they slept on Covens, then... let this be a lesson to them that Pokémon Go isn’t the only thing they’re competing with, and they need to more proactively cast a wider net in keeping a finger on the pulse of trends and tropes in location-based gaming, both good and bad.) If for some reason you’re going to only slightly lessen the speed cap (up to Pokémon Go values, which I also accurately consider to be too restrictive), then some things need to change: 1. The game needs to acknowledge that a player has stopped WHEN A PLAYER HAS STOPPED, NOT TWENTY SECONDS LATER. 2. If a passenger is playing the game in a vehicle that is accelerating out of a stopped position, and that passenger taps on a creature that has just spawned, what happens now is that the camera slowly zooms in on the creature and then before the battle can start, the creature poofs (disappears in an ugly cloud of dust). This seems designed to do nothing but insult people playing the game. In Pokémon Go, if you tap on a monster, it initiates the battle and lets you stay in the battle for as long as the app doesn’t close. That’s better. Draconius Go really ought to be getting that right too. I can’t imagine that that’s difficult to program and hopefully roll out in, say, the next 48 hours, absolute TOPS. ALSO IMPORTANT: The other cap that needs to be completely done away with is the minimum player level cap for participation in Arenas and Libraries. It took me a week to get to the point where I could interact with these structures, and that’s just bad design. If I’m in a high-traffic area and I get kicked out of one of these buildings fair and square by a player who is stronger than I am, then great, lesson learned, there’s incentive to build up my character. Not even being allowed to interact with the main interesting places in the game until I reach a certain point is the exact opposite of incentive: it’s fully discouraging. So definitely fix that too. There is a ton of potential here, and Draconius Go could be an incredible game if only the decision to make a handful of extremely specific and unjustified mistakes were instead the decision to not make those few mistakes at all, and to just be awesome across the board. UPDATE: Covens was still a thing when I wrote the former part of this review, so I don’t think that Champions had yet been introduced. I see that some people like the addition of Champions. I finally got a quest from an Obelisk that requires me to pick fights in Libraries and Arenas, so I’m finally grateful for Champions, but I do think that they should be on their own NPC team. That team’s color can still be yellow (with neutral points of interest being changed to a pale grey, a tiny design shift that Pokémon Go has also been getting right the whole time Draconius Go has been messing it up). To clarify: I’m saying that the Champion NPC Team should be something different from a Library or Arena reverting to (pale grey!) neutrality. It’s cute in Paraversume when, in aid of that game’s narrative, “neutral” is synonymous with “owned by the corrupt PPA”, but other than being spiritual cousins in design, that game and this are different enough that I think that my suggestion makes sense. I guess that at some point the developers “responded to” and earlier draft with some excuses that I’m positive I would remember if they mattered. Some drivel about how them taking user suggestions “into consideration” isn’t the same as a guarantee that they’ll be implemented. Uh... okay? Everything I’ve talked about here comes together to form an eight-lane expressway to a future for this game a dozen times brighter than its present. They are precisely as negotiable as the very success of the game itself. Like... am I wrong? Give me another “response” and let me know.
Review by Monstevr on Draconius GO: Catch a Dragon!.