So i recently decided it was time to install and try diabotical. I waited a little to taste a more finished product. Here's my impressions on it, keep in mind it's just my opinions and my point of view. I may be wrong or biased

---------------------The pros: ---------------------------------------------------------

+ Servers all around the globe. South America, Africa, Asia/oceania players finally have another afps platform since qc left them in the dark

+Mouse input feels very good. Very responsive and consistent, in spite of the frame fluctuations

+Graphics aren't that bad, they're about Fortnite level. It's enough

+You can set everything from the game menu, there are tons of options and many are very sensible/refined.

+Nice match browser, you can queue for everything at the same time and you won't have to wait long even playing early in the morning or in other dead timezones.



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(Grey area: dash/weeballs. I don't have a definite opinion on those, i'd prefer if they weren't there, but they don't seem to be too broken.)

------------------------------------------The cons: ------------------------------------

-The name: we've already been over this a million times, but it's a dumb name and while it might have made someone giggle once or twice, it's just dumb and generic. Doesn't help the marketing or taking the game seriously.

-The engine is inexpicably heavy for the kind of graphics it outputs. Standard graphical settings give me only 20-30 fps more than QC set to all low settings. Wtf?!

-There are like, 3 graphical options. Quake champions has more graphical settings than Diabotical! WTF?!

- There are no explanations for any command or setting, not even a very basic one, and the crosshair settings don't stay saved, you have to re-set it every time you launch the game

- The hitboxes feels weird, completely inconsistent and unreliable. Sometimes they feel too small in general, but the shape is so weird and having non hittable limbs feels very off. It's difficult to hit in general, with any weapon.

-The sounds cues are bad. They're too childish and generic. It's difficult to spot enemies/friends and it just sounds bad and half assed.

- Some weapons are well designed, like rl, lg and railgun. The others seem half assed and have 0 personality, but the shotgun deserves a special mention: it looks atrocious, it's just a box, it feels like you're holding a tin box that farts out a handful of pebbles.

It sounds bad, and somehow it feels more inconsistent than QC's shotgun. Yes, it didn't seem possible, but apparently it is! More inconsistent than qc's shotty.

-There is no classic tdm. Classic tdm is something that is there in every single shooter, of any kind. It's the most basic multiplayer option, it's what any new player expects to find in a new game.
From this and other choices, i got the impression that the game design was mostly trying to be "not quake". Maybe that's what the game should have been named then, "NotQuake" since it's trying so hard to be different for the sake of it, and mostly in the things that make it just a worse arena fps game experience.

- The EGGBOTS:

They have TERRIBLE visibility. There is no excuse for this, was it so disgusting to give the eggbots a bright neon color? Was it so unacceptable? Was it... i dunno, "too easy to see"? I dunno what's the reasoning behind them.

Yes you can set their colour picking between millions, but they're not bright enough and even when set to maximum yellow/green they're only visible from close, at any distance they blend into the walls and you can't see shit. They also look too small.

Also spherical/bullet shaped hitboxes are only a good idea on paper. They suck in practice. CZM already found out with his Ultrono Arena.

Cilindrical/humanoid hitboxes are the best ones by feeling. Eggs were also a bad choice because that limits their design to a joke. "Eggs! Looooooool! "

Humanoid characters would have been a better choice. Even very stilized and charicatural, WOW style, Fortnite style, quake3/live style. They didn't have to be realistic.

They would have been better for a marketing angle too: you could start with one basic model, and then sell all the cool ones, like robots, aliens, futuristic armor suits, whatever all the cool stuff in the shop.
Who's gonna buy "cool eggs"?

- The first time player experience: terrbile. Simply atrocious. I am a quake veteran, i have years of afps experience, i also dabbled in unreal tournament, warsow, fortnite, call of duty, whatever.

I still struggled a lot. The first matches are BRUTAL, i can only imagine how they must feel to someone new to the genre.

There is no new player protection whatosever, zero. There's a dumb, quick tutorial that's just frustrating because it consists of a bitch talking for half an hour and never shutting up while you're confined in a closed room with a rocket launcher. Cool.

It really prepares you well for the raging spamming inferno you're going to step in.

-And the last point, and the worst of them all: the cheating.

There is already widespread cheating going on, there probably was since the first week of closed beta lets be honest.

It's unbearable. Players aren't even trying to hide it, to be coy and subtle, no: you'll be locked and tracked with lg while dodging or pinpointed mutliple times consecutively with railgun while there's a smoke ball between you and the opponent, and you got there after the ball was already in place, and you changed position after every shot. Like it isn't even there.

You sit around any corner for any amount of time and there'll be someone that "somehows" manages to "see" you while never actually seeing you directly there and perfectly bounce grenades right on your hitbox,direct hit, from any angle, without ever seeing you. The most ridicolous and over the top wallhacking and aimbotting you can witness. Completely careless, they have 0 fear of being called out or- lmao!- banned.

In any server i've been in, a good 50% of the population was cheating hard. 180 degrees flicks hitting you while you're flying in the air at 1000 ups, lg glued on you no matter how hard you're bouncing them around in close combat with rockets, completely fearless pushes all the time because they can always see if you're alone, aiming at them or running away, that kind of stuff.

It's bad, really bad. Worse than in quake champions.

That shit is gonna scare players off faster than they can dribble in.

That's gonna kill the playerbase, worse than any other issue could.

But there's nothing that can be done about that, except SBMM to contain the issue a little, but the playerbase could be already too small for that.


(TL,DR: 6 years..... for this?!)




What are your toughts and feelings about the game, now that it's been out for a couple weeks?