Eclipse Lighting: This makes it extremely difficult for me to focus on the screen or make out anything. My eyes are not young, and they do not do well with low light situations. This is the game equivalent of driving at dusk, and it is causing me to squint, with a healthy side of eyestrain and headache. I’m pretty sure this feedback came up in beta repeatedly about the dim lighting on Siptah and that got fixed. It’s unfortunate to see it back again in Exiled Lands.
Blood crystals: Unless I missed it, the only place that they tell where to find blood crystals is…they don’t. This wouldn’t be terrible if you didn’t need to use a rare resource locator spell in the right area to find the two mobs that drop it. As it is, it’s a step away from the linear step-by-step instructions that the Journey has shifted to, and that’s confusing and frustrating. If it is supposed to be “fun” to discover this, it’s not. 0 yoodles received. Also, the Challenge step for ‘Harvest Blood Crystals’ shows someone hitting a rock, which is just flat out deceptive. It also wants me to hit 10 of them in one day to progress that challenge. Given how few and far between the nodes are, this is not happening on a public server. Oh, and I hit one of the rocknoses with a modded starmetal pick and got 12 blood crystal. I think maybe they could’ve picked one, or even 2, of these manufactured obstacles in the process… but all of them? It’s not fun. I’m not discovering anything other than the fact that I need to hit up a tutorial from someone who did this beta to figure out how to do anything but wander around and get frustrated.
New Dungeon? The quest for the new dungeon thing suggests I get blood crystals (I’m sure you can tell how I feel about that by now >.>). The merchants behind it sell things for blood crystals and heads, as well. I’m assuming I need to do the dungeon to find the heads. I need crystals to get into the dungeon. I think. The transport pad Mem suggested wants me to give it 30 blood crystals. That’s not horrible. Perusing hints, though, I have found suggestions that I will be murdered and lose all my stuff if I don’t complete what’s in there in a certain time limit. Not sure if this is true, but it was enough to make me log off the public/Exiled Lands server and stay logged off. I was already salty, and I’d already lost one direwolf to spending more time staring at a tutorial on my second monitor than the Unnamed City I was standing in. Losing more thralls/gear to a surprise dungeon mechanic was not in the cards for me today.
Arcane Cabinet: I understand they didn’t want to have something seem pay-to-win, with the biggest storage that wasn’t a vault coming from the battlepass. What they should have done to fix it was make regular boxes or cabinets bigger and lower the hit points of the arcane cabinets. This was an aesthetic benefit, for people who did not want a wing full of (not snapping) ‘stackable’ boxes ruining the look of their storage areas. Vaults are for PvP. They’re awful for PVE and design. I was already raging about having to log in to play the new content and instead have to redo my entire storage system to be able to put anything away at all, since all my cabinets were now 500% full. I was full-on bleeding from my eyesockets after looking at how those boxes all looked stacked like a drunken toddler with legos, even after I took a lot of time trying to stack them. Then I went to play the new content. (I had, before I got in there and realized any of this, dropped $50 into Crom Coins…because cool stuff, right? I am the poster child for regret.) They lose nothing by letting people organize in a more aesthetic way. I’m not sure how their system load works, but isn’t it going to be worse to load 30 metal boxes than 3 curio cabinets anyway?
At this point, I’m only going to try golems on my (heavily modded) rented server (which is Siptah). I’m having a very hard time wanting to spend any time on the public server anymore, because competition for resources is just the straw that breaks the back of the new blood crystal system. I am definitely not paying for another rental server to run Exiled Lands just to do that plot line anymore. If it can’t be run on a public server, I won’t bother with it. It’s supposed to be fun. It didn’t work out that way for me.
I’m sure when I get back into Siptah after a cooldown (a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, I dunno), I will be able to stop and appreciate the new battlepass items (when it’s possible to do the challenges, which it wasn’t for me today…I could not get the things to make a golem part, or make a golem, or find 10 blood crystal nodes, or kill a Kwhatever it is). It was just insanely frustrating to face all of those hurdles en masse. I legit didn’t get any “fun” to go with my frustration. For me, who plays a battlepass and then take a break because we’re burning out… coming back this time burned me out after 3 hours of just trying to get one new thing started. I finally found one crystal creature. Killed it. Realized I got 12 crystal and only 1 tick on my ‘harvest 10 crystal’…and then I logged out. The bright side? I only have…8 (maybe more?) more completely full arcane curio cabinets to somehow reorganize into individual material storage boxes stacked like the back room at a Dollar General. Just the touch my bases needed! (Kill me. Oh, wait, that’s what the dungeon is for!)