Hi there,
I wanted to make a general topic about some of my overall feedback regarding the game. I’ll start off with a short introduction and a bit of positive feedback!
Introduction & positives
So I first played this game around two years ago. At the time I didn’t end up spending more than a few hours to it. It just felt that it was pretty early in the development and that there really wasn’t that much into the world. I started to play it again a few weeks ago and this time around we got a lot more of our gaming community to join us - at most we’ve had almost 10 people online at the same time, which for us is pretty huge! Even though we have some dozens of active gamers on our community, we just don’t often all get into the same game at the same time.
I’ve really liked what you guys have introduced in the last few years. Great job on that!
The harvesting/crafting gameplay loop feels really good at the moment. The end tier stuff like map rooms really take a significant amount of resources and it feels like an achievement when you can do it the first few times. The progression from the lowest tier of items to the end tier is pretty sweet and ramps up nicely when you’re playing with a small group of friends.
One of my favorite things about the game is the aesthetics. The game doesn’t have the most complex models or the best animations, that much is true, but, what the game has is an uniform design, a lot of good visual effects and an expertly created color palette. Stuff just fits together really well. As a result, the game looks great and adventuring around and building stuff feels really nice.
Criticisms
There’s a few departments that I still find a bit lacking. One is boss fights. The idea of them is great and I like the diversity, attack patterns and challenge offered by them. However, the balance is really wacky at the moment. For example, the first boss of the game, Abyssal Remnant, would need over 200 hits from an iron pike to kill for a single player. For a duo of players, it’s really not recommended to try it until they’re level 30+… Which takes quite a decent time to get to, if you’re also building a base and exploring stuff rather than just power-leveling up.
Bosses are still extremely glitchy. We tried Abyssal Remnant twice with a group and neither time did it actually attack us more than once or twice. On the first time, we couldn’t kill it because we didn’t have enough arrows and it would not attack us so we could reach it with our melee weapons. For the next time, we restarted the server and stocked up some ammo. Well, again, it did not actually attack us, but we all had +100 steel arrows per person, so we just slowly chipped it to death with the arrows.
The mounts and pets are super fun, but not very balanced. Firstly, you can carry as much as you want on them, which feels both unrealistic and also trivializes harvesting e.g. iron too much - you can literally put thousands of ores on a wolf and it still runs with you like nothing. Secondly, combat is not really very well balanced. There’s no stamina loss when fighting from the horses. So you can e.g. use an heavy attack on a spear to inflict bleed on enemies while kiting them endlessly. We duo-killed Rotbranch with just tactic at around level 35 or so. Just rode around it and stabbed it with spears until it died. The pets can be massively overpowering, too, once you level them up.
The AI in purges and with NPCs would still require quite a bit of honing to make these experiences more thrilling. The purge AI seems to mostly warp around and not really end up doing much anything of particular danger. We could quite easily just get the enemies stuck in various obstacles and then stab them to death with spears.
More positives!
Okay, let’s get back to the positives!
I really like how you guys approached lore with the game. Finding pieces of lore from rune stones and from ghosts and whatnot is really fun. Feels immersive and enjoyable.
Aside of a few outliers, I generally speaking enjoy the weapon and attribute balance. At least for PvE, I don’t think there’s a set of weapons, armor or attributes that would be completely unviable. Of course, there are “meta” builds and weapons, and sure some builds and weapons are better for a particular thing than others, but still - it feels like you can choose how you want to play the game and you aren’t overtly punished for that. Light armors might be a bit weak at the moment, since it’s not really completely clear how far enemies can hit, how you can dodge them, and server sync is not perfect. But oh well - it’s not too bad, IMO.
Voice acting, even though there isn’t much of it, is really pretty good. Overall the audio side has been done well.
Future wishes
Aside of what’s already been stated, there’s a few things I’d like to see, perhaps as a part of a larger DLC or so:
Procedural content. It’d be really nice to have more procedural elements to the game. I don’t mean to say that the whole map should be randomized, I think it’s a good thing that it isn’t since that has allowed you guys to make some really great locales. But there could be e.g. a few caves with random populations; some dungeon entrance could be randomized from several possibilities; there could even be a rogue-like dungeon or two as a DLC. e.g. Grim Dawn did that and it worked great.
More fine-tuned NPC AI controls. It would be nice if the NPCs could be set to e.g. try to flee if they are low on health or if you could control how they switch weapons. For example, there could be two weaponsets on each NPC and you could use a command to tell them to which to use. So you could use a NPC with a truncheon more effectively. And it’d be great if you could command your follower(s) to flee or if they could do it on their own according to their behavior settings.
Improved Purge. Well already touched this higher up, but yeah, the Purge experience is a bit lackluster atm. The enemies have a habit of spawning into your base if they can’t easily enough find a route inside. They tend to get stuck on various obstacles. Etc.
Improved network sync, AI for better boss fights. Boss fights are a bit of a hit or miss. Some are fun and great. With some, the AI has a habit of just not functioning well, at least on dedicated servers. I think there would be a lot of potential in giving players more enjoyment if the boss fights functioned better.
Balance pass. A lot of content has been added on top of old content. This has led to some boss fights being extremely difficult, while others are very easy; Some monsters are out of proportion for their zones, others… too easy. Once you guys get your pet/thrall balancing done, I think there really should be a wider look into how the whole game is balanced from level 1 to 60+. I really love when the difficulty hits the sweet spot where you manage to proceed on your own skill, and where the content doesn’t feel very easy nor impossible, and while this game generally speaking does better with finding this balance than most games, it’s still veered a bit off course.
Long post, but yeah, just wanted to give my overall impressions of what’s done well, what doesn’t work so well and what I would love to see in the future.
Thanks for reading & really well done with the game, you guys deserve to be proud of your work!
Good atmosphere, pretty nice boss fights, nice design. Sometimes these kind of dungeon and boss themes can end up feel a bit cringy, but here it really wasn’t the case at all. The writing, voice acting, visual effects, environment design and dungeon pacing worked nicely together.