After 300 hours, 6 builds over 15 different realms I’ve developed a few opinions on the game.
Firstly, the game looks beautiful and the combat is fantastic. The first time you land on the beach and struggle your way to getting your ass handed to you by Warwick is fantastic. But only the first time. Having to do that again on new characters gets old pretty quick. Subsequent builds had me sending in a level 30 ringer to bulldoze my way to Sacrament. There I had gear and exp potions waiting in my original realm, which allowed me to level up quickly.
Before patch 2 the only way to try a weapon was to create a new build and often I upgraded a character to a high enough level just to try a weapon only to abandon that build because the weapon’s move-set sucked. Now at least we can equip and try the weapon. The new respec feature might have saved me some heartache but I think the cost is a little prohibitive. High respec cost doesn’t encourage build diversity in my opinion, it does the opposite. It makes you weary of spending your hard earned embers, preferring to stick with what’s tried and tested. Making a new build isn’t that difficult if you farm the crucible, because you’ll end up with tons of exp potions.
I have 15 realms but only the first one is fully upgraded. The others have level 3 Grinnich, which have allowed me to get a lot of upgrade materials. The cost of this has been spending a lot of time farming the crucible to get the coin to buy everything I want. So I have an abundance of upgrade materials now as you can imagine. In my first realm I’ve got 2 houses that only contain chests. One has only upgrade gear, the other has weapons and armour.
I am absolutely sick of going through the crucible. It’s boring and you only die in some ridiculous way like rolling off an edge. The ledges in the crucible are the most dangerous things in there. I really wish they would stick a whisper before the Echo knight boss room and let us try more than once. In my experience, the absolute key to winning in boss fights is practice and running the crucible for a single attempt is discouraging. How many times in souls games did I get my ass handed to me only to get right back into the saddle to get my ass handed handed to me again, over and over because I wanted to learn the fight. The crucible feels like ground hog day. The idea of doing another 7 rooms discourages me from wanting to do it any more. Having a bonfire or at least a short cut through the rooms you’ve cleared to the boss gate encourages you to try again. It’s absolutely no fun running the crucible no matter how easy it has become for a single attempt only to die because you rolled off the ledge! Yes, it s skill thing I know. But it still sucks.
The other thing which I really dislike is having healing on a timer. I think the devs created a problem because you can run around the game with almost unlimited healing and they decided to hamstring your ability to heal as a result by restricting often you could heal. Most of the time it isn’t a problem because you can use heal aura and heal right up. Heal aura means you rarely use food to heal anyway, But in the Echo Knight fight it’s much more a problem and it makes you want to use weapons, armour and rings which give you health on damage dealt to compensate and this makes the game even easier. I hear people railing against the meta and about wanting build diversity but when the cost of losing is so high you just want every advantage you can get. Limiting how many times I can heal but letting me heal when I want is a much better solution.
I also don’t like the RNG in its current form. You are constantly getting gear and enchanting it in the hope of hitting the jackpot and inevitably turning your gear into trash. Sometimes the enchanting gods smile on you and you hit the enchantment jackpot but it’s just too random. How is it that cursed gear with the right stats is better than legendary gear! That doesn’t seem right to me. I did that Darak fight in the sewer 7 times too just to try and get his sword and only once did he drop it. Ridiculous. I won’t he doing that any more. Bosses absolutely should drop their legendary weapons every time.
Players want the power to create their own build and this type of randomisation does the opposite and means some players will be better off than others just because they got a good roll. It’s not a fair system. The choice and the power to build your character in your own fashion should be in the players hands, not in the hands of some RNG. At the moment, much of that choice has taken away from me and put in the hands of luck! The power to create a kick ass build should be mine and mine alone and achieved by hard work and skill in the game. Putting gems on weapons and gear and carrying rings allow you more freedom and flexibility to develop the build you want. Developing these aspects of the game are favourable to the current RNG mechanic. Gems could be removable too without destroying the weapon too. Any good blacksmith worth his salt could do it.
Other things like limiting fast travel is just unnecessary. Weapon degradation is just annoying at best. I know that the devs are trying to move the genre forward but there’s no need to fix things that aren’t broken or reinvent the wheel regarding some of the mechanics in the game. Especially fast travel or healing,
Anyway, props to the devs. The game is beautiful and a work in progress. Some of the mechanics raise more questions than answers. The game is great though,keep it up. Unfortunately though, I need some new content to keep me playing at this stage. Not enough in patch 2 to keep me playing right now. Looking forward to seeing what’s coming though. Very excited about the future of this game.
