Hello, I recently sunk over 30 hours into this game over the course of a couple days with my partner (we were REALLY addicted) and over the course of reaching the ‘endgame’ together, with no more story quests or locations to find I’ve collected together various thoughts about things I’d like to see changed or improved upon in some way or another.
To give a basic idea of my knowledge on these types of games, I’ve played the entire FromSoft catalogue, from Demon’s Souls to Elden Ring, games from other developers like Lords of the Fallen and Outward alongside a number of isometric ARPGS including titles like Diablo 2/3 and Path of Exile. If it’s got Souls elements, I’ve probably played it.
It’s my hope that any number of things I list off here prove to be useful feedback, as I genuinely loved playing this game but there were a couple pain points.
- Gear enchantments and re-rolling.
Currently trying to chase that ‘god roll’ for a weapon or armour piece is an extremely tedious waiting cycle of letting an area’s fog of war creep back then running through set paths to hit up as many chests and orange item orbs as possible for embers.
I’d personally like to see alternatives using currency, such as paying to disenchant an item, as we rack up quite a lot of money towards the endgame with not a whole lot to spend it on after acquiring a house.
A lot of people seem to share the same sentiment that Fallen Embers drop off in drop rate later in the game and it seems like it could use a buff to enable more experimentation and re-rolling. - Enemies can ‘wombo-combo’ you when you’re knocked down.
This simply shouldn’t happen. It’s a staple in Souls games that if a big attack knocked you on your back, you’re invulnerable long enough to stand back up and potentially roll away from any follow ups.
I’ve died at least a few times to plague bosses because I messed up once, got knocked down and was unable to do anything at all while they continued hitting me with their combo until I died. - Lack of things to spend money on/shops shouldn’t be tied to real life days.
As I mentioned in the first point, we end up just accruing a ridiculous amount of money in the late game with barely anything to spend it on after acquiring a house.
I think having the various shops refresh more often would alleviate this alongside allowing us to find new runes and such to play with in a more reasonable amount of time. Waiting 24 hours to see if a new spell I want to use shows up in the enchantment shop isn’t all that great. - An option to disable friendly fire.
Even though friendly fire does negligable damage, the main annoyance comes from the fact we can stun each other. There was no worse feeling than winding up a charged heavy attack only for my partner to accidentally knock me out of it.
A toggle option/more fine tuning over how a multiplayer realm works would be nice to allow people to pick and choose what they want their experience to be like. - Pure Dexterity seems to be underperforming/Any semi-coherent build should work.
I played a Strength Faith combo for our run while my partner opted for pure Dexterity. As we reached end game my partner felt their damage was seriously falling off, to the point they did some searching online and found most people heavily advise against pure Dexterity. They inevitably re-specced.
It seems to be a wide consensus in the community that going for pure Dexterity is a bad time.
Any build that’s relatively coherent with a decent enchantment setup and proper stat allocation should be viable enough to feel comfortable, that’s always been the magic of Souls games and care should be taken to make sure underperformers are brought up to snuff. - Consider adding a method to change the scaling on gear.
I’m sure you know in Souls games you can infuse weapons to change their scaling, some work better than others but it gives you a whole lot more freedom of weapon choice and you can make just about anything work well if you’re determined enough to use that specific weapon on a different stat.
I’d really like to see that freedom brought over to this game. - A transmog/layered armour system.
Fashionsouls is love, fashionsouls is life. Since this game has no actual PvP (aside from duelling your friends for fun) I feel like it’s not really encroaching on balance to consider adding a system to wear what you want on top of your actual gear.
Please consider letting us play dress up while still fine tuning our gear stats. - Plague rarity doesn’t feel worth the tradeoff in most cases.
I’d like to see more incentive to actually use plagued gear, a single extra enchantment for what is usually a fairly hefty penalty just doesn’t feel worth it right now and I found myself just outright avoiding using that rarity outside of getting an indestrucable facet paired with unrepairable to negate it. - The focus system struggles with sustainability/costs a little high for most runes.
Most spell runes I found typically cost 100 or more focus to cast, by the endgame I was roughly level 28 with about 260 focus. I could cast maybe two buffs/weapon skills then be out of focus. Regaining focus feels a little slow and more often than not this led to me completely ignoring weapon runes entirely, favouring the 180s buffs like the stamina utility rune and the melee damage up rune.
Overall I feel like focus needs some amount of natural regen outside of using a specific gem and/or it needs to be regained more quickly from smacking enemies. - Staves and Wands should have a built-in ‘free’ ranged attack.
When my dex-oriented partner found their first bow, I looked forward to pairing a faith staff or wand into my build to have some ranged utility, only to find by default you.. melee things with them. This leaves magical catalysts purely as ‘rune sticks’ you put different spell runes on and only swap to in order to cast one of those runes. Paired with my gripes about focus costs and such, this again found itself being heavily neglected by me as there was just no incentive to really use it on a Strength Faith build when the alternatives were expending my focus on buffs and going full melee. I had really hoped to see more of a mix of close and ranged combat on a mixed build like this.
I’d suggest having the elemental infusion on a staff/wand change the element of this basic attack. - AMD GPUs capable of ‘upgrading’ FSR currently cannot upgrade FSR in this game.
More of a minor thing, but I noticed you use FSR 3.1.5 in this game. Certain GPUs like the 9070 XT are able to automatically upgrade FSR 3.1 or higher into FSR 4. However the Adrenalin overlay reported it wasn’t able to do this.
I’ve heard some people mention this is due to the game being DX11 and not DX12.
With that said, adding DX12 as a toggle option might be good for some people? - The offhand slot needs some love/flexibility.
The very first thought I had when I found my first wand was to put it in the offhand slot so I can keep my main weapon readied and cast spells at the same time. However weapons are currently hardcoded to go into the right hand slot.
Adding the ability to put certain right hand items into the left hand slot would majorly benefit build variety and flexibility. - Gear Scaling lettering.
How much am I getting out of my Faith on this weapon that scales with Strength and Faith? Is scaling just always the same no matter what on every weapon? I have no idea.
More information on how my stats affect the weapons I use would be nice, such as the lettering system other soulslikes use. - Make it clear what enchantments work on what gear pieces ahead of time.
“Damn I just extracted this weapon enchantment not realising it won’t work on this armour piece, there’s an ember wasted.”
I think that’s about it for now, I’ll probably add more to this later if anything else comes to mind but hopefully this provides some useful insights that can elevate this from a pretty good game to a pretty great game.