Pros
- Really beautiful and atmospheric unique world that has high level of immersion
- High quality voice acting and writing
- Combat system (excluding the UI and the staggers)
- Skills are really interesting and powerful
- Good amount of loot - not too much not too little
- Feeling of progression overall
Cons
- UI during combat is insanely hard to read. With more hectic battles it´s almost impossible to make out your amount of stamina. Wish it would be just a bar..
- Artificial pacing such as: farming for health item ingredients, not being able to fast travel between bonfires, durability of gear (especially fishing rods)
- Bounties are really fun but you can´t repeat them. I don´t understand why.
- Staggers. Even with high poise you are gonna get staggered by certain enemies (BEARS, BIRD GUYS) all the time. That is NOT fun gameplay.
- Purple items. I dunno how lucky I need to get to actually fit one of those really strong deficits into my build.
My overall experience in a few sentences:
First 10 hours of progression had a nice power creeping curve where you actually felt a lot powerful after upgrades and level ups. After level 15´ish something happens and you farm for upgrades just to keep up with monster health and damage. Cheesing certain (broken?) and running away from some monsters just because they are too obnoxious to engage with. Running level 24 “battlemage” with 2 handed staff. Don´t get me wrong - I really love the game. It has been really fun and it has great potential. But with a great game comes a great responsibility.
Stats and gear:
First off I haven´t played the game before so I do not know what has been nerfed or buffed neither I do know what kind of builds actually are “meta” nor do I care. What I feel like atm is that I have hit a wall around level 15 and after that all I do is get 1 hit in and run and repeat after using a focus skill to actually deal damage. That playstyle starts to get pretty tedious at some point. I figure I wasn´t the only one dealing with that. Once you get to level +23 aroundish and hit the upgrades the power comes back from wherever it was hiding for several levels. It´s weird like first it goes up, then you hit a flat FOR A LONG TIME and then up again. Maybe it´s some kind of hidden scaling similar to what Avowed had that you took 5x damage and dealt 5x damage if your gear was “underleveled”. I don´t know but something is not right here..
I feel like the difficulty of some monsters in this game are fucking insane. Especially bears and the bird guys are so ridiculously overpowered and aggressive. That bow bird guy who is afloat most of the time and barrages them arrows who stun you after 1 shot even with high poise. Also their hitboxes do not match their skills. Mostly other monsters are pretty well telegraphed and beatable but sweet baby jesus those damned bird guys..
Broken monsters:
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Bears. These guys are jacked to the teeth. They relentlessly slap you to death with no downtime on their skills whatsoever. Thicker armor and parrying doesn´t seem to help at all.
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The bird guys. Yes if you have seem them you know them. These guys are on Adderal and Meth at the same time. If they are not flying or throwing something they are executing a never ending ruthless combos with barely any downtime. Best part is they call for backup pretty much instantly after they are aggroed.
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“Flown from the Coop” -knight. This guy has infinite life potions? After the narrow time window you have for dealing damage after avoiding 15 traps on the ground he literally just heals up to full health with no chance to interrupt him whatsoever.
Frustrating mechanics: (some of the mechanics might exist but as of now I haven´t access to them)
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Repair, repair, repair. It serves zero purpose. Zero purpose. If it doesn´t add to the game it is NOT needed. Especially the ***king fishing rods. You need them for the best healing items and the rod gets destroyed after like 6 fish and you need 2 fish for 1 item. That´s in-***king-sane. When you are fighting a boss and get wrecked you spend a lot of your hard earned currency (and playtime) going back and forth repairing your gear. If they want their durability at least make it so that boss deaths don´t break your gear (and replenish some of your health items???)
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Bad drops from bosses. Yeah. It´s possible to get like 1 blue and 1 white item from a really difficult boss. Self explanatory. Should not be the case.
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Vanishing loot. Best example is the trap-knight from the “Flown From the Coop” -bounty who just regularly kills himself at some point by jumping off a cliff or some shit and then you are awarded with no loot. Why can´t the loot just drop at the edge of the cliff where this suicidal maniac jumped off in the first place.
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Upgrading weapons and armor. So some weapons are WAY WAY harder to upgrade because the system works in a way where you get like 4 easy upgrades and the 5th one has crazy rare stuff that drops from god knows where. This can soft lock you in some areas because you went to the “wrong” area where the enemies don´t drop the needed upgrade materials.
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Runes. These little bad boys are bad just because they suck. 3% heat damage, 3% life steal, 3% healing. Come on. At least let us roll them again or something.
QoL
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Let us use fast travel whenever we want to, like return to the last bonfire visited. I don´t understand why we can´t travel between the bonfires once we have cleared the area and killed the boss. The game contains a lot of traveling and making it slow and tedious doesn´t add to the game at all. Maybe you could get a “Sigil of Recall” from the first area boss which let´s you teleport to the last bonfire visited with no downsides or something.
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Runes. I´ve played the game for 30 hours and have found like 15 runes of which at least half are unusable. The stuff that´s sold in the city hasn´t been any better. Bad as they are at least let us a pop a new rune into an old shitty roll or something.
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Food cooking quantity increase (probably early game problem). I dunno what to say about this but I´ve spent way too much time farming for food ingredients because I need almost 1 food per fight. If I get hit once I probably need to heal up. Looking for “healing items” doesn´t really add to the game. At least in boss fights give us a back let´s say half of the food items we lost or something I dunno the solution but this mechanic doesn´t add to the game..
I´ll be adding and editing stuff as I progress to the endgame.