The new crucible is definitely better than the old one in so many ways. However, it needs more. It gets boring fast especially in single-player. Multiplayer would probably add more game time to the crucible system as it is just more fun doing with your friends online. Playing it single-player I am already bored with it sadly.
Crucible needs more diversity. You need to make more maps or implement some kind of random map generator. I don’t mean new environments, but just using already existing assets to make many more map layouts. There are not that many map layouts right now. Especially with 10 chambers per run, the map layouts become very repetitive. And that brings me to another point.
The 10 chambers per run is way too many. Even with 2 chambers skip echoes it quickly becomes a chore/grind. And on top of that, dying at the boss feels extremely bad because you have to do the 9 chambers again to reach the boss. There were times where I just exit the game after I died to Echo Knight because I don’t feel like doing the 9 chambers again. You don’t get that much from it either once you unlock all the things in the Crucible. I think Crucible should be a short 5-7 minutes gameplay loop. Maybe 3 chambers max. 2 chambers with normal enemies and 3rd with the boss. And the boss should be randomized as well. How many times can you fight the echo knight? You could just customise the final chamber to resemble a map layout of another boss fight so instead of Echo Knight we could fight Warrick or Falstead for example.
If the 3 chamber system is something you consider too short or too little, then make Crucible to have 12 chambers. Every 3rd will be a boss fight with the 12th being the Echo Knight. So we have 2 chambers of normal monsters and 3rd the boss fight. But then we would need to have many more bosses in the game to choose from. Dozens of bosses… The Vendor NPC could appear after chamber 5 but it wouldn’t count as a separate chamber. It would just be in between chamber 5 and chamber 6.
After defeating each boss, we should get 3 chests with materials inside for upgrading and enchanting items. I think it’s a good idea to obtain weapons and armors in open world, and then the only way to obtain materials for upgrading and enchanting fast would be doing the crucible. This way it doesn’t make any part of the game obsolete after leveling up to max lvl.
Another thing that is needed (I think) is some difficulty setting in the Crucible. After doing the blood offering there should be a pop-up window asking you what difficulty tier of crucible you’d like to do. The higher the difficulty, the more rewarding the run. I feel like the current difficulty will be too much for your average casual player, especially the echo knight fight.
Hopefully the multiplayer update comes soon. This game is going to feel much better playing with friends. Once you play through the open world/story solo and get to max level, It gets boring fast in single-player. We don’t even need to have full pvp multiplayer system implemented yet, but just a simple co-op for now would do. It would be better than nothing. I have many friends who would love to try the game, but they refuse to buy it until there is multiplayer.
For multiplayer I feel like we need a separate Crucible mode. So the current Crucible we have would be only for solo runs. For multiplayer we probably need a different chambers layout to accommodate 2-4 players. I think it would also be nice to have different enemy structure in open world when playing multiplayer so instead of encountering 1-2 enemies, we would encounter groups of 3-5 enemies and they would consist of 1-2 damage dealer enemies, 1 tank enemy and 1 priest/support enemy. So we would have to think about taking out the priest/support/buff npc first so it doesn’t buff the other enemies. Same should be applied to multiplayer version of the crucible where instead of just enemies acting independently, we would have enemies acting more in a group structure with each enemy having a different role.