Hi all, I finally finished the available content after almost 30hs. Here are my suggestions on some topics:
General Gameplay
While I fully understand this game is still on EA, some likes and dislikes:
Likes:
- World traversal is the best in the genre, the world feels truly alive, and Im glad these beautifully crafted areas are meant to be revisited so often.
- Cozy/Slow paced mechanics like farming/gathering makes you have a good contrast to enjoy the game a bit more rather than running through it mindlessly.
- General game pace. I can’t stress this enough, but I personally love a non-frantic game for once in this genre. Every moment feels that it has weight, and for me there’s a lot of value in that.
- Combat. Thank you for brining challenging slow paced combat to a beautifully crafted game.
- Graphics. A work of art.
Dislikes:
- Some tutorials needed. I didn’t know what embers did until I read about them in the forums. Maybe a small hint box at least would be nice or Elsa explaining or however. No need for a pause tutorial dialogue, but perhaps a more organic way of learning how to use them would be great.
- Travelling. While I disagree with fast travel, even more so with such good traversal and masterly crafted world, I think some areas should have easier access. Getting from Sacra to Marin village right now means doing all the puzzles again, which demands a bit too much from the player to just check another town.
IDEA: Perhaps something like Skyrim where you pay an NPC to take you there, that should be good enough. - Foreground elements. While it shows the foreground elements make the setting a lot moodier and it’s great, at times they make the battles harder than they need to be when for some reason they dont go transparent. Maybe its a bug, but if it’s intended, consider having the classic transparency bubble on our character or something. I can’t fight if I can’t see whats going on.
- The Plague events should mark remaining enemies when theres less than some quantity.
Mixed:
- Food system. This one is a hard one, I love the concept of food in the game, and getting recipes. The situation is a lot better than before, but. I think food should be just a TAD easier to get somehow. I had a much better time with the food vendor, but maybe he should have stock sooner?
- Class/Attributes. I had no issues with this, but I can see why people would get confused. The loot situation isn’t great, so you’re somewhat better off not putting any points into attributes until you get a proper item, and with respecing being a out of reach for a while (I even had to google this), you’re bound to be stuck with low damage or trash items for a while.
I wouldn’t have a locked in class system because there’s no skill trees, but maybe make either respecing easier or guide the players a bit more towards the current solution.
Difficulty
I’ve always yearned for a slow paced APRG/Soulslike since Diablo 1. There’s never been something quite like it that looked good. THIS is the game I’ve been waiting for. It IS supposed to be challenging, otherwise it would be another mindless lootfest with good looks.
I’m no skilled player by any means, but the last hotfix seemed to be making the game TOO forgiving. None of the bosses except the Bear posed a lot of threat (that fight was amazing btw), which I felt like I earned that win after learning the patterns. On the other hand, I beat the Marin Woods boss in the first try, and felt kind of bummed, it didn’t feel right.
Most of the enemies now I can just MASH X (Im running gauntlets), without thinking about it a lot, which takes away some of the caution into running blindly into areas, making for a lesser experience on this front.
The first boss might just be another regular monster, he deals no damage, and dies in very few hits. Not even counting if you know parry and have a fire spell, then it’s just hitting a wet cardboard box.
Performance
Im running a 6800XT with 5600x, 16GB Ram, on FSR Quality.
While most zones are at 60+ FPS, there are times where the stutters just shatter all immersion, mostly when traversing and the odd boss fight. I hope this is a fine tuning of the beautiful engine problem, unlike some known shader issue in UE5.
Cinematics
This is by far the most beautiful game I’ve played, and the team has greatly talented artists, and it shows.
During my run however, I encountered that when my character came into the screen, for some reason an aura or glow or something came into action, dropping the performance to 10fps, and it was horribly distracting. Not sure if anyone else has encountered this but it happens.
Audio
I’m running a 5.1 system with Dolby Atmos. The environmental sound, the music, and the fights weighty sound are all incredibly amazing. BUT some cinematics have weird mixes, where some characters sound farther away than they should be and not coming out of center channel. Seline upon her arrival to Sacra is the first example on this, she sounds like shes 10m away, while Garrick comes out perfectly clear.
Another example is Odessa’s cutscenes when in Marin Woods.
One last bit, having the Ori composer on board, the music default setting should be a tad louder. I had to tune everything down 80% to make the music at least present.