Game is NOT Co-op Multiplayer

Wicked Feedback
1

…and you need to fix that.

I’ve split my time between a single-player game and a duo game with a buddy. So this is where my perspective originates. Single-player is pretty much fine.

In the duo game, however, I always feel like I’m competing with my friend for access to the content (instead of sharing the content, together.) Since he’s the melee guy, and I’m the ranged guy, he’s out front (naturally) which means he sees all the content, first, before I have a chance to even know it’s there. Whether it’s a chest, a resource node or even enemies, there is less (or zero) left for me to access after him.

Someone in another thread described this game as being good to team up for specific boss fights, but bad for exploring the world and story together, and in its current state, I agree with that assessment. Here are some things that I think would change that:

  1. Individual Loot - I heard the reasoning about treasure chest conga lines, and 4 guys running a single-player game together, but there are other ways around those besides sharing all the loot. In the 1P game, I have gobs of loot. It works, because even though 80% of what I find is trash and gets discarded, I’m still able to make steady progress on my gear. In the duo game, the progress is MUCH slower. If you’re going to have a 4:1 trash:useful loot system, then every player in the game needs their OWN gob of loot. (In a 4P game, you might even need 4.5 gobs of loot.) Easiest way to do that is individual loot with a scaling pool system.

This is the most minor issue the multiplayer part of the game has, and if it were the only one, it probably wouldn’t need correction.

2. Shared XP Distribution - Neither my buddy nor I are running any XP boosts in our game, but he earns hundreds more XP-per-hour than me, even though we’re staying together and engaging what content we can, together. I can only guess that there’s some damage-based XP distribution system (unless the realm host gets a boost), but in a game where content is zero-sum, this is a bad idea. It’s especially bad when it interacts with the next point. All the XP should be shared.

  1. Either Go All-in or Fold on Friendly Fire - Currently, the damage from friendly fire is a joke. It’s not even noticeable. This is fine if you’re the guy receiving the FF, but as the guy dishing it out, your XP is getting nerfed because your melee buddy never even thinks about lanes of fire (see #2.) If the design goal is for players to be conscientious about combat positioning, you’ve got to make FF hurt. Also, some attack animations, while playing, (such as the suplex move) negate a second player’s ability to damage that target, as do attacks that knock mobs around. Attacks would just be better if they homed-in against anything except an enemy’s avoidance abilities. Alternately, you could just split the XP and none of this would matter any more.

Summary - Those are the most glaring issues that need to be adjusted to make Multiplayer truly cooperative. I’d very much like a game where players can work together, making different, but equivalent contributions to solving the challenges the game offers, but in its current state, one player ends up feeling like the kid brother, holding a disconnected controller, watching someone play the game. Definitely, would not recommend this to any of my friends, except as an interesting single-player game.

2 Likes
3

EXP is not based on damage at all. It is based on the ammount of “balls of lights” (that are the exp) that you absorb. If for some reasons you doesn’t get all of them for EACH killed enemy, you lose some exp.

IF for some reasons you split and kill monsters, you’ll have to REMEMBER to go the same way the other team member has gone, to recover the exp light balls. We are playing since the beta coop and we never had issues leveling together..

And about loot.. it is NOT an issue. It is NOT slow. We have so much loot that we have to buy all the houses and fill them with chests for the ammount of crap we have gained just within a couple of days from the start of the beta.

You are not supposed to just skip all the exploration, there is so much stuff to loot around, secret areas and so on, that you’ll be filled really quick.

2 Likes
4

Just don’t play with that guy if he takes all the loot, don’t wait for you and play with you like you are shooting bot, not a real partner in the story based game

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5

My friend plays melee and I’m ranged. I tend to gobble up all the loot and farm all the resources. He even told me that himself, so now I leave more for him to pick up.

So it’s not a problem of the game, it sounds more like a problem between the two of you in terms of play-compatibility.

Btw, playing ranged doesn’t mean you have to be behind your melee friend. You can charge in and get behind monsters. That way he can get an easier backstab, and they need to focus their effort in two directions. You could try if this makes it more fun for you :+1:

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6

I don’t have a problem with shared loot, but one thing that would greatly alleviate the feedback I’ve seen is the ability to simply drop loot. Like the little bag when you pick up a chest in your house.

Currently, if I pick up a bow that the archer in my party needs, I need to: ask them to stop moving, face in front of them, and initiate a trade. It would feel so much smoother to be able to drop it and say “hey look at this”.

2 Likes
7

100% agree. I believe there’s at least one forum post for exactly that feature request :+1:

1 Like
8

Friendly fire was an incredibly naive idea and needs to be scrapped entirely. The overwhelming majority of encounters in this game are in tight areas or corridors and blocking each other’s shots is simply unavoidable.

They designed the levels, placed the monsters and allowed them to push your character around; simple playtesting would have determined this a failed concept.

Another poorly thought-out system is handing in bounties and challenges on a shared realm. In a group of 3 only whoever loads into town first and makes it to the hand in first gets all the loot and, by extension, all the silver.

As new players, we didn’t know this and so our mate was sitting at 40s or 50s at the end of our first night playing while the rest of us had 2s or3s.

How about making that particular NPC demand a full-party channel and a vote-ui for what to do with rewards? Why can only one player interact with an NPC or a stash at a time?

This game is incredibly clunky; we’ve had 15 years of Dark Souls, 20 years of WoW and 25 years of Diablo, there’s simply no excuse.

1 Like