Hey, I’ve played the game for a little while now and thought I would give some feedback on a couple of topics. I’ve only got 2 characters in endgame, one in normal, one in hard. Cleared all content on both.
There’s quite a few topics, which I know might be a bit annoying to read through in a single post, but I’ll split it up into sections, so it’s easy to find what’s interesting.
Item balance
I’m not gonna go into bows and caster weapons, firstly, because they’re clearly not in the right spot at the moment, secondly, because I haven’t played enough around with them to have a qualified opinion on them.
I think the balancing between weapons is incredibly tight and I’m truly impressed how no melee weapons are true outliers for the most part. What I also enjoy, is that despite the very low numbers we’re playing around with atm, you can truly feel how every stat and stat point makes a difference. I hope you guys can continue to make this scaling work into what is presumably higher player levels and possibly crazier enchantments.
I cannot stress enough how delightful it is to have a game with very few, but very meaningful modifiers, that synergize so well with each other. Every stat is interesting and has potential in the game, all the way down to weight and durability.
I wanna start off with an example of what I think is an absolutely incredible level of balancing between some weapons.
Originally, I wanted to use this example to show how the balance of Ogre Club was completely off, compared to the other 3, but the longer I looked into the interchangeable balance between these 4 weapons, I got completely blown away. The weapons involved are as followed:
(unfortunately I’m not allowed to post screenshots, so you’ll have to do with links)
Cleric’s Mace:
Fast attack speed
3-hit combo in a 2 attack chain, meaning you only spend 2/3rds the stamina for normal attacks.
Gapclosing running attack-chain.
The Last Word:
Slightly faster attack speed than Cleric’s Mace
Normal 3-hit combo
Misses out on gapclose on running attack
Ogre’s Club:
Medium attack speed
3-hit combo, last 2 attacks deal 20% more damage, meaning you deal a bit more than 13% extra damage over a 3-hit combo, at the cost of attack speed.
Spirit Edge:
Pretty much the same moveset as the Cleric’s Mace
Normal 3-hit combo
Lower base damage
Inherent Ice infusion, which frees a gem+facet slot, that potentially will make the weapon stronger than the other weapons, for an ice build.
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What I’m trying to show with this example is that despite 3 of these weapons have the exact same attack values, and 2 of them have almost identical movesets, they all have a distinct quality that makes neither of them superior. This is truly incredible for a game to pull off. Balance like this is not consistent across the board, but I really hope it will be looked at and be brought to this standard.
And I generally still think Ogre Club is still slightly weaker than the rest, but not in a significant way.
If I am to make one criticism here, it would be that it is absolutely unacceptable that Ogre Club has less poise damage than 2 of these weapons. Both in terms of feel of the weapon, but also because it has a significantly slower attack speed than the rest.
Which brings me to my next point: Poise damage needs to be looked at.
It is absolutely unacceptable that slower weapons do so little poise damage. Personally I don’t like 2 handed weapons atm, and it is solely because of poise.
1-handers have too much poise damage and 2-handers got too little. I think on paper the poise numbers kinda align with the attack speed, but it doesn’t work out in practice.
Let’s give a theoretical example:
1-hander with 2 aps, 10 poise damage
2-hander with 1 aps, 20 poise damage
These 2 weapons should be balanced, but because the 2-hander has to be a lot more deliberate with their attacks, the fast weapon wins out in most cases. A fast weapon will find many more openings than a 2-hander.
Besides balancing reasons, it would help the 2-handers feel a lot more weighty thematically.
One last thing about 2-handers is their early level strength. At higher levels the damage between 1- and 2-handers is sufficiently different, but at early levels they simply get completely outclassed. Like pretty much the exact same damage at half the speed.
Stats and runes
I don’t know how relevant this is, when you’re introducing a class system at some point, but as it stands now, stats are simply too boring.
As it stands now, there is no difference between a dex build and a faith build, except for some arbitrary reason they can’t use the same weapon. It is simply boring. You might as well lump them all together and call them Main Stat and it would have absolutely 0 impact. This is extremely sad for an RPG and is significantly low standard in comparison to the rest of the game.
The same goes for runes.
It is incredibly unimaginative that all runes can go on so many different weapons, they should definitely be restricted somehow.
An easy fix for this, would tie stats and runes together, so some runes are reserved for strength weapons, some for dex, maybe dual-stat weapons could use both, making them more attractive for some builds.
I’m sure this is on your radar, so I won’t delve too deep into this, but it really needs work.
Ichor/Inventory Management
Plague Ichor:
Ichor is a great idea, implemented very poorly.
The reason Estus Shards work so damn well in DS, is because it gives you a very tangible power upgrade.
Imagine if Dark Souls had an inventory limitation and the way they made you solve that, would be through a choice between getting a better Estus Flask or being able to pick up more loot. It would suck.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely think this game should have an inventory limitation, otherwise you would end up with too much stuff to want to deal with. I also think that the full inventory should be unlocked from the beginning.
I like how Ichors make you choose between different options, but I think they should strictly be power. As it stands now it is Ring Slots, Utility Runes, and Hunger Limit. I think these options can be expanded, but I can’t come up with what else it could be.
For the rest of the current options I would personally like to see them go away completely. If you insist on keeping them, I think they should be tied to a different resource.
It should be exciting to turn in an Ichor every single time, not “make the game less annoying to deal with.”
Inventory management:
There’s WAY too many resources already and it is only gonna get A LOT worse when 1.0 drops.
I think the biggest pain point is how small the chests are. Dumping all your stuff is a hassle because there’s simply not space enough for all your different tabs in a single chest.
I like having to go back to the city and going through all the little things you have to do, but sometimes it simply takes too long. There’s so many interactions you have to do in a run. I’ll go through a typical run:
Repair
Restock Smelter
Restock Sawmill
Sell/Sort what to keep
TP to house
Deposit weapon chest
Deposit armor chest
Deposit resource chest 1
Deposit resource chest 2
Deposit food
Deposit Gems
Deposit Runes
(Sometimes go to Rookery)
That’s a lot of interactions and god forbid you forget to repair, now you have to TP back to town, run, repair, TP. This is only gonna get worse when 1.0 drops, I don’t think it would ruin the experience to have chests that can hold ALL resources and another one that can hold ALL food. Let the limited chest space be for equipment.
Another point in regards to the inventory, there is no reason you can move the indicator on to a slot with no item in it. It would be a huge QOL improvement, if you let us skip that altogether.
Dark Souls have already perfected the item management/UI in games like these, I think you can draw a lot more inspiration from there. I like the current UI a lot, but it can still be navigated better.
Exploration/Gathering:
The level design in this game is S+. I’m completely blown away how well thought out these map are.
One small thing I would watch out for is too many resource dense areas. Personally I really don’t mind the gathering, but when I went through lowlands, especially the southeastern part, I experienced a bit of gathering fatique. It’s not really a criticism, it’s very good to have some spots where you know you can get tonnes of mats, but just have some stuff to break a bit of the monotony.
Speaking of gathering, I think it would be cool to have different sized trees/nodes. So for a small tree 1 chop for a tier appropriate axe, medium tree 2, large tree 3 and an equivelant amount of resources. Don’t know what to do about perfect strikes, maybe they have a higher chance of giving rare mats.
Besides that, it would be cool to have some rare nodes, some that even the anti-gatherers would be excited about.
And PLEASE just put the resources in the inventory, it’s too much tedium.
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Final words**
This got a bit long… I kinda also wanted to talk about the crucible and some other stuff, but i’ll get there another time. I hope it’s useful and thank you for an absolute banger game.