So, I’ve actually sat down and gave the game a solid chunk of time after the Crucible update, and thought I’d leave some relatively detailed feedback on the game as it stands, both in the Crucible and out.
I’ll be up front here- I was really disappointed with the focus on the Crucible as the core of the first update. I’ve tried not to be too negative as a result of that, but that disappointment is probably coloring my opinion at least a little.
I was really hoping for a new map area rather than an infinite roguelike mode- that’s just really not what I was looking for out of this game, and I don’t really understand the focus on an end-game activity in a game that doesn’t have a mid-game yet.
(The positive read on this is I like the existing story and maps enough that I was really disappointed not to get more of that, by the way. I did enjoy the story and non-Crucible maps enough to play the game several times, even though I don’t care all that much for the Crucible right now.)
Anyways, I played the new Crucible a bit, and then started a new character from the beginning, did the story again, and continued into the Crucible until it stopped being fun for me. Some thoughts on that basis:
-
On my new character, I was level 17 when I finished all of the story content, and that does include several trips to other realms to farm for town upgrade materials. The crucible feels like it’s been balanced for characters in their mid 20s and up level-wise, and having to just grind out 5 or so levels to not feel under-powered for the only activity I have left to do isn’t great. This is made worse by the enemies in the crucible no longer giving experience. This will probably change as new content comes out and the max level goes up, of course.
-
It’s not the enemies that are killing me in the Crucible. At least half, and probably closer to ¾ of my deaths are due to falling off ledges. I had the misfortune to pick a weapon that has several forward leaping attacks in its move set (spiked club), and my character will gleefully hurl themselves into oblivion given any opportunity. Combine that with several rooms that are full of narrow paths over instant doom chasms, and it gets annoying very fast. One mistake ending the run immediately feels awful. I haven’t reached the Echo Knight, and I don’t intend to keep trying, as I’ve just stopped having fun with it. Attack while facing in the wrong direction once, and the whole run ends, and I can’t find any reliable way to not do those jump attacks. I guess I could switch weapons, but honestly, after sinking all the upgrade materials into the club all game and it being perfectly fine everywhere else, only to have it repeatedly kill me in the Crucible, I don’t have the motivation to upgrade a second weapon just to push through to the Echo Knight.
If you really want this many cliffs, maybe instead of instant death the falls can work like in Zelda games where you lose some health then get dumped back onto the ground instead of the run instantly ending? That keeps the level design without the infuriating ‘one mistake and run over’ element. -
The Echoes in the crucible are a good idea, but they feel all over the place in terms of how useful they actually are, and it makes the level of challenge on any given run annoyingly random and a lot of it isn’t anything you can really influence. Sometimes you get 2 +15% damage echoes and +50% healing received by the second floor, sometimes you get a bunch of room skips and plagued echoes with awful penalties and you spend the first two floors just re-rolling. The difference in how hard the run ends up being ends up being pretty substantial. The plagued ones almost never seem worth the penalty in my experience, and their presence has also stopped me from using the random echoes after I picked a random echo and got a ‘bonus’ that reduced my focus pool by 50%.
-
Regarding character builds- I’ve played all the existing story content with a Dex/Faith hybrid and a pure Strength setup, and played significant amounts of it with a pure Intelligence and pure Dexterity character. With the exception of the pure Int character using staves, who did genuinely feel noticeably different, all of the other builds feel pretty much the same to play. Only real difference was that the characters with some Dexterity were better because they could use a bow, which is useful. But they’re all basically using the same tactics and fighting in the same way with the same selection of runes. There’s not much of anything to really make them distinct other than the weapons being visually different. I think following the path Intelligence has taken and having at least some weapon-exclusive runes might be a good way to mitigate this- in the same way there are ‘spells’ on runes that can only be put on staves, have stuff like healing and support runes that can only go on Faith weapons, or big heavy attacks that can only go on Strength ones, that kind of thing.
-
Purple items almost never feel worth their negative effect, to me. The only ones I actually use are if something happens to drop with good benefits and the -50% durability penalty, which basically isn’t a disadvantage in my experience (in 60-ish hours I have never seen a piece of equipment break). The rest come with penalties like -50% healing received, or constant health drain, or similarly crappy stuff, and the bonuses they have aren’t that much better than you can get on items without those penalties. This also makes the enchanting function so unreliable I just stopped using it- almost none of the purple enchantments I get are worth the penalty, and the blue ones are a complete crapshoot as to whether the bonuses are actually useful anyway. It turns gear into vendor trash more often than giving you anything good, in my experience. Thankfully adding gems into gear can give you some very good benefits reliably, so I pretty much exclusively use that system instead.
-
I know it’s been beaten to death, but all of the timers to make you wait for things really drag down the experience, and it felt even worse doing it again on a second run through the game. I genuinely do not see how making me wait six minutes for ore to smelt into bars in a totally non-interactive way before I’m allowed to upgrade my sword is adding anything positive to the game. I already spent ten minutes farming the ore to upgrade the thing. At least that involved me actually doing something instead of just waiting to be allowed to do something. I don’t feel a sense of delayed gratification from these things, I feel annoyed that my time’s being wasted for no good reason.