The authorities have answered two of my concerns. Single-player mode will not be connected to the Internet, you can play when there is no Internet. EA version will not have anti-cheating, do not worry about anti-cheating will affect the frame performance.
2 Likes
Main elephant in the room is enemy and encounter variety. If the player is expected to adopt a very passive, dodge-roll away and wait to punish playstyle with a simple moveset, then the enemies & encounters have to pick up all of that slack.
Additionally, those enemies need to hold-up over multiple showings via the Alive system (and there are reasonable concerns regarding the scope / variety of the Alive system). If enemy variety is low, then the Alive system will really emphasize that lack of variety.
Other concerns would fall along stagnant design problems seen in other Soulslikes: limited defensive options (dodge or parry, no real inbetween like Lies of P), poor inventory UI, boring weapon / armor upgrade system (small number increases, resource-driven), attribute requirements (this is worse here due to the randomness of loot), and so on.
General respect for player time has also flagged in a few systems like Resource Gathering animation time, Durability, and Respec-ing.
All that said, I’m confident that these Devs will polish and deliver in time. Rocky start, but smooth finish.
4 Likes
Nice summary. However, I’d emphasise the open trade system ala D2. Everybody knows this has the highest potential for every kind of exploit, predominantly for RMT.
Telling folks to only trade with those they know would be weaselling. Hopefully, they will reconsider this approach.
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1 Like
Is it not fair to only ask people to trade with those that they know? I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be.
1 Like
After giving the game a fair shake with 25-hours logged, I’m sad to say this forecast was spot-on. I’ll try to write-out a more thorough review here and on Steam, but I’m feeling pretty unmotivated to invest in feedback because I really dislike the direction I’m seeing so far and it feels like the devs have invested too deeply in said direction, so major pivots are going to be very unlikely.
First, I’m not sure how scope was approved for individual portraits and VA (at least 4 separate lines of dialogue per NPC) for the 50+ NPCs in Sacrament, but then enemy variety is at puddle-like depth, especially enemy attack variety (multiple trash mobs only have a single attack animation, and that attack animation is reused across multiple, reskinned enemies). Encounter variety is honestly close to non-existent, and this especially flags when the Crucible throws the exact same 3-to-4 enemy types at you in a more-or-less samey encounters over and over and over (ranged Witch at the back or elevated, gotta make it through Knights + Giant). The end result is that encounter design feels like it was an afterthought.
For attack variety, the same 2-hit sword attack from Risen goons at the start (and this is the ONLY attack they have, so you will be seeing this a lot) is the frame-identical animation you’ll be seeing across the game with shield Risen, green soldiers, and the Tanth mercenaries; same goes for Axe Man, the Nith (the giant one even gets reskinned as the 3rd boss and as a Crucible enemy), the torn enemy you encounter in the War Room is the frame-identical moveset as the Caged Exile, etc. etc.
It’s a constant loop of recycled content, even the 1st boss gets recycled as a trash mob for the Alive system (and the way he gets crammed into small spaces in the Orban Glades area feels particularly concerning, like no one on the team really thought about how goofy his moveset would look & feel in a small space); also, his health bar is lower than the Torn Bloaters in the same area, adding to the wrong feeling of it all).
Overall, the Alive system really hammers this shallowness home, and then the Crucible takes it a step further by failing to even reskin the Witches & Nith from Nameless Pass. Bottom-line: there is so much recycling and yet so little to recycle from. Not only is enemy variety small, but their movesets are tiny, so the staleness gets compounded that much quicker. The scarcity is spotlighted so heavily that I really question the thought-process behind it all.