First off, I’m in love with this game. The art style, the gameplay, the combat, the story, the setting, everything. It’s absolutely incredible and I believe it’s a GOTY contender hands down. The one main thing I’m concerned about however is itemization and the progression associated with that. I’m confident that QOL stuff will be ironed out, however IMO, this is one thing that can completely ruin this game if not done correctly. The way that itemization is handled will be the difference between this game being GOTY and it fading into obscurity.
That being said. I decided to go with a Dex build. I found that there were very very few dex based weapons during my ~30 hours playing. I found a pair of fire daggers early on (I’d say about level 10-ish) and ended up using those all the way through the crucible because I never found any other Dex based weapons (except for the katana, which I bricked by enchanting and getting XP loss on getting hit). I upgraded them as much as possible, however, while I was running the crucible over and over, I was hunting for that upgrade that I wanted. There were tons and tons of STR/Faith/INT weapons, and some hybrid dex/int, dex/str, or dex/faith weapons, but absolutely zero pure dex weapons. The Hybrid weapons would have required a significant investment, at least equal to, my dex investment for the entire game up to this point. This is not correct. Weapons should occasionally have equal stat requirements, however they should mostly have one primary stat that the weapon requires, or scales with, and some secondary requirements/scaling.
I did eventually find a new purely dex weapon. It was a one-handed dagger with a whopping dex requirement of 42 and a level requirement of 21. I grinded until I was able to get my dex that high, upgraded the weapon as much as I could, and upon using it for the first time, was sorely disappointed at the fact that it was much, much weaker than my dual daggers that I found 20 levels earlier, that had a dex requirement of like, 10, and a level requirement of, I believe 4.
This weapon, being that it had a dex requirement 4x higher than the weapon I was using, and a level requirement of 21, should be, hands down, better, or at least on par with the weapon with a much much lower dex requirement, or it should have some aspect of it that makes up for the lack of damage, IE: a very powerful focus ability. The moveset is literally one stab animation, done over and over again, and the damage is far far less than my dual daggers. The focus generation is not enough to make up for the lack of damage and horrid moveset and the focus ability is also very lackluster.
So this is what concerns me: that he devs don’t understand how itemization should work. This whole experience just kinda felt really bad, as someone who mainly plays fast, cloak and dagger type of characters. I did find a Katana that was dex based, by the way, in the quarry area, however I promptly completely bricked it by enchanting it and getting perhaps the worst possible negative effect: XP loss on getting hit. It seems that the devs are aiming for an Elden Ring type of itemization system, where all the weapons have unique movesets, and I fully support that and think it’s awesome, however it could feel really bad and really fall flat if not done correctly. I’m not saying to copy Elden Ring; I love the aspects of this game’s own unique identity, however you may want to borrow a few pages from that book when it comes to itemization and progression. I’m also aware that this is early access and there are likely a lot of placeholder systems and items, etc.
Thanks for reading; especially you, devs. You’ve got something truly spectacular on your hands – it’s not lost on those of us who appreciate the artform of video games.
