I think the game is absolutely amazing. I bought it on sale for 24€ and it’s a complete steal. For 40€ it would still be an amazing deal. For 60 it would still be a great deal. The art, story, music, combat, exploration and level design are all incredible. However, all the secondary mechanics are not.
The respawning chests and items for instance cheapen the exploration since you know you won’t find anything exciting in them. The equipment you find could be cool, but since you can buy or craft the same quality items you just don’t need to open them.
Crafting is therefore also gimped since you can find the same weapons already enchanted on the side of the road. Also items you craft have random stats which means you can craft weapons that have higher stat requirements than you have planned. They also come with random infusions, so if you wanted a specific one you have to craft in bulk and hope you roll correctly. This is even worse because you can’t uncraft items. Crafting is therefore a massive waste of time. Why not give each weapon a unique infusion? There’s already over a 100 of them in game and they are not so different if in the same class and you can use gems to tailor them further if needed. This is made even worse because enchantment is also random and you can’t replace enchantments. And if you use a rune, you can also never change it. I specifically don’t understand why removing a rune destroys a weapon. I would much rather lose a rune rather than a weapon you need to roll for. This combined with leveling means that all but the most dedicated will just not experiment with builds. You have to find a weapon you like early and stick with it.
Equally wasteful is the refining process. You can refine 1 item at a time, the refinery takes 10 items at a time and it takes a few seconds per item to refine. This is too short to walk away and play the game but too long to wait. And to craft some items you’ll need 8 or more refined items. Which means around every minute you’d have to refill the refinery multiple times. I don’t understand why it’s like this. Refining is the only mechanic on a timer. Buildings technically have a timer, but it’s so short it’ll be built before you walk to the vendor.
Gathering is tied in to crafting. It’s done through a timing mini game. For all types of resources it’s the same mini game and the same timing for all equipment tiers. Honestly I don’t understand why it’s in the game. This is not a survival game, you don’t need to build or craft, the main gameplay is combat. Maybe you could get resources by just hitting them with your weapon like in V rising, because no mechanic could compare with how good the combat is.
Equipment damage is entirely counter to the core game. It only punishes the weaker player or those trying to challenge themselves by fighting underleveled. It doesn’t encourage player to switch to another weapon since you level for that specific weapon, making others useless. And repair cost is trivial, so all it does is waste a bit of players time for going back to the city.
The inventory system is a weird one. I understand why you’d want extra ring or rune slots be upgrades, even extra weapon slots, but why would the inventory size be locked. This isn’t a survival game, so storing resources isn’t really an issue. If you find better equipment than your current you just put it on, the rest can be thrown away or sold. The limit only serves in throwing away more items. You can teleport to the city at any time at no cost, or even walk since the map is extremely well designed with many shortcuts. It could be encouragement to engage with housing mechanics, but all but the best equipment is useless for you, so why would you want to store it. These upgrades give you a much nicer sense of progression than leveling, but at too large a cost for the early game. I would remove experience and just let players level up with plague ichor. Now you have a tangible reward for killing a boss without having to experience the tedium early game. Also if you unlock a weapon slot, but decide you don’t need it later, you still have to scroll past it which is just inconvenient. You could add your hands as a weapon or have an ability to switch to unarmed combat outside of the menu. I’d much rather the game assume if a weapon slot is empty i don’t want to use it.
Building is very out of place in a game like this. Story wise it doesn’t make sense that over a course of a week you become the biggest landlord in the city as well as the most generous sponsor of it’s reconstruction. Because items are so plentiful while exploring and you can’t even buy food recipes vendors are almost useless for gameplay. Upgrading them is worth it just for the visual and the new paths they unlock, but I almost exclusively used them to sell my items to. Rebuilding the city would be much better if it was based on your actions in the story rather than through some guy. For instance the cook could build his kitchen after you rescue him or the carpenter could come from marin village after it’s saved. This would tie the city with your actions and wouldn’t feel so detached. Housing is completely inoffensive as it is completely unnecessary. The buffs you get from sleeping are very minor and the storage is pointless, so it’s clearly for people that want housing for housings sake. I would only change it so when placing furniture it’s not attached to you, but instead you control it separately, moving with left stick and rotating with right, or moving with mouse and rotating with scroll wheel or something similar. Having to rotate and move with your character is very clunky and this would simplify the controls.
I think the leveling system gives you more problems than solutions. It doesn’t work well with the multiplayer solution since you can outlevel your coop partners in single player. It doesn’t provide much of difficulty alleviation since the cap is so low. It forces the player to grind. And it makes Your job balancing much harder. I reached caylen in 5 days. I did daylies every day and spent most of my time exploring and following the main story. The first zone was just right in difficulty, the second zone was a little harder at first and a bit easier by the end. The third zone was easy. Then the last 2 required me to be 5 levels ahead. While the enemies were reasonably harder both of the bosses would kill me in 2 hits since i put almost no points into health. This meant that these fights were extremely tedious as all of their attack chains had more than 2 attacks. So i got couple more levels and put that into health and these fights became almost trivial as i beat them in 1 or 2 tries. The last boss was almost as easy as the first since i was probably over leveled at that point. My point is that this leveling system breaks too easily in a non linear game like this one. You can see the same happen in elden ring. Unless there’s an area in between the sewer and forest/lowlands that i missed, or is planned to be added, I don’t understand what a player is supposed to do besides griding ot out. My solution would be to remove leveling completely. Tune the bosses to be progressively harder to that base and not to an arbitrary level that a player should have and then let players use any weapon they want and use plague ichor to give them permanent bonus to health or damage overall. Then if you are ahead of ur coop players you can just give them the ichor or you can team up to kill some mini bosses instead of having to grind up small enemies until they are at the appropriate level. And why are there daily quests in a single player/coop game? Why not just respawn these enemies every in game day, or just whenever the regular enemies respawn. Fighting old or remixed bosses is a very cool idea and I enjoyed it, but same as with vendor upgrades it’s a cool idea for some reason put behind a menu screen. The loot you get for it isn’t even worth it for reasons mentioned prior, it just cheapens the experience.
Overall, considering some of the mechanics present - the respawning loot, multiple overlapping progression systems, crafting and gathering, limited inventory, the housing, the dailies and weeklies, the level gated areas, the mentions of long term support or roadmaps or just the way the currency is formatted into gold silver and bronze makes me think the developers wanted to make a different game than what they are making. And if the goal is to make a live service MMO then this could be a good base for it. But if you are making a coop action game all of these mechanics just dilute it’s excellent core.
This sounds a lot more negative than what I actually feel about the game. I hope you release an artbook for it, or noclip makes a documentary. Even with all the problems I listed the game is incredibly fun and I can’t wait for full release.