Love the Game!!! Going to keep playing.
** Best Parts
Environments. Exploring and mastering the zones is fun. To incentivise exploration, I think resource nodes and chests in hard to reach locations should be weighted with better loot, that would be a good change. Maybe a bounty system, where the longer it goes un-looted, un-mined, etc… the more rewarding it becomes.
Weapon Animations. Finding weapons with new attack patterns is probably the most addictive part of the gameplay loop. More, more, more of this.
Bosses. Bosses are beautiful. Love the mechanics. Could probably increase the difficulty later on. First-timed every story boss after Darak part 2… Echo Knight not included.
Story. Voice acting, cutscenes, music. All great. MOAR!!
** Concerns
Understandability. We need in-game descriptions with numerical values for rune effects and condition types. Need to display the min-max values for various enchantment effects to know if your roll is good or bad. Limit Wiki usage down the road.
Materials. Upgrading and making weapons and armor works well. But materials should be usable for even more things. Some Materials go unused if you don’t focus on those weapon/armor types. I think the Ichor inventory upgrades should be tied to the crafting resources to ensure you at least have a use for all resource types.
Consumables. I never used them… Could you really make a bomb build? Guess I gotta try.
Combat Feel. Base combat feel is amazing!! But too easily trivialized. The tuning is a little off.
- Focus. When you don’t have it, you have to play the game. When you do have it, you melt everything. If you find a way to generate it easily, you’ve already won the game… Either must be harder to generate, or the power of Rune attacks must be rebalanced.
- Runes. Almost all runes should have a cooldown to promote variety (you will want this balance tool in the future). Some Runes could be free to cast if they had a cooldown.
- Flinching. Some attacks cause monsters to flinch, while others do not. If you find a weapon with a spammable attack that causes monsters to flinch, then those monsters are never a challenge for the rest of the game. Flinching should have an internal cooldown on enemies, so they can’t be stunlocked forever.
- Animation Cancelling. Eventually, I think the game will need at least partial animation cancelling on dodge rolls. Not to make it easier! But, to make it harder. Giving the players this tool will open design space to make harder combat encounters with larger groups of enemies and more ferocious enemies.
- Ranged Combat. Even if Focus is fixed… the game needs to punish ranged characters more. Ranged makes everything too easy. More intelligent enemy behaviors, dodging/gap closing/blocking…
- Ledge Protection. We need limited ledge protection on dodging and lunging attacks. Enemies should smack us off. But there needs to be more of a buffer for combat inputs.
- Elemental Resistances. No meaningful choices to be made here. Everyone is just focused on weight, that’s it.
Progression. Became too strong, too fast. Punished for experimenting early.
- Overleveling. I liked doing bounties, but then I realized that I was overleveling the campaign, and made it too easy. I stopped spending my level up points to try and preserve the challenge of the game.
- Enchantments. The best weapon enchants and runes should be handed out more judiciously. Fallen Embers are acquired early. And they are all you need to make the best builds… The Gem system seems better in theory, even if it is broken in game right now. You shouldn’t be able to accidentally become godlike so early. Maybe Fallen Embers should only be used to re-roll/improve the numerical values on the Enchantments that you are unlocking using other progression systems…
- Experimenting. If you experiment with stats before unlocking the re-spec option, you can make your game a lot harder. I would change weapon leveling to use a runescape/elder scrolls style, use-to-improve system. That way, you can always try something new without trapping yourself.
- Gear Grind. New weapons and armor become unexciting to acquire too quickly. The gear treadmill should be extended. Need to be careful about how good some vendor weapons are. Maybe you should do quests to gain the recipes before crafting them. Might need a transmog system eventually… so that some armors can actually have different stats/bonuses than other armors of the same armor class.
Miscellaneous
- Bounties and Challenges - > just Challenges. No need for multiple screens here. Weekly challenges should award gems!
- Boss Rush in the Crucible would be fun.
- Screen Blocked by Environment a little too frequently. Not horrible. Just like a 10% improvement and the problem is fixed.