Greetings, i am a big fan of the game, having pretty much completed the entirety of available content in Early Access, i think i have amassed some personal takes that i would want to disclose, with possible suggestions to resolving the problems i had during my 30h+ experience.
General gameplay:
I think that the game is amazing, it plays well, it introduces the player to itself quickly and straight to the point, it is a good and familiar environment for a fan of games of similar genre (Dark Souls 1 and Salt And Sanctuary are the closest i can think of), while bringing much needed new takes and expansions on familiar formula. I love the fighting pacing, i love the balance of attacks and impacts. Animation work is supreme and i don’t think i have ever seen in any game. I love the diversity of weapon types, their animations and especially a mix and match build capability of the game. I especially love how previous locations change with players progressing the story 10/10.
Character and gear progression:
Now, the first problem i began having with the game was skill progression. So far, most of the skills are accurate and have their own purposes. However, INT and FTH stats feel lackluster and pretty much rudimentary, just an alternative scaling stat that locks out a lot of gear (quite often very unintuitively), filling the same role as STR and AGI stats.
No runes, skills or spells scale or require investments in FTH or INT stats. FTH and INT do not affect any defensive or alternative offensive stats (outside of DMG scaling of weapons).
I think that INT and FTH skills need to be expanded upon, maybe consider dedicating some buff skills to FTH to increase their duration/potency/focus cost, while magic attack skills towards INT, scaling cast times, damage, etc. This will allow Devs to shift forcing FTH and INT requirements from too much weapons as more options for these stats open up. It will empathize players to experiment and compromise between stats more than the game does now. Scaled spells will also benefit the stat investment and allow players to be even more flexible.
Resource progression:
At first i felt that the resource gathering, spending and refining was a cruth to increase the playtime and rudimentary in a non-live service game, but i think there’s a way to adjust it all without removing the idea of resource timeouts and time taken to achieve meta-progression. However i have concerns regarding future of the game with higher tier resources bloating the refine time to an unreasonable amounts for solo/coop game.
My suggestions mainly contain QOL suggestions:
- Make refineries able to stack resources:
It will not reduce the time taken to refine resources, but will allow players to dump and go their gains without needing to invest into a “refinery compound property” by buying a housing and filling it with smelteries just to have bigger queue. Still would benefit players to have more refineries to speed up the general refinement speed.
- Tie resource and enemy respawn to ingame day/night cycle:
Right now it’s not quite clear when locations refresh, in my 30 hour playtime i genuinely have no idea when i can go and revisit the location to gather resources and enemies. This will set concrete time of refresh for players that want to resource hunt, and at the same time allow players to focus on progressing the story while cleared locations are refreshing.
To avoid or balance out bigger delays, i’d suggest making beds functional and actually provide time skip/boost options as well as general health regen, tavern and household beds could provide differently scaled bonuses to empathize the ownership of the property or investment into the tavern.
Gear, Gems, Runes and Enchantment
- Outfits:
I love how all of it works, but after experimenting with different builds i can safely say that the best armor to weight items always win, there is no reason to use lighter armor if you can afford wearing plates. Cloth and leather i found to be useful only when i was very limited on carry weight capacity, no other reason what so ever. Poise/balance from heavy armor gives even more benefits towards using it over light variations. And, if i have to choose between medium load cloth set and medium load plate set, i will go with latter, because there is no reason not to. How to balance it out i will suggest in the next paragraph.
- Inscription and Enchantments
I suggest fiddling with effectiveness of enchantment and inscription values when it comes to Cloth/leather/mesh and plate armors.
I think that the less direct protection armor provides, the more it should work as a blank slate for character building. Plating would be the best pick for physical defence and combat, still allowing all the inscriptions and enchantments, but maybe providing less effeciency and more randomness, while cloth, while providing little to no physical defence woudl allow players to compensate via using stronger enchantments/curses and higher enscription numbers.
By approximately tying strength of enchantments and inscriptions to the armor class (The lighter the more potent they would be), players would always be able to make choises between leaning into more groudned physical attributes of armor or into more minmaxing and niche or risky playstyles (Glass cannons, high mobility, low health, high regen, focus farming and focus buffs.) fit for more casting and agile leaning playstyles.
Leather and mesh armors would be a great middle ground between playstyles and allow players to utilize all aspects of gearing without sacrifising the rest. Win on all fronts.
- Runes:
Experimenting with runes is an amazing way to shake up the playstyle and craft the perfect weapon. What game has right now is great, but it really needs some quality of life for the sake of player sanity.
Right now i have no idea what majority of focus skills do, and sometimes i can only guess. Please add descriptory tooltips to runes so i could know what i buy and permanently put on my weapon.
I personally think that runes should behave like that:
When first extracting the rune, the item gets destroyed, but the player gets permanent access to the rune. Any subsequent applications of this rune do not consume it nor destroy the item on removing it. The whole idea of destroying gear just to experiment with it is counterproductive and not nice to have in general, please don’t do it, as the game has enough of permanent and big resource investment items.
Misc and unclassed feedback
- Some 1h axe weapons are unbelievably sluggish, almost as slow as two handed analogues, feels a bit unfair.
- Bows feel terrible and deal miniscule damage even when upgraded to the mainline of your gear, maybe make bow cost focus, but deal seriously bigger damage, so it could compare to the staff?
- Make some two handed weapon types able to cast staff related spells, staffs and, say, spears or even halberds share similarities, and if we have a spear or a hammer that requres huge investment into intelligence, why not allow i to use more staff oriented spells. Sounds fair.
- 1h Axe and 1h hammer could be used as their tool analogues of the same tier maybe even harvest resource with simple attack animations - bonus for axe or hammer players to save a tool slot or investment and a drawback of slower speed and more durability spent.
- Consider heaviest weapon charge attacks be able to break blocks or be unparriable by enemies, it’s pretty stupid when my giant mallet with a rock on the end gets absolutely thrown away by a buckler.
That is pretty much i can give about the current game status. It has it’s issues and some questionable design elements, but overall i had amazing time playing it and i am looking forward to seeing what comes to be in the future.
Reducing the Effects is fine though!