Recently completed this game and I thought I would give feedback on my experience and how I think the game could be improved. I didn’t see any guides that I need to break this into finer categories, so I will just write it all here, in no particular order.
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I really like rune skills, they are quite fun for the most part. However I was thinking of trying a bleed build after my current one and there is currently almost nothing for it, except for 1 weapon, 1 gem and 1 rune. So I think at least a couple of new runes should be added and perhaps a weapon or two with bleed default damage. I am not saying there should be exactly the same set of bleeding runes as for other types of damage, but perhaps something like a “hurricane strike” attack with double daggers that deal piercing damage to a group of enemies and inflict bleed on them, to balance it with all the other AOE types of damage. (And I am aware of the plague and bleed combo). Also, maybe combine bleed with lightning, e.g. bleeding enemies are easier to stun or build up lightning.
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Crucible. I find it way to tedious. I keep postponing it because it’s just too long and you cannot pause while inside. I think there should be a way to start from the floor where you previously left. Maybe start over on death, but have an ability to leave and come back. Or have two modes - one like it is now, with more rewards and one where you can go to any floor with fewer rewards. Also, I think the store should be accessible from the lobby, without the need to traverse up to the fifth floor simply to check in the inventory. Having it in both places should be fine, I think.
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Enemies. I have a couple of issues with them. First, large enemies. I found there are many inconsistencies in the hit boxes and attacks of these enemies. In particular, two enemies I want to talk about are the “lost huntress” type, including the plague variants. And the Bloodbound Torment type, the one with a giant club that smacks you really hard on the head. First, sometimes I take damage from the attacks where their strikes are nowhere near me. In particular, the bite attack of the “lost huntress” type is the worst culprit for it. It’s really hard to dodge or even figure out at what point you get damaged because it seems to clank it’s teeth 5 meters away and I am damaged. In addition, the way their attacks deal damage is not consistent. For example, sometimes my character stays “inside” of the lost huntress type and its attacks miss or do no damage. But sometimes, they do. There is an attack where it stands up and hits you with front paws multiple times. If I stand too close to it, it never seems to hit, but if I step back a little - I get damaged. There is a similar attack Bloodbound Torment with vertical bashing and spin. However, Bloodbound Torment seem to always hit, even when it’s weapon just passes buy when this thing walks or it lifts it in preparation for a strike. No matter if you are close to it, far from it, it seems to always hit. And it’s also very hard to find the correct timing to parry it. Partially, because the boss is so large that a big part of it’s attack is off screen and in many cases, the boss itself attacks you from offscreen and you can’t even see what it’s doing. These bosses also block your character from view all the time, so it’s even harder to do anything because you don’t see what they are doing and the parrying and dodging seems to be weird when the boss is large and you are close to it.
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Smaller enemies. Blame my bad eyes, or whatever. I am playing on the 24 inch screen in 1080p. And I am always having hard time figuring out what the green glowing enemies are doing. They mostly look like glowing tentacle blobs to me, especially the large ones. Also, many of them have these glowing attacks and there were some cases when I was surrounded by 4-6 of them and I even lost my character on the screen because there were so many particle effects and glow. In addition, I often can’t even tell where is the back and where is the front of them if I want to do a backstab.
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The backstab. Continuing from the previous point, the backstab seems very finicky and inconsistent. Even if I get to the back of the enemies, the icon for the backstab sometimes never appear and I try to position my character for 10 seconds or longer, and the enemy eventually turns around. However, for those slow heavy knights, it’s often quite easy to do a backstab. For a lot of other enemies, it seems fairly difficult because the icon seems to often appear if you stay at the back for at least 1 second.
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Delayed attacks. The delay is utterly ridiculous. In some cases it seems to be 5 seconds or longer. The recommendation for parrying in the game says “look for flashes”, but I can never see the flashes they are talking about. Maybe 1 or 2 enemies had it, but most of the time I can’t see it. Thus parrying becomes almost impossible. There are enemies where it’s not an issue, but quite a few of them do have this issue. The main problem is that pretty much all attacks are delayed, followed by a long chain. There should be a mix, at least.
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Ledges. The hardest boss in souls games. A ton of tiny ledges everywhere is what almost made me quit the game. I lost count how many times I fell because the character took just 1 step in the wrong direction. And in some cases if you fall, even if you survive, you have to run around for like 5 kilometers to get back to that ledge again.
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Arena. Can we have practice arena where we can just practice with enemies? Given the game’s structure, it’s actually quite difficult to properly practice if you are having a hard time with a particular enemy. Especially, for example, the crucible. If you fail the boss, you have to do the whole thing again. It would be so much better if after getting to him once, we could practice as many times as we wanted on the arena instead of doing the whole crucible again just to try and die.
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The “stamina” wheel. I honestly don’t understand it. I don’t think the game also properly explained it. It seems to show the stamina bar, the posture bar and something else? First of all, the size of the wheel seems to be changed depending on something I don’t know what. Secondly, it’s really hard to actually see what’s on it. I would say that this wheel is not only unhelpful, its effects might be negative.
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The town and houses. I felt the immersion in the town is a bit shallow and I also want to have some more interactions with NPCs and a bit more complex systems in place. For example, there is the lady who is asking for help in one of the roads, but you can’t do anything with her. I think it would be nice if we could give her money, food or even hire her as a servant. Then, if we gave her money, there might be a random chance that she would be robbed and killed and maybe we would have a chance to save her if we come across the robbery in progress. If we give her food, she might get a job in one of the stores and give us a discount or a gift. If we hire her as a servant, we could giver tasks to craft things for us. She says she can saw, so maybe she can automatically refill the tanning rack from the storage and maybe other refineries too, make food for us, or have some other functions. There can be other similar things, like if you give some coin or food to beggars on the street, they will give you some information later to help with a quest or generate a small quest for you while if you don’t, maybe there is going to be a hire crime rate in town.
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The questing. I think there should be a few more side quests along the way that should also help with navigating the area. I sometimes felt completely aimless, like I was doing thing for the sake of doing things and not because I had some task ahead. In particular, the prison was probably the worst in this regard. It took so long navigating around it, I actually forgot what was the purpose of me even going there and had to look it up again. By the end I was too tired from navigating the whole thing that I skipped a lever and couldn’t figure out how to progress for a while, which raised even more questions about why I am even there in the first place.
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Ladders. My character died a few times because when I went up to a ladder to go down, instead of climbing down, the character simply walked over the edge, fell and died. So there should be something done, I think, about the ladder detection.
Well, I think that’s all. Thanks for having patience to read thus far if you did 