Gave the game another try since the Breach patch. The game does overall feel a lot better since the breach patch. Combat and progression is generally smooth and that felt pretty good. So these are just some thoughts I had after playing the coop experimental branch.
- Coop:
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Overall does feel good and it was fun playing with other players. Friendly fire is good as it is not too punishing so it ads another dimension to gameplay and it is not frustrating.
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I did have a lot of reconnecting and lag which became incredibly frustrating after a while since it always happened near cliffs and Id just end up dying. It seems playing different regions is not working well at all, I hope this gets improved.
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Player icons on the map could probably be a lot more clear, when joining a map it was a bit janky to find players, maybe we could have an option to teleport to players via the whispers ?
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Matchmaking was my biggest gripe with the coop however, we should be able to join random servers based on campaign progression and/or character level ? I dont have a lot of friends that play NRFTW so now I need to go and find people. I do NOT want to play the game by NOT playing the game, please dont make me spend time on external sites in order to play some of the features. A lot of modern ARPGs (PoE, Diablo, Last Epoch etc.) do this, they force you to go to external sites for guide, trading etc. This absolutely kills the immersion for me and I’d honestly then just not use multiplayer and takes a big part of the game away.
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In game chat, why is this not a thing, again forcing me to use external sites/tools ?
- Combat/Movement:
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Combat felt good and progression good, not many bad things to say. Balance felt good, never felt like a hit a brick wall like in previous patches. Difficulty settings are fine imo if people want an easier game let them, it doesnt affect my experience.
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Skills or runes were my only issue. Like where are the runes ? I played for hours before finding any and they ended up being pretty lackluster. I honestly despise the rune mechanic and would prefer character archetypes. PoE2 uses skill gems which are similar to runes but not item bound and I really dont like it. Items should have meaningful modifications to skills but skills shouldn’t be tied to a specific weapon. Enchantments is also not a good system right now. We need some deterministic crafting. Diablo 4 spent so long fighting player because the wanted deterministic crafting, in the end they gave it and people were happy and the game was a lot more fun as a result. Please consider making crafting more deterministic.
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Jumping is still jank, especially when you running jump onto vines, my charact would just drop and die if I was holding the sprint button in.
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Using a bow and a torch: Was this even considered ??? RIP to bow enjoyers going into a cave.
- Crafting:
- I absolutely hate the crafting aspect of this game. It just isnt well refined and feels like a chore. It ads nothing to the game and feels like it’s crafting for the sake of crafting.
- You need resources to craft better items to gather more resources quicker for crafting storage because you ran out of space for more resources. This gameplay loop is honestly just completely tedious and unfun. Tools should not break, at some point money is not an issue and this is just another thing to pile onto the chore list. Inventory space……. what can I say here ? You want me to pick up everything but you give no space for it ? WHY ??? Now I have to run or TP back to town to go store stuff just because I cannot pickup 1 resource, this breaks the flow of exploring an area and ruins the immersion and it is simply NOT fun to do. (This made me again stop playing because of burnout. so many hours are spent just collecting stuff instead of playing the actual game). It is much better than previous patches but this is still my single biggest issue with the game and why I cannot thoroughly enjoy it. Because what is the purpose of it ? It feels like a crafting game with some RPG elements to it and not the other way around (exaggeration but you get my point). Devs really need to think about what they want this system to be because imo it’s the one thing holding this game back from being a top tier game.
Overall: Game is in a good state, I love the world, the visuals, the hidden secrets scattered all over, the combat is fun and engaging. Coop just took it to a whole new level, now just let me play the game ffs. And fix or just get rid of crafting because this was the worst part of the game for me.