My feedback after ~10 hr: Please improve the UX

Wicked Feedback
1

I have ~10 hours into the game and want to share some thoughts about changes that I believe would make it more enjoyable for people like myself.

The game started off strong. The controls are responsive and pace was enjoyable. Combat is fun and the sound / art is good. Then my inventory started to fill up. I finally got to town and the action dried up quick. I spoke to maybe the first 20 NPCs 3-4 times to hear what they have to say then gave up talking to more.

I’ll start with a list of some items I think can be improved:

  • inventory space management
  • access to in-town storage space
  • fast travel limited to last node
  • time to harvest a node
  • forge time
  • town upgrade time and cost (a function of harvest time)
  • explanation of weapon abilities (if they exist at all, I’ve yet to find them)

I realize the overall theme is time. It’s starting to feel like a mobile GATCHA game that wants to sell your time back to you.

It appears that arbitrarily sinking player time has become a core design philosophy. I encourage the decision makers to seriously consider how this affects the player experience.

You find town and see that you can upgrade it. You need ~10 wood and ~5 copper per upgrade and there’s ~7 of them. This is going to take some time to upgrade so maybe you choose two items to focus on first. You need 20 trees and 10 ore. There’s a quest NPC, lets see what that’s about. You need an additional 5 ore and 5 tree.

Well up to this point you’ve been hitting trees and ore and it take something like 5 seconds per node, once you find the resource. Sometimes it’s already depleted so you have to wander around some more. You finally get enough stuff to do a couple upgrades, and now it says it’s going to take an hour or two.

So how does that feel as a player? It feels like the game wants me for a long time, not a good time. It feels like I need hours each session so I can grab these resources, find a place to store them then slog between my storage and the usage point. It feels like a chore.

If this game doesn’t change to respect my time, I will move on to other things. If I ever were to discuss this game with someone, I would not recommend it in it’s current state due to it’s time sinking designs. The game play, art and sound is great! The management is tedious. I do not hold hope that it will improve, but I would love to be surprised!

2

I couldn’t agree more. I loved playing through the story, levels, and bosses once. I think I’ll wait for 1.0 and try again. If it still has these time wasters, and I can’t just “git gud” to circumvent to get through the story, I can’t say I’d bother. It’s just not a game for me then, which is a shame because the writing and voice acting are so damn good. :sob:

3

“Mobile gacha game” my brother in christ have you never played a game with loot before? The town upgrades taking 4 hours real time is perfectly valid but everything else just screams you wanting to fight fight fight no gameplay loop. There’s no “selling the time” back to you you can’t buy more ore, more wood, you can’t buy your way into the perfect build. It’s about the journey not the destination.

This is not devil may cry, it’s very clearly an ARPG where you have to manage loot, farm for drops for what you want, they want you to engage in the gameplay loop as a whole. It’s fine to wish there was more story or for the tree chopping to take less time, but you can fix that by upgrading the town/leveling up. Then you get access to better tools that mine faster.

4

I can totally understand OP’s view on how it’s gacha like. It’s probably my first PC RPG that takes 2 to 7 minutes to craft 1x material.