Hey devs! Really starting to love the game, the art style, the story, the animations are just gorgeous but if I’m honest it really did require some perseverance to get to that point and there are still some things that drive me absolutely nuts and definitely some things that I think could be improved. I’m gonna be a little brutal in parts… but trust me if I didn’t love so much about this game I wouldn’t even bother giving feedback!
Stuff That Basically Feels Unfinished or Is Just Plain “Huh?”
Backstabbing - I literally have no idea why this mechanic is here because it doesn’t work 75% of the time and I don’t know why. I’d love if it did though because the animations are so cool.
Fix why the prompt doesn’t appear most of the time or disappears a microsecond after appearing
Would be kind of cool to backstab stunned minor enemies while in combat
The Crafting System - It took me a while to realise what you kind of expected me to do with this because it mostly just seemed to be a lot of effort to create a bunch of trash. I understand now that you can make items, then take them to be enchanted, then upgrade them to a good level… but urgh that process is just not worth the time.
Give me an enchanting station or something that lets me randomly enchant items in my house without trekking over to the enchanter lady
Reduce the cost of upgrading items. I am not going out to hunt 3 deers, 2 wolves, 4 soldiers, 2 leeches, 3 rats etc. and chop down half a forest etc. every time I want to upgrade my crappy weapon from level 4 (useless) to lvl 9.
Make it much easier to craft higher level items.
Stuff That Grinds My Gears
Jumping - There are a few places where you give every indication to the player that a jump is possible and then kill them when they try. Any of the bridges in the black chasm that haven’t been extended yet should NOT kill the player when they try.
Put a little ledge under it or some water or something
There is also one gap in one of the crucible maps that looks jumpable and is instant death. No no no no no no. That is a controller across the room moment.
A wobble woah anim that stops you from falling would be the best solution though.
Swimming - Your demigod heroic protagonist can’t swim for more than 20 seconds?
Please make zero stamina start draining health not be insta kill. This is just cruel.
Light - Please make the animation for the light spell faster… it almost feels like it doesn’t work. Also can you please respawn with enough focus to cast it?
Combat - This kind of gets its own section because I know it’s supposed to be hard but I swap between loving it and hating it.
Power Fantasy - I think my biggest issue is that too often I feel like a dumbass klutz. I don’t have great exact solutions to this problem but it just needs a pass to make the player feel more awesome.
Pause Attacks - When enemies start swinging… then their framerate slows to almost nothing for a second, and then they swing. Ugh I hate these. Maybe one or two in the entire game would be ok but there feels like SO many. This is not how feints work in real combat.
It should be some different animation, or a glint or something followed up by the real animation… do not start an attack and then drag it out for no reason just to bait out a parry.
Parries - These feel like trash splatters, ie. a move that is only really useful on mobs you could just button mash dead anyway. I’m playing a medium weight dex build and for the most part, parries just don’t feel worth it at all.
Would be great if this was more configurable via difficulty settings. Having easy just be more health/less damage doesn’t feel cooler… it just feels like you’re cheating a bit.
Weapon Rune Attacks- At least the default ones that cost 100 focus feel like a massive waste. They often whiff, their damage is meh and they get interrupted all the time. The animations are so cool but they just feel like trash splatters again, not useful tools.
Combo Increases - Feels like a lot of bigger mobs upgrade their attacks by just turning a two hit combo into a nearly identical 4 hit combo that is really hard to see coming.
Put a glow or some rage particles or something on these upgraded attacks pleeeeease.
Stuff That Could Be Better Explained
Enchanting - I had no idea you could replace crappy enchantments on your gear for SO long.
Stats - I feel like it is way too easy for new players to completely cripple themselves by picking bad stats, and then respeccing doesn’t occur for ages.
Whispers - The process of enabling fast travel is really not explained well.
What to Do After You Get To Sacrament - Not a big deal but the extended areas beyond the city are not pointed out very well.
Multiplayer - How does this work? Is their level balancing? What happens when one player dies? I would like to play this with friends but I feel like I am already way too far ahead of them.
I’ve been playing since before Breach and I still don’t grasp backstabbing. All I know is that it stops being viable the once you get to the quarry as mobs don’t stand around long enough
This research paper stuff is just goofy. Just drop re-roll embers or something that Eleanor can apply if peoplel want RNG to be less punishing. Right now it’s just another bit of bureacracy on top of how things already work.
Nevermind it completely messes up everything that’s not armor/weapons. I still can’t get a large chest late in the game for some reason despite having both Davos and Whittaker maxed out. The ‘random research’ only selects things you’ve seen before… what?
When I first started, jumping was risky in certain places cause the landing carries momentum so you shuffle forward in animation. This is particularly bad in the prison when ascending the cages to the get the key to unlock Finley. I adapted by pulling back the other direction when landing.
That one plague monster. But really there’s too many mobs to remember their timings. Props to you if you can but its a bit much. On top of the nerfs to parry and stagger, this is pushing me to almost exclusively rely on dodge, which can’t be the kind of gameplay they intend. Nevermind mid- and late-game mobs all jump or teleport 20 feet back after their first attack. But speaking of parries…
Right, again, dodge is now the only reliable defensive move against elites and up and a number of mid- and late-game mobs. That really takes away the haptic sense of combat that was present in Breach and prior, I don’t want to boot up to play Dance Dance Revolution until I can reliably strike. But you can’t let staggers be valuable cause multiplayer would get cheesed. I dunno, they gotta find some identity here.
Strangely, ranged cerim seem to be the big winners in the Together update
They’ve gotta cut the gating of respeccing behind Crucible. I don’t understand how they cave on crafting cause people want more RNG opportunities but not respeccing. Especially annoying because if you don’t unlock it from Crucible early, it gets much harder with the Echo Knights running around. Now you’re punished merely for not knowing (if I’m a new player) as they game doesn’t tell you its there at all, or even hint that there’s a special vendor in there.
i mostly agree but one thing i have to correct here.
the random research exclusively researches things you HAVENT seen, so for example with your chest problem, if youve seen most storage containers, but the big one is the only one you havent, the next one random research will get will be 100% the big chest.
that was actually how i did it, i had 2 empty spots, randomed 2 times, got the chest.
i do that all the time tbh, i check weapons, gears and other stuff for categories where only one or 2 are still blank and then random research those to have no blanks in there anymore.
BIG AGREE with the parry thing. parry still feels nice as a mechanic, and the window definitely is way better and precise now, but the fact parry is absolutely useless against bosses is just a bad decision imo.
i know its for coop so ppls dont permastun and stuff, but when they do different attacks even for bosses when playing in a group, why not let you still stagger bosses when u play solo? cant be that hard to implement when the game already has to check if youre in a group or not when fighting enemies.
now you only parry small enemies for the feeling, cause like you said, we could just mash them dead in a second anyway. not a good design choice at all.
I kinda like the backstab mechanic, but it took me ages to figure it out.
You can backstab anything, including elites (and I think bosses? not sure on that) if you stagger them and get behind them. You can also backstab normal enemies at any time by getting behind them. I find it as a nice way to insta kill small enemies in melee, especially since you have iframes while doing it, but there’s definitely some rule of cool in there.
Getting behind them is the challenging part, but it’s really easy if you can parry them (just sprint around them after) which is made even easier by getting the “blink” rune and just blinking behind them (this allows you to sometimes just ignore parries and just blink behind them after they queue an attack).
My issue with parries is around the mid game certain attacks seem to be unparriable (at least I’ve tried and couldn’t) but there’s no clear indication or what is and what isn’t, which makes it awkward to parry at all once you encounter enemies like this regularly (is it a timing thing or an attack you can’t parry) – e.g. lowland meadows enemies when they twirl their arms around don’t seem parriable, or when the axe enemies “charge” their 4/5 hit combo for like 2 seconds (my mind says this must be parriable like every other enemy weapon attack but for the life of me I can’t time it)
You can backstab anything, including elites (and I think bosses? not sure on that) if you stagger them and get behind them. You can also backstab normal enemies at any time by getting behind them. I find it as a nice way to insta kill small enemies in melee, especially since you have iframes while doing it, but there’s definitely some rule of cool in there.
That sounds like how I’d like backstab to work but it just feels busted. Like I haven’t had the slightest hint that this is even possible… it’s hard enough to backstab totally stationary enemies without waking them up. Would be cool if short range weapons were a lot easier to backstab with.
My issue with parries is around the mid game certain attacks seem to be unparriable (at least I’ve tried and couldn’t) but there’s no clear indication or what is and what isn’t, which makes it awkward to parry at all once you encounter enemies like this regularly (is it a timing thing or an attack you can’t parry) – e.g. lowland meadows enemies when they twirl their arms around don’t seem parriable, or when the axe enemies “charge” their 4/5 hit combo for like 2 seconds (my mind says this must be parriable like every other enemy weapon attack but for the life of me I can’t time it)
The thing I find weird with parries is sometimes it feels like the window is minutes long and then other times it’s microseconds and other times there is no window at all and there is very little rhyme or reason.
The only time I am even vaguely confident of pulling off a parry is soloing a low level mob that takes forever to swing (and doesn’t pull any delay BS.) i.e. when it’s total overkill and you’re just doing it to look cool.
Every other time I feel like at BEST it’s a coinflip and usually nearly impossible.
Backstabbing without engaging in combat is for sure a little janky and usually not worth it (stealth in general is lacking, what is crouch even for lol), I feel you there. But I think backstabs in combat are pretty reliable once you get the hang of it.
Good to see that it can be consistent - When me and my friend noticed you could sometimes backstab enemies after staggers I tried it excessively, parrying every enemy we came across, and I swear I’ve run laps around every single enemy in the early game without seeing that skull icon pop up. I couldn’t get it to trigger a single time against even fully staggered enemies, so I just gave up and haven’t tried since.