I’ve beaten the game as a light armor staff using mage, who sometimes uses a sword and shield.
Only real concern here is the lack of weapon options.
Have not yet beat the echo knight, as the combination of combat, exploration and story are what drove my interest.
I’ll be replaying the game as different styles in the near future.
Base Game
Enchanting
I like having enchanting in the game.
However, the current execution is problematic because I have no choice in cursed vs baseline.
And no way to ensure I get anything useful out of the process.
So if I’ve spent a couple hours farming the items I need for a new armor set, and then get a bad roll.
I’ve just wasted my real world time, and in game resources (loots and money).
Which just feels bad.
Not sure if this would work with the aesthetic, or time constraints of development.
However, a point buy enchanting system could be great.
The end results can still have randomized ranges, while also allowing people to get what they need/want out of it.
It grants the ability to have meaningful trade offs in terms of risk and reward.
Personally, I’ll never take a gold or xp loss on death item.
I hate both of those, but some people enjoy that risk, and being able to choose that would allow enchantment tailoring in a way that is transparent and easy to balance.
Enemies
Pillory mages are really spammy.
It could be neat to make it so that enemies start with full focus, and once that’s gone they have to regain it via damage and/or regen.
If they don’t already.
Otherwise, no comment.
Healing
While it’s neat to have craftable healing, lack of base item healing leads to a nasty reinforcement loop.
This is compounded by the durability mechanic.
If you do well, you win harder as you just get better gear and more healing than you need.
If you do poorly, you lose harder as you run out of both gear and healing.
Running out of healing doesn’t encourage players to explore, or get better at fighting what they are struggling with.
It forces them to go back to areas they can already do to repeatedly farm up healing so that they can go back to progression.
Which, the more one struggles, the more frustrating this becomes.
Inventory Management
Most of this has been improved as of EA Patch 1.
However, the fact that I’ve found no reasonable way to stack items in inventory is still problematic.
I feel like sorting should fix this, but it doesn’t.
Could stand to have slightly larger chests and stack sizes even with all the buffs.
Item Use
Is the ability to select which item is the current one by holding up/down on the dpad new?
Was there a tooltip I missed?
Because I didn’t learn about that until after 25 hours, and it was on accident.
Loot
In general, it’s a fine implementation of what I consider to be a boring loot system, that doesn’t feel great.
It works well enough.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of great.
Though, some of the ancillary item, like boar tusks, drop rates seems to low, given how low their spawn chance seems to be.
Garment Crafting
The garment item drop rates are way too low.
I’ve rarely found any of the crafting items for garments.
Map
The map is good, and I love having markers.
Though a dedicated one for locked doors/closed off shortcuts would be great.
I’m not sure which one that’s supposed to be currently.
We also need a clear count for how many markers we get so that we can use them appropriately.
I didn’t know there was a limit and went around marking every forageable spot on the map until I hit the limit and had to go back and prioritize.
Rune Information
There is not enough in game display on runes.
We should be able to get a sense for without having to buy and test.
I should have enough information to be able to understand the utility and value of my stat investments.
- Their damage values
- Their scaling stats
- What they do
Sorting
Almost every game I’ve ever played makes the exact same mistake.
Not having proper alphabetical sorts everywhere things can be sorted.
And it drives me bonkers.
Please add alphabetical sort.
Type, time, weight, value, are all useful sorts.
But sometimes you just need to cleanly find things without considering anything other than name.
A simple O(N) lookup.
Cerim Crucible
I do not have a lot of experience with roguelikes/lites.
Play them occasionally, and the only one that has ever truly gripped me was Hades because of how it wove story into the roguelite elements.
So I’m not sure I can give any useful feedback here outside of how this can easily trigger healing/resource grind feedback loop.
And each run seems a little long.
Major Patch 1
The staff nerfs feel like they went too far.
My 42 intelligence staff now does less attribute damage than my 22 intelligence sword by a significant margin.
And when unupgraded, the sword does more overall damage by a slight amount.
While this seems like a problem for a lategame weapon, the larger concern here has to do with rune damage, which is what staves should mostly rely on - so long as they have reasonable amounts of focus generation.
However, without a way to see how much damage my runes do, I can’t get a real feel for that.
All I can go off of is the baseline damage that I’m getting from attributes, and damage comparisons to my memory of what the runes were doing beforehand.
Final Thoughts
Great game overall with an amazing art direction.
All the ongoing QoL changes are awesome.
Keep up the great work.
I’m looking forward to the final version where I can actually finish the story and the world.