After the last patch (patch 1) and with removal of bought crafting materials I have leveled up a new character to see how the progress now looks like and have a little bit of feedback.
I have almost finished the campaign - only the last boss left to kill. Character is Dex/Faith with Heavy loadout - affects mostly upgrade materials I need.
TL:DR - gathering is mostly fine, processing needs better UI and QoL, cloth is missing, animal parts take a lot of space
Gathering:
- Wood and Ore are perfectly fine - gathering all resources before going to Sacrament allowed me to upgrade 3 buildings (smithy, cook and general goods) as well as staircase, with some wood leftover. I was missing mostly copper ore and some clay. I had to do 2nd run for most of the missing resources but it was fairly quick and I had upgraded almost all buildings to T2 by the time I reached Nameless Pass
- Cloth - to this day I have no clue how to get it - there are sometimes Threads in resource chests but I have not found a reliable way to get it and the game does not explain it in any way - I haven’t played mage/cloth user so it was not a pain point though. My guess is there is something missing - like plants or a farm
- Leather - gathering it from animals is pretty clear but a bit inconsistent - not sure if they drop from critters (stags and rats). There are also too few animals to get this reliably in order to upgrade the whole set of armor.
- Respawn timers for materials - it’s pretty clear when zone clears and materials respawn, though maybe game should tell us once we open map for first time after reaching Sacrament or at some other point
- Cooking materials - abundance of herbs and mushrooms/crabs makes it non-issue. Rarer materials for T2/T3 food providing buffs makes using them a decision, although I’m not sure how I feel about buying most of them from Gordon.
- Fishing - I like that fish are a rare resource, but would love for fish to not deplete after first use. Although the system of fishing needs a bit of tweaking - I feel the variance in time of fishing is too great.
- Inventory space for materials - I had no issues with space as long as I did not pick up everything. I had to skip things like skulls or just sell them really quickly, but otherwise it was pretty ok, especially after 2 ichor upgrades.
Upgrading:
- Amount of ore and wood to upgrade mesh armor and spears is fine, even when considering upgrading buildings, although I had saved upgrades of equipment for last.
- Amount of weapon and armor shards for upgrades seem to be ok - only once I have run out of weapon shards
- I think higher tiers of armor should consume more armor upgrade shards - I have stacks of those even when I fully upgrade all of them. Weapon shards are fine, especially if I wanted to switch weapons at some point
Crafting:
- Biggest pain point is gathering and storing materials that are supposed to be gathered from animals - especially stags since they don’t exist in game or deer don’t count. Wolves and Sirens are fine. Number of different claws , skulls, horns or kidneys was overwhelming before getting a house, though. After that it’s one chest so it’s fine as far as storage goes.
- Crafting using materials from chests is perfect - no more running between vendor and house
- Having a list of recipes accessible from the Main Menu is great. I would love recipes to be account-bound instead of character bound - there is no way to check which character has which recipes so what ends up happening is hopping between realms to dump everything to one character. Not fun at all.
- Crafting decorations is pretty enjoyable and usually does not take a lot of resources. I got a recipe for a better bed that required a lot of planks and ore but because it was 1 time craft it turned into a very satisfying experience. It’s also a good way to dump excessive planks and ores.
Processing resources:
- Again, having access to chests is great.
- Processing times for T1 resources is fine - I believe it takes 1 minute to process 1 wood into plank, same with ore and cloth/leather. It takes 2 of them to upgrade once so it’s perfectly fine in campaign, especially if you are not sure if what you have warrants upgrade
- Processing times for T2 resources are a bit too much - 4 minutes per 1 resource is a bit long if you need 20 of them to upgrade all equipment - I was not able to upgrade all my slots while going through story, I had to stop my progression for quite a while before reaching last boss
- Restriction on the amount of resource we can put into the furnace/sawmill/tanning rack is probably my biggest problem. Currently the crafting/gathering loop for me looks like this - put all 8 resources into a processing station, go do some open world exploration, get back and put in again 8 resources, repeat. Why is it only 8 and we have to put them one by one? I believe having the ability to put whole stacks would make this process less tedious and would allow us to plan crafts/upgrades better.
- Another problem is that I have no idea how long processing is gonna take - there is no end timer for the whole process, just one for the next resource. I can calculate it based on resources input but I would prefer not to do so manually.
Generally I have found the gameplay loop of gathering, crafting and upgrading pretty satisfactory and enjoyable. Limiting resources makes decisions more important, but the ability to farm them if one wants to spend time does not make players stuck at any point. Obviously systems need a bit of refining but I believe it’s a good start.