Dear developers:
I am a player from China and I really like the game you created. I played the first version last year for 300 hours, and I have played 600 hours until now.
I saw the game’s follow-up patch 1 released by you on the Chinese forum. I specifically registered an account here to share my thoughts on the direction of the change and the areas I think really need to be changed. Since it was converted using translation software, I hope you have the patience to read it through.
First, let’s talk about the many negative reviews from Chinese players on Steam. Due to cultural differences, most Chinese players do not like overly hardcore games. They prefer casual and relaxed games. The recent hot fixes have made this originally challenging game too simple. (For players who like hardcore action games, the current difficulty is even a bit boring.) Of course, you will set some custom difficulty options in the upcoming update, which seems to meet the needs of both players at the same time. But I hope you can know that Chinese players are very utilitarian in playing games. They hate doing things that have no benefits or do not match the rewards. Therefore, when customizing the difficulty, please also consider the matching of item drop mechanisms and difficulty. Otherwise, casual players may complain that the returns of the simple mode are too low and they cannot beat the high difficulty (please forgive them for being so contradictory). Or the core players feel that their gains are not proportional to their efforts and are forced to go to “farm” with no challenging difficulty, and in the end, they will still give a business evaluation, and in the end, you may still not be able to satisfy any part of it.
Secondly, I want to talk about the upcoming free teleportation. Undoubtedly, free teleportation will make the game’s beautiful and well-designed map less prominent. Therefore, choosing a compromise method for regional teleportation may be more satisfying for everyone, which is to place only one appropriate teleportation point in each area. (Many people on the Chinese forum also support placing only one transmission point in one area) In fact, currently only daily tasks require players to travel long distances. You can choose to place the daily tasks near this teleportation point where you can reach through shortcuts to provide convenience for players who like to clean up tasks. In China, there is a saying that “it is easy to go from frugality to luxury, but it is difficult to go from luxury to frugality.” Once you have made this move, it will be difficult to withdraw. I hope you will treat this change with reservations.
Here are the areas that I personally suggest needing to change at the moment:
- Weapon runes add animation demos. The existing text description is not intuitive enough. Because it is not easy to obtain runes and dismantling runes will damage the weapon, some valuable runes may not be used best. Perhaps you can balance the damage and attack methods of each rune so that they all have the same practical value. But this seems to be a lot of work, and hopefully, at least for now, we can add animated demos.
- Runes are saved through specific rune pages, not boxes, because even if you do rune stacks, the in-game runes will still take up at least 4-5 large boxes, maybe it should be a book or something? The rune records you have can be used unlimited times in the book (you can add an animation for learning runes, etc.).
3: The double daggers and the gloves are too frequent. Due to the high attack frequency of these weapons, the body movements of monsters are too frequent when they are attacked, making it difficult for players to see the monster’s attack actions while attacking, thus unable to dodge and parry attacks in a timely manner. It is hoped that the impact feedback effect of these weapons can be adjusted.
Finally, I want to say that the main reason for the many negative reviews this time is that the difficulty is too high for casual players, and they easily collapse, at least in China… and you should have enough confidence in your game. There is no need to blindly listen to emotional and unreasonable comments and excessively adjust your game mechanics. Overly focusing on reviews will only turn this game into another Dark Souls or be mediocre like other commercial games. Optimistically, negative reviews are still a minority. Even the majority of core players who accept this game will not leave comments on Steam. Abandoning their own characteristics is equivalent to abandoning the players who originally liked this game. I am looking forward to the subsequent multiplayer and PvP modes of this game. I hope the development team will focus more on the game’s action and make the game better and better.