Hello! I hope everyone is doing well today! I have 4.5 hours of gameplay in, I’ve made it to the 2nd boss of the game, and am just getting clobbered by him haha. So I decided to do some other side quests, and bounties/exp farming etc.
However, I do want to write down some feedback for my experience thus far, because there’s definitely things that stick out to me that “could” be changed. I do not really expect anything to be changed, this is simply my take on how things currently are.
Really quickly, the Ori franchise is in my top 5 favorite games of all time, and I have a decent amount of experience in Souls-like games (Elden Ring, DS3, Sekiro, Lies of P, Honorable Mention: Hollow Knight). This will be important when I talk about difficulty in a minute, because I’m not inherently a gamer that says “game too hard, me complain”.
As I mentioned above, the 2nd boss is rolling me, but that’s actually not what I’m going to complain about, every attempt thus far is incredibly fun, and I really just love the boss designs that I’ve experienced (the first 2 bosses). What I will say is that normal mobs, feel like they have a little too much health. On a 1v1 this doesn’t matter, but when clearing a room of 2-3+, it gets a little annoying. In other Souls-like games, the reason clearing rooms, especially in the early game, feels good is because frankly, base mobs have very low health, and you can delete them in a couple hits. They’re also slow, so dispatching a group of 4-5 basic enemies doesn’t feel like a chore. Here however, is pretty rough. mobs are mechanically more difficult than any other souls style games early mobs. And they’re fun to fight, but just have so much health. With the lack of stagger that you have on enemies, fighting multiple in small places doesn’t feel punishing, it just feels unfair, and is frustrating.
I’m thankful that dying doesn’t have much of a real tax, I hated losing exp in other games. However, durability in the early game is a bit of a turn off. I don’t mind losing durability, to me it’s the actual cost at the blacksmith that makes it rough in the early game, when money is in short supply. So let me show you an example of when this becomes unenjoyable gameplay.
As i’ve said a few times, the 2nd boss, wrecking me. Let’s say I do 8 or so attempts, and my durability is low. I fast travel back to the city, repair for about 80 copper, travel back to the boss, to do it again. 8 times, gotta go back to repair, another 80 copper. This btw, involves nothing else other than boss attempts. I’m not looting anything, not really able to sell anything to recoup any of the cost of attempting this boss encounter. Now, your response can be “Well, just go kill some other mobs for copper, and then come back.” BUT, since the area will reset over time (not that long of a time either), the game pushes me to finish the boss as soon as possible, or else I have to trek back later, and go through all the mobs to get back to the boss.
I really just think that durability costs should be much lower, especially at the early parts of the game, to incentivize wanting to attempt bosses and areas. At this point i’ve just accepted that I need to level more, and build up my funds before I attempt the boss again, because I feel like I am inadvertently being punished for trying to attempt a boss too many times. So I might as well just go and over level, and move at a different pace than i’d like to, which is a bummer.
That’s pretty much it. I’m enjoying the game so far. There’s a couple things that feel a little buggy, and the performance is a little shaky sometimes, but I know those things will be ironed out over time, and I don’t think it makes sense to talk about them much here.
OH! One last thing. For bounties, please tell us in the UI how many mobs are attached to the bounty, and how many mobs we’ve killed. Just tried to do a crabs bounty, and they’re spread over a huge area, I couldn’t actually even find them all and have no clue how many were left. It’s a small UI change that would be really nice. Also maybe an option to pin it to our UI would be great too. Going into a menu every 15 seconds, especially when it doesn’t pause our game is a bit of a bummer.