My Thoughts and Feedback

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Arcanis#9837 wrote:

I just wanted to put this here to relay my thoughts on the game and what can be improved. I literally never do this, but I will for this game as I feel that it could be something special. I will not check back into this thread, or reply to anything here, so flame me for being a filthy casual or tell me to "Git Gud"...I don't care and I wont see it.

I am a more casual player. I will start with that because that is likely the majority of the player base of all games and my experiences with this game are not unique from what I read.

The Good:
1. This game is beautiful. The story is pretty good and the visuals are great. Lighting, environment, character models are all on point and get me excited to play. The prison area in Act 4 where the tide comes in and out literally made me compliment it out loud when I first went in. Amazing detail and a unique environment. Kudos to the person(s) who designed that one!

2. I like that I can jump into the game and in the 2 hours I play after work, clear 3-4 whole areas. I like to kill everything and loot every chest/rock/pot so that may seem slow to some, but its my play style choice and I am not punished for it here.

3. At first I hated the map resets but as I continued to play, that design choice is spot on. It makes re-running an area fresh and fun.

The Bad. Based on my play style, you can probably see where this is going. I made it to the end of act 4, which is where my time with this game will end.
1. My biggest issue with this game is the boss difficulty spikes. I am going to break this down into a few sub-points.

1a. Being one shot. This is not fun. Not at all. I don't mind something being difficult but one shots are not difficulty, its trolling the player base. Flame me if you want, its the truth. No single hit should take 100% of a players HP and shield. Hard cap hits to maybe 75% or so of max hp + shield? Fail to dodge twice in a row without healing in between...sure, kill me.

1b. Telegraphs for attacks. There are two issues I have here. The first is that some bosses are enormous. I play on a 34" ultra-wide monitor and still usually only see the legs of the boss unless I am right inside of it. Makes it hard to dodge when the attack telegraph comes from the hands or head and you only see his waist and below. Zoom the screen out further, even if its just for bosses. The second issue I have here is when there are effects that cover the whole arena and other effects layered within them. Best example I can give here is the third phase of Act IV boss. He did something that covered the whole arena in what looked like grass while layering in rows of spikes. Well, first what does the grass do? Obscure vision? It did not seem to damage me, but it certainly made me get hit by spikes every time it came out because it partially hides them. That is bad design imo. Either reduce the damage the layered effects do, or make them happen one at a time. If you want a good way to handle this, see Final Fantasy XIV. Big red circle where the attack hits. Still makes the fight hard, still have to react, you just know where the safe zones are.

1c. Multi-phase bosses. Again, Act IV. I get that the phases get progressively harder, that makes sense based on the story and what is happening at this point. But for the love of God, when I finally make it to phase 3, only to be instantly deleted because I have never seen this fight before, don't punish me and send me back to phase 1. This adds so much time and frustration to the fight.

1d. Death happens too fast, without adequate opportunity to learn from it. When a boss kills me, often I have no idea what just happened. There is no death recap, no tips, no replay. This makes learning the fight very difficult to do without looking up guides. I hate looking things up, but I had to change that mentality for this game, which is sad. If I did not look up mechanics, I would have quit in Act 1. Please add a death recap/rewind to boss fights or some other way to ease into the mechanics they use to give the player the ability to analyze their fight and where it went wrong. Yes, I know third party tools exist, but I should not have to resort to that.


2. As a new player to the franchise, what is up with the currency? I bought the stash tab, as a way to hold my orbs and was just overwhelmed by the number of currencies there. Why is there 37 different currencies (counted all open spaces except for the ones at the bottom)?? This is insane to me. Same with the runes tab. The top portion is great, what I expect from an ARPG. The bottom? What is that? 48 more unique type runes that are a combination of other runes? I expect the tabs to look like this after the game has been out for 20 years, not early access. It is convoluted and confusing and can likely be consolidated down into 10 or so.

3. The passive tree. What the heck is this? There are so many nodes here that I looked at it and immediately just said nope...going to look up a guide. It is not intuitive, it is not innovative. It is an absolute mess that very few people will ever take the time to learn and optimize. The rest of us will look at what Streamer_A is doing and copy that with some small deviations for things we see along the way that we may like. I did eventually try on my own. My character took 5+ hits to kill a single white enemy, the guide I followed erased whole screens in seconds. Optimization of a build is great, but it should not take a masters degree and 15 hours of data analysis to make it through the campaign. I should be able to survive the campaign with my own home-brew build. I expect that at end game, this level of optimization is needed/expected.

4. The campaign as a whole is tuned way too hard. People may not like this statement, but its true. The campaign should not be face roll easy, but come on, its the main campaign. Its the story element and the initial training for the end game. Why break your player base to the point that quite a few of them quit before ever finishing it?

5. Again with the campaign, its such a slog. This is good and I actually enjoy this, but many do not. Look to Diablo 4 here. Add a campaign skip for future leagues.

Overall this game has the potential to be amazing. I would love for it to become something I play long term, but at this point I have to let it go. It is entirely too frustrating and no longer fun for me. I will check back in and see where it sits in a year or so maybe. Thank you for your development efforts and for taking the time to read this.

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game need to work for hardcore and ssf. Cannot be balanced roughly on just "first playtrough" experience. Your feedback is valid mostly for a tottally fresh player - and will change on second - third and 20 playtrough then you will find boring to one shot bosses that you before struggled with.