Just got the game a few days ago. Made a new Primalist Druid reaching lv36. Wanted to give some feedback on my experience with the game.
Story
The story is in my opinion the most glaring problem. This game doesn’t provide any intro exposition on the state of the world or the major conflict like other games typically do.
As a Primalist I got a 15 second intro that said that my character’s tribe was having trouble surviving and were moving to a new location. My character decided this was a bad plan and went out adventuring instead. That doesn’t set the stage whatsoever. Take a look at other games. Popular ARPGs and most single player games on the market do a better job of giving some starting exposition.
As the game progressed I continued to get very little information on the big picture or any important characters. I got the shard of the epoch from some random girl and her father? Why on earth do some lv3 mobs pose a problem to carriers of the most important item in existence? Completely unbelievable.
Most of the quests are rather inane fetch quests that aren’t connected into a story. “Go find a ledger of names of people that owe me money” is one that stands out as particularly out of place. These types of quests are fine as long as they actually tie into the story and there’s enough substance of the main quest to keep the player interested.
I’ve reached Chapter 5 and while it gets a bit better around chapter 4 it’s still feels like the entire story is a placeholder. Nothing is making me feel connected to the game’s lore. I don’t remember a single NPC’s name or purpose. I saw some snake lady. That was unusual. But the moment I met her she said nothing important and told me to go somewhere else.
Graphics
I played on 1080p with all settings set to Ultra with the exception of Shadows which were set to Very High.
There seems to be two clashing art styles in this game. One is used for the environment and the other is used for the characters, NPCs, and monsters. The environment looks very nice! Crisp and detailed with lots of destructible objects. However the characters all look like they’re out of a mobile game – large shiny blobs without the same level of detail as the environment. The lighting on the characters and the environment is different. The character has light falling from the front, but their shadow (which is missing half the time!) is in the complete opposite direction.
As an example, take a look at Grim Dawn and then take a look at Last Epoch. Grim Dawn has the characters fit into the environment. They have the same level of detail and the same art style. LE has has a similar feeling to cartoons from the 60s-90s where the background is a painting and all of the characters are drawn on top. It’s just jarring and not appealing in my opinion.
Primalist Druid
I decided to focus on physical melee combat with a 2 handed weapon from the very start of the game. The swipe, fury leap, and upheaval are great abilities. I think there should be some more variation between swipe and upheaval as they did similar damage with the only difference being horizontal AoE or vertical. I leveled both but maybe that was a mistake on my part. I didn’t want to use any spells at all and the only other physical based ability was Warcry which didn’t seem interesting.
Transitioning into the Druid was a rather poor experience overall. I unlock the class and the Werebear ability around lv25 but I don’t get a new skill specialization slot until lv35. So I had to wait until lv35 until I actually start putting points into my new ability. This isn’t fun at all. The moment the character unlocks the sub class, they should get a big power spike and have an incentive to use the newly unlocked ability.
My goal was to continue the game as a Werebear druid physical damage dealer. However playing as a werebear actually felt worse than playing as a human! My player model grows twice the size so dodging slams and area damage becomes a lot harder. My fury leap ability is no longer available so my mobility has been reduced. In its place I have a charge that’s slow, on a cooldown, stops whenever I hit any environmental obstacle, and doesn’t let me change directions. I even added passive points into the Skull Crusher passive which lets Maul act as Fury Leap but Maul still only hits in front of it and doesn’t function as a movement ability like Fury Leap.
My damage seems to be roughly the same as my human form so at first glance there doesn’t appear to be any major benefits of being a werebear. Maybe once I level up all the passives on the werebear it will begin to show its worth, but at lv36 with 8 points into the skill it still seems to be detrimental to my gameplay instead of adding to it.
Nitpicks
The Ambush and the Apex Predator passive points on the Swipe ability appear to be using totem icons which is very out of place as the passives give critical strike and critical strike multiplier. I was going to completely ignore them at first glance. Please find some standardized way of displaying crit and crit multiplier icons so they can be identified at a glance amongst all the passives of all abilities.
The crafting resources should just automatically go to the forge. Why must I pick them up, then click on the button in my inventory to make them disappear into my infinite nebulous storage. I already know I found some new crafting thing when I saw it fall on the ground and clicked on it. I don’t need an itemized version of it to know that I got one. If you want itemized versions for trade then have an ability to extract resources from the forge.
Whenever the passives or the abilities screen is open the GPU usage jumps up 20% and my fans start running like crazy. This is completely unacceptable for a simple static overlay. Really needs to be fixed.
Conclusion
It feels like the game still needs a lot of work. I am sure the itemization, end game systems, crafting, etc. are all very well thought out and have great replayablity but at this point I’ve lost interest. It was a nice diversion but it failed to capture me long enough to actually find those end game experiences. Maybe I’ll push through a few more levels and I’ll check back every now and then. Hopefully this feedback is helpful to someone.
EDIT: Grammar and some small additions I forgot about.
EDIT 2: Not sure why my badge isn’t being displayed. Bought the game on steam.