Loving this game so far and I want it to succeed. So here’s some feedback on the area I think its actually struggling the most in comparison to the competition - the appearance and “feel” of the game. The mechanics, skill trees, crafting, and pretty much all systems in the game are really fun and well designed on the whole. But there are a couple of immersion-breaking and frankly kind of ugly visual things I want to call out (Acolyte is my favorite, so kind of centered around that experience):
the Acolyte in particular has really goofy walking animations - every time she comes to a stop she stumbles an extra step then has to recover - not the coolest thing for your badass queen of the undead to be doing over and over
there is a big flash visual every time a melee hit connects (you can turn off the enemy flashing in settings but you can’t turn off the flash from the hit animation) this might not be that noticeable for a regular melee character but for a minion build with 20 skeletons all you see during combat is a firework show (immersion-breaking and just cartoony looking)
minion AI still needs some work: they run in place a lot (A LOT), they all swarm to a single target instead of spreading out, and they lag behind you considerably rather than the approach you see in a lot of games where they run ahead of you so they can intercept the next enemies
If you were already planning on addressing all these things then please, carry on.
Another note on minion AI: they stand/walk on top of each other a lot. I’ve noticed this especially with my Primalist, my wolf pack collapses down into what appears to be a single wolf all the time (then they usually fan out again during combat).
The primalist wolf has unique minion AI. They rolled it out to just the wolf to evaluate it, and it seems MUCH better. I imagine they will roll it out to other minions if they deem it successful.
Hmm, not sure I entirely agree that its better, though that makes sense because I noticed it was different. I hope they address the standing on top of each other thing before rolling it out. Also wolves are very prone to stop attacking whatever they were attacking and run to you if you move even a short distance away, and thats not always great. I read a blog about how they were going to make minion behavior configurable so you can choose between defensive/aggressive, so maybe we’ll have options and we can pick whichever works best for us. Wolves also seem to follow the character more closely and engage enemies before they can reach you. Which is great, although the stop/start animations for them following you so closely make it look like they keep running into your back.
