First impressions are important — 30 minutes of gameplay

[Ryskim]

I know the game is much deeper than any 30 minutes of gameplay anyone can have. But first impressions make a lot to any gamer. Some gamers will just let the game sit there months and months and never touch it again just because they did not have a good feeling or impression after a few minutes of gameplay. But these are my impressions for now, and without any will to brag about it, my god I have been playing lots of games, lots of betas, lots of RPG’s over more than 30 years and I will keep going. So I have a bit of knowledge about the thing here.

Characters
Game needs a character creation screen (with gender choice of course). Yep, they are characters, and there is a story behind them. So were the ones in Divinity II and there they are, those guys at Larian are developing Baldurs Gate III because of their nice work. This includes multiple races. I know: you are an indie studio and don’t have the resources right know. But at least mark it on your to-do list for the future, even if it takes time to achieve.

Improved controller support
Again, I know this is a beta, and I know you mouseclickers love playing with your mouse and keyboard — so do I with certain games. After playing Diablo III on PS4 I never looked back. So did the devs, including absolute native controller in Diablo IV. Games nowadays unless strategy (and I still have my doubts) should all have full native controller support. I mean, I wouldn’t play Master of Orion or Total War Warhammer II with a controller but this one I would, and I want. I understand then that being a beta, more controller updates and improvements are on the way. Still, not a good impression but better than others like Wolcen (they also have it planned soon). Controller support is a must, and it must be good — especially and at this point the targetting system (a passive proximity targetting system as in Diablo 3 would be the ideal thing, considering this game is not turn-based as Divinity 2).

Mouseclickers can still click and click all over the place and enjoy the game their way.

Camera Rotation
Yep, it’s a game similar to Diablo 3. Can’t rotate camera. So was Grim Dawn and you can. Or Divinity II for example. Yes, this is not Diablo 3, not Divinity II and not Grim Dawn. I’m talking about the genre it belongs to.

About the classes
I love them all. They are awesome and I think the progression system is the strongest part of the game. It’s really hard to balance all the classes, advanced classes, passives, items and all. I know, and you have my greatest thanks for the nice work there (and there is a LICH CLASS!). Honestly, the class system in this game is what made me buy it right away.

Roadmap
Haven’t seen any roadmap around. Do you have any roadmap published or any upcoming streams with this being explained?

Multiplayer
One of the things I loved is that lovely chat as I entered the game, with people exchanging opinions and helping each other with this and that. Absolutely lovely. Thank you for that. Can’t wait to see the co-op in action. I know it’s planned.

Last words and conclusions
The game looks awesome and promising. Thank you so much for making this possible and please take this as feedback and feedback only. By no means I’m telling you what to do, you’re the experts and the developers, not me. This is just my perspective as a player and I think it should be considered somehow.

Cheers!

Edited: changed some aspects of the points to avoid sounding a bit rude.

[mandaden]

Hey Ryskim there is a roadmap for the game on the steam store page for last epoch (Last Epoch on Steam)

[Ryskim]

Thanks!

I guess the controller improvements fall under “UI updates” at the bottom?

[Llama8]

@Ryskim

Characters
Game needs a character creation screen (with gender choice of course). Yep, they are characters, and there is a story behind them. So were the ones in Divinity II and there they are, those guys at Larian are developing Baldurs Gate III because of their nice work. This includes multiple races. I know: you are an indie studio and don’t have the resources right know. But at least mark it on your to-do list for the future, even if it takes time to achieve.

You might find this post interesting.

That’s the point. And no mouseclickers, this does not affect you in any way. You can still click and click all over the place and enjoy the game your way.
… so save yourselves the unconstructive replies in that fashion

You can chill out a bit, this foru/community is reasonably relaxed & friendly. Personally I’m not a controller user, but I’m of the opinion that if it’s in, it should work well…

Camera Rotation
Yep, it’s a game similar to Diablo 3. Can’t rotate camera. So was Grim Dawn and you can. Or Divinity II for example. Yes, this is not Diablo 3, not Divinity II and not Grim Dawn. I’m talking about the genre it belongs to, so save yourselves the unconstructive replies in that fashion.

Sacred 2 had camera rotation & that (the camera rotation) was nice (IMO the game was awesome).

This is just my perspective as a player and I think it should be considered somehow.

It will, they are of the opinion that newer player’s feedback is important as well as that of more experienced players.

[Ryskim]

Thanks a lot for your reply.

I forgot to mention a bit of the world map. It feels… low quality somehow or is it just me?

[EHG_Dodo1]

@Ryskim

Characters

Races does not make sense, but as you said, development budget is real and while genders would be great, this is not happening anytime soon.

@Ryskim

Improved controller support

I am all for controller support, but tone down your arguments a bit please

@Ryskim

Camera Rotation

While I can understand why camera rotation could be interesting for many people, there is reason, why so many isometric games opted-out from this option. - you can optimize your assets for better performance and also you can save tons of time in world building. If you know what angle your scene will be seen, you can focus 100% effort to very focused area and make it beautiful - with free camera, there is tons of additional work to be done, which again, could be time spend elsewhere.

I am not against camera rotation per say, I just understand, why many games are not doing it. Also in GD, I am not rotation camera at all, but that’s only how I play it.

Anyway, keep feedback coming, just because some things are not feasible right now, does not mean they are not listening.

[Llama8]

@EHG_Dodo1

While I can understand why camera rotation could be interesting for many people, there is reason, why so many isometric games opted-out from this option. - you can optimize your assets for better performance and also you can save tons of time in world building. If you know what angle your scene will be seen, you can focus 100% effort to very focused area and make it beautiful - with free camera, there is tons of additional work to be done, which again, could be time spend elsewhere.

I’m not entirely sure how true that is (given I’m neither a dev nor do I work in the industry). I would have assumed that when you make the model of a house (or whatever), you’d create the full house from all sides so that you could then rotate it to fit a particular scene/area, or re-use it in a different orientation without having to go back & work on it again (or as much). Then once it’s in a particular area, I can imagine someone (or the engine) going through & removing all the **** the player wouldn’t be able to see with the fixed viewing angle to remove the amount of stuff the game has to render.

I am not against camera rotation per say, I just understand, why many games are not doing it. Also in GD, I am not rotation camera at all, but that’s only how I play it.

Yeah, it’s a bit odd. I never rotate the camera in GD, but I used to do it all the time in Sacred 2…

[EHG_Dodo1]

@Llama8

I’m not entirely sure how true that is (given I’m neither a dev nor do I work in the industry). I would have assumed that when you make the model of a house (or whatever), you’d create the full house from all sides so that you could then rotate it to fit a particular scene/area, or re-use it in a different orientation without having to go back & work on it again (or as much). Then once it’s in a particular area, I can imagine someone (or the engine) going through & removing all the **** the player wouldn’t be able to see with the fixed viewing angle to remove the amount of stuff the game has to render.

In case of Diablo 3, many assets don’t have polygons you can’t see. If you see tree from D3 from other side, there would be nothing. Backfaces are not rendered and frontfacing polygons are just not there. It actually have tons of implications. On one hand, realtime shadows are just unable to work with these assets, but you save tons of memory and culling calculations.

When you have fixed camera and you are smart with your asset creation, you can make for example house, which is not mapped from back side(or is just mirroring the front side). This means, you can either have textures half of the size or texture twice as detailed. Just example.

For the detailed areas, imagine you have these ledges and beautiful vistas you can see from here, like deep caverns, or just seeing distant forest. Now, if you would have rotating camera, you have to make vistas like these from all possible angles - not doing this can save ton of creative time and processing power.

[Ryskim]

If we consider that all in-game elements are made 3D then I don’t see why rotating the camera would be an issue.

Then again, unless they did as in D3 where some of the assets don’t have polygons where they can’t be seen. Not very sure about this.

If I learned something about gaming over the years is that nothing is written on stone. For now I think gender lock and controller support are more important matters than rotating the camera (I can live with that).

I edited my initial post to avoid sounding rude but still…

[EHG_Dodo1]

I believe it’s a little bit too late for rotating camera at this stage, even if they did not optimized their assets for fixed camera (I believe they did, at least partially), there are still environments, they have to redo just for different angles - i can’t see them to do that for “not sure how many” chapters they have in the game right now.

Making camera static in mid development is much easier than to decide to make rotating camera suddenly.

[XLVI_carpo]

The camera rotation would be a cool gimmick for me, but bot essential.

First impression feedback is important no matter what. We people that already are playing for a longer time can never give first impression feedback again .

For character depth and story you are referring to Larian. That are some big footsteps. Their solo RPGs are mainly focused on story and character building. In these games you only have the story as content, if your through, it’s done. No endgame and grinding for gear.

While I like having good story telling even in ARPGs there are a lot of people who just are interested in gameplay mechanics, grind and replayability. While Divinity customers are 99% interested on the story content.

I’ll go a step further and bringing Torment Tides Of Numenera to the table. This game has one of the best world building and story telling I’ve ever seen in a game. But the combat was goddamn awful. But that was something that was not that much of an issue because the game was not focused on combat.

An ARPG with bad combat mechanics is dead right from the start. You won’t convince anybody with a good story.

That said I don’t wanna say everything is fine and should stay as it is. But I understand the devs focus on that regard. I won’t expect an ARPG to be the reference in story telling. It will propably improve a lot in time and with additional content.