I’ve started yesterday, I like the passives, skills & specializations, basically character progression. Love the tooltips and loot filters are AMAZING!
However I feel like I’m constantly fighting against the strange feeling of dislike during combat. It is hard to exactly pin point what it is, but I think it is mostly the quality of animations.
Animations.
note: while game progression systems might be different across games and I might like them in different games because of different reasons, the animation quality and polish is something I hate to feel like it is inferior compared to x or y, it feels bad. To put it into meme terms “we have x at home” type of situation.
- Characters posing during class selection feels unnatural. Sentinel makes lighting fast sword moves in heavy armor, rogue stance after the animation looks extremely uncomfortable, contributing to general disbelief.
- Quill Hogs going underground feels like teleporting, no indication how they move underground, it might be logical, but that is not the point.
Skill animations.
Acolyte.
Hungering Souls and Wandering Spirits:
- depending on background in some cases are almost invisible.
- might be because of other things happening on screen (minions attacking monsters), but it feels like hungering souls/wandering spirits have no impact when they hit the enemy, maybe sound effect is too generic, maybe it shares the same hit effect animation with other skills, I’m not sure, but it is a general feeling that I can’t distinguish when different skills interact with targets they connect with.
Mage
Glacier:
- feels like gifs/slides instead of what would be a “proper” animation.
Freeze effects - lacks animation/sound effect which would indicate when the freeze is coming to an end. For example crackling ice sound intensifying before freeze is over, or “ice thawing sound”, I know ice thaws silently, but you get my point.
Fireball: - flies too fast? Maybe it is as it should be in terms of gameplay, but in terms of visuals it certainly feels like it is going so fast there is no way to appreciate how the fireball looks, and this is recurring theme across most spells/skills I’ve encountered, the animations sometimes seem so quick I can barely notice them in some cases.
- sound effect reminds me more of a blunt weapon than the ball of fire hitting something.
There are many more details like that, some of them I attribute to the fact that I might need some adjusting time, but then again this is about first impressions.