I’ve played this game a year ago quite successfully to level 95 on a Void Knight and decided to give it a second spin after seeing that there have been monolith changes. This time my choice was Necromancer which ended at level 80.
Here’s my short summary on what I think:
- Dices icon in the first city.
Dices themselves are kind of an unwelcome icon as it’s way too explicit for displaying that you’re gambling. I’d suggest changing the icon to something more subtle.
- Uniques need to be cheaper early.
I found 2 uniques early on which gave me 1000 gold by before I even got to the gambler Completely trivialized my early game gearing.
- Going Lower Archive was disappointing.
I felt like I got trolled by clearing it and seeing that there really is nothing. It felt like the right path and while I could have checked the map, the negative emotion is there already. I am inclined to believe that an average player will feel the same.
- Music is too intense in first area.
Right as you start the game, you get this mega epic final boss music, some sort of intensity management required here.
- Too much loot from the first moment, cut down on whites especially because everyone knows that from minute 1.
Already after 30 minutes I was able to understand that white items are completely garbage and my screen was full of items all the time. I feel that it’s a bit too intense and unnecessary early on. I also did not pick up a single white item intentionally during my whole playthrough. I’m not sure what purpose do they serve? Feel free to write in the replies.
- Idol of Loathing boss goo doesn’t seem to do anything.
The ground effects were there but I didn’t seem to care about it. This was an afterthough, didn’t fully test it.
- Health potion numbers UI.
I confused myself multiple times looking at the numbers without the image on how many potions I have left as I look bottom to up when searching for information.
- Tanky monsters with high damage and low loot.
Although I know that this has been worked on, I still feel that the effort is not worth the time and danger which they impose. I ignored a lot of monsters already early on after seeing the reward patterns.
- Spirit Plague is well done visually.
- Only have monster info that matters.
Too much random information below monsters names. Developers really have to think through what information might change the players actions and which not. The more lines you have under the monster’s name, the less a player will read them.
A player will also not change neither their tactics or decision to engage the monster just because it will become stronger if it’s allies die, most likely ever.
- Temple Guardian boss has too low HP.
Plenty of bosses died before I even came to realize that this is a boss, not a rare monster.
- Minions moonwalk too much.
One of the strongest immersion breaking scenarios, especially as it happens mostly when you become idle and if you’re idle, you’re noticing a lot more small details.
- Story characters leave me completely cold
If the characters aren’t emotive both physically and phonetically, it’s very hard to care about them.
If a snake queen would slap me on the floor and then yell at me how her coffee beans are grown by a local small business and are green friendly, I would remember and care about it but as of now, no character has convinced me that their coffee beans are carbon neutral.
- Horton terrible visual ques.
Not enough clarity for how much is going on.
- Bosses have too low dialogue sound, try mixing down music during speech.
It feels like all bosses are simply mumbling and it takes effort to hear what they’re trying to tell me. Also I assume that character’s distance from the boss is what messes with the speech as well. You could try adjusting that variable for these scenarios.
- Prism Wraps felt strong
I felt like they had too much functionality this early on. I got it at level 10 and didn’t swap til 40.
- Max minions could be a different color.
The minion numbers in top left could have a different colour when they reach maximum number as the number constantly changes early. Would make the gameplay smoother.
- Maj’elkan Catacomb is too long with nothing special.
It felt pretty flaccid, just running and being bored with nothing special.
- 2nd gear at level 40, first at 20.
I geared up only twice, until the finish. I generally ran through everything and didn’t even bother to pick up items much as the enemies barely scaled up.
Acts finish
- Too much or too little info.
There’s way too much information which I should not have to know and / or don’t care; and too much information which I very much need but don’t have. I’m sure you’re aware of that.
- Removal runes are weak.
I started using them only super late when I had no other options left and huge excess of shards available. It doesn’t make sense to use removal runes early as items already break before they reach their maximum tier, so you’re pretty likely to not get what you want even if removal is successful.
- Refinements & Cleansings are wack.
Out of 50 pieces of equipment I eventually used, I gave them a spin only once when I rolled a 100 minion HP out of 150.
Again, it just doesn’t make sense to get additional instability and possibly break your item completely.
Players are hesitant to even upgrade to the max tier, let alone refine the tiers.
I didn’t use the Cleansing rune not even once during my whole gameplay.
- Monolith sometimes empty - bug.
Have to restart to fix it.
- Enter button to log in.
Pressing enter to log in and select your character would be pretty great!
- Spikes & acid pools on ground - too little visual emphasis.
Some void monster leaves spikes on the ground once they die. They do stand out in isolation but they last for a long time and I’ve had plenty of scenarios where I’m close to dying due to not being able to visually notice them.
Ground effects in general are sometimes pretty poor, same with acid pools.
- Don’t care about not getting final passives.
There are so many passive points that I just flat out didn’t bother to check if I finished all passives or not as the power gain is minuscule. I most likely have 2 - 5 missing.
- Make rerolling no fracture but have stability.
Refining items should not give fractures but should be able to break due to instability.
- God Lancer good boss, voice & skills.
The first and only boss in the whole game who wasn’t boring and had some character attached to him. Voice acting, boss mechanics, character were all in their respective categories better than any boss I encountered the whole game.
It feels completely different from the rest of the game.
- Giant / strong mob specific levels are bad design.
There are some levels which just have loads of giant mobs. These levels were met with just running to the end and ignoring them as much as possible. I think it’s a bad design to have levels which have excess of these Ice Giants and Soul Cages etc.
This also breaks the gameplay as when you before had to dodge some spells, now you just have to keep away as the whole screen is full of them.
- Huge lag sometimes, probably due to excess effects from monsters.
I have a 2080 TI with 3950X and 3600 64GB ram @ 165HZ + Nvme.
It’s pretty hard to make this PC lag.
My bet is on poorly optimized / built VFX.
I know I know.
- Progression feels better than last year May.
- Fallen Harbour mega lag.
This map seems to lag more than the others
- Soul Cage instakill.
Soul Cage either has way too high damage or the damage sometimes bugs out. I died very few times during my playthrough and when I died it was mostly to Soul Cage which seemingly killed me in 0.1 - 0.5s without me having time to react to it.
I am almost all the time at max HP due to blood golems and potions, I also check the deaths through Nvidia replay.
- Add an animation timing randomizer with 200ms.
I believe this very easy to implement solution would help your animation department greatly. The mobs all having similar animations will stand out less and the game would look far more realistic.
Just a random delay between 0 - 200MS before aggro start would solve this.
I came up with this myself : = )
- Affix art should be for tiers not rolls.
I noticed that there are small white boxes in front of the affix if it’s max roll. This is a great concept but pretty much useless as players care 20x more about the affix tier, not the roll.
If you would swap this max roll to max tier, it would help players far more.
You could even assign colours for T4 - T7 like that.
- Colorblinded & T6-7 affixes
I found 2 purple items at level 50 or so then for the next 20 hours I seemingly got none. I was quite frustrated that how is this possible - RNG THIS BAD!?
No, it seems that I have a minor purple colorblindness which I discovered just now LOL.
So yeah, something like a SFX or a different shade of purple or ability to change colour would help plenty with it.
I can almost barely if I focus hard on the color, make the difference between a blue and a purple item in this game.
- Player’s own skills don’t stand out enough
I used Marrow Shards and already from the first moment I was simply aiming in the general direction and that’s it; this applies to at least half of the skills with mostly just estimating the area which the skills covers / covered.
I assume having a brighter colour contrast on player skills would help plenty.
- Gimping players curiosity with despecialization
Players most of all are going to test their creativity and explore to new areas when they’re faced with adversity. In this scenario, you cannot explore anything in the skills section because you’re completely guaranteed to be worse off than before.
I would suggest that the skill slots have at least half of their levels retained when despecialized. Players are able to make the connection that if they give away their skill, then they will have a really bad time.
Because of it I personally didn’t try at least half of the skills more than once blasting them in the air.
Suggestions relating to psychology
I’m pretty well versed in psychological models and neurobiology so I thought I’ll share some of my thought and knowledge (:
I am mainly talking about the average player’s cognition, not the whole or myself alone.
I could probably talk about these endlessly and if there’s more curiousity towards them, I’m open to talk about them more through the replies or PMs.
- Item molds concept
An item mold which could be placed in your idols section. Players could put an item base which they want to drop more often inside the mold. This would increase players enthusiasm towards the grind as they feel more power over RNG now, even if it would not do anything at all.
It will create good positive illusions towards players being good strategists and the positive confirmation bias will be absolutely rampant. The enthusiasm from finding an item they want AND with the affixes they wanted will be 100% in their head because of the item mold, even if it wouldn’t do anything.
- VFX on gear / art
Even a minuscule sparkle on 2D art or a tiny effect on the item will greatly increase a player’s interest in having all or some items shiny as a goal.
This is greatly observed in almost all games which do have such features - there’ll always be audience who’ll set their goal as “all shiny items” and also try to impress others with them.
Even if nobody saw it, you would make sacrifices for that shiny shiny item.
- Positive emotions from crafting
The current system is great for players to feel positive emotions in high quantities. The more a player has succeeded at crafting, the more they will engage with the concept.
This could be abused further if you’d lower the amount of T5/T4 items drop so players instead of waiting for the perfect item to drop, would craft them themselves.
Right now, it’s statistically and practically better to wait until an item with at least 2x T4/T5 drops and then craft. I’ve derived it purely from my own pattern recognition.
This is PoE crafting system’s biggest weakness - it doesn’t provide enough good emotions and the frustration of losing currency is the biggest detractor for players to avoid crafting.
This makes inexperienced, statistically uneducated players avoid crafting as a whole and look towards the market’s direction.
PoE also knows that, this is why Harvest exists.
- How to abuse loss aversion
One of our biggest weaknesses and flaws as human beings is loss aversion. We really do not want to lose and will do everything and anything to avoid it.
This heuristic could be abused by introducing even more rare and stronger guardian scrolls.
Players will engage and farm far more than they potentially would just so they could avoid the loss of a craft.
You could start off with 10 guardian scrolls exchanging for 1 really strong one!
- Helping the players with their imagination
If you’re able to make players imagine abstractions where they run around with their perfect gear, they’ll play for far longer. As of now, this is not the case.
An example:
I know right now that this 2x T5 and 2x T4 chest will be the best chest that I’ll ever have and I will stop looking at chests on the ground as a whole. If my gear stops me from advancing, I would quit before making another chest like that.
BUT
If I know that if I spend 10 hours grinding in a specific fashion and then I’m guaranteed to upgrade one of my T4s to T5, then I’d probably start grinding.
If I knew that it would take another 20 hours to get my second T5, I would maybe even consider it.
This is a plan which I can visualize and be certain won’t be a waste of time although it might take far more than it ever would for me to by just picking up chests from the ground and crafting on them with the current odds.
- Uniques to create interest in other classes & builds
A good way to do that is to have unique items that have giant % numbers which are exclusive to a single class. Big number = brain go whoa!
As an example if you introduce a chest piece which has a shock effect of 1000% but you cannot use your weapon as a mage then HOLY HECK?! Who wouldn’t want to try this out?
What!? Golem shoots 500% more spell projectiles!? That’s insane!
There are many other ways than the numbers, but that’s one of them.
- Unique items which incorporate other classes & builds
This is another tool to help players exercise their imagination. As an example if a Sentinel player gets a Sentinel only minion unique which does BIG damage hits like 5000 per hit without AOE then the curiousity towards other minions and their masters will greatly increase.
- Tankiness is always bad
It almost doesn’t matter what the rewards are, if the monster takes too long to kill and you have to walk around with your mana empty or minions dead or just taking too long to kill a mob because you chose tanky modifiers; you will be bored no matter what the reason is, you also will not learn from it.
The more time the player has to wait and not see new monsters, the worse it is.
I don’t advocate for necessarily PoE style of rushing everything with one shot but having rare monsters which require a minute to kill is too much.
My suggestion : limit tanky modifiers everywhere greatly xor replace them.
- Bad luck protection
This is quite crucial to avoid early burnouts due to bad luck. If a player doesn’t receive any uniques or good items within lets say the first 1-2 hours, his/her journey is quite likely going to end.
I know some games have already implemented bad luck protection and I believe this game could do that as well.
This could be tied to a check on item drops within a total time spent in map/arena.
- Exhausting the brain
Currently the game is too exhausting in terms of constant cognitive power required to make progress. You cannot progress in this game at all if you simply and just run the content while killing mobs - you ALWAYS have to check the items on the ground.
This sort of gameplay doesn’t allow players to change intensity of the gameplay if they wanted to.
In other games you just up your lootfilter and/or change your activity to something more relaxed.
On the same subject, the default items settings should be set on shortest with least information shown. It’s visually exhausting to look at all these items and text on the ground and most players aren’t aware of that option ← I am not that confident on that statement though.
- You’re such a good player!
Another strategy to create an illusion of adeptness is to let players make things harder for themselves; through making the base content extremely simple and giving tools to make it harder with.
If you add an option in the monolith to TRIPLE THE DIFFICULTY of the modifier by PAYING GOLD, people will think they’re big professionals and crazy gamers( pfsh, do you even triple your monolith modifiers, bro?) but in reality they would be as good as every other players and are playing on the intended difficulty.
On top of all that, you would also be creating a sense of strategy, as the player thinks that they’re developing a strategy which involves clever use of sacrifice for future happiness which in return makes them feel good about themselves and the sense of achievement feels even stronger!
I am not sure and I haven’t looked into it but I believe some RPG turn-based games seem to apply the same logic that the hardest difficulty actually is the intended level of challenge but the player’s ego will be sky high during and after completion - the player now TRULY feels like a hero.
Visit the forums in these games and you’ll see that everyone starts their posts with “I finished the game on the Immortal God of Geniusman hardest difficulty”.
The End
Oh I forgot, I have to clean the house.
ok that is off the topic and just me bit%$#@%^ng