Pathing Lategame (Thoughts / Suggestions)

There are a few things I’ve noticed playing this patch that I feel still could be improved a little bit.

The first is pathing down and to the left. When having to do this in a monolith in the ice temple / jotun area, the columns and brick walls don’t fade away fast enough or completely enough to allow you to see what’s happening. And the lack of space in those areas leads to getting ambushed by offscreen enemies more than you otherwise would. It may seem videogame-y but it might be a good idea to allow enemies to glow faintly when obscured by terrain so you can at least tell where they’re standing relative to you. This would also be a good way just to help notice where and how often this is happening in the levels.

This really matters too, because as you’ve probably experienced, Ogres, Saboteurs and Light Mages clipping you the second you stop moving or get stuck gets old quick when it’s over half your HP or potentially all of it on a crit. The final version of the game probably needs to either pull the camera out a smidge or just have some kind of rule where at least the first time an enemy attacks you, it doesn’t start to wind up a powerful attack while you still can’t see it. The sheer number of enemies on the screen in Empowered Timelines make it where you can’t even really know if you can walk a certain direction in the chaos, so this would be a welcome tweak in general.

Where you can and can’t walk is a little vague in certain places. I found myself pathing the wrong direction or getting stuck because it’s hard to see where the invisible wall begins in the snowy courtyards of the temple. This is not the only spot that happened, but it was the one where I noticed this problem the most.

Along those lines, it’s also very hard to tell if you can get across some gaps with a teleport and it seems to be angle specific. Either making this more lenient or creating some kind of indicator so you can tell if you can make it would be nice. Not a must-have, but it would make movement less frustrating, especially since you have no choice but to do this sometimes.

What I’ve found due to all of this is that you spend lot of time lategame pathing into enemies you didn’t know were there or backtracking trying to get control of the situation again if you’re not playing a tank. While this can be challenging, it doesn’t remain interesting for very long. This is because much of what you end up doing is waiting around to be allowed to do something.

Lingering AoE’s or certain long reaching attacks force you to poke and back away a lot. Time lurches while waiting to be able to move forward again. You really feel it dragging by. And if you can’t see what the enemy is doing because it’s offscreen or hidden behind terrain, - Or you just can’t see it clearly in the clutter to tell what it’s going to do next - you’re basically having to roll the dice on human error setting in when you finally do. And the pathing issues I’ve pointed out here all add into that gamble.

I get it that this margin of error probably needs to exist to challenge certain players, but I’m sure there are more interesting ways of having it, like just fighting the harder enemies when you get to them. Making all of this simpler would only improve how the game feels to play and move around in while you’re approaching those challenges.

Hope this helps! Keep up the good work,
-SMK

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