Yet another noob's first impressions

Hello devs, and thanks for a great game.

I have had a blast these last few weeks playing through the campaign. In the spirit of being a beta, below are my first impressions. I will talk mostly of feelings and atmosphere, not detailed mechanics or suggestions (because most of these are already dicussed by more experienced players).

Context: I have played only he campaign so far, haven’t started endgame stuff. 2-3 characters to lvl 30-ish to get the hang of it, then 1 in HC who died at lvl 57 (my one and only death), now back to lvl 51 in SC to push to endgame (deathless so far).
I am ancient enough to have played Diablo 1 at launch, and pretty much all other ARPGs since then. In recent years mostly PoE and Grim Dawn, almost always on HC.

What I like:

  • Skills system. The skills specialisation trees are a great concept. Opens up so many possibilities for builds, while still easy enough to understand and use efficently without guide.
  • Passives system. While each tree is not very big, I really like that even after choosing a mastery you can access half the tree of the others. Again, gives a lot of building options.
  • Story. I know, not capital in an action RPG, but yours is probably the best of your direct competitors. Can’t wait for the next chapter and see what happens. Is divine era Yulia the same as imperial era Yulia? What happened to her? Is Grael the Immortal Emperor? What is the void and how did it appear? Gripping!
  • Crafting. Very easy to use, takes a while and some luck to get the perfect item but just enough to not be discouraging. Good balance.
  • Stash. It is so easy to customise and arrange our tabs the way we want! Brilliant.
  • Loot filter. I haven’t really played with it yet, but it seems great and easy enough to use while being extremely detailed.
  • Game guide and tooltips. Great job on these. Some of the clearest I have seen in any game.

What I would like to see added (I understand it is a work in progress and you have other priorities. This is a long term plan!)

  • Lore. As I said, I enjoy the storyline. Would be great to find some books or a few interactive chats with NPCs that would tell me more about the world’s history. Ideally, recorded in a log book somewhere so I can come back to them. Easy to implement, but time consuming, I appreciate that.
  • Character customisation. OK, most ARPGs don’t have any. But why not beat the competition and be the first ones to have some? Simply being able to choose male or female would be nice. 2-3 races with little stat perks would be paradise.
  • Player housing. You probably thought about that one. Huge work, but also a huge plus to any game.
  • Trading. No comment, everybody is talking about it already.
  • Quests rewards. Seems to be only xp and money. And idol slots, which is a very good idea, but watered down as you still get some of these quests after you have unlocked everything. Only one quest in ruined era gives an item (even better, a choice between two rewards). More like this would be great, both the reward and the choice between two quest givers.

What I don’t like so much:

  • Graphics. They are a bit underwhelming. In general, lack of details and diversity. But they get better as the campaign advances (most recent additions), so I have great hopes for the future. Also, the atmosphere and style feel VERY influenced by PoE, I think you need to find your own style.
  • Difficulty (maybe?). The campaign feels really easy, including the bosses. Perhaps I should try masochist mode, or perhaps I have played too much hardcore in other games and I pile up too much defenses, but I don’t even get close to dying in the first 50 levels at least. Never.
  • Crafting shards. Material list in the forge is a bit hard to navigate, I am never sure of what I have and what I need. I think I would like them to stay in my stash and be easier to visualise. Maybe another, separate stash only accessible through the forge, but that I would be able to organise the way I like?

Right, that’s all for today, will probably write more after I experiment the monolith.
Houlala

EHG …

For the love of all that’s good in the world … please ALPHABETIZE the dang list! :slight_smile:

Hey there…

Thanks for the feedback… As you say, lots of this has been discussed but there are a few that I could probably touch on…

Lore - not that often requested but heavily discussed and theorised… I think its just a case of the incompleteness of the game right now…

Character customisation - requested a lot and in some cases the discussions have been very heated… The devs have indicated that they would like to do this but the added work of additional 3d models/animations and adjustments to just about every visual in the game is something they dont have the time/resources to do right now… I dont think there is any other reason for it not existing already…

Housing - I dont think I recall a single request for this before… Might have missed it in a discord session or update but this could be a first… :wink:

Quest rewards - probably another one that is just the state of the game right now… I see no reason why additional quests couldnt be added or items added to existing quests…

Graphics - You hit the nail on the head… the newest stuff e.g. Chap 9 is much better than the older stuff… Every single patch includes updates to graphics so its just a matter of time really… Eventually everything will be updated… maps. items 2d/3d models, everything…

Difficulty - Again a very highly discussed topic… Everyone agrees the campaign is easy until a new chapter drops… Then everyone complains the mobs are too hard and the devs adjust accordingly… End game isnt complete - there are at least 2 more end-games still to come (Dungeons supposedly in the next patch)… The devs have indicated that they expect to do a whole game difficulty balancing pass or two when most of the content is complete… right now its probably a little hard to balance difficulty when they are still reworking things at a skill level… Once you have spent time in monolith you will appreciate how much harder it can get (stacking corruption levels) vs the campaigns…

Enjoy…

I know, this is super hard and/or time consuming to do. That’s why no big ARPG has any. Grim Dawn offers a male or female choice, and I think that’s the only one.

Really? That’s weird. Again not a typical ARPG feature, but PoE managed to create such a system and it is VERY cool.

Apparently just biological male & female options is a huge thing to implement purely in creating additional models etc. to fit the underlying character model change… From what I understand, they would have to make male/female versions of virtually every armour piece just as a start and considering how long it takes them just to do single model revamps with recent patches, I think that will likely be too much to ask of them right now… and thats not even considering all the dialog changes etc that would have to become dynamic etc…

Besides giving people choices to play the character in a biological gender of their choice, the “heated” side of this is issue is also related to the gender identity concerns that many people may have. So its not a simple topic…

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Yes, many players have asked for it.
Personaly I don’t feel a need for this, I’m not here to rest on my couch in my house, but it seems important to a lot of players, so why not? The devs have already said it will probably not be for launch, but it may be considered after.

Good input.

Quest rewards also include Passive points. More quests with the reward choices would be good as you say though.

Regarding housing; I know that Asheron’s Call and Skyrim had housing which allowed you to store items, and mount some as decorations. This would be cool if it existed in LE but it’s not something that I feel “has” to be there.

That’s true. These are good. :slight_smile:

Amongst many, many others. Almost all MMOs have some kind of personalised space, and a lot of modern CRPGs. In ARPGs it is more unusual. Of course, it doesn’t have to be there, it is just a nice little plus that makes people immerse more and stay longer in a game.
Not an emergency at all. I did say my ideas were long-term plans! :wink:

I very much agree with you vapourfire.

Having two options for gender per character literally doubles the work. What’s worse, most of this will not even be relevant because it can’t be seen unless you zoom in. It’s like making customizable faces and hairstyles that you will not see for 99.8% of the game because you will have helmets on. And yes, there are people who will always tick the box to have their helmet off because they like their virtual face that they created and that’s fine. The problem here is that this is an ARPG and you will spend almost all of your time zoomed out because that is how the game is intended to be played. Sure, you could cut off 85% of your visual information by zooming into a character’s face if you like dying a lot. I’m sure there are a few hardcore and/or inebriated players that would welcome the challenge, but most people would not.

Ultimately, the dev team has limited time and money to develop things. Yes, it is important to cater to a reasonably broad range within your target market. It is not wise, however, to spend a lot of resources on something that will be either provide minimal benefit or only be used by a small handful of players. Sure I would love to have a cool face and the option of body type and gender and color and all that fun stuff. But I also know that I’d much rather have cool armor, extra content, more quality of life features, and few to no bugs in the game. It’s simply a matter of priorities. So I’m totally okay with not getting extraneous features regardless of how “neat” they may be.

I would also argue that Lore, almost all visual character customization outside of gear, and housing fall into this category. If I had to pick one that I thought would be the most fruitful for the company, I would say “housing” with the caveat that it’s not actual houses but more like hideouts a la POE. They could focus on microtransactions that are similar to POE since the art styles are very close. That could include hideouts, skill visual changes, armor, auras, pets, and so forth. I’m not super keen on that, ESPECIALLY in a game you have to pay for upfront, but as long as they are very cheaply priced and offer 0 tangible gameplay benefit then I’m okay with it. I know this is a bit of a tangent, but POE irritated me because they were like - hey, we’re small indie devs so we need help with donations to get started and $60 microtransaction packs twice a year along with $500 packs every two years because we’re poor and just want to make a great game…then got bought out by Tencent (a MASSIVE Chinese gaming company with DEEP pockets) and were like - yeah, things will stay the same price because we got used to your money! /endrant

Also, you mentioned hot topics. I don’t want to deal with political or social issues in a video game because there’s more than enough of that EVERYWHERE in real life. Even if you do try to go that route, people will NEVER be happy on any side of the argument. It’s just a rabbit hole of wasted resources, frustration, resentment, anger, and broken trust that leaves everybody unhappy. I want game devs to develop games, not pander to my or anyone else’s unrelated opinions or personal preferences. Keep that mess in the real world please and thank you.

As a final note, I think once they update all of the graphics the game will be a lot prettier. I hope they have some brighter (maybe slightly happier?) areas because I’ve played one too many apocalyptic ARPGs that are just dreary and depressing. I’m not saying this game is all doom and gloom, but I think back to Titan Quest and Marvel Heroes and remember all of the cool scenery that just felt kinda chill. It’d be nice to have more of that in my humble opinion.

Cheers

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