Genuine Heartfelt Feedback

I hope this message finds you well, and thank you for the work you put into this game.

I am one of the last people to write feedback anywhere for any game. I typically don't because I generally have a lot of trust in the community and developers to say all the right things, but I feel there's a lot of chaos now and I worry that the vision for the game can be shaky in between the onslaught of complains (however varied and valid at times) and feedback.
So I thought it would be best to clarify what I believe is going to hurt this game in the long run.

When I played 0.1.0 these last few months, it was without a doubt the best RPG I’ve played in my life. I even wrote my only Steam review I’ve ever wrote because of how much I enjoyed the game after 30 years of gaming, and within the span of 4 weeks I sank 500 hours into the game. The reason for that – was the combat.

The combat (especially after the enemy collision was fixed), had this pseudo-ASMR feel to it. Even as the “worst class” (I started with Warrior at its *lowest* point) – and I still enjoyed every single second of gameplay and kept coming back every day. Sure, the class overall wasn’t as strong as it ended up getting tuned to by the time I started trying other classes, but the impeccable combat kept me engaged.

What do I mean by that? Hits actually “made sense”; when hard attacks hit, enemies crumbled, and certain sounds added up with those interactions; altogether with the score this created a perfect symphony of gameplay that you could play endlessly even with abilities getting nerfed left and right.
But now? That “symphony” is gone. The musicians are playing the wrong instruments, and the instruments haven’t been tuned for the show. The week 1 collision issue is now back (but worse, somehow?). The sounds, the enemies, the combat itself no longer adds up – it feels like I’m playing some odd version of a completely different game entirely. This isn’t the game I fell in love with.

Something that bugs me with feedback sometimes is people just complaining and not offering real solutions. I will go a step further against this and empathize with your vision as developers.

Boss fights as a core issue affecting the rest of gameplay: I understand that killing bosses too fast was an issue, but what are players supposed to do when bosses can practically one shot you? I saw that lives were added in pinnacle boss fights (while it’s not an impractical solution, it’s still a band-aid that almost doesn’t still address the core part of the problem which was made worse by making the boss health pool / defense more resilient, and still having them hit the same or harder. So what does this do to the mindset of the player? Even MORE focus on glass cannon builds, even less experimentation. What else does that create? No longer having fun. No longer experimenting.) I think the best things are done with the carrot, not the stick. Make the player want to play the boss fight for longer, stop having the bosses’ attacks just one-shot the players first, and keep the multiple lives. Make slow adjustments like that, I’m sure you’ll see players get more engaged. If you see those boss times slowly going up, great – if you want even longer fights just play with the DPS windows a bit, make them shorter if needed somehow, or find ways for bosses to evade player hits or return fire when taking tons of damage from a player.

I’m no professional, these are just my ideas that may be fun for myself. But please, be gradual and measured – for whatever reason, this core issue has now affected every single aspect of gameplay it seems. Mapping and fighting normal/magic/rare mobs was near perfect in my opinion, it almost scaled perfectly by T15. I was just looking for more content and varied gameplay. But what I got was an extremely confusing cocktail of misconfigured combat. Nerfs came through (everyone expected this), but mobs now collided worse, they (still have) way more health, their defenses were blasted somewhere many planes higher, all seemingly for the purpose of what seems like tailoring a more ruthless player progression to prepare them for the new pinnacle boss fights. So I do understand that vision, but the reality is – even from a Souls game loving player like myself – the execution of it made the game practically unplayable long-term.

I ask, at least for the core gameplay (mapping, fighting mobs), please look at and go back to what worked in 0.1.0. What made players come and play this game for hundreds and even thousands of hours, experimenting, making builds and new classes left and right, and just appreciating every aspect of your game. They say ‘those who avoid a certain fate, ironically make even more steps towards it in the quest of preventing that fate’ – and I think that’s exactly what happened here. Everything you wanted to avoid, players solely focusing on high DPS and overpowered builds? The game is exactly that now, but on 5 billion steroids.

So once again, please be gradual. Go back to what made 0.1.0 so fun. The core gameplay was perfect, you already nerfed skills for 0.2.0 – that already plays with so many variables. Focusing on just gradually adjusting the boss fights, and then adding all the other content that looked really cool and I that want to get into with several characters (but cannot right now because of the reasons I stated), is what we need right now in my view.
I hope this message finds you well, and thank you for the work you put into this game.

Thank you for reading, and I genuinely hope to spend tens of thousands of hours this game. I want this to be a generation defining game.

As of the recent announcement event with 0.3.0, I feel heard.

Thank you, and I look forward to trying the new update!