Some Feedback to the current state of the game

Hello,

so I have some more feedback to give here:

I think this might be the one thing that will not be changed anymore, because it would probably be a lot of work to do so, but needs to be changed: some boss fights need to be reworked, imo. There are some parts of some boss fights that are not very challenging. I think boss fights fit into the game very well. They test your builds in ways that are very interactive. I love that. It's a new approach to ARPGs, creating some kind of deep combat system that has been overdue for the genre for a long time in my opinion.

But for example, I just fought the shark and there is a phase where it burrows into the ground and appears from time to time to attack from underneath. It looks cool. It's stylistically well made. It reminds of some tropes that fit to the genre of the game, I think. It has some kind of humour to it. But it's not very exciting gameplay-wise. You just have to move a random direction to evade all of it and there's no real interaction going on here.

What I really like on the other hand is when bosses jump at me all of a sudden. I am using an incinerate build right now and it wants to build up the damage over some time. Then I have to sometimes interrupt this chanelling and ramping up damage, beause there's a big attack coming or I suddenly get stunned, because the boss decided to jump at me from a short distance. I love that. It makes me feel boss fights were designed with interaction in mind, trying to create a deep combat system, making me adapt to the behaviour of the boss and it also feels like the devs knew about possible builds and how to disrupt them.

All in all I feel this game is a lot of fun when it tries to create these interactions; these deep combat systems. When I say "deep" in regards to the combat system I mean that with as few complexity as possible a system tries to create lots of possible methods to interact and use this complexity. This is what makes games fun, in my opinion. One example for this would be that I use my ice nova to first create chilled ground so that I damage mobs around me, I usually sprint and then roll into groups to do that, then if I don't see the fight ending soon I try to funnel them into small corridor-like paths in order to let them come to me and charge up my incinerate in anticipation. The game didn't tell me to do this. I had to come up with that tactic myself. It feels like I am supposed to play like this, which speaks of good design choices in my opinion. But there was no hint given to me that this would be a good way to play and it feels as my achievement to have come to this conclusion of playing this way. This is what I mean with "deep" in regards to combat system.

Well done, GGG. But please, don't neglect the boss fights. From what I know from game design history, I have the feeling that these kinds of things are likely to be left as they are, because they're "good enough". Well, they could be a lot better, for sure. I am not saying they're bad. A lot of boss fights are actually very good, better than most games, I think. But, could be a lot better, still.



In kind regards