Arcen Games
General Category => A Valley Without Wind 1 & 2 => Topic started by: x4000 on May 09, 2012, 04:23:59 pm
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Upgrade stones are now trivial to get, and we have further changes planned for those.
Platforms and boxes are plentiful enough that presumably those would not be an issue.
It takes a while to get really good enchants, especially if you have a particular type of enchant you're interested in. Any thoughts there? How bad do you find that?
Then there's materials for the new spells and guardian powers and NPCs and all that. Those can take a while, but I'm not sure how long a lot of folks are finding they have to grind secret missions in order to get what they want. I tend to be more flexible and go with the flow, but if you're after specific goals then I expect your experience could be really different. Thoughts there on how the experience has been for you thus far.
No need to be rude or accusatory if you've been having a rough time, please -- we're asking for feedback here, so cut us a break and let's just get down to the issues themselves. Several major review sources have been complaining that we're wasting your time with how the game is structured -- making you do lots of things in too repetitive of a fashion. However, feedback during late beta was exactly the opposite (how many of you were telling us to put in our marketing materials "without the traditional grind?" Boy I'm glad we didn't, given how things have shaken out.).
What I'm looking to do is collect some player feedback here about where the tension points are for various styles of play -- everybody plays a big differently.
TLDR: Where is there a point in the game where you want to do something fun, but instead the game is making you do an activity you find un-fun before you can get back to the fun bits?
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I don't know if trivial upgrade stones may not be part of the problem: One of those tedious but beneficial things that can be ground and is then considered mandatory. I'm still highly conservative with the things, only using a boost or two when I'm dealing with a REALLY dangerous situation but others seem to think that you're underpowered if you don't have 10/10 upgrades. Maybe they should be boss-only drops just like experience was back in 0.500 so they are neither trivial nor farmable.
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The current plan with upgrade stones is actually to make those be something you don't even collect: you just get 10 points to allocate to your character for purposes of customization, and that's that. Then there's nothing at all to collect ever, relating to character death in that particular way. Other optional spell scrolls and traps and goodies in the stashes would then be the draw for those: new stuff you want to find in stashes, rather than repetitious stuff you're forced to go find to remain competitive.
The reason I've been thinking in that direction is that upgrade stones represent some basic character choice for players: and the whole collection mechanic with those just gets in the way of that and slows things down.
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It takes a while to get really good enchants, especially if you have a particular type of enchant you're interested in. Any thoughts there? How bad do you find that?
I like the enchant system the way it is right now. I really like how they always get better, on average. It's like you've taken a loot game like Diablo and abstracted it away into enchant containers. I know some people aren't too happy that some green and blue enchants they get are useless, but I really think they should be kept the way they are right now. Making rarer enchants better will have those same people complaining that all the common enchants are now useless.
Then there's materials for the new spells and guardian powers and NPCs and all that.
There's a few potential bottlenecks early on that sometimes get in the way of getting your NPCs to level II and III. There's one NPC that you need to get all the other ones to level III. (I believe you need both stonebinder and lumbermancer to build the rest of the buildings). If you're unlucky and don't get those NPCs at the start, you have to look for them with rescue missions. But at this point you can't cast seek survivor! On continent 2 I found two rescue missions but unfortunately I failed them, and to progress further I had to search buildings specifically for a rescue mission. I really think Seek Survivor and Seek Resources spells should be more easily accessible early on.
I haven't tried 1.011 or 1.012 yet, so if anything I said contradicts what's in the latest versions, please disregard those parts.
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Right now I'm at Tier 4 on my first continent and I can't defeat the Overlord (cleared all of the lieutenants). So, the obvious thing to do is upgrade my main spells. I need 7 Charred Amber and I just can't seem to get them. I used Seek Resources to get 5 missions in Grasslands and got only one mission offering Charred Amber, and that was for a single piece. Now that I unlocked Cat's Eyes and Sunstones, it feels like those materials are everywhere and they're blocking from getting what I need. I also need Magma, but my desert is filled with missions offering limited time buffs. I don't feel a minor buff for a paltry 5 minutes is worth raising the tier of my continent.
That's where it's dragging for me. I have to push myself to do missions that don't give me what I want, which pushes me towards a higher tier, which is exactly what I don't want when my spells need to be stronger.
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I like the enchant system the way it is right now. I really like how they always get better, on average. It's like you've taken a loot game like Diablo and abstracted it away into enchant containers. I know some people aren't too happy that some green and blue enchants they get are useless, but I really think they should be kept the way they are right now. Making rarer enchants better will have those same people complaining that all the common enchants are now useless.
I don't really mind that green n blue enchants are not normally that good, it's mostly the legendary (and sometimes purple) ones I have a problem with. They are pretty rare sometimes, and you can go whole continents without getting one, and when you do get one it's not as good as a common enchant which you may already have.
I suppose you could just remove the "Legendary" types and I probably won't be that bothered anymore.
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This is a good topic. I'll toss my two-cents in.
The first "Dragging" part would be early-on, when you don't have any enchants and you have to get some. You're basically stuck grinding for them, no matter what. Sure, you can get some through missions or caving, but most of the time, you have to either grind buildings, grind killing enemies (For consciousness shards), or grind Pyramids. I know a lot of people like to explore to find the enchants, and I do too...
But I just find the current system really tedious. Having to go through almost every inch of a Maze Room to get enchants is maddening, and finding only 1 or 2 enchant containers in a Stash is a real bummer too. Maybe make stashes drop full Enchant containers and maybe have Maze rooms have 2-3 full containers hidden in there somewhere instead of a crapton of little ones.
The second is trying to get the "Right" enchantment. In one of my games, I've been looking for a Conserving Mind enchantment for AGES and I haven't found one. I'm using Right-Arm Seeker and buying Right Arm enchants left and right and simply not getting one. So it's basically turned into a "Grind for what you need" situation. I like the random nature of the enchants and such, but there should be some sort of way to get a more specific one somehow.
I'd purpose an "Enchant Trade" system, where you can trade in several enchants of the same slot and get to choose a replacement. For example, trade in 10 Right Arm Enchants and you get to choose from a list of Right Arm Enchants, even rare ones. The quality of what you get would still be random, but you'd know what type of right-arm enchant it was. You could do this for any slot, potentially. It would allow some nice customization and some choices. Do I want to use Leg Seeker and get a bunch of potentially useless enchants so I can trade a dozen of them for a Triple Jump? Or do I want to not use the Leg Seeker and hope I get a good enchant for another body part?
The third is the Lieutenants. By the time I'm ready to face them, I'm usually ready to face all three AND the overlord in quick succession. And that makes me realize how repetitive it is to go through 3 "Evil Outpost" towers that are almost the same and fight 3 Lieutenants that are also very, very similar.
And in return, you get ONE enchant for it. Nothing else. The wind doesn't get weaker, you get no resources, nothing. There is almost literally no incentive to kill a Lieutenant other than to eventually kill the Overlord. IMO, it's a pretty big weak point in the game.
The last one is the repetitiveness of going to a new continent. Sure, there's new stuff. But you end up doing mostly the exact same things. Rescue survivors. Build Wind Shelters. Tier up spells. Kill Lieutenants. Kill Overlord. Move on. There isn't much variety to this, unfortunately, and it makes each new continent feel like just more work than something rewarding.
And being able to bring your Enchants to the new continent makes things really awkward in the early Tiers. Triple Jumping around with 60% detection reduction, 50% Mana Cost Reduction and a 60% Cooldown Rate reduction during Tier 1 makes the entire Tier almost pointless.
Once you have some good enchants, your character is basically "Maxed out" already, and you're just going through the above steps to kill the overlord again.
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I'll admit to not having read the reviews, but I'd guess the main focus for thing beings repetitive is the tier system, remaking the same spell 4-5 times and then doing it for however many spells you use is going to be repetitive by anyone's standards, largely because of the perceived lack of progress over any actual repetition in what you're doing. I have to say that that is probably my interpretation because recently I have been considering suggesting removing the tier system entirely, back when we had infinite tiers there was an argument for it but as we just repeat the same 5 tiers now it seems sort of like a hangover.
TLDR: Where is there a point in the game where you want to do something fun, but instead the game is making you do an activity you find un-fun before you can get back to the fun bits?
This is going to seem a really strange answer, and indeed not specifically the kind of answer you are after, but the least as it stands the least fun I have in the game is when it comes time to kill the Overlord. I enjoy everything up to and including killing the lieutenants (which I generally do when I have a couple of Tier 4 spells), but when it comes to the Overlord it is all sort of overridden by the knowledge that killing the Overlord makes what you just spent your time doing completely pointless.
As to the real question of where I find there to be grind or drag, it's mostly down to spell choice, I arbitrarily pick new spells to use when I start a new continent, if missions don't offer what I want then that is where the drag comes into it, you can spend a lot of time getting nowhere whilst trying to get what you want rather than using what the game offers you.
I suppose the real problem there is once you are part way down a path switching to a different one is somewhere between difficult and tedious. I mean if all the initial missions give me say Sea Essence and I start upgrading my Water Spells, then suddenly the RNG screws me and no Sea Essence spawns, my options are either...
1) Persevere with Water Spells and grind secret missions or advance time a lot in hope that some turns up.
2) See what resources are spawning and start again from scratch with those spells whilst hoping that the RNG doesn't Screw me twice.
Neither of these are particularly fun options. and the second whilst the most rational choice goes against the grain, it's like I am giving in to the system not going along with it.
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I'd like more short-term goals that do some good to the world rather than the player. Actually I think we have a bit too much of the "one more term" thing Chris was talking about.
I really don't find all the grind-type stuff --- getting better gems, spells, etc --- compelling. That is to say, the possibility of killing an overlord doesn't motivate me to fire up the game, and then go look for some upgrade stones so I can go get some sapphire so I can finish some tier three missions so I can get some tier four spells so I can take on a lieutenant. I find much more that I just want to wander out into the world and get some incidental thing done and then get distracted and go somewhere else. I'm pretty happy setting my own fairly arbitrary goals, but I'd probably play more if I could spend half an hour and help one of my NPCs get his teddy bear back or what-have-you.
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In AI war, you have a single resource to
grind gather for gaining new ships, knowledge. You make your tough choices in how and where to gather that, and take the repercussions. But, what you can spend that knowledge on is based on a different hard choice of what to steal from the AI.
In AVWW, we get too many of some things, and not enough of others. The 15 tier orbs per CP level is too many, I never have nearly enough resources to use even half of those. Then, as Terraziel said, one hard choice for specific resources in the beginning might actually be wrong by not getting any more of that resource. It's like picking to upgrade to a Rank II ship and finding out later you aren't allowed to get the Rank III for reasons that were totally unforeseeable. At least in AI War your low ranked ships still have purpose.
So, the part that feels a little "draggy" would be the hunting for secret missions and hoping the RNG gives me what I want. I feel like I have no control and am floundering. Having checked X secret missions with things I don't want doesn't give me a sense of "progress."
There was a suggestion somewhere (don't remember) about a way to trade one resource for another, even like 2 or 3 to 1. While not "optimal" it would at least give a sense of progress. Then, finding the "wrong" thing isn't worth zero progress, it's worth a third.
Same thing with NPC professions. Maybe there could be a school that could retrain some. Like, if you have 3 Technozoologists, you could make one something else.
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The last one is the repetitiveness of going to a new continent. Sure, there's new stuff. But you end up doing mostly the exact same things. Rescue survivors. Build Wind Shelters. Tier up spells. Kill Lieutenants. Kill Overlord. Move on. There isn't much variety to this, unfortunately, and it makes each new continent feel like just more work than something rewarding.
This is something I've been worried about myself. Although I'm still on the first continent in my game it was something I did notice in earlier builds of the game. It all seems very unnatural when you think about it. That every continent (or area of the map in earlier builds) you come across is in the EXACT same situation (ultimately) as the one you just left.
I also miss things like how mobs of enemies used to threaten my settlement. Sure it did get repetitive itself, but it was something that I actually had to react to....which was nice. I felt like I was actually protecting my people from something that was very real.
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I'd like more short-term goals that do some good to the world rather than the player. Actually I think we have a bit too much of the "one more term" thing Chris was talking about.
I really don't find all the grind-type stuff --- getting better gems, spells, etc --- compelling. That is to say, the possibility of killing an overlord doesn't motivate me to fire up the game, and then go look for some upgrade stones so I can go get some sapphire so I can finish some tier three missions so I can get some tier four spells so I can take on a lieutenant. I find much more that I just want to wander out into the world and get some incidental thing done and then get distracted and go somewhere else. I'm pretty happy setting my own fairly arbitrary goals, but I'd probably play more if I could spend half an hour and help one of my NPCs get his teddy bear back or what-have-you.
I actually like the tier system for spells alot myself. Most games of this type would just go the tired/boring route of having the player have to get experience points for EVERYTHING...... I much rather prefer exploring different caverns and environments, finding ore deposits after clobbering some monsters, and doing some missions for other items..... these activities are MUCH more varied than the usual sort of thing. It's also more of what I expect from such an open world, "sandboxy" game like this; particularly one centered on exploration.
.....that being said, I TOTALLY agree that there should be some.... er..... "sidequest" stuff, I guess is the best way to put it.
I mean, ok, the Overlord, obviously this guy is trouble, right, so your MAIN job is to take him out.
Difficult world like that though, surely he's not the ONLY trouble; he's just the BIGGEST one. There's gotta be other stuff that the survivors need to deal with. The pirate ships on the worldmap, for instance. These could be made into some sort of optional area/boss/whatever, perhaps more difficult than alot of similar stuff at whatever tier; they'd be optional, and hard, but you could get something neat for doing them. Other optional stuff would be nice too.
As for if the game drags at any point?
Hmm...... I think it's a little slow at the very beginning of a new world, but..... I dont find much drag anywhere else. "Grind" seems ENTIRELY up to the player, as to wether grinding even appears or not. Some players say the game has grinding; others, such as myself, say there really isnt any.
Enchants though, the one thing about those is sometimes it can take AWHILE to get a new good one. I really like the charge system; collect enough charges, get enchant. That part is nice. The part that's a little annoying is that it's only every so often (and not really that often) that you'll get an enchant you'll want to KEEP, wether it's one you're gonna equip and use all the time, or one that you'll sometimes switch out. I'm guessing that's hard to balance though; as the very same thing happens in games like Diablo or Torchlight, where you'll get all of these random items..... but few of them that you'll want/keep/use.
I guess that'd be my only real issue, and it's not that much of one.
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#1 - The part I dislike like mentioned about is going through mazes. I have grown to just exit a building if I have to go through a maze room. It's hard navigating the mini map because everything is small and the doors are hard to see because of the green enchant icons. Maybe make the doors we have been through more pronounced or something more contrasting with the enchant icons. I know you can zoom the minimap but then it just gets too big so I can't really have it like that when running around. I have decent enchants and now that I can purchase them there is no need to farm these rooms. Like above, I hate having to go to the corner of every part of the maze to get the enchants.
I really like the idea of having 100% enchant drops randomly in stashes or maze rooms. This would make it feel more rewarding. Only getting like 10% towards an enchant doesn't really fulfill my diablo tendencies. Maybe it's time to get rid of the enchant containers and maybe 1/10 times where an enchant would spawn there would be a full enchant.
#2 - Now that I am on the 4th Continent and about 60 hours in with pretty much everything unlocked there isn't really a lot of incentive to keep continuing knowing it's basically going to be the same here on out with harder monsters and slightly better enchants. Get npc's/buildings for windmill, get an upgrade 5 spell and head to overload. Since then I have started playing on a higher difficulty but with the same statistics there isn't much incentive to do so. I would propose making higher drop rates or better enchants/stashes with a raised difficulty. Also, more achievements are good!
#3 - Buildings and profession abilities need to be improved. My first 3 continents on normal difficulty, I only used special abilities a few times and I didn't notice much difference for the short 5 min time frame. This has made me only attempt missions that have resources or buildings/npcs and just ignore the special abilities. Maybe now that I am playing on hero I can see some missions like battlegrounds and other boss battles might be near impossible without them so my view may change. Part of the problem is we need to go back to town to use them, so if I am about ready for a big boss battle I dont' really want to run back to town. I would suggest being able to activate these abilities at any time. This would also alleviate the fact I only have 5 mins to get to mission or overlord room and makes everything feel rushed and that I already wasted half of the time because the warp was far away.
Using these abilities just doesn't feel special. I would propose at least an on screen buff so we don't need to hit escape to see what is still active.
#4 - Getting stuck using same spells. After a few continents I just can't give up fireball. I think part of the problem is the right hand enchants. Maybe if they did something else than boost spell power I would try out more of the other skills. My 64% fire damage enchant I found on continent 1 has been too good to me and other spells feel very weak comparatively.
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Teir 1 Survivors.
Thats the worst bit by far. No Lumbermancer, no tier II. And you need tier III to use seek survivor. You can nullify this by killing off your charcters repeatably but this doesn't seem to follow the intent of the situation.
First set of Enchants
How quickly you become effective is almost entirely determined by these. Theres a world of diffrence f you get decent mana reduction, cool down, extra damage e.t.c. This would best be soved by making more ways of getting enchants on par with mazes.
And on that note...
Torso/Feet Slots
Since you five featherfall and moderate light right from the get go, it gets really hard to consider any other enchants you get in these slots for a long while. This gets fustrating quick if you get 5+ in a row X_X'.
Luts./Overlord
These seem to come in a sudden burst. it was kinda fun honestly, but I feel the game would benifit for some more obvious, and spread out goals of this kind as you go through the teirs. As for most of the game theres little driving force.
Something like there being one lut. per teir, which you need to beat before you can use the next teirs upgrade orbs. or stuff with the sky priates, or stuff that makes your settlement cooler.
Trying out new spells
A lot (almost all) of spells are tier gated early on. This means that trying out almost any spell other then the defualt few requires a lot of extra grinding for materials to get them to a usable level. So the spell slection seems more limited then it is.
Lack of overarching driving force to progress
This occurs the moment you finish unlocking everything reasonable on a continent. At that point everything feels a lot more grindy as your just getting things for getting things sake. The overlord itself isn't overly motervating (He hasn't really done much other then has his name listed in the big bad slot). Some kind of multi-continental goal would be nice. Even if it's just a bigger statue to your awsomeness, shinyer buildings, or some other frivilious thing.
Puzzle Rooms/Lore Hunting
Rare to find rooms, that only seem to show up in the mazy buiildings, which end in a rather boring and finicy switch room. Thats bad enough to put most people off hunting for the lore.
Lore helps people care about the world, and would help aliviate the 'why am I beating up these big dudes who are stuck in these little rooms at the top of these towers' feeling you get between obsessing over the next upgrade material.
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The part I dislike like mentioned about is going through mazes. I have grown to just exit a building #1 - if I have to go through a maze room. It's hard navigating the mini map because everything is small and the doors are hard to see because of the green enchant icons. Maybe make the doors we have been through more pronounced or something more contrasting with the enchant icons. I know you can zoom the minimap but then it just gets too big so I can't really have it like that when running around. I have decent enchants and now that I can purchase them there is no need to farm these rooms. Like above, I hate having to go to the corner of every part of the maze to get the enchants.
I really like the idea of having 100% enchant drops randomly in stashes or maze rooms. This would make it feel more rewarding. Only getting like 10% towards an enchant doesn't really fulfill my diablo tendencies. Maybe it's time to get rid of the enchant containers and maybe 1/10 times where an enchant would spawn there would be a full enchant.
#2 - Now that I am on the 4th Continent and about 60 hours in with pretty much everything unlocked there isn't really a lot of incentive to keep continuing knowing it's basically going to be the same here on out with harder monsters and slightly better enchants. Get npc's/buildings for windmill, get an upgrade 5 spell and head to overload. Since then I have started playing on a higher difficulty but with the same statistics there isn't much incentive to do so. I would propose making higher drop rates or better enchants/stashes with a raised difficulty. Also, more achievements are good!
#3 - Buildings and profession abilities need to be improved. My first 3 continents on normal difficulty, I only used special abilities a few times and I didn't notice much difference for the short 5 min time frame. This has made me only attempt missions that have resources or buildings/npcs and just ignore the special abilities. Maybe now that I am playing on hero I can see some missions like battlegrounds and other boss battles might be near impossible without them so my view may change. Part of the problem is we need to go back to town to use them, so if I am about ready for a big boss battle I dont' really want to run back to town. I would suggest being able to activate these abilities at any time. This would also alleviate the fact I only have 5 mins to get to mission or overlord room and makes everything feel rushed and that I already wasted half of the time because the warp was far away.
Using these abilities just doesn't feel special. I would propose at least an on screen buff so we don't need to hit escape to see what is still active.
There ARE "full" enchants that you can find on the ground, but they usually seem to be things like Acid Gills and whatnot.
Since 100% enchants seem to mostly be special boss drops, why not have, say, rare-ish "large" containers, that immediately give you 50-60%? They'd be rare, but not THAT rare; Maybe, as rare as the Bat scrolls? I think with the current system, it'd be satisfying to find one of these. But the special drops from the big bosses would still be special.
I agree with the bit about the guardian powers too. They ARE useful..... but 5 minutes is very short. Also having them just be more VARIED would be nice; I like the whole profession system and the buildings and all, but would like to just see MORE types of guardian powers that could be found, both low level and high level ones. That would be quite nice.
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There ARE "full" enchants that you can find on the ground, but they usually seem to be things like Acid Gills and whatnot.
Since 100% enchants seem to mostly be special boss drops, why not have, say, rare-ish "large" containers, that immediately give you 50-60%? They'd be rare, but not THAT rare; Maybe, as rare as the Bat scrolls? I think with the current system, it'd be satisfying to find one of these. But the special drops from the big bosses would still be special.
I agree with the bit about the guardian powers too. They ARE useful..... but 5 minutes is very short. Also having them just be more VARIED would be nice; I like the whole profession system and the buildings and all, but would like to just see MORE types of guardian powers that could be found, both low level and high level ones. That would be quite nice.
Yea, I think I've only ever found acid gills on the ground before and that was maybe 1 or 2 times compared to 400 glyph transfers and 50 bat scrolls. Because of this I don't usually bother with stash rooms.
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Puzzle Rooms/Lore Hunting
Rare to find rooms, that only seem to show up in the mazy buiildings, which end in a rather boring and finicy switch room. Thats bad enough to put most people off hunting for the lore.
Lore helps people care about the world, and would help aliviate the 'why am I beating up these big dudes who are stuck in these little rooms at the top of these towers' feeling you get between obsessing over the next upgrade material.
Oh god. How could I forget this.
Devs, if you read anything in this topic, read that. The Lore Hunting, something that I thought I'd absolutely love, is currently so grindy that I actively avoid it.
You have to grind maze buildings until you find a rare room. Then you have to complete the a tedious puzzle. Then you have to do it over and over again until you get ever piece of lore.
The room-hunting wouldn't even be THAT terrible if it wasn't for that Puzzle. It absolutely breaks the flow of the game.
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Puzzle Rooms/Lore Hunting
Rare to find rooms, that only seem to show up in the mazy buiildings, which end in a rather boring and finicy switch room. Thats bad enough to put most people off hunting for the lore.
Lore helps people care about the world, and would help aliviate the 'why am I beating up these big dudes who are stuck in these little rooms at the top of these towers' feeling you get between obsessing over the next upgrade material.
Oh god. How could I forget this.
Devs, if you read anything in this topic, read that. The Lore Hunting, something that I thought I'd absolutely love, is currently so grindy that I actively avoid it.
You have to grind maze buildings until you find a rare room. Then you have to complete the a tedious puzzle. Then you have to do it over and over again until you get ever piece of lore.
The room-hunting wouldn't even be THAT terrible if it wasn't for that Puzzle. It absolutely breaks the flow of the game.
Agreed. The puzzle puts me off from learning any of the lore. Wouldn't be so bad if it was maybe 1/4 the size. The way it is now it's just 20-30 minutes of frustration.
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I agree with what Terraziel wrote. The worst part, the part that is the least fun to me is the overlord. The fight is fun, but the knowledge that it "resets" my material gathering is just a damn shame. So, to put it in a way that answers your tl;dr question is:
The part of the game where I want to do something fun (kill the scary overlord) but the game forces me to do something un-fun (start on a new continent afterwards) is at the end of a continent. I would really like to see more to do on a continent after the overlord is defeated. Maybe not RIGHT after you beat him, but I would like to have the knowledge that all the spell tiers I slogged through, and all the resources I gathered are not essentially gone, due to lack of incentives to return to previous continents, or dwell on ANY continent that isn't the latest and greatest.
Since I know you guys already have this in mind as something to work on, I'm not worried.
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Currently the biggest gripe I have about the game is the enchants, obtaining the buggers just isn't very fun. The only way save for a (very) small handful of bosses is to explore buildings for the charges. The whole "efficient" exploration thing will net you maybe 3 or 4 containers a building if you're lucky, and more often than not, I need to gather the full 100% to actually get an enchant. Even running through building stashes isn't the best way to gather the things, it all comes down to finding a maze room.
It didn't take long to catch on to the fact that nearly every dead end in a maze room would contain an enchant charge. At that point I just started avoiding regular buildings when I wanted enchants. I go to the desert, find a pyramid, and farm the Hell out of those extremely tedious maze rooms. It's unfortunately the quickest way to gather enchants.
Though the new shop has alleviated the problem quite a bit, I simply ignore charges now unless my friends want to go searching for them. At the shop, the enchants are cheap, and I can buy a particular slot that I want. It's far more convenient simply because I can get the shards anywhere I go. But that's completely cut out hunting for enchants as a game play aspect so it's really just putting a bandage over the problem and pretending it doesn't exist.
One thing that still perplexes me whenever I think about it......Why are enchants not available as secret mission rewards? It would be a great alternative to grinding charges. I already complete nearly every secret mission I come across, and the reward for secret missions is already very minor, why not offer a enchant to sweeten the pot? It would guarantee that every mission includes at least SOMETHING that everyone would be interested in, and it would provide an alternative to running maze rooms.
The final thing that bothers me about the enchants is that many of them are simply not useful. I'm not trying to imply that the stats just aren't up to par with what I'm using currently, I mean that many of the buffs provided are rendered obsolete by other game elements. For example, Jump Height increase won't ever be useful compared to double jump because not only does double jump well, double your jump height, something which jump height enchants don't and probably can't ever do, it gives you direct control over your ascent and descent (making fall velocity mostly pointless), and let's you avoid fall damage provided you planned for it (making fall immunity useful only in the situation you hadn't). Even the ability to make platforms directly hurts the value of most of the leg enchants, and storm dash almost completely diminishes the value of running speed.
So where does this leave me? As far as leg enchants go, if it has windstorm immunity, I'll take a look. Otherwise it either has double jump or I toss it immediately.
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Currently the biggest gripe I have about the game is the enchants, obtaining the buggers just isn't very fun. The only way save for a (very) small handful of bosses is to explore buildings for the charges. The whole "efficient" exploration thing will net you maybe 3 or 4 containers a building if you're lucky, and more often than not, I need to gather the full 100% to actually get an enchant. Even running through building stashes isn't the best way to gather the things, it all comes down to finding a maze room.
It didn't take long to catch on to the fact that nearly every dead end in a maze room would contain an enchant charge. At that point I just started avoiding regular buildings when I wanted enchants. I go to the desert, find a pyramid, and farm the Hell out of those extremely tedious maze rooms. It's unfortunately the quickest way to gather enchants.
Though the new shop has alleviated the problem quite a bit, I simply ignore charges now unless my friends want to go searching for them. At the shop, the enchants are cheap, and I can buy a particular slot that I want. It's far more convenient simply because I can get the shards anywhere I go. But that's completely cut out hunting for enchants as a game play aspect so it's really just putting a bandage over the problem and pretending it doesn't exist.
One thing that still perplexes me whenever I think about it......Why are enchants not available as secret mission rewards? It would be a great alternative to grinding charges. I already complete nearly every secret mission I come across, and the reward for secret missions is already very minor, why not offer a enchant to sweeten the pot? It would guarantee that every mission includes at least SOMETHING that everyone would be interested in, and it would provide an alternative to running maze rooms.
The final thing that bothers me about the enchants is that many of them are simply not useful. I'm not trying to imply that the stats just aren't up to par with what I'm using currently, I mean that many of the buffs provided are rendered obsolete by other game elements. For example, Jump Height increase won't ever be useful compared to double jump because not only does double jump well, double your jump height, something which jump height enchants don't and probably can't ever do, it gives you direct control over your ascent and descent (making fall velocity mostly pointless), and let's you avoid fall damage provided you planned for it (making fall immunity useful only in the situation you hadn't). Even the ability to make platforms directly hurts the value of most of the leg enchants, and storm dash almost completely diminishes the value of running speed.
Good point about secret mission rewards. Enchants would be nice.
So where does this leave me? As far as leg enchants go, if it has windstorm immunity, I'll take a look. Otherwise it either has double jump or I toss it immediately.
Few points about the enchants. The jump % boost is useful because you can use it in a lava suit which double/triple jump don't work. You are probably going to need this for the lava escape missions which it sounds like you might have not done yet.
Also, I noticed that you don't have triple jump yet. Once you get this you will probably think your double jumps are a waste. This points out that the some of the enchants are just used for progressing to the next better one...in your case jump % until you find a double jump.
Also, windstorm immunity is situational. Obivously, you wouldn't want to use outside of a windstorm, and in some cases I actually prefer using a triple jump enchant instead of windstorm immunity in a storm.
Falling immunity was useful for me when I was just starting journey to perfection missions. I used them a lot before I finally got a double and later triple jump.
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I wasn't aware that there was a triple jump enchant. I know about the spell, but I was trying to speak specifically about the enchants. Windstorm I consider, same with Acid breathing because they provide a direct counter to situations that would otherwise be dangerous.
As for falling immunity, I agree. Same with the jump height, velocity, and running speeds. They're useful but really only so until you obtain the extra jumps.
You're right about the lava escape missions, I haven't encountered one. I play with the platforming difficulty at max however and I've read that they're extremely difficult with it set high, so I'm not too interested in trying them either, in contrast to the rest of the game which to me raising the platforming difficulty didn't make the game any noticeably harder.
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I don't think gathering non-mission components is tedious at all. The game tells you where you can get them, and you can go there and get them. No needless mucking about, no dice roll. If you want jade, you know where to get it, and you don't have problems finding it.
Mission spell components can be trickier. Right now I'm on continent two and out of the twelve something missions available only two offer any mission spell components. The rest offer guardian scroll powers that are really no good to me unless I get some tiered spells. If there was any way to ensure that X amount of missions offered component rewards, I think that'd really help out with the game progress.
Another thing I have an issue with is finding settlement denizens. When you can use a find survivor scroll everything's gravy, but if you don't have the right denizens to use that scroll you have to wade through secret missions hoping you'll find the appropriate mission, THEN keep your fingers crossed hoping that survivor is of the right profession. Since every settlement starts with three denizens, what if at least one of those denizens was of the right profession to use the find survivor scroll? Just my suggestion.
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So where does this leave me? As far as leg enchants go, if it has windstorm immunity, I'll take a look. Otherwise it either has double jump or I toss it immediately.
This is true as well. Once you get good at the game, you probably won't be taking anything besides a double/triple jump enchant under normal circumstances. Which is a shame, really.
It used to be the same case for Conserving Mind (Which really should be renamed now because it doesn't "Conserve" anymore), because reducing the base mana cost was a better deal than almost anything else. Now the regen boost isn't quite as essential.
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For me, it's been gathering the required inhabitants in order to be able to construct a wind shelter. It's not too bad if the settlement starts with both a lumbermancer and stonebinder, but I've had more than one continent where I've had none of the required residents needed to get wind shelters up and running. In one particularly bad case, this problem led to hours of searching when rescue missions refused to show up at all for quite some time, searching both caves and large buildings.
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At the moment I'm in late-game (continent 4, could kill the overlord any time) so my boring bits are kind of specific.
1) I've been gathering tons of enchant containers and I have yet to see a single "legendary" enchant, whatever they actually are. Since I'm something of a completionist, I'm going to want to get all the achievements, so I can see this getting tedious to the point of insanity.
2) Swamp dungeon level 10. The bug in the current version (1.013) is the only reason I managed to get this. I've delved down at least two dozen cave systems in swamp areas over continents 3 and 4, and I never found one with more than 9 levels (2 of them had exactly 9 levels and they were both on continent 4). If, as I suspect, it's impossible to get a 10-level dungeon until continent 5, you might want to say this somewhere in-game. If not, raising the odds of the dungeon going deep enough might be nice.
3) Buildings. I don't know what the odds are of seeing a shape matter guardian scroll, but as I previously mentioned I am on continent 4, I've grabbed every single building scroll I've seen on this continent, and I have a total of 13 buildings in my settlement. Maybe adding an expensive purchase to the white guardian stone which gives you a random shape matter scroll? The possibility of getting useless extra copies seems like an effective deterrent to abuse, meanwhile I can collect upgrade stones during the hour I wait for new missions to spawn (as it's virtually inevitable that none of them will have shape matter rewards). Of course if I've overlooked an important means of getting these scrolls, having a note which points it out would also be nice.
4) Plums. You read that right, plums. My current continent has exactly 3 squares of abandoned town, and 0 grassland with groves. I've gathered all the plums I can from the towns, so in order to get more I have to use "gather resources" to generate a mission on a town square and hope it's an outdoor mission and further hope that it has plum trees. But now I'm just nit-picking.
I'd also like to agree that the initial search for secret rescue mission rooms when you get to a new continent (until you get an apothekineticist, a lumbermancer and a stonebinder, along with the buildings to be able to cast "seek survivor") is tedious. On my continent 3, I found at least a dozen secret mission rooms before I found a rescue mission, and eventually I got an apothekineticist after I had 3 lumbermancers. A note on where best to find secret rescue missions might help, and it also might be nice if you tweaked the missions to always give you someone with a skill you're missing, if possible, the way that "seek survivor" scrolls seem to work.
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As for the thing about not being able to find the necessary NPC to use the rescue scrolls:
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=7641
That particular complaint has popped up quite often now, so I set that up.
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Probably one or two things jump out most.
Firstly, the guardian scrolls. At the moment, I find these are kind of useless, I avoid doing missions with them because they are nowhere near as useful as resources for more spells and such. I think this is because 5 minutes is far too short, I never activate the scrolls because I only need them when i'm in trouble, which is not something that I can prepare for a maximum of 5 minutes in advance whilst standing on the world map.
Perhaps rather than provide a one-off 5 minute boost instead activating a guardian scroll would provide everyone on the continent with a special ability that has say 1 min duration for 5/10 minute cooldown that grants the same ability. Using another guardian scroll would replace the effects of the first one (The obvious drawback to this would be that people would be inclined to find a single scroll they like and then never change it again, perhaps making the scrolls slightly more common or make it so multiple scrolls are picked up at once would encourage people to swap scrolls out).
The second problem is the whole resources issue, there are just far too many of them and it's rather difficult to just "go with the flow" since once you have started down your upgrade path for spells you are pretty much locked in. Maybe create a continent wide loot goals in the settlement and let people pick a couple of resources which have an increased chance of spawning (lock this down per tier so it can be changed at the start of a new tier, otherwise your only option is to enable/disable it to stop people just cycling through every resource).
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Ok, ok, I found one thing that REALLY drags (and that I'm surprised HASNT been fixed yet):
The bloody robots on the new-character screen!
The game is OBSESSED with them. Utterly obsessed. To the point where my first advice to new players might be: NEVER RESCUE ANY ROBOTS.
Yes, these guys can be useful. But not when 5/6 of the starting characters is robots, and furthermore, not when that happens 80% of the time!
The only way around this is the annoying "kill characters till you get useful one that is not a robot" method.
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So where I'm at at the game now, I'm continent one, tier 2, and I have ONE tier 2 spell, Energy Orb.
I am also like only one mission away from tier 3. I do not have the materials to make any other tier 2 spells other then energy slice which is a crap spell. I certainly don't have the materials for any tier 3 spells.
90% of the secret missions I find have guardian power scrolls as the reward, and I really, REALLY don't care even slightly about that stuff at this point in the game.
I'm basically at the point where I am going to have to lower the difficulty level so that the game doesn't brutally overpower me.
Also, the point I was at until now, the unlocks. With the recent "things you should unlock" or whatever it was called part of the Planning menu it made it a lot easier to see what I needed to do to be able to get the materials I needed to make better spells, but none of the tasks it proposed were even remotely enjoyable. Pretty much all of them were "Reach cave system x in area y" and I really had no desire to do that, so I ended up turning down the difficulty to minimal so I could lazily rush through it, instead of the process being boring and annoying it simply became boring. tl;dr I think the unlocks system could really use some reworking.
Some attention could be given to what landed me in the underpowered situation above, I went and did a whole bunch of missions with NOTHING unlocked, so I didn't get any of the rewards needed to actually make the higher tier spells. The game needs to let the player know more clearly that unlocks are important for progression and should be done before running at a whole bunch of world missions. Maybe make missions increase the CR by 10 instead of by 20? I definitely find them to be the most enjoyable part of the game, hence the part I want to spend the most time on. The only other option is aimlessly wandering through buildings hoping to find something worthwhile, which almost never happens. 95% of stashes are full of crap I already have more then enough of, so I have no desire to seek them out.
Some other things I would like to note, maybe an idea that the difficulty setting affects the number of shards dropped by monsters? The game feels like the difficulty level is totally arbitrary and there is no link between increased risk and increased reward, and there really should be. I would also like to see the difficulty level NOT increase monster defense/hp but just affect their AI and projectile speed and also increase the number of monsters that spawn. Buffing enemy health and the damage you take is the cheapest/laziest form of implementing difficulty and should really be avoided if you have other options for making the game challenging. That's just my opinion though, and I know we have some differing ideas on game design :) but I just wanted to throw that out there.
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I will second the thoughts about the Resuce Survivor missions. I have been stuck for days.
Real life days. On continent two, not being able to cast Seek Survivor, or build Wind Shelters.
After killing my character for the random chance of getting an Apoth, I'm stuck with the
Seek Survivor scrolls only bringing up profession I don't need.
The new changes for enchantments seem to change mana requirement reduction to a regeneration bonus.
The effect of this is, that next to not being able to advance on the continent, even with ten upgrades
on mana, I can get no villager to reach 400 mana. So no creeping death any more.
It's reaching the point where I feel the game is more wasting my time, than being
enjoyable. I still like it, but I'm afraid I will not be able to continue playing it.
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I will second the thoughts about the Resuce Survivor missions. I have been stuck for days.
Real life days. On continent two, not being able to cast Seek Survivor, or build Wind Shelters.
After killing my character for the random chance of getting an Apoth, I'm stuck with the
Seek Survivor scrolls only bringing up profession I don't need.
The new changes for enchantments seem to change mana requirement reduction to a regeneration bonus.
The effect of this is, that next to not being able to advance on the continent, even with ten upgrades
on mana, I can get no villager to reach 400 mana. So no creeping death any more.
It's reaching the point where I feel the game is more wasting my time, than being
enjoyable. I still like it, but I'm afraid I will not be able to continue playing it.
Yes, they do need to do something about those mana costs now. Some of them are WAY too high to be anywhere near practical.
At the same time though, it shouldnt be THAT hard to get a character to 400.... need one from the new-character thing that has around 300 at start, should make it easy. That's what I did anyway. Getting them to the rather silly costs to use things like Sun/Moonrise though (what are those.... 480?) isnt happening. And I dont think Creeping Death is quite good enough to be worth the 400 cost; it would need to do yet more damage first.
Anyway, I'm sure they're well aware of the thing with the early survivors on new continents, so I doubt that problem will be there for long.
Dont forget to check that the character you're USING isnt the one you need (need the Aqua guy, I take it, I believe that's the one that allows wind shelters and buoys). I've had THAT idiotic mistake a few times.
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This might be relevant to the enchant discussion (or it might not!):
Enchants - implement player options (http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=6209)
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Every game has repetitive elements (no game can focus on doing more than a few things well). The point that it becomes grind is that you start noticing that you're doing those repetitive elements rather than being distracted by other things like new experiences or new situations.
You could say that the whole tier system is grindy. Why do I have to reach tier 5? It's arbitrary. It could have easily been 3 or 10 tiers as well. And why can I only research spells one tier up? It's also arbitrarily caused by the fact that missions only give rewards one tier higher. It's not properly explained by the game, making it appear grindy. This is one advantage of the XP/level system: even though it's equally arbitrary that I can only learn spells of a certain level, it's a convention in fantasy games, so it makes more sense to the player, and therefore encounters less resistance.
Another issue (that has been mentioned by others) is that upgrading spells, while fun, gives you very little reward. Spell tiers are too similar, and they're too predictable. After upgrading spells, I'm not even entirely sure which spells WERE upgraded. I have to check to remind myself that 'oh yeah, fireball's now tier 3'. I think that especially if you're going for a system with a ton of spells, you really want to go in the direction where spells are randomly shuffled per continent. Fireball could be in tier 1 and tier 4 for example. But between those tiers, it's randomly not available, so you have to research something different and interesting. Researching the same spell over and over is boring and grindy.
But the issue that I believe has the most potential for improvement is missions. You're forced to repeat missions over and over. That's not a problem in itself. The problem is that the discrete nature of missions makes them stand out as grind. Imagine that you were playing Diablo, but there were no weapons whatsoever. The only way to get weapons is to undertake special missions, that put you into a completely different 3-level dungeon where you have to kill 3 bosses. Once you kill those bosses you get a weapon, and are put back into the dungeon you were in before. It's jarring, and you'd immediately feel the grind.
It's also a waste of resources: you're crafting all these unique, interesting situations. Why not make them a part of the world? Quests have a huge advantage over missions in that they are things that get you to do what the game does anyway, but to do a couple of interesting things along the way. This is how it would work: the world would be seeded with what are currently the missions. So one chunk would be a battleground between two forces. At any point you could choose to join in and destroy the bad guys, completing that quest along the way. You'd have a boss tower with some kind of anti-map magic, where a boss resides. Rather than forcing the player to do a stealth assassination, you could have a quest available to kill the boss. You could go in with guns blazing and face higher tier monsters, or choose instead to use a stealth enchant. In other words, you build the mission scenarios into the world, and create quests that match those scenarios. Another example: going through caves, you'd encounter an umbra vortex cave. You could just try to go through to the next cave, causing the bosses to reset, or you could stay and fight the bosses. Some caves and buildings could also be locked, so that only taking on specific quests unlocks them. These would be only for specific scenarios that would be to complex to build into the world itself.
In other words, rather than making all these scenarios, build up the world so it's more interesting at the same time, and craft the quests around that world, making the feeling organic. As to how to give rewards for the quests, that's something that has to be thought through. Perhaps you could have a quest selection board back in town. You can go out in the world and solve as many quests as you want, but to collect rewards for quests from the Ilari, you have to choose which quests you want to 'turn in', and the Ilari will only give you certain rewards for certain quest types. You could also either go out and randomly solve stuff, coming to collect the rewards later, or you could assign yourself a list of quests and go seek them out.
It would be really nice if there was some big reason for going up in tier, again, to make the tier progress feel natural (this was also suggested above). So each tier would have a 'grand quest' to lead up to. After turning in X quests, you'd have to take on the next big quest. These could range from defeating a boss or a lieutenant to building some defensive structure. They could take the form of several small quests, each looking for a smaller piece of something bigger to build. They could be strategic things that weaken the overlord. Only at the end of tier 5 would your quest be to defeat the overlord, and even that should have variety so that not every overlord is just a big boss fight. Sometimes an overlord could run away to join the next continent's overlord. Sometimes he could be in hiding. A lot of variety is needed here to prevent every overlord from being the same.
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I also miss things like how mobs of enemies used to threaten my settlement.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
Making the world more dynamic in terms of the Overlord actively trying to destroy your settlement would lend a real sense of urgency to the game, and IMO make it much more fun. Plus if somehow your townspeople could use their powers to help foil the Overlord and his underlings they would become much more important and saving them would be even more rewarding.
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I also miss things like how mobs of enemies used to threaten my settlement.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
I'm not sure I would call it fun it also applied to the vengeful ghosts left behind when you died. At one point in early beta I had a settlement wiped out by five of my own vengeful ghosts not good.
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At one point in early beta I had a settlement wiped out by five of my own vengeful ghosts not good.
I thought it was hilarious :)
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At one point in early beta I had a settlement wiped out by five of my own vengeful ghosts not good.
I thought it was hilarious :)
Keep in mind, this guy finds armadas of very intelligent hybrids curb stomping everything and a giant mega-ship that is 3 times more durable then anything else in the game being sprung on ambitious players without warning hilarious.
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At one point in early beta I had a settlement wiped out by five of my own vengeful ghosts not good.
I thought it was hilarious :)
Keep in mind, this guy finds armadas of very intelligent hybrids curb stomping everything and a giant mega-ship that is 3 times more durable then anything else in the game being sprung on ambitious players without warning hilarious.
Yeah. So? :)
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Keep in mind, this guy finds armadas of very intelligent hybrids curb stomping everything and a giant mega-ship that is 3 times more durable then anything else in the game being sprung on ambitious players without warning hilarious.
(Prints this out and puts it on his refrigerator... well, not really, but close)
:D
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At one point in early beta I had a settlement wiped out by five of my own vengeful ghosts not good.
Haha, I'm used to games in the roguelike tradition, so I think horribly desperate battles are fun!
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If the tier system itself feels grindy, what about changing it so that instead of leveling up continents to upgrade the whole continent's tier, they're fixed so that X squares away from the settlement on the continent map they go up in tier.
I like the idea of doing missions causing bad things to happen though, so maybe every mission that's completed causes the Overlord to build up an army that he'll eventually send after the settlement which you'll have to defend. (okay this is very much an AI war concept, but its a good one!)
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Yes, they do need to do something about those mana costs now. Some of them are WAY too high to be anywhere near practical.
At the same time though, it shouldnt be THAT hard to get a character to 400.... need one from the new-character thing that has around 300 at start, should make it easy. That's what I did anyway. Getting them to the rather silly costs to use things like Sun/Moonrise though (what are those.... 480?) isnt happening. And I dont think Creeping Death is quite good enough to be worth the 400 cost; it would need to do yet more damage first.
Worse yet, the higher Mana Costs spells have, the more it really shoehorns players into using Time of Magic characters above the other ones. In fact, higher costs actively cripple Robots and Medieval characters.
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I'm sick of grinding to get the spells I like every time I start a new continent. Let me keep some (or all!) of them, please. Especially double jump.
Actually, here's a crazy idea: let me pick which spells to keep when I move to a new continent. More choice is alway nice.
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I'm sick of grinding to get the spells I like every time I start a new continent. Let me keep some (or all!) of them, please. Especially double jump.
Actually, here's a crazy idea: let me pick which spells to keep when I move to a new continent. More choice is alway nice.
I don't think this is a good idea because people will keep using the same spells. One of the great things about the game is there are like 50+ spells. I think there should be some kind of mechanics that forces people to use different spells, possibly only make some of them available on specific continents. It doesn't help either that once you get a good right arm enchant for 60%+ dmg you tend to keep using that element.
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I'm sick of grinding to get the spells I like every time I start a new continent. Let me keep some (or all!) of them, please. Especially double jump.
Actually, here's a crazy idea: let me pick which spells to keep when I move to a new continent. More choice is alway nice.
I don't think this is a good idea because people will keep using the same spells. One of the great things about the game is there are like 50+ spells. I think there should be some kind of mechanics that forces people to use different spells, possibly only make some of them available on specific continents. It doesn't help either that once you get a good right arm enchant for 60%+ dmg you tend to keep using that element.
That'd be fine too, as long as I got the spells immediately instead of having to unlock them. Actually my original idea was for the player to keep the level of spells they didn't use at all in the previous continent, so they'd have to think strategically about what spells to use and upgrade, but I think I mentioned that somewhere else and it didn't seem relevant.
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I also miss things like how mobs of enemies used to threaten my settlement.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
I'm not sure I would call it fun it also applied to the vengeful ghosts left behind when you died. At one point in early beta I had a settlement wiped out by five of my own vengeful ghosts not good.
It makes the world feel alive. If nobody ever threatens you and your allies existence then as a game about survival AVWW would really fail. (that's nothing to do with the exploration side of the game mind) Do the overlords actually do anything to make you and your settlers lives harder? I wouldn't really count the tier level of regions going up as something the overlord actively does. That's more like a game mechanic quirk.
The way I see it is that in a world where survival is such an important thing, being technically able to just stand around in a region doing nothing for hours on end without consequences is odd. Even in Terraria you had times when you'd be wandering around exploring and suddenly a message would appear in the top corner of the screen saying an army of goblins were heading for your settlement to wreck havok. It wasn't happening every single day (or even every single week) but it still happened occasionally. (then you had the blood moons also....it's just a sort of rallying together/call to arms feeling that doesn't exist in AVWW right now.)
It's something that would make npcs feel more important too and you wouldn't take them for granted. Although it would probably have to be a bit easier to come by npcs though. I can understand it's difficult to find a specific npc at the best of times only to have them slain in battle the day after you recruit them would be insanely annoying. You could always make it so npcs are trained rather than being pigeon holed into the one profession though.
For me when it comes to the game dragging, it's not so much that the game drags (although many have made very good observations on this already) but more that I don't feel like I have a strong purpose. That the overlord and his lieutenants are such a terrible plight on the land seems very abstract. I mean the overlord isn't doing anything to hurt me really (and nothing at all to hurt my npcs), I could just hang out in my settlement forever and we'd all be fine. I'd like to see the game attempt to whack me over the head if I ever get too comfy or complacent. Have moments where I'm running around with my pants on fire but not necessarily moments where all hope feels lost.
I don't know if being at all helpful. :-\
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I have but three issues that have not already been expounded upon here
1. The spell variety seems a bit lacking. I find myself regularly gravitating towards 2 spells (Lightning orb and Forest Rage) despite having gone through several continents with them. The high cost mana spells are useless (to me) right now thanks to the mana cost reduction "nerf" I find that slightly lower cost ranged spells work the best as long as I keep elemental variety.
2. Freaking knockback. Fairy bosses are a royal PITA because they go flying off in a direction when I nail them. Certain espers are particularly annoying in this habit too (Amoebas are the worst offenders of the lot). On the espers I can just ignore them and move on but the fairies are Freaking mini-bosses.
3. The lieutenants don't feel very special. They are big, yes but they don't do any unique attacks that their miniboss equivalents don't already do (Granted I have had nothing but skelebot lieutenants so far so maybe my view is skewed), They just feel like big damage sponge bosses to me.
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2. Freaking knockback. Fairy bosses are a royal PITA because they go flying off in a direction when I nail them. Certain espers are particularly annoying in this habit too (Amoebas are the worst offenders of the lot). On the espers I can just ignore them and move on but the fairies are Freaking mini-bosses.
This is one of the key reasons to use more spells! Energy Orb causes no knockback, and is perfect for fighting the fairy bosses.
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I like energy slice for faires, because it cuts right through their minions. 8)
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I like the enchant system as it is. More variety is always welcome and if anything, I'd like to see it hard to get exactly the enchants you want. It's fun to adapt the playstyle to the powerful enchants I find. For instance, I have a very good enchant that also gives 100% extra damage taken so I counteract that with damage reflection in my other enchants.
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2. Freaking knockback. Fairy bosses are a royal PITA because they go flying off in a direction when I nail them. Certain espers are particularly annoying in this habit too (Amoebas are the worst offenders of the lot). On the espers I can just ignore them and move on but the fairies are Freaking mini-bosses.
This is one of the key reasons to use more spells! Energy Orb causes no knockback, and is perfect for fighting the fairy bosses.
Aye, I agree.
Energy Slice is another good attack; really great against fairies (because it can slice through the small ones and hit the actual boss), and absolutely excellent against both dragons and the big green amoebas.
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Point taken and noted. Thanks guys.
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The grindy points for me generally revolve around spell crafting:
1 - early on the continent, your mobility is very limited (especially on the 1st continent) making gem/ore/coral/clay/ingot resource gathering very slow going. Later on, gathering is a bit quicker, mobility-wise, but the spells are so much more expensive. So it pays to focus on just a very few spells. If you instead want to experiment and diversify, the grind gets really bad. And as I see it, while getting to the next continent opens up new stuff, there's not all THAT much new stuff to do there, so why not encourage players to stick around a bit longer on each continent rather than racing forward?
2 - Getting the arcane ingredients are also a bit of a grind: The best source of these is the main map missions, but you are extremely limited in the number of these you can do without raising CP to the next tier. And you also need those same main map missions to get the building scrolls. So you end up having to grind on secret missions, which take a while to find, may not actually be what you need, and provide less reward even when it is. It's a bummer to make my way across a series of caves to a secret mission only to discover that the reward is a buoy and a minor boost scroll.
3 - So by the time you're really able to freely do main missions to gather the huge variety of resources you need, you'll be at tier 5, which means that to get the spells you want to try out and experiment with up to effectiveness, you have to get them to tier 5 too.
(A side note about those temporary effect scrolls: They feel a bit like a booby prize to me. A 5 minute boost to some ability or stat isn't nearly as valuable or useful as a building scroll or spell resource is, IMHO. Not even if it was a 25 minute boost.)
I understand that you don't want to make it too easy to race to get one or two tier 5 spells and then kill the overlord, so how about this:
The first spell of a particular color to be upgraded to any given tier costs full price. After that, other spells of the same color can be upgraded to that same tier at a substantial discount.
Alternately. I suggested on Mantis a game option to multiply the resources given as one way to reduce this grind.
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2 - Getting the arcane ingredients are also a bit of a grind: The best source of these is the main map missions, but you are extremely limited in the number of these you can do without raising CP to the next tier. And you also need those same main map missions to get the building scrolls. So you end up having to grind on secret missions, which take a while to find, may not actually be what you need, and provide less reward even when it is. It's a bummer to make my way across a series of caves to a secret mission only to discover that the reward is a buoy and a minor boost scroll.
3 - So by the time you're really able to freely do main missions to gather the huge variety of resources you need, you'll be at tier 5, which means that to get the spells you want to try out and experiment with up to effectiveness, you have to get them to tier 5 too.
(A side note about those temporary effect scrolls: They feel a bit like a booby prize to me. A 5 minute boost to some ability or stat isn't nearly as valuable or useful as a building scroll or spell resource is, IMHO. Not even if it was a 25 minute boost.)
As I understand it, the whole thing with the CP is there to force the player to make choices; you can only do so many missions before next tier, so you have to decide for yourself what the priorities are; it keeps players from being able to just level EVERY freaking spell up every time, and also tends to DISCOURAGE the very grinding you speak of (or, that's the idea anyway). As you go through any given continent, you're generally going to end up with a specific set of spells based on the choices made; I think that's WAY more interesting/challenging than just "do them all every time". Not to mention..... this game REALLY isnt for completionists. That type of decision-making permeates the whole experience. You CAN go run around and grind for components if you really want to.... just as you could explore EVERY room in EVERY building or cave you go to..... but it's a very non-practical and inconvenient approach, and in the long run, wont actually accomplish much. Which is, I think, how the secret missions should stay.
Not to mention, alot of this would become overly trivial if the costs for crafting were so dramatically reduced.
All of that being said, I do think there are a few very specific arcane items that are...... a little abnormally difficult to get. Mainly, the Sea Essence (when you dont have swamps unlocked.... and even then I'm not sure, because I dont HAVE those unlocked yet). You need missions to spawn in Shallows for this, and those shallows need to be ones you can REACH, and this almost always involves multiple buoys AND a shelter. Coral isnt too tough to get.... because once you ARE in one of those you're gonna find plenty of it.... but the Sea Essence? Yeah, good luck with that.
The comet shards or whatever those are also seem a little annoying to get, but I've only JUST started encountering them, so it might just seem that way for now.
As for the scrolls..... that depends a bit on the player and the situation, it seems. I've had a couple of missions recently where I used a boost scroll, and it actually made the difference between victory and defeat (like a particularly nasty Battleground; that WOULD have ended badly if my damage level hadnt been so high thanks to the scrolls). My only problem is that they dont last long. But something like a 20 to 40% boost can make quite a difference, particularly over time..... I'd rather see these work for, say, 20-25 minutes, particularly considering that they do require some trouble to get. I do use them pretty often though.
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As I understand it, the whole thing with the CP is there to force the player to make choices; you can only do so many missions before next tier, so you have to decide for yourself what the priorities are; it keeps players from being able to just level EVERY freaking spell up every time, and also tends to DISCOURAGE the very grinding you speak of (or, that's the idea anyway). As you go through any given continent, you're generally going to end up with a specific set of spells based on the choices made; I think that's WAY more interesting/challenging than just "do them all every time". Not to mention..... this game REALLY isnt for completionists. That type of decision-making permeates the whole experience. You CAN go run around and grind for components if you really want to.... just as you could explore EVERY room in EVERY building or cave you go to..... but it's a very non-practical and inconvenient approach, and in the long run, wont actually accomplish much. Which is, I think, how the secret missions should stay.
I've already debated the pros and cons of the "make the hard choices on what to focus on" philosophy extensively on my Mantis ticket so I don't really want to rehash the whole thing again here, but I'd like to point out a few things:
- The "hard choices" aren't really that hard. You can easily get by with just leveling up your favorite 3 or so offensive spells. Having more spell variety isn't really that big a benefit beyond "flavor".
- If you want to discourage grinding, making things expensive so it will require EVEN MORE grinding seems like a backwards way of doing that.
Not to mention, alot of this would become overly trivial if the costs for crafting were so dramatically reduced.
The only things that would be "dramatically reduced" would be the additional spells of the same color. Which you likely wouldn't be leveling up at all anyway if you're following the "make the hard choices" philosophy, because you need to diversify your spell colors.
As for the scrolls..... that depends a bit on the player and the situation, it seems. I've had a couple of missions recently where I used a boost scroll, and it actually made the difference between victory and defeat (like a particularly nasty Battleground; that WOULD have ended badly if my damage level hadnt been so high thanks to the scrolls). My only problem is that they dont last long. But something like a 20 to 40% boost can make quite a difference, particularly over time..... I'd rather see these work for, say, 20-25 minutes, particularly considering that they do require some trouble to get. I do use them pretty often though.
If I could activate them in-mission where I'd know better if I actually needed it or not , instead of from the settlement, that would help. That would also help them be useful for lieutenant or overlord battles. As they are now, they're very likely to expire before you reach the boss.
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As for the scrolls..... that depends a bit on the player and the situation, it seems. I've had a couple of missions recently where I used a boost scroll, and it actually made the difference between victory and defeat (like a particularly nasty Battleground; that WOULD have ended badly if my damage level hadnt been so high thanks to the scrolls). My only problem is that they dont last long. But something like a 20 to 40% boost can make quite a difference, particularly over time..... I'd rather see these work for, say, 20-25 minutes, particularly considering that they do require some trouble to get. I do use them pretty often though.
If I could activate them in-mission where I'd know better if I actually needed it or not , instead of from the settlement, that would help. That would also help them be useful for lieutenant or overlord battles. As they are now, they're very likely to expire before you reach the boss.
You can, can't you? From the Planning menu?
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I've already debated the pros and cons of the "make the hard choices on what to focus on" philosophy extensively on my Mantis ticket so I don't really want to rehash the whole thing again here, but I'd like to point out a few things:
- The "hard choices" aren't really that hard. You can easily get by with just leveling up your favorite 3 or so offensive spells. Having more spell variety isn't really that big a benefit beyond "flavor".
- If you want to discourage grinding, making things expensive so it will require EVEN MORE grinding seems like a backwards way of doing that.
The bit about spell variety is (somewhat) true.... in all honesty I use more spells than just basic attacks myself, but I always play on high difficulties..... but that's something the devs have stated often that they want to work on.
As for grinding...... er...... that one REALLY seems subjective. I havent seen ANY grind in the game, aside from the upgrade stones before they changed the costs. That might be my playstyle being different, or something, but I dont think I've ever grinded for anything at all in the game aside from those stones. Ever. And as said above, I use alot more spells than just 2 or 3. I am certain of this fact because of the simple fact that I ABSOLUTELY ABHOR GRINDING. I cant stand it for more than about negative 20 seconds. It's why I dont play RPGs half the time, because the instant I hit a "gotta grind" section (in what is already, to me, a rather dull genre), I stop and sell off the game. This is due to an absolute and total lack of any patience whatsoever. In this, though, basic ingredients are found by mere exploration, which the game is all about in the first place, and arcane ingredients, well, careful mission selection makes sure I get what I need; the "search for supplies" scrolls are used to produce a better selection when the game is being snotty about it (or the Sunrise/Moonrise trick to cycle them). The ONLY item I've ever had trouble with in the game is the Sea Essence, and as such I've just ignored it, until the swamps unlock.
I've seen people that think the game is FULL of grinding.... and I've seen others similar to myself that dont see any at all. I've wondered just how that makes any sense, but..... I'm guessing it's playstyle and such.
The only things that would be "dramatically reduced" would be the additional spells of the same color. Which you likely wouldn't be leveling up at all anyway if you're following the "make the hard choices" philosophy, because you need to diversify your spell colors.
Currently? You dont need to diversify that much. TWO colors will do, for attack spells.... three at most, and even then, that's excessive most of the time. It's certainly possible they might change it later, but right now it makes WAY more sense to specialize than to try to use all colors. Oh, I'll often branch off into colors I'm not using for attack.... like fire, for the Fire Shield, or stuff like that, but that hasnt given me any trouble yet, in terms of getting the stuff for them.
You can, can't you? From the Planning menu?
.......holy crap. You're right. You CAN use these outside of settlements and even IN areas you're exploring. Just went and tested this....
Either the game did not make this apparant during the tutorial, or I merely missed it..... it's also not obvious because of the fact that it looks like you can only do it during invincibility; the planning menu vanishes the moment you move (makes sense to me). Whoa. I do wish I'd known about this before! It mighta saved me some difficulties in certain areas.
Thanks, Zebramatt, for pointing that out. That'll be helpful indeed.
But yeah, it seems like it's not whatsoever obvious that you can do this with these; the planning menu going *poof* every time you end invincibility, well..... usually I'm scanning for foes during invincibility-on-entering, so I never noticed it down there....
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I'll tell you one REALLY big drag that I've noticed: You can't use a Warp Gate to directly exit to the world map. This is really annoying.
It forces me to teleport back to that first chunk, then walk out, which can take quite a bit if that Warpgate in the first chunk is underwater or in a cave.
It's trivial, really, to make us have to do that walk. If you can get to a warpgate, you can usually get back to the settlement anyway. Just let us "Warp to World Map" from inside a Warpgate and cut down on the trivial walking, please?
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I wanted to think about my answer to this before I commented because there are some things in this game that feel annoying to me not because they're grindy, but because it's outside my usual genres. Or at least is for the last 10 years or so. I am definately not the guy. So I wanted to try to see my biases.
Also realize 95% of my gametime is on a multi-player server where different people have different goals, and sometimes that competes with World Tier.
There are a few things that feel grindy to me.
Mission only spell components:
One is mission only spell components. Because some of them (I'm looking at you, Earth Essence) usually only pop in one or two/mission and you need eight or better, you spend the entire Tier 4 looking for only missions with that as a prize. This leaves you at the mercy of the RNG or having to hunt down secret after secret hoping the one or two prizes are what you need.
There are two ways I could see reducing this. The first is to make 'seek resources' not be CP missions. The second is allow some secret missions to be 'pick your own prize'. Since I don't really get a choice of what mission it is, I'd have to do whatever came up, even if it's outside my 'favorite', or I could skip it.
Town Building
This has been recently addressed in the patch, so until I see how that flows I don't see a reason to comment. The new pieces and enforcing order/volume are a welcome thing to see.
Maze Rooms and Puzzles
Okay, I get the maze rooms, but when I first started I tried going into everything, now I avoid them like the plague. However, when you're first starting, you get this real feeling of NEEDING to build your enchantment library. Then you spend 4 hours in 3 maze rooms or something equally foolish. Now, I realize the store etc makes this less of an impact, but the maze rooms are still grindy to me.
However, these rooms are primarily used as delays in getting to the REAL grind... puzzle rooms. Alright, I get it's supposed to be a spell usage/aiming challenge. Do they REALLY need 400+ orbs in them? I did one of these once just to see. It took me two hours trying to aim different spells in different ways to figure out what/how/where/when. Also, that's not a puzzle, it's a test of patience. All too often spells 'slip' and hit inner orbs, you're trying to walk a blue/red to the outer corner to just hit one and now you hit 3 instead of two, etc. A 50 orb room wouldn't be TOO bad, then it's just something different to do for 10-20 minutes. At 400 it's a bit much.
and those enchantment comments lead to:
Legendary Enchants
This is a biased annoyance and probably doesn't belong in this list, but I'd like to see some Lieutenant level bosses who drop legendaries in some secret missions. 6 drops/continent when they're procedural seems less then optimal, and I'd like a chance to go after more bosses for better ones without having to switch continents.
Oblivion style world leveling
The last piece that's 'grindy' to me is more of a feeling then anything else. It's the fact that I never get anywhere. Sure, the idea of 'constant challenge' is good, but this game has a 'leveling' feeling as you build bigger spells and whatnot. When are they bigger? They aren't. The only thing they are, ever, is "too small" if you go OL/LT hunting too early. You can never go farm Green Slimes, they grow up with you.
Now, for World Missions matching Tier makes sense, they're the 'challenging' part and the OL's not exactly excited you're coming after him. I'd like to see the old mechanic that I've only seen pictures of in Beta where the tiers 'spread out' from you and if you go back to an 'early area', you're a superman.
However, I realized something while I was pondering that for this... and it's that it will cut early players off from far-reaching areas to get their favorite spells, because they'd be T4/5. That's absolutely no good either. I don't have a solution to the issue, but right now my numbers simply match their new numbers. Yay?
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I wanted to think about my answer to this before I commented because there are some things in this game that feel annoying to me not because they're grindy, but because it's outside my usual genres. Or at least is for the last 10 years or so. I am definately not the guy. So I wanted to try to see my biases.
Also realize 95% of my gametime is on a multi-player server where different people have different goals, and sometimes that competes with World Tier.
There are a few things that feel grindy to me.
Mission only spell components:
One is mission only spell components. Because some of them (I'm looking at you, Earth Essence) usually only pop in one or two/mission and you need eight or better, you spend the entire Tier 4 looking for only missions with that as a prize. This leaves you at the mercy of the RNG or having to hunt down secret after secret hoping the one or two prizes are what you need.
There are two ways I could see reducing this. The first is to make 'seek resources' not be CP missions. The second is allow some secret missions to be 'pick your own prize'. Since I don't really get a choice of what mission it is, I'd have to do whatever came up, even if it's outside my 'favorite', or I could skip it.
Town Building
This has been recently addressed in the patch, so until I see how that flows I don't see a reason to comment. The new pieces and enforcing order/volume are a welcome thing to see.
Maze Rooms and Puzzles
Okay, I get the maze rooms, but when I first started I tried going into everything, now I avoid them like the plague. However, when you're first starting, you get this real feeling of NEEDING to build your enchantment library. Then you spend 4 hours in 3 maze rooms or something equally foolish. Now, I realize the store etc makes this less of an impact, but the maze rooms are still grindy to me.
However, these rooms are primarily used as delays in getting to the REAL grind... puzzle rooms. Alright, I get it's supposed to be a spell usage/aiming challenge. Do they REALLY need 400+ orbs in them? I did one of these once just to see. It took me two hours trying to aim different spells in different ways to figure out what/how/where/when. Also, that's not a puzzle, it's a test of patience. All too often spells 'slip' and hit inner orbs, you're trying to walk a blue/red to the outer corner to just hit one and now you hit 3 instead of two, etc. A 50 orb room wouldn't be TOO bad, then it's just something different to do for 10-20 minutes. At 400 it's a bit much.
and those enchantment comments lead to:
Legendary Enchants
This is a biased annoyance and probably doesn't belong in this list, but I'd like to see some Lieutenant level bosses who drop legendaries in some secret missions. 6 drops/continent when they're procedural seems less then optimal, and I'd like a chance to go after more bosses for better ones without having to switch continents.
Oblivion style world leveling
The last piece that's 'grindy' to me is more of a feeling then anything else. It's the fact that I never get anywhere. Sure, the idea of 'constant challenge' is good, but this game has a 'leveling' feeling as you build bigger spells and whatnot. When are they bigger? They aren't. The only thing they are, ever, is "too small" if you go OL/LT hunting too early. You can never go farm Green Slimes, they grow up with you.
Now, for World Missions matching Tier makes sense, they're the 'challenging' part and the OL's not exactly excited you're coming after him. I'd like to see the old mechanic that I've only seen pictures of in Beta where the tiers 'spread out' from you and if you go back to an 'early area', you're a superman.
However, I realized something while I was pondering that for this... and it's that it will cut early players off from far-reaching areas to get their favorite spells, because they'd be T4/5. That's absolutely no good either. I don't have a solution to the issue, but right now my numbers simply match their new numbers. Yay?
Hm, I actually agree with alot of that.
The whole "choose a reward" thing is a good idea if they were to implement it right. Could get those accursed Sea Essences that way indeed.
The only bit I dont agree with is changing the tier system; I know I sure as heck dont speak for everyone, but part of why I play the game and enjoy it as much as I do is because it's challenging. Way too many games out there are so bloody easy that they barely take effort..... THIS one does. And really, if there's an area where I'd be overpowered for, like, taking hardly any damage and squashing foes in one hit (due to character power, instead of say, difficulty setting)..... it's an area I have absolutely no desire to go to, and if I DO have to go to it, I'm bored before I even enter. I cant focus on easy games whatsoever; never could.
I would like to see the increase in difficulty be a little.... stronger though, as the tiers increase. Enemies get new patterns and such, but their relative damage level usually only increases a little. That's how it seems, anyway.
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While I recall since it was brought up
Mission only spell components:
Since you only get to do 5 missions per tier, (and secret missions tend to have few and far between in rewards you want) the spell diversity per continent tends to be /very/ slim, as you only get enough materials to do so much. And onve your down an upgrade path it becomes more and more difficult to diversify (since more expensive tiers need more, and you've already used up a lot of your allotment). This is worst when the spells actually locked until mid teir
The only time you /can/ diversify and try out new spells is at teir 5, when it's a massive grind.
Or to sumerise...
The 'hard mission choices' /arnt/
Unless your willing to grind secret missions, at any tier above the second the choice is 90% of the time going to be an easy 'Continue upgrading the 2-3 spells I have upgraded so far, as I won't get enough materials to upgrade a new one'
The only time you make a choice is early on. Or if you want to grind.
Perhaps more misison reward materials, but of more varyed types (6-7 diffrent ones, as oppsed to 3-4 of the same) would at least mean your likly to /have/ other materials avialable for upgrades.
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The current plan with upgrade stones is actually to make those be something you don't even collect: you just get 10 points to allocate to your character for purposes of customization, and that's that. Then there's nothing at all to collect ever, relating to character death in that particular way. Other optional spell scrolls and traps and goodies in the stashes would then be the draw for those: new stuff you want to find in stashes, rather than repetitious stuff you're forced to go find to remain competitive.
The reason I've been thinking in that direction is that upgrade stones represent some basic character choice for players: and the whole collection mechanic with those just gets in the way of that and slows things down.
Please do this. I completely agree with you. This is the only way I've found the game dragging at all, even after the trivial nature of getting the stones. It just makes more sense, frankly.
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Regarding the tier upgrade system, I think it could use a modification to make it such that you can both feel powerful and get a challenge.
How about if certain region types (chosen at random) got an upgraded tier level when you went up a level? So tier 2 would be applied per region type (or per time shard). At tier 2, let's say 1/2 of the tier shards went up to level 2. At tier 3, 1/2 of the tier shards went up to level 3, so there'd be a few that are still tier 1. At tier 4 and 5, etc. By tier 5 you'd have a mix of tier 3, 4 and 5 and maybe even a 2 somewhere.
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Regarding the tier upgrade system, I think it could use a modification to make it such that you can both feel powerful and get a challenge.
How about if certain region types (chosen at random) got an upgraded tier level when you went up a level? So tier 2 would be applied per region type (or per time shard). At tier 2, let's say 1/2 of the tier shards went up to level 2. At tier 3, 1/2 of the tier shards went up to level 3, so there'd be a few that are still tier 1. At tier 4 and 5, etc. By tier 5 you'd have a mix of tier 3, 4 and 5 and maybe even a 2 somewhere.
/spitball
That could make for a fairly interesting mechanic if, rather than regions, individual chunks upgraded. So, you could have a T4 surrounded by T2 or T1 chunks. Then, take that idea of enemies 'bleeding' into other areas, and you could have the occasional souped up enemy floating around with the more normal enemies. A T3 mech, from a nearby chunk,walking around in a T2 town chunk.
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OMG I just tried an outside JtP mission while miniaturized, using the most rapid-fire spell I have (I think it's plasma bolt) and I still wasn't able to do that stupid mission after about 30 tries!!! I hate them so much! Keep on landing on frickin' robots!
I swear if there's anything that hurts my enjoyment of the game more than anything else it's those missions. The only ones I like are the stealth assassination and anachronism. But even those I don't want to do over and over. Just make them optional! The strength of the game really isn't in those missions. I have the most fun when I'm thinking about what I want to get next, when I go to get it, when I get distracted on the way, and when I upgrade my stuff. It'd be really cool if upgrading my settlement really mattered as well, or if I could upgrade tiles or something. That's it. That's the core of the game. Everything else should be optional or should enhance that core experience (ie. quests to take care of while I'm hunting for stuff would be great).
If I could enhance the game to make the core stand out, I'd put an Ilari stone that talks to you every time you go to the settlement. "What did you get? Great! That's just what we need for X." It'd have a list of "We need X for the settlement to do Y. We need you to go to Z to take care of A and B." (ie. a list of quests) and "Looks like you could use some better spells. You can go to C to get D to get ingredients to upgrade your spell."
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Perhaps that blue Ilari? It seems to be a sort of advisor, it gives another way to access the planning, so maybe, instead of that, it should advise based on recent events. Completed a mission and earned lots of magma? Great! That can be used to improve fire spells, along with X and Y. 'What is X?' X is a material earned from these places *list places*
A more personal version of the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia...
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OMG I just tried an outside JtP mission while miniaturized, using the most rapid-fire spell I have (I think it's plasma bolt) and I still wasn't able to do that stupid mission after about 30 tries!!! I hate them so much! Keep on landing on frickin' robots!
I swear if there's anything that hurts my enjoyment of the game more than anything else it's those missions. The only ones I like are the stealth assassination and anachronism. But even those I don't want to do over and over. Just make them optional! The strength of the game really isn't in those missions. I have the most fun when I'm thinking about what I want to get next, when I go to get it, when I get distracted on the way, and when I upgrade my stuff. It'd be really cool if upgrading my settlement really mattered as well, or if I could upgrade tiles or something. That's it. That's the core of the game. Everything else should be optional or should enhance that core experience (ie. quests to take care of while I'm hunting for stuff would be great).
If I could enhance the game to make the core stand out, I'd put an Ilari stone that talks to you every time you go to the settlement. "What did you get? Great! That's just what we need for X." It'd have a list of "We need X for the settlement to do Y. We need you to go to Z to take care of A and B." (ie. a list of quests) and "Looks like you could use some better spells. You can go to C to get D to get ingredients to upgrade your spell."
Later on JtP missions are some of the easiest, especially on higher difficulties. Get a triple jump, stealth enchant, and spam something like energy slice with tab targetting. Don't forget to be using flash of light if it's dark. Not really much to it...
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OMG I just tried an outside JtP mission while miniaturized, using the most rapid-fire spell I have (I think it's plasma bolt) and I still wasn't able to do that stupid mission after about 30 tries!!! I hate them so much! Keep on landing on frickin' robots!
I swear if there's anything that hurts my enjoyment of the game more than anything else it's those missions. The only ones I like are the stealth assassination and anachronism. But even those I don't want to do over and over. Just make them optional! The strength of the game really isn't in those missions. I have the most fun when I'm thinking about what I want to get next, when I go to get it, when I get distracted on the way, and when I upgrade my stuff. It'd be really cool if upgrading my settlement really mattered as well, or if I could upgrade tiles or something. That's it. That's the core of the game. Everything else should be optional or should enhance that core experience (ie. quests to take care of while I'm hunting for stuff would be great).
If I could enhance the game to make the core stand out, I'd put an Ilari stone that talks to you every time you go to the settlement. "What did you get? Great! That's just what we need for X." It'd have a list of "We need X for the settlement to do Y. We need you to go to Z to take care of A and B." (ie. a list of quests) and "Looks like you could use some better spells. You can go to C to get D to get ingredients to upgrade your spell."
Later on JtP missions are some of the easiest, especially on higher difficulties. Get a triple jump, stealth enchant, and spam something like energy slice with tab targetting. Don't forget to be using flash of light if it's dark. Not really much to it...
OK so if a mission is insanely hard initially and later on becomes trivially easy as you get enchants to help you cheese it, then you know what I think? I think it's broken and needs redesign.
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OMG I just tried an outside JtP mission while miniaturized, using the most rapid-fire spell I have (I think it's plasma bolt) and I still wasn't able to do that stupid mission after about 30 tries!!! I hate them so much! Keep on landing on frickin' robots!
I swear if there's anything that hurts my enjoyment of the game more than anything else it's those missions. The only ones I like are the stealth assassination and anachronism. But even those I don't want to do over and over. Just make them optional! The strength of the game really isn't in those missions. I have the most fun when I'm thinking about what I want to get next, when I go to get it, when I get distracted on the way, and when I upgrade my stuff. It'd be really cool if upgrading my settlement really mattered as well, or if I could upgrade tiles or something. That's it. That's the core of the game. Everything else should be optional or should enhance that core experience (ie. quests to take care of while I'm hunting for stuff would be great).
If I could enhance the game to make the core stand out, I'd put an Ilari stone that talks to you every time you go to the settlement. "What did you get? Great! That's just what we need for X." It'd have a list of "We need X for the settlement to do Y. We need you to go to Z to take care of A and B." (ie. a list of quests) and "Looks like you could use some better spells. You can go to C to get D to get ingredients to upgrade your spell."
Later on JtP missions are some of the easiest, especially on higher difficulties. Get a triple jump, stealth enchant, and spam something like energy slice with tab targetting. Don't forget to be using flash of light if it's dark. Not really much to it...
OK so if a mission is insanely hard initially and later on becomes trivially easy as you get enchants to help you cheese it, then you know what I think? I think it's broken and needs redesign.
But such things tend to happen anyway. Stuff that was ridiculously hard becomes much easier when you have all these upgrades boosting you.
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OK so if a mission is insanely hard initially and later on becomes trivially easy as you get enchants to help you cheese it, then you know what I think? I think it's broken and needs redesign.
I'm inclined to agree with this point. However, I can't speak for the missions themselves, because I've never fricking seen one :P
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OK so if a mission is insanely hard initially and later on becomes trivially easy as you get enchants to help you cheese it, then you know what I think? I think it's broken and needs redesign.
I disagree. That sounds like a balance issue to me!
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OK so if a mission is insanely hard initially and later on becomes trivially easy as you get enchants to help you cheese it, then you know what I think? I think it's broken and needs redesign.
I disagree. That sounds like a balance issue to me!
Same thing. Balance change is the same as redesigning from my perspective. I'm not saying to throw the mission away.
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I've seen people that think the game is FULL of grinding.... and I've seen others similar to myself that dont see any at all. I've wondered just how that makes any sense, but..... I'm guessing it's playstyle and such.
As you said, it's very subjective. I can easily imagine how what feels like grind for me might be awesome exploration for someone else.
The only things that would be "dramatically reduced" would be the additional spells of the same color. Which you likely wouldn't be leveling up at all anyway if you're following the "make the hard choices" philosophy, because you need to diversify your spell colors.
Currently? You dont need to diversify that much. TWO colors will do, for attack spells.... three at most, and even then, that's excessive most of the time. It's certainly possible they might change it later, but right now it makes WAY more sense to specialize than to try to use all colors. Oh, I'll often branch off into colors I'm not using for attack.... like fire, for the Fire Shield, or stuff like that, but that hasnt given me any trouble yet, in terms of getting the stuff for them.
Yes, that was my point. If you believe in the "hard/focused choice" philosophy and only going to focus on getting 2-3 spells, you will be getting them in all different colors to diversify. So my point being that making getting additional spells of the SAME color cheaper won't really impact that type of gameplay. (This was in response to you saying that my suggestion of making getting additional spells of the same color cheaper would dramatically make the game easier.)
You can, can't you? From the Planning menu?
Wow, I didn't know that either! Thanks!
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Maybe this belongs in a different thread, but wow, the combat! We have the difficulty set to "Hero" (the recommended level for "experienced gamers") and it feels like the enemies are massive, brainless chunks of hp that are most dangerous when they accidentally bumble into close proximity to you (because even a ranged enemy seems to typically do 5-10 times as much damage when you run into it as it does with its shots).
We don't even have time to get bored by anything else because we're so busy being bored by the combat. This is just using spells at same tier or one above the enemies, including ones that hit the enemy vulnerability.
If you want to talk about bubble-popping fun, I think multiplying enemy ranged damage by 5, dividing enemy melee damage by 2 and dividing enemy health by 4 would be a good place to start, at least on Hero difficulty.
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I find the game drags when starting a new continent. It would be kinda fun if when you first when into a town there was an overlord attack on the settlement, and you had to save a many people as possible. Naturally some of them are gonna be KIA, but some might survive or none at all. Obviously this wouldn't be the real overlord, just one of his lower bumbuddies or something.
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I find the game drags when starting a new continent. It would be kinda fun if when you first when into a town there was an overlord attack on the settlement, and you had to save a many people as possible. Naturally some of them are gonna be KIA, but some might survive or none at all. Obviously this wouldn't be the real overlord, just one of his lower bumbuddies or something.
When I first started playing, for some reason I thought there were going to be "defend the settlement" type events - things you'd know were coming and would have to prepare for them in some way. Fighting off an initial attack upon arrival would be cool, also, and together they'd really give some motivation for getting rid of the Overlord. I'd definitely love to see that.
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Honestly, I wouldn't mind if the overlord just showed up at the begining and said mean things about the charcters mother. Anything more then 'His name is in the bad guy slot' would be nice XD
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Maybe instead of a fortress, the Overlord could randomly enter different zones, creating a "Battle the Overlord!" mission. Basically, he spends his time rampaging instead of chilling out away from the action. As a mission, you could really spice it up. Maybe even make the fights different depending on which Overlord you're facing(determined at continent gen, probably, to keep weirdness like the Overlord changing between fights if the player dies or flees).
Maybe the godzilla boss could rampage around a large, mostly flat map while meteors(like those from the Defend Supply Depot mission) rain down everywhere. We could have a lava-dragon type boss that you have to fight in an area with very little land and lots of connected lava pools, which the boss swims between to attack you from, occasionally launching the lava in a spray everywhere. Or some really weird stuff, like a flying fortress style robot boss, which could even act as a multi-stage fight. First you have to get into the "overlord"(which is in the sky, and has tons of turret defenses and flying mechanic monsters), then once you're inside you have to navigate to the core, or mother computer, or whatever, and defeat it in a typical "Shoot the core!" style fight.
If the player doesn't do the mission, have something happen in the zone he was in. Maybe it renews the windstorm in that zone, forcing you to deal with it again, with some sort of "repair the wind shelter" mission?
Or what about different windstorms depending on the overlord? Godzilla gets the normal windstorm, lava-dragon gets a fast acting heatwave that does more damage than normal but can be mitigated(but not removed) by a heatsuit, Fortress gets a lightning storm that instead of doing steady damage randomly hits you with lightning for larger chunks of damage, but can sometimes be dodged.
Either way, the point would be to make it at least look like the Overlord is actively causing trouble, rather than just chilling out, enjoying the weather when the glyph bearer busts in Kool-Aid style "YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED, OVERLORD!" with basically no provocation beyond the dude being named "Overlord". And his parents just thought it'd be a cool, intimidating name, you know?
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I just wanted to say, I'm not a very good player (around 20 hours in, done lots of exploring and fudging around and only at Tier 3) but I've never really found it grindy.
I've come from Minecraft though, and if there were similar discussion about that then Notch would have been forced to make a 'store' for all the materials because 'mining for materials takes ages and is a grind'.
Some games you have to work for stuff, yes, but that's just the nature of games like this. It's great you introduce stuff to ease it, but don't spoonfeed everything to the lazy ones.
My only gripes about the game are when I get lost and have to attempt to read the map to try and get out, which is tricky - so an improved map system would be nice.
I also don't really like when all the monsters level up with me - I like it on older games, like the Pokemon ones and older Final Fantasys, where you could go back when you're much stronger and battle those wimpy first bosses in the original areas.
A lot of the game is still quite confusing, but that might just be me. It'd be good to be able to 'search' through the encyclopedia in the game as I tried for ages to see if there was something that would help me against the wind / storms - it'd be good to just search 'storm' and it come up quickly.
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Either way, the point would be to make it at least look like the Overlord is actively causing trouble, rather than just chilling out, enjoying the weather when the glyph bearer busts in Kool-Aid style "YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED, OVERLORD!" with basically no provocation beyond the dude being named "Overlord". And his parents just thought it'd be a cool, intimidating name, you know?
Bursting in Kool-Aid style and giving a corny one-liner seems like reason enough to battle an overlord to me :P
But I agree that the overlords presence and activity could be made more prevalent somehow.
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Maybe this belongs in a different thread, but wow, the combat! We have the difficulty set to "Hero" (the recommended level for "experienced gamers") and it feels like the enemies are massive, brainless chunks of hp that are most dangerous when they accidentally bumble into close proximity to you (because even a ranged enemy seems to typically do 5-10 times as much damage when you run into it as it does with its shots).
We don't even have time to get bored by anything else because we're so busy being bored by the combat. This is just using spells at same tier or one above the enemies, including ones that hit the enemy vulnerability.
If you want to talk about bubble-popping fun, I think multiplying enemy ranged damage by 5, dividing enemy melee damage by 2 and dividing enemy health by 4 would be a good place to start, at least on Hero difficulty.
You talk about "we", how many people are you playing with? Enemy health is scaled to the player count so that may be amplifying the problem.
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A lot of the game is still quite confusing, but that might just be me...
It's not you, I felt the same way when I started, you'll get used to it -especially the maps, once you learn how to read them they become incredibly useful.
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Maybe this belongs in a different thread, but wow, the combat! We have the difficulty set to "Hero" (the recommended level for "experienced gamers") and it feels like the enemies are massive, brainless chunks of hp that are most dangerous when they accidentally bumble into close proximity to you (because even a ranged enemy seems to typically do 5-10 times as much damage when you run into it as it does with its shots).
We don't even have time to get bored by anything else because we're so busy being bored by the combat. This is just using spells at same tier or one above the enemies, including ones that hit the enemy vulnerability.
If you want to talk about bubble-popping fun, I think multiplying enemy ranged damage by 5, dividing enemy melee damage by 2 and dividing enemy health by 4 would be a good place to start, at least on Hero difficulty.
You talk about "we", how many people are you playing with? Enemy health is scaled to the player count so that may be amplifying the problem.
There are just two of us. I think it may have something to do with it, yes. We're not running around on the same map soloing or anything like that, but it's possible it still makes the enemies a lot less fun to fight.
I turned the difficulty down to the default one and the combat is a lot more fun. Basic enemies tend to die in one to two hits, even with both of us in the same area. There's no challenge, but it's heaps more fun than chipping away at huge mountains of hp constantly.
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I now have brown minions running thru my mind going 'FOR DA OVERLORD!'
I'm totally okay with this.
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I was playing Castlevania the other day and was particularly struck that putting the difficulty up doesn't make enemies any harder to kill (most are one-hit anyway) but just adds a lot frakking more of them.
I think I'd like that solution more in Valley too, up to a point.
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The Overlord definitely needs to pose a threat. Something sort of the rampaging monsters in the older betas, but sent by the Overlord. Perhaps on Civilization Tier increase he/she/it sends an attack force to the settlement? The problem with that is that without the strategic turns there's not much of a way to measure time that passes, perhaps it could get a tile closer every time a mission is completed?
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The Overlord definitely needs to pose a threat. Something sort of the rampaging monsters in the older betas, but sent by the Overlord. Perhaps on Civilization Tier increase he/she/it sends an attack force to the settlement? The problem with that is that without the strategic turns there's not much of a way to measure time that passes, perhaps it could get a tile closer every time a mission is completed?
The idea I had is that missions (actually I envisioned specific time crystals you went and blew up, but even the old time controls from the beta are fine) allow time to flow between time shards. The problem with controlling the movement of stuff tile by tile is that every threat becomes trivial. See a gang of monsters approaching? Go and intercept them. The AI never has a chance to get to you.
However, if you say that time flows within a time shard, then armies can move freely within a time shard. So you don't know where exactly the monsters are. They're somewhere in the time shard, but moving around in real time, so they're really hard to catch. Maybe they were spotted a couple of turns ago, but now who knows where they've gone to?
The key is that they can't transition between time shards. Only glyphbearers can do that, and the Ilari allow specific passageways to open between time shards when you do X. That's when the monster armies can come closer to the settlement.
As further ramifications of this approach, a settler you rescued will not be able to arrive in town until he/she has traversed the time shards necessary to reach the settlement.
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For me, the only grindy part I've encountered are the Survivor Rescue Missions. More specifically, it's finding them. When you can't cast Seek Survivor because you don't have the prerequisite survivor, it can get very boring going from building to building and cave to cave.
It would be nice if the Seek Survivor guardian scroll didn't require a specific job.
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For me, the only grindy part I've encountered are the Survivor Rescue Missions. More specifically, it's finding them. When you can't cast Seek Survivor because you don't have the prerequisite survivor, it can get very boring going from building to building and cave to cave.
It would be nice if the Seek Survivor guardian scroll didn't require a specific job.
Are you still seeing this with the most recent versoins? We made them a lot more common a couple versions ago.
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The only problems I'm having at the moment is finding the last few pieces to T5 Plasma Bolt. I'm exploring every building I come across, trying to find as many hallways as I can to get clay from vases. But while I have like double or triple the other resources needed to upgrade Plasma Bolt, I only have 2 bits of clay.
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I agree. Clay and Plums are killing me and they need to be more common. My shield takes like 16 plums to upgrade and I can't find anymore since I only have 3 town tiles on my continent.
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Agree about clay, pretty sure I've not seen any for a long long time.
Also, are there plans to add the amount of drops in the future? There's obviously so many destroyable things, with 99% dropping nothing ever, will some of these things ever drop extra stuff?
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Agree about clay, pretty sure I've not seen any for a long long time.
Also, are there plans to add the amount of drops in the future? There's obviously so many destroyable things, with 99% dropping nothing ever, will some of these things ever drop extra stuff?
Eh?
Clay is usually everywhere, at least it seems so to me anyway. There's many different types of vases and they all drop it, and seem pretty darn common in buildings in general.
Unless this changed?
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Agree about clay, pretty sure I've not seen any for a long long time.
Also, are there plans to add the amount of drops in the future? There's obviously so many destroyable things, with 99% dropping nothing ever, will some of these things ever drop extra stuff?
I can add more clay, but, what type of buildings should I add it in? You are aware that it only appears in hallways, and not all buildings have hallways, right?
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The small 1-room shacks and sheds usually have nothing of interest in them. Perhaps they could be used for vase storage? Or possibly a common ending room type such as attics.
Edit: The main problem with clay is that most hallways don't seem to spawn it and some can spawn 5 or so vases. It's oddly inconsistent.
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The small 1-room shacks and sheds usually have nothing of interest in them. Perhaps they could be used for vase storage? Or possibly a common ending room type such as attics.
Cool idea, making storage sheds actually like storage sheds.
EDIT: I also like the attic room type idea.
Edit: The main problem with clay is that most hallways don't seem to spawn it and some can spawn 5 or so vases. It's oddly inconsistent.
A suprisingly easy mistake to make, expecting consistency from a random number generator. ;)
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Well, I can easily add more clay, but, what I'm wondering is... are there areas that would be more beneficial to add them to than others? Or should I just add more all around?
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I usually venture into the buildings in abandoned towns, because those seem to have hallways up the wazoo, but I probably only find one or two bits of clay for every 10-15 hallways I come across. Otherwise, it's just marble stands and clocks.
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Ok, I've just increased the frequency of vases across pretty much all hallways everywhere.
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Aw, just throw a bunch of Clay Golems at them.
"Here lies Urist Sediment. He got his clay, alright."
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Aw, just throw a bunch of Clay Golems at them.
"Here lies Urist Sediment. He got his clay, alright."
I'm tempted to do a Soviet Russia joke, but then I remembered that AVWW currently does not have a region featuring buildings with Russian archetecture.
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Aw, just throw a bunch of Clay Golems at them.
"Here lies Urist Sediment. He got his clay, alright."
I'm tempted to do a Soviet Russia joke, but then I remembered that AVWW currently does not have a region featuring buildings with Russian archetecture.
makeithappen.jpg?
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I actually like the Clay Golem idea. Heck, do this for more things. Want walnuts? Better be ready to fight some War Trees from the Time of Magic.