Excited but concerned: Constructive feedback manifesto from Veteran Gamer

General
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This post encapsulates nothing but my honest opinions regarding my experience with the pre-alpha version of this game and what I feel should be the direction this game should take for optimal success. I will continue to update this as I play the game.

Background on me: I’ve been a ARPG fan since the release of the first diablo, with diablo 2 being my all time favorite game. I’ve been playing diablo 2 for almost 18 years now which is astounding. This is just so you are aware of my biases.

 

I just happened to stumble upon this game reading the Grim Dawn steam forums and it lit a spark in me that I haven’t experienced since Path of Exile was first announced (I was part of the alpha/beta there as well surprise surprise). I constantly wrote feedback (Back when I had the luxury of all the extra time) and they ended up incorporating a lot of the feedback that I suggested, such as monsters having auras, special events where spiders would climb up the wall as a triggered event and the monkey’s climbing down the trees. Very attentive to feedback those devs were and Chris is an awesome guy.

 

That being said, lets get started.

 

  • My very first initial reaction to entering the game was obviously most of the graphics/animations are placeholder so I won't comment on them as I'm sure these will be improved as the game continues its developmental cycle.
 
  • I don't see the reason for the three difficulty settings from the get-go (normal - masochist). Everyone should start out on the same difficulty and the game should progressively get more difficult as you quest and get gear.
 
  • I do like the hardcore option, all ARPG's should have a option to make their characters hardcore.
 
  • Being an ONLINE ONLY game, this raises a few questions. Are you going to be hosting the servers like Path of Exile? Is it going to be more diablo 2 esque where you can join created games from a list? I highly recommend following diablo 2's style of online lobbying (trade rooms, duel rooms, questing rooms) or Path of Exile with a universal chat function. Stay far far away from Grim Dawn has done with their online. No one plays it and from my experience it's just terrible.
 
  • Will this game have player PVP (Preferably open world like Diablo 2)? Will this game have trading? If there is PVP, will there be a loot corpse option? Will there be a loss of experience for softcore players/loss of gold? I highly suggest incorporating a PVP function into this game similar to diablo 2 where people can duke it out as it gives people incentives to min/max their charcters, find epic loot to slay others with etc.. that just straight pve won't give. In my estimation, a hardcore PVP system such as diablo 2's is the best option. Allow people to hostile and kill each other everywhere except safe zones such as towns. Diablo 3 took pvp out of the entire game and threw it into an instanced arena. People after 6 years are still crying foul and it crippled the game's potential significantly. I'm not kidding, diablo 3 is a dead game even compared to its predecessor and if you read the forums you still see people being bitter about PVP being omitted. If you log into diablo 2 people still PVP TO THIS DAY!!!!!!!! This game could learn from this. The vocal minority that hates pvp will shit on me for this aspect of my suggestion however TRUST me when I say there is a lot of soft/non-spoken individuals who yearn for hardcore ARPG PVP. Look at some of the MOST popular games out there right now, all centered around PVP (MOBA i.e. LoL and Battle Royal i.e. Fortnite). I feel this is PoE's Achilles's heel, it failed to really capitalize on the PVP potential of the game and made it mostly a PvE carebear game which is fine, however PVP is so underrepresented in this genre we cannot go another good game ignoring it. How do you add a truly great PVP system? Don't over complicate it. Don't make it convoluted. Simply, let people kill each other anywhere they want except for towns. My original reference point, diablo 2, will stand as a pinnacle example over and over. You don't need fancy PVP systems, PVP loot or any of that garbage. A good PVE aspect of the game will compliment a PVP aspect of the game. People will PVE so they can PVP as I stated earlier. If you want to slay others and take names, you will have a true incentive to PVE and find the best gear possible so you can pwn anyone and everyone that crosses your path, a blend of PVE and PVP made in heaven. I think this is where a lot of game studios get it wrong and they refuse to learn from the past. Look at people who used to play WoW and how they speak so dearly of the "golden days" of Vanilla where you would have world PVP and it was so amazing... What's different? All the PVP systems in place that made it so homogeneous and convoluted it became a check in a box rather than a organic experience you could dynamically control as the player yourself. How do you make it dynamic and organic? YOU MAKE IT AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE. How? Don't put PVP systems in place, simply, allow people to kill each other. That's it. Get fancy and let us loot each other or give us the option to do so and that's it. That's all it would take to create a amazing pvp experience.
 
  • The UI is clean, pragmatic, servers its functions without being in the way, good start.
 
  • I played for two minutes and found 4 different colored items. Stop this, this isn't fun or exciting. I know your loot table system is pre-alpha but I should be finding 97% common (White) items at minimum! I don't even know what all the different colors mean but it's ugly and not fun. Seriously, go download diablo 2 right now and run outside the town and hack and slash a zombie and quill rat and see what kind of items you get. That's fun right there.
 
  • Game feels extremely claustrophobic. Sadly reminds me of those Asian Grinder MMO's where you are lead down a corridor each map. Open up your play space, seriously! Each map, unless something specific like a path leading up to a boss, should be open and randomized. Yes I highly suggest randomizing your maps as the level of replayability it offers is uncontested. But seriously, cut the corrider style of mapping out of this game instantly and make maps, at minimum a square-esque style instead.
 
  • Allow me to click and drag items from equipped items to my inventory. Currently you have to double click.
 
  • Do not allow for easy reallocation of skills/passive points. Each character should be unique and a permanence of skills and points fortifies this while adding risk behind spending your points. This might be unpopular however I just look back at diablo 3 and how you only need to make 1 character and you never have to make that one type of character again because he can just respec ad lib.
 
  • Stash is big and open, good I like this.
 
  • Draw a silhouette of my character when my vision is blocked from seeing them. i.e. doodad in foreground, let me see my character behind it.
 

 

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Hello,

That’s a lot of feedback! Thank you so much for the amount of time you’ve invested into this.

To touch on most of the points you have raised;

  • We're discussing the difficulties and we're not sure if those will be permanent. A few of us on the team are leaning against them. That said, I don't consider their removal urgent. If they help add longevity to a demo with relatively little content, they could be beneficial temporarily.
  • Agreed! I certainly couldn't make all of my characters Hardcore, but I love having the option! It also gives us a relatively easy way of making races more challenging.
  • Our game is not online-only; we will support both online characters which are stored server-side, as well as offline-only characters which would be stored locally. Do you mind if I ask where you got this impression? I'm very sorry if something we've said was misleading.
  • Our game will indeed have PvP. We have committed to having Duels, a Colosseum with 2v2, 3v3, 5v5, as well as a Free For All mode. One of our stretch goals is to expand the amount of PvP content available. We'd like to do PvP well, but we have to balance our budget carefully.
  • We have posted a Development Blog about trading. We've gotten a lot of feedback about some of our planned restrictions, which we'll continue to discuss internally. That said, we are conscious that it is perhaps easier to remove restrictions than to try adding them later. We're committed to getting this right, and we're happy to admit it if we get it wrong and need to make changes.
  • I don't expect we'd have lootable corpses in PvP.
  • We've been discussing death penalties and XP loss is one of our preferred options.
  • Thanks, although we do have improvements for our UI in progress!
  • We deliberately have the acquisition of loot and XP at a rather crazy pace currently. That's an intentional decision made to aid testing. Things will be different at release!
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Thank you for addressing my concerns so fast Sarno. I wrote a reply however somehow it’s not showing up in this thread. Let me rewrite it real fast.

Please remember to revisit this thread once in awhile as I’ll be updating the original post as I keep playing the game.

I saw online-only here: Crate Entertainment Forum - Official Crate Community

I would say give us the ability to loot corpses. Make it a tickbox in pvp, if two alpha males want to pay the ultimate price for defeat after talking smack, they should be allowed to. If you don’t want your stuff looted, simple, you just don’t click it.

XP penalty for death sounds reasonable. For PVP death maybe 50% or 25% so it still leaves a sting? Hardcore pvp should atleast have an option for permanent death (Diablo 3 hardcore pvp doesn’t allow for it… facepalm I know I know).

glad to hear that xp and looting is set to a superfluous rate and not permanent.

Implementing PVP shouldn’t affect your budget if you do it the way I described in my main post. Allow people to hostile each other outside of town. Simple! If you want to get all fancy with arenas and 2v2 etc… do that at a later date when you have established stable financial capital. For the initial release just allow people to beat the dogsh*t out of each other outside of towns, trust me this will go a long way!

Could you please elaborate on how your online will look? Will it look like path of exile’s online? Diablo 2’s online with a lobby system where you can join games of others? What will be the player limit per game? Thank you

 

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I am sincerely sorry about that!

If this ever happens it means that one of our, at times overly zealous, spam filters has auto-flagged it. I’ve unflagged the comment and it should be visible now. Would you like me to delete one of the responses (which?), or would you prefer that I leave them both up?

I’m not sure whether you’ve joined us on Discord, but you’re welcome to send me a private message any time this happens so that I am aware of it more quickly. The only thing I ask is that you understand that, due to time zones, I may be asleep or othewise unavailable temporarily.

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You can delete the first reply. Thank you kindly. Now I know why it happens and will adjust accordingly.

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Would you mind if I asked you to add new points in separate posts?

It’s much easier to stay on top of feedback if I immediately know what’s new and what I’ve seen before. When you edit an existing post I’ve no way of knowing unless I happen to check. Forums are designed so that new posts bump threads so that we know to look at them again. Edits don’t do this.
 

Thanks!

I’m going to have to look at this again tomorrow morning as I’m quite tired at the moment and feel like I’m missing something when glancing at the thread. Using Ctrl F the first mention of that seems to be a post from somebody else responding to something not in the OP. Maybe it was mentioned on the website and has since been edited. I’ll talk to the author of the about clarifying in an edit.
 

I’ll talk with the team about this.

My initial feeling is that it may be something we add to the PvP-orientated stretch goal. While some people are very passionate about PvP, the majority of ARPG players generally don’t spend much time in PvP, and this strikes me as something that many PvP players may not be interested in.
 

Could this discourage people from trying PvP?

If so, would you consider that worth it?
 

It would most closely resemble Path of Exile’s multiplayer.

In most of the game there will be a limit of 5. Some game modes - 5v5 PvP being a somewhat obvious example - will have higher limits. We don’t want zerg groups trivialising content.

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Sure thing

I might have overlooked OP as I usually read the replies from the users and most said it was online only. This might be my fault as I could have jumped the gun on this.

Sorry but I’ll have to disagree, especially with the point of ARPG players generally not spending much time in PvP. Perhaps the current/new breed of ARPG players aren’t into it, however I know plenty of people just like me who yearn for some good old ARPG PvP action. As I said, it’s not like it even has to affect your budget much, just allow us to hostile each other and if it picks up later add those fancy pvp modes. Those who don’t want any action can make private games with their friends or join PvE lobbies etc. My most cogent example would be diablo 3’s lack of PVP. If no one in the ARPG realm liked pvp why do you think it caused such a big upset? As I said, PVP in ARPG’s is such a rare phenomenon these days it creates a market for people like myself who would like to partake and usually keep us as loyal customers (for 18 years in diablo’s case). Another example is PoE’s battle royale island PVP gag that garnered universal praise by most players who said it was the most fun they’ve had in the game in a LONG time (And the PoE team only spent ONE DAY making it!) What was done? They created a giant island and let people slaughter eachother, that’s all. Heres a link: Announcements - How we Made PATH OF EXILE: ROYALE - Forum - Path of Exile

I know the reviews of the event are salt and peppered, however look at how many people absolutely wanted to keep it. I feel that you guys should definitely tap into the ARPG PVP market since it’s such a underrepresented niche. Sure the cliche is people in this genre don’t like to PVP, however I’ll argue to the contrary that ARPG developers usually don’t put any effort worth sh*t into it. All I’m asking is for a little effort. For those without PVP proclivities can PVE to their hearts desire but giving us more options to PVP can ONLY help the game in the long run.

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This is just more of a nuance, doesn’t matter to me either way. There should be SOME substantiation behind losing however, even if its just dropping your ear (ego hit? oof).

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[quote quote=5679]

 
It would most closely resemble Path of Exile’s multiplayer. In most of the game there will be a limit of 5. Some game modes – 5v5 PvP being a somewhat obvious example – will have higher limits. We don’t want zerg groups trivialising content.[/quote]

This is really good news, I like the sound of this.

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I’ll answer with my point of view/opinion about the things you have posted that i disagree with, i will also say why i disagree.
The rest of the points i agree with. (except for the pvp things, im neutral in that because i never liked pvp and dont really care)

First one:

  • I don’t see the reason for the three difficulty settings from the get-go (normal – masochist). Everyone should start out on the same difficulty and the game should progressively get more difficult as you quest and get gear.
-I disagree with this because, because the game does get progressively harder but everyone likes their own version of hard.

Lets say you start on normal and lets rate that 1 through 10, 1 being the beginning of the game and 10 at the end of the game and lets say Veteran start at 5 and ends at 15 and masochist start at 10 and ends at 20.
This way you can decide for yourself how hard the game is going to be, even when you outgear normal, you can go to veteran and find a challenge again if thats what you are looking for.

Im willing to bet there will be people starting at masochist on hardcore and just take hours and hours to progress through the game because thats fun to them. And there will be plenty of people who will just stick to normal because its easier to kill dozens of enemies without too much effort.

Here’s an example:
Ok so i start the game at normal and after a while i find a really good item that makes me so strong that enemies on normal hardly are a threat. Which isnt fun for me at all because i personally like a challenge. So i up the difficulty to veteran/masochist and suddenly i cant just hack my way through enemies are easily, i actually have to use potions,defensive skills and mabye even a form of hit and run tactic.

Next one

  • I played for two minutes and found 4 different colored items. Stop this, this isn’t fun or exciting. I know your loot table system is pre-alpha but I should be finding 97% common (White) items at minimum! I don’t even know what all the different colors mean but it’s ugly and not fun. Seriously, go download diablo 2 right now and run outside the town and hack and slash a zombie and quill rat and see what kind of items you get. That’s fun right there.
-I disagree with this because white items are useless even in diablo 2, you dont even pick them up unless they are the right amount of sockets of ethereal and the base you want etc. Its just allot of items that are being left behind because its useless.

In this game you can shatter items for crafting and the affixes and prefixes of that item you can use again for crafting, so finding items is fun and exciting and should happen allot because its important for crafting. (The more affixes and prefixes the better)
Just imagine that you are playing a max level character and you think to yourself, hmm i want a new character, so you start a new character and that character can find items with affixes/prefixes that your max character needs, so you shatter the item on your low level character and you can use the affixes/prefixes on your max character.
So by playing a very low level character you can help progress your high level character through crafting and the coloured items.

Instead of playing a low level chatacter and just ignoring most of the items because they are white and cant be used for anything. And you just grind away to the level where coloured items can drop.
I prefer that coloured items can drop right away and immediately put you in the ‘‘searching for the right item you can shatter and potentially use it for this character or other characters’’

Its not fun for me to find white items all the time that i leave behind because they have no use and hardly any value, i prefer to find items that have meaning to not just this character but also my other characters.

Next one:

  • Do not allow for easy reallocation of skills/passive points. Each character should be unique and a permanence of skills and points fortifies this while adding risk behind spending your points. This might be unpopular however I just look back at diablo 3 and how you only need to make 1 character and you never have to make that one type of character again because he can just respec ad lib.
-I agree with this point but i just want to say that should be a way to respec atleast some of the skill/passive points through a large amount of gold or some other type of currency. Or mabye even like a special quest or instance/event that grants refunding skill/passive points. It shouldnt be a full refund of all the skill/passive points but if you made a mistake somewhere you should be able to fix it instead of lvling a whole new character. (In my opinion PoE did this the correct way, where you can change a few points but not too much)
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The problem with the loot is not in colors, but in quality / quantity.

The point is that usually in a game you find a useful item once every few hours in end game. You want this to be as frequent as possible because finding stuff is fun, but you don’t want end game characters to be maxed out within a few days.

The basic idea of this games itemization i think is great. You can also find items to scrap, so that increases the frequency of finding something useful. Next while you improve items, they can fracture, which again increases the frequency you can find good stuff before its perfect. I also really like the customization of the items.

The colors are i assume a result of the system and they are useful. When i use the dev mode loot explosion, i very much use the colors. I pick up all the yellows and scrap them because they produce most shard. I pick up rings, amulets and tomes because they produce stat point shards. I look for specific items to become my next base items to improve upon mostly in green and bleu because once they have more than 2 stats, the chance of all stats being useful gets abysmal. In real, you would probably move to looking for more stats later in the game to optimize the chances of getting a full perfect 20 out of 20 statpoint item.

The problem is that finding stuff isn’t really fun anymore. Its a burden because of the amount of stuff and how closely you have to watch the stuff to decide if its useful. I read something about loot filters, and a system to filter that stuff would be good, but i think the amount still needs to be reduced. There are lot of weapons, and i doubt many of them will be useful. If you want to maximize crit and you need your weapon to contribute to that, the one that gives 8% added crit and something like 34% dmg is the only real option. If you don’t want crit, you really want 4x added damage stats (2x white and 2x primary:Kraken beak with double elementel primaries). The dmg%, mellee%, crit damage% stats are all kind of useless because they can come from so many other items.

I don’t know how it is easy to fix this. Simply removing half the colors will only make things worse imo. You need the different number of stat points to choose a point of where to start with the base items you will develop and no longer recognizing those on first sight will just increase the burden of selecting loot.

To improve things, i think i would reduce the number of items that will see no use as base items. 6% added crit is useless when 8% exists. (so it can exist in early game with the 8% in later game, but then don’t let the 6% still drop in late game) I would probably also remove the useless stats/shards. Who wants lightning protection when there is elemental protection ? If you reduce the useless stats, more of the items will be useful, so you need to drop fewer items to find the same amount of useful stuff per hour.

I would also make the legendaries modable with shards. Either make it that somehow you can improve the stats that are on them or let stats be added to them. If they aren’t modable. I know there have been many people who complained that it is boring that everyone used the same legendaries in D2. D3 tried to solve that at first by making yellow items play a more important role and it turned out to be a failure. They returned back to legendaries. I think legendaries are nice, pretty and we shouldn’t be afraid of them, just improve upon them (let the player inprove upon them)

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@Alchemist.

Just wanted to say that i really like the idea of molding a legendary.

Here’s what i think about the other points, the base weapons and the resistances/elemental resistance

Mabye they have allot of base weapons that are similair and inferior and superior to eachother to make perfectly rolled items near impossible to get without allot of luck in crafting. You first have to find the right base weapon and then hope it has atleast a few of stats u need and then with crafting bump those up to tier 5 without fracturering. If you remove multiple weapon bases the chances of this happening will be higher and thus less rare.
I would like to see that in the higher difficultys of this game and in endgame the better base weapons start dropping more frequent so you feel rewarded for playing at a higher difficulty or playing endgame. (Just make sure the difference isnt that much else people who play normal difficulty will feel left behind)

Just wanted to point out that i think the only reason solo resistances exist is because they can roll higher than elemental resistance. For example: Items can get +60 to lightning or only+30 elemental resistance max. So if you have a really bad resistance you can use that specific resistance to boost it up allot.

I really like the idea of being able to mold a legendary, so even if multiple people have the same legendary, and that legendary has like a theme (summon bee’s on attack) that will always stay the same but the stats will differ due crafting and/or adding stats. And this will make sure a legendary is truly unique for each person if they wish to alter it with crafting.

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Do not allow for easy reallocation of skills/passive points. Each character should be unique and a permanence of skills and points fortifies this while adding risk behind spending your points. This might be unpopular however I just look back at diablo 3 and how you only need to make 1 character and you never have to make that one type of character again because he can just respec ad lib.

I completely disagree with this. I get that you’re a big D2 fan and the way they made the skill system back then was in a way brilliant but I don’t think it fits today’s generation of gamers as not a lot of people enjoy spending time remaking characters just for the purpose of testing a skill that unlocks at level 40 (which takes Idk how many hours to get there) and besides you can still get a lot of replayability from classes seeing as if you wanna try out every mastery in its entirety you’d still have to make 3 characters for each major class.

I feel like the system they came up with is perfect. It actually even bothered me at first when I saw how the specialization thing worked but when I got to lvl 30+ I noticed that it’s easier to lvl up a skill so all in all it’s good.

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After 2 years, I think we’ve all moved on from the OP…

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Yeah, sorry, I just realized how old this topic is. I don’t even know how I came upon it. My bad :rofl:

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