Some thoughts after finishing

[Detective Costeau]

I finished the game last night, and overall it was a great experience for the price. I'm hopeful there'll be some kind of sequel or follow-up in the same style, even if it's with a different story. The game managed to be a lot of fun and tell a very good story for the vast majority of the game, so congrats on a job well done!

A few things did feel problematic enough to mention in the way of constructive criticism though.

1)The completely random loot doesn't really work well, in my experience- it's way too common to just not get stuff your characters really need to be effective. E.g. in my game I specialized Roland in using two-handed swords, and he finished the game using the exact same sword he started with, because there simply never was any kind of better two-handed sword available. The result is his effectiveness started to fall off hard later in the game, because he was stuck with a very outdated weapon. Similarly I only ever found a single hammer that was actually any kind of upgrade for Driina.
I think having a handful of hard-coded loot drops so there's at least a few good weapons of every type would help a lot. I guess I could have sailed in circles for in-game days to refresh merchants until they had something useful, but that shouldn't be necessary just to get decent weapons later in the game.

2) The class balance feels pretty off. All of the warrior and thief classes feel fine, and I could get a Guild-Magos character to be useful, but the hybrid magic/fighter classes (Champion, Hospitaller, and Battlemagos) feel very underwhelming. The problem is they just don't have enough weapon/armor skills to be especially useful in a fight, and they lose a lot of magic in return for the not very useful combat abilities. I tried playing both a Champion main character and had Driina as a permanent part of the party, and neither felt especially good. I'd happily have switched Driina for a pure divine caster if I could have (I wanted to use the story characters instead of mercenaries, though). They just don't get enough combat power to justify how much magical stuff they lose. I think a lot of it is down to not being able to get the second melee attack, because my experimenting with a Bard has been fine compared to the other hybrid classes, and getting that second attack is a big part of why.

3) Magic balance is very strange. E.g. at endgame with Embla, I could choose to cast Lightning Strike for 15 Attunement and do 14-23 lightning damage, or cast Swarm of Gnats for 3 attunement and do 13-16 damage. Add to that that Swarm of Gnats is *much* more likely to get successful Cascades- I could cast it 3-4 times a turn reliably- and the high-powered attack spells just aren't worth using. You literally do more damage per turn for less Attunement cost by just spamming cheap spells, from my experience. The buff spells feel fine, it's just the damage spells that feel very unbalanced.

4) The late-game enemies (after Horryn) get to be a bit too damage spongey for me. This is worst in the Tower of Ash because everything there resists so many damage types, but even the enemies with no damage resistances had a combined 250 or so Vitality and Wounds at a time when my characters were doing on average about 20 damage per attack. I'd have much preferred enemies that did more damage but died faster.

5) I absolutely loved the story- until after the last boss. The part after that was a big let-down for me. I don't think introducing major story elements with no buildup (if there was any foreshadowing or hints of what's after that boss, I didn't find them and I was paying close attention) in the last 15 minutes of the story works very well. I don't mind the ending being bleak- the whole story is bleak, it's to be expected- but the way it plays out comes out of absolutely nowhere, and that left it feeling pretty unsatisfying to me.
Is there seriously *any* foreshadowing I missed that there's actually an ancient spaceship under the Priory in the game? I genuinely can't think of anything.
There's also a major story element that never really gets any kind of explanation or resolution.
The whole idea that the events are part of a time loop feels like something left over from an earlier draft of the story- it doesn't seem to effect the game's events at all in the current version, and the events being in a loop doesn't really seem to make sense with how the story ends. The ending seems to suggest you awaken the sleeping god every time- but given that causes the end of the Conjunction and the Dragon's attempts to get into the world, it's not clear what would be causing a loop, or why it appears to have stopped, since time is clearly moving forward instead of the story's events looping in the ending. I honestly think you could remove the whole time-loop idea from the story completely without having any impact on how events unfold.

Still, despite having a few criticisms of the game, I enjoyed it a lot, 95% of the story was great and the combat and exploration were overall quite fun, and I'll be keeping an eye out for whatever you decide to do next.

[Du-Vu]

I suppose how blatant the signposting is for the ending depends on how familiar you are with the Cthulhu mythos, or even just Warhammer 40K. Given how magic is a corrupting influence and the Dragon is some kind of eldritch abomination rather than your typical fantasy dragon, it actually felt pretty predictable to me. But if you’re not steeped in these tropes, they might not feel obvious in the same way.

Not necessarily predictable in a bad way, just in the sense that the whole game is more about recreating a certain atmosphere than doing much of anything new. But it means that, for me, ‘the emperor is an alien god!’ came as less of a late-stage twist and more just the inevitable payoff to what had been hinted at all along.

[gallaghan2000]

I personally think that the problem with the hybrids is that they're given a single road to success.

For example, I've heard very good things about the champion, to the point that one has apparently soloed the game.

Battle Magos - Fire warrior could make them awesome (giving a temporary second attack) but the lack of access to a spell granting a longer frenzy and inability to use any weapon that's not light... Well, cripples their value. That's not even getting into how having evasive being so deep into their feat trees cripples using them to help the thief set up backstab.

It's just a completely different design philosophy compared to how the bard was designed imo.

[Detective Costeau]

Originally posted by Du-Vu:

I suppose how blatant the signposting is for the ending depends on how familiar you are with the Cthulhu mythos, or even just Warhammer 40K. Given how magic is a corrupting influence and the Dragon is some kind of eldritch abomination rather than your typical fantasy dragon, it actually felt pretty predictable to me. But if you’re not steeped in these tropes, they might not feel obvious in the same way.

Not necessarily predictable in a bad way, just in the sense that the whole game is more about recreating a certain atmosphere than doing much of anything new. But it means that, for me, ‘the emperor is an alien god!’ came as less of a late-stage twist and more just the inevitable payoff to what had been hinted at all along.

It's funny you should mention that. I'm actually a huge Lovecraft and 40k fan, and I still feel like the ending came out of flipping nowhere.

I'm curious: what's the signposting you're referring to that hints at the ending?
Because as far as I can tell, there's nothing beyond "this game takes a lot of inspiration from the Cthulu mythos, and some of those stories had aliens." There's nothing in the game itself that I can think of. You said the whole alien god thing felt like a payoff to hints in the game, but I genuinely can't think of anything that hints toward it in any way. It's possible I missed or forgot something, though.
Yes, the Dragon is very obviously not a typical fantasy dragon, but personally I feel like "there's an extradimensional nightmare threatening reality, therefore aliens" is still a huge leap in a game that's been a 100% fantasy story about horrors from the ocean depths up to that point.

And I'm almost certain the sleeping spaceship god isn't meant to be Emperor Gallian (assuming that's what you mean by 'the Emperor is an alien god'), because that contradicts a lot of what the game says. The whole place is described as being far older than the Empire, possibly older than humans, and it's been buried under a mountain all that time.
I guess there could be some kind of projection or something going on to allow the spaceship god to have been the Emperor anyway, but there's nothing in the little you see to suggest it could possibly care about being an emperor of humans. It'd be like me trying to set myself up as ruler of the local anthill. Why would it bother? For that matter, given it's still alive in the game's present, why wouldn't it still be in charge? It's not like there's anything in the world that could oppose it.

I dunno, I liked the game's story a lot up to that point, but even as someone who loves Lovecraft the sudden shift right at the end of the story just felt incredibly arbitrary and jarring. If you liked it, more power to you, though, I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong on anything.

[Ghoul Hunter]

I agree with the random loot thing. I don't think I ever saw a 2 handed maul.

I completed the game with a battle magos main on hard, so they are fine. That said, the magic system definitely needs balance adjustments. Reading further, you nailed it right on the head, high level damage spells are worse than the low level damage spells. Because of cascading and cheap costs, magic missile or swarm of gnats are the best damaging spells. The damage of the higher level spells should be a lot higher, maybe even as far as double the current damage values. Note that these low level spells are not overpowered. If the dev nerfs them, then mages will be terrible damage dealers.

The ending was hinted from the very beginning. Embla was called a star-child, and her mother became pregnant in the forest one night, and she has mysterious powers. Definitely some cosmic alien stuff going on. Then there's the whole eldritch monstrosity stuff that is going on, which leads it to not just being a D&D flavor adventure game. The empire has questionable stuff in its history if you click on the green entries. I'm surprised that people are surprised by the ending, because it was hinted at plenty. Maybe I'm just accustomed to the genre from Darkest Dungeon.

[Du-Vu]

What Ghoul Hunter said, mostly.

It didn't feel like a purely fantasy story to me. And to be clear I don't consider it a *good* payoff, and I'm not really defending the ending. I think the game holds up for its tone and art and some fun but flawed gameplay, and a moody opening that hooked me quite a bit, despite a somewhat weak overall story that gets more generic as it goes along. But I felt like the ending was weak *because* it felt so telegraphed to me.

I'm not saying all of this was directly stated. It's just such a part of the genre at this point that I'd have been more surprised if it didn't go the direction it did.

It's been a while since I finished the game so I might be misremembering, but the sense I have is that Gallian either was one of the aliens himself or was created by the ship, and then bestowed magic upon mankind, which would make him alien and godlike enough for the me one way or another. The ship is very low on power and waiting on humans to develop to a point where they can repower it, I think? Or possibly be absorbed by it? Not sure.

Again, not really trying to convince you the ending was good, actually. I didn't love the twist myself. Just not because it came out of nowhere.

[Detective Costeau]

I find it very interesting we seem to have reached a similar judgement from completely opposite directions (too predictable/too out of left field).
I think maybe it's because I've read/played a bunch of darker fantasy stuff that took a lot of inspiration from Cosmic Horror stuff while staying 'purely fantasy' (for lack of a better term) without sci-fi elements like spacefaring civilizations and such from Lovecraft, like the non-40k Warhammer, for instance. The story in this one felt much the same.
So, sure, Embla being connected to some ancient power is well-telegraphed, her needing to be sacrificed to save the world isn't too unexpected.
I think it's mostly just the spaceship that's so jarring to me. It felt like Geralt of Rivia getting gunned down by a Space Marine in the middle of the Witcher 3's ending cutscene.

[gallaghan2000]

I'd argue that cascade itself needs an overhaul, maybe even being altered into a critical multiplier type thing with the roll difficulty reversed (low level spells need a high roll to cascade/crit while higher levels need a lower roll; non damaging spells could instead have cascade increase duration [looking at all the one round buffs], modifiers, or save dcs)

In short, cascade success increases spell results up to a number of times equal to max cascade chances.

[Detective Costeau]

I think the thing that makes the magic so off is a combination of the higher level spells just plain costing too much for what they do, cascade making it easy to spam spells, and magical aptitude adding a flat value to every spell's damage that's the same no matter the spell's base damage.
The last one is what makes spamming weak spells hit so hard, because you get to add a flat value every time you cast any damage spell.

For those of you that had better luck than I did with Champion/Battlemagos characters, I'm curious how you set them up to work effectively. Both my attempts just ended up feeling like they were mediocre at two things instead of good at one.

[gallaghan2000]

Eh, the magic was constantly a problem in multiple builds before release. If you think the damage is low now, you should have seen the demo with the first Magos.

[Du-Vu]

There's kind of a long history of D&D settings being built on the rubble of high science-fiction settings, spaceships and robots and all. Might've had that on the brain. Vance's Dying Earth. Expedition to Barrier Peaks. Ultima, Wizardry, Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star, etc. 40K and Lovecraft themselves have enough mixing of different eras, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror that it doesn't feel like that much of a stretch to me, but hey. If you don't like it you don't like it.