Honest (and long) review of the game by Pamyu

[Pamyu]

Review of DD:A

Introduction

Hello everyone and Chromatic team. This will be a long and honest review of the current state of the game after the Early access release on Steam. I will not get through all that has been posted so far (haters, optimization issue, character lost, etc..) and i will try to focus on the gameplay and the possible evolution of the game. I am a true fan and a lover of the Dungeon Defenders license and this is my personal feeling and review of the game. Sorry for the english mistakes, english is not my native language. I also want to say that i respect the choice of the team to launch as Early Access and to take time to polish the game with time.

Graphics and Artistic direction

New Engine

First of all, i will say that i hate the Unreal Engine. I hate the spongy and glossy shaders of the engine, that is 100% personal but i do understand why the team choosed it and i think it is a good move for the future updates and content of the game. There is actually some optimization to make but it is playable. The game looks like Dungeon Defenders and i have the feelings of the first game so.. nice move!

Characters

It is... horrible. Let's be honest and look at the characters. You have no gender selection and they look terrible. The monk is a monkey (is that a joke by the way?) and others look like very very bad modelling assets. Faces are ugly and it should seriously be remake in the future.

Level designs

I like the new effects on the maps. Level design is nicely done and i am really hurry to see more new maps coming using the new engine. When i first played on the tutorial map (the first one), i was brought back in time and i had this happiness feeling of hours and hours playing the first Dungeon Defenders. Nicely done! There is of course some tweeks to make here and there but i like it!

UI or User Interface

This is a complete... mess. Despite the bugs with UI stepping to each others and hiding other informations, i think it is the first thing that devs should improve as soon as possible. Dungeon Defenders 1 is a game about "Theory Crafting" or TC and in this version, you simply can't understand properly what improves or not your TC. Clicking tower informations should like the first one shows all informations of the tower. The UI panel is way too big and brings no needed informations. Speaking of that.. the rest of the UI is poorly made. Level selection screen is poor, images are low quality and navigation is way too long for the poor informations giving to players. You cannot understand properly what towers makes what unless you create a new character and read all the informations. Plus... and i think it is a big PLUS, players should be able to understand better what stats improves what skills or tower's abilites. My opinion is currently, making a proper theory crafting is impossible with the current UI.

Inventory

Why do i feel like getting in my inventory will makes me lose time ? i don't want to open that. Comparing gear is a mess in-game and in inventory. I cannot sell sorted gear fast.. no shortcuts.. i hate this inventory.

Defenders

We will speak later about what this game is lacking and why this new remake will surely be left by all players but just keep in mind that Elemental Immunity is the worst thing that happened to that license so far when reading the rest of this thread.

Squire

It is actually the MOST viable Defender in this remake. Towers are impressive in terms of damages and damages per seconds. This Defender does not have to think of Elemental Immunity, it is pure Physicial damages and one tower is simply broken in terms of Gameplay. Fast, Strong and a game breaker at this point of development. It is the easiest and brainless class to play.

Monk

Absolutly useless at this point. What made Monk viable was the TC of dealing with the D.Rate and Power of his Electric Aura. Here, some monsters are Immune to the Electric aura which force the Monk to use a new aura to remove Immunity and deals LESS damages to monsters. It cannot be played as a main character and seriously lack of love from the dev team. Monk was a terror in DD2, now it is a simple and bad support Defender. For example, nothing is explained but the Ensnare aura is broken. Only one stat can be applied to it, it is the Range. I made tests for hours to understand which stats would apply a better snare to ennemies. The answer is None! Power, D.Rate, etc.. no stats actually snares more the ennemies. Which makes this class at this point the worst support of the game.

Huntress

Not useless but seriously lacks of gameplay. Ennemies are immune to most of her towers. It is pretty fun to play her as a support DD (Damage Dealer). For example, put Squire towers and play with her for additionnal damage to monsters. Plus, staying far from ennemies makes you not dying stupidly and loosing your experience!

Mage

My biggest deception. Due to massive Elemental Immunity of the monsters, playing this class is absolutly useless. Lots of bugs with the explosion damage of the fire tower. Mage has become the worst Defender for towers. Making a TC with this class is a pain and it forces you to play multiple characters to remove/debuff elemental immunity. Mages was to me the strongest of DD1 and now, i just deleted it because i don't want to handle specific towers for specific elemental ennemies. A waste and barely playable solo.

Overhaul Gameplay

Gears

I do not appreciate that gears has specific level (.., 32, 45, 60). I should be able to find a gear of my level and use it or not if i can evolve it to makes my towers or character more powerful. Is it possible to add gear scaling ? stats should be based on character level and not gear level.

Levelling

I am currently level 52. It was way too fast to get here. I am missing the MMO effect (taking time to get geared and to know your class). Here, i made a TC with a powerful class, played hours without looking at my screen (watching movies during waves of 1600 ennemies) and wait 15 levels to equip new gear.. It is, unbrained, pain, horrible and a huge mess (gladly... not the movies i watched).

Elemental Immunity

This is, in my opinion what will break the game and makes people left the game. There absolutly NO NEED of this feature. It makes Defenders a pain to play and forces players to use multiple classes to bypass the immunity system. Unless you play Squire, this feature is absolutly terrible and i hope it will be remove forever.

Solo playing VS Multiplayer

I am a solo player and I DO NOT want to play multiplayer. There will be always cheaters (they are already here) and unless you play with friends who wants to Theory Craft and Try Hard the maximum difficulty, it forces players to focus on an aspect of the game that DO NOT rewards them. For example, a Snare Monk is very efficient but you do not kill monsters so you have less experience. I think what would be interesting also is to NOT allow players to change classes during a game. You play a mage then.. you HAVE to play it until the rest of game (not only the wave in progress).

Ragdolls

Let's be honest, it is a broken feature. Sometimes it works, sometimes monsters just fly through the entire map. Their bodies stretch on walls and create bugs. Dragons freezes and dies without falling. Well.. it is just no need feature unless it could be fixed.

Pathfinding

Some maps have serious pathfinding issues which makes ennemies to get stuck at spawners when there is too much ennemies getting created. Unless you have 3-4 minutes to wait for them to despawn, some maps gets really boring very fast.

Number of ennemies VS Speed

Playing low difficulty in Survival is a pain. You wait for hours for them to spawn and walk on the map until after wave 20, they all become Narutos and instantly destroy your towers.

Sounds and Music

Fastly, i do not listen to game musics so i turned it off quickly and the sound is terrible when there is too much of them so i am just playing without the sound as well. There is a glitchy and annoying sound when too much ennemies are dying and/or multiple turrets shooting at the same time (specially with the mage).

Conclusion

Well.. i love this game. Surprisingly, this is a new start of what was the best tower defense of my life. DD1 is brought back from the deads and i like to play it. Despite all the lacking features, maps, content and all the bugs, it is a nice move of Chromatic Games to bring us this new and polished Dungeon Defenders. It is an Early Access and all people should be able to put some water in their wine. We are here because we love DD franchise, we love tower defense and i have an ABSOLUTE trust in Chromatic Games. I do not care about the anti-cheat, i do not care about the bugs. I just play for what this game is for.. our new Dungeon Defenders 1!

I think it is the beginning of a new experience, not a fast remake of our lovingly DD1. There is.. OF COURSE, a huge work to get done by the devs but i have the ultimate hope for this game. I am pretty sure i wanted to say way more about this game but this thread starts to get too long.

Should i ask people to not trash,spit,avoid childish comments or haters to not answer this post ? Of course not.. you'll do it no matter what i say.

Long lives Dungeon Defenders Awakened!

Pamyu

[DD Dtgnoome]

Respect!

[Xengre]

Interesting post. I haven't played DDA but have significant experience with DD1 & DD2.

What caught my interest the most was mention of elemental immunity and physical dmg from Squire. This kind of design can prove crippling to class design, balance, and variety of build/theory crafting. Below I'm going to list some past issues with DD2 that had a similar situation to kind of show why such a system can be harmful to a game. The devs should already be familiar with it, considering it comes from their prior DD2 project, but obviously need some reminder.

DD2 had this issue with physical and magical resistance (not elements) and it was a problem. For a long time there was no proper way to deal with magic damage resistant mobs because the only physical dmg towers that exist in the game were Squires which were bad compared to other options and Huntress traps.

Squire harpoons were so bad they were the worst tower in the game for a very long time simply due to awful fire rate, low dps, and area covered with each hit even though they had strong target range/AoE piercing effect.

Squire Cannons were bad for a long time due to being single target and overwhelmed by sheer enemy count in magic resistant lanes, especially as mobs became too strong in higher difficulties and later waves (notably onslaught, but even on campaign farming maps). They even had a powerful stun effect but simply got overwhelmed by mob count and special tankier mob types.

Huntress Traps were ground based and thus not intended for flying targets of which were some of the most problematic in magic resistant lanes for a long time (especially on onslaught) and ranged mobs that could be harder to hit with physical traps as they stand so far away from wall leaving you guessing and not letting you use them also on mobs at wall as you needed DU for other physical towers in that lane primarily.

One strategy used to deal with this was one I pulled from my methods in DD1 and the first real way we enabled dealing with and reaching the highest levels of end game nightmare that devs didn't intend for us to be able to complete (the gear growth prior was actually underwhelming, on purpose, as we weren't supposed to have the proper stats to reach NM4 due to gaps in difficulty and gear prior much less beat NM4 as they wanted to add more content/features to assist in this at a later point). In fact, I used this strategy not only forcing them to rework all of NM difficulty and do a minor gear wipe (downgrade actually) but then first day of patch NM2 was sworn up and down by Trendy to be the highest possible to reach, but I carried player base to NM4 and taught hem how to reach it. The method was abusing elemental lane resistance and Squire. This consisted of using only a FEW DU on just a phew physical towers and a set of double walls (second set in case first fell for redundancy because it was heavily player and a bit luck based). The rest of the DU (about 70-80% went into a single physical resistant lane (technically double, but the two lanes merged). This resulted in a certain map (the tree one in the sky forget name of) being popular and almost the only map played at end game which became an issue for devs. WIth that much firepower/DU focused on the dual combined lane with effective AoE magical towers against phys resistant mobs there was zero need to worry even with significantly undergeared stats about that lane falling or upgrading it so mana (which was very tight at the time) could be focused on reinforcing the physical lanes (mostly repairing/replacing walls tho... because they got hammered, hence redundancy). Then one of two strategies or a hybrid setup would be enforced. A squire (or two) in each magic resistant lane to aggro (taunt ability), CC spam, shield to survive crazy powerful mobs (high block rate stat), and a healing aura to maintain them if possible. One player may act as purely a supporting roll rushing between lanes to maintain, heal towers while the Squires focus on defense, and occasionally relieve/check the phys resistant lane and CC or repair walls then continue. Once gear became better from doing these runs you could slowly make it more reliable swapping one Squire out for a DPS oriented character to run between lanes and support but still one squire per lane, and of course one char really ought to always be supporting all lanes back and forth.

A secondary strategy was also developed, not by me, of building a TOOOOOOOON of barriers in all lanes except one and then a ton of the remaining DU spent on lightning auras, then a Squire tanking the ogre that came out in the first wave (only boss/ogre dropped gear to prevent farming the weak mobs in first wave to advance without actually being able to beat content). This strategy basically held trash mobs long enough to farm the first ogre, rinse and repeat, basically doing the same they had designed the boss class only loot system to defeat. This resulted in further changes pretty fast and was to slow and unproductive so it didn't get far initially before being patched unlike the above method which allowed full runs I listed above this one. However, it shows one type of flaw with certain design elements that fit into this topic so I mentioned it.

The issue was solved within the game when I developed a strategy using mines in onslaught on a higher area or side area and would use a barrier (later evolved to frost tower for kobold lure) to pull flying mobs into mine range and this was a really cheap setup that forced flying mobs into trap range. Traps, themselves, were cheap so long as you didn't have a bunch of more expensive physical towers eating up DU in the lane. The strategy eventually evolved to predictive guessing of ranged location + lure methods as well as far more physical traps and zero ranged supporting physical towers so we could really splurge on physical traps which were actually high DPS + AoE + insanely cheap when only using these and not other expensive physical towers in that lane. This eventually lead to a revolution in which a similar idea was adopted by me and others for magic lanes using the magic version of the trap, too, and similar tactics and at which point almost exclusively traps were used for DPS (very odd sight and obv not intended). Devs had to nerf them and buff other towers significantly to fix this after a while. This forced them to start adding an entire new series of passives (passives weren't a thing really prior to this point) because other towers were so underperforming almost nothing was used but barriers, the two trap types, and occasional frost tower/lighitng aura.

This passive had one intended for harpoons that was explodey intending to improve the AoE performance of harpoons, boost harpoon damage based on tower hp stat (because you would typically have high stat for this due to their use of barriers), and at the same time harpoons overall performance was to be buffed in terms of fire rate (a huge issue it had always had prior). It was a failure for a time but eventually improved a lot. This and some other tower buffs lead to a much more balanced state though there was still clearly best options most of the time hampering balance, it was far less one sided and unviable at high end game than the entire time prior.

There were more cases of these types of issues during its history that were less severe but still worth mentioning if anyone can remember due to the enemy type. In each of these situations it was hindered by resistance affinity and only overcome via abuse of balance oversights that were discovered. There was always a case of one way is truly supreme over others as this is what such a system enforces. It also depreciates the concept of flexibility, theory crafting, and synergy because it hard locks you to optimal only methods as it splits variety due to an already low amount of options (tower and hero wise).

Enemy variety is good, however, in this type of game enemy resistance affinity to actual damage types can be a real problem. Anti-flying defenses? Okay. Anti magic, or elemental, or other damage type (physical, DoT, etc.) are far harder to balance and far more limiting. It is better to have each tower excel in certain situations rather than having them all be relatively similar and forced variety by purely a statistical damage negation from resistance. The entire reason I describe the above is in hopes this is discussed and devs move away from this because it will hold back their game if this mistake is repeated and having it done as elements (more than physical and magical) makes it even more problematic to balance and have a good design. Can it be done successfully? Yes, but it would be arrogant to think your team is capable of this when they struggle with basic development of even simpler things and balance. It also doesn't mean the product would be better off even if you did succeed at handling elemental affinities. Focus on enemy variety and tower advantage/disadvantage, inherent to the tower, instead.

[Ryzours]

Great review. I agree I have no reason to play something else than the squire as long as there is elemental immunity. And there are many, many flaws in this early access version, but all is not lost, the game is still kinda fun. Let's hope.

[BoyHoleBrigade]

This review is completely off. Especially on the huntress, it's like you played DD1 recently and went straight to reviewing this lol

[BoyHoleBrigade]

Squire is the most BUGGY this time around lmao

[Ice-Nine]

I don't know which game you're playing, but Apprentice + Monk build is better than Squire all day.

You complain that Apprentice sucks because of elemental immunity, and that Monk is useless. But Monk has an aura that removes elemental immunity. Combining Fireblast Towers + Strength Drain Aura is better than Squire towers.

[BoyHoleBrigade]

Also reviewing without showing your amount of gameplay tracked is a bit wack

[Zanarkand]

I'm clearing every single survival level atm on insane with monk electric auras + deadly strike towers+ enrage aura. I highly disagree with what you said about monk, same with mage, same as huntress. Actually it's like you never played the game at all or tried using traps together. Why am i even typing this, are you trolling?

[Xengre]

Originally posted by Zanarkand:

I'm clearing every single survival level atm on insane with monk electric auras + deadly strike towers+ enrage aura. I highly disagree with what you said about monk, same with mage, same as huntress. Actually it's like you never played the game at all or tried using traps together. Why am i even typing this, are you trolling?

Is the enrage aura useful in this version? I've yet to play DDA but remember it really slowed pace in DD1 and caused auras to die extremely fast due to mob count while mobs beating each other did too little damage vs their scaling health.

From what I'm seeing in later posts it sounds like monk works very similarly to DD1's monk with regards to auras (minus stat scaling issues) which, can indeed, compensate for elemental affinity but runs into the problem of to many similar towers causing overlap as they do the same thing. No point in having 4-5 raw DPS towers when you will just end up picking the best DPS tower. They need niches, strengths and disadvantages to ensure using them. This elemental affinity design ends up being pointless because it will just be countered by str drain making it a moot addition. DD2 suffered from specific towers simply being best choice and DD1 still suffers from this (App completely invalidates Squire in DD1 and many of App's towers completely invalidate any reason to use other DPS towers of his own set, magic missile/fireball). I'm not sure if they function the same in this one so I'd be interested to see what people have to say about that but they definitely need to be made more unique in functionality.

[(C)FatheredPuma81]

Looking at your character and elemental immunity it seems you've never played the Original DD very much at all I assume? The whole point of elemental immunity is to get you use to playing multiple characters. There's no way in hell you'll ever be able to play on anything beyond Hard difficulty on survival without getting use to using more than 1 character for building even if they remove elemental resistances.

Granted though Monk is currently in a terrible state due to his towers (hopefully) being bugged.

[Ice-Nine]

Originally posted by (C)FatheredPuma81:

Granted though Monk is currently in a terrible state due to his towers (hopefully) being bugged.

What's bugged about Monk auras?

[Pamyu]

Originally posted by MegaMilkers:

Also reviewing without showing your amount of gameplay tracked is a bit wack

That's what a review is for. No matter how long i have played, a review should help and improve development state of a game in early access.

Originally posted by Zanarkand:

Why am i even typing this, are you trolling?

By all gods, i hope not!

Originally posted by (C)FatheredPuma81:

The whole point of elemental immunity is to get you use to playing multiple characters.

And that is something i do not like in Dungeon Defenders. It was a personal review. I let everyone judge of what they like or not.

[Ice]

"Mage

My biggest deception. Due to massive Elemental Immunity of the monsters, playing this class is absolutly useless. Lots of bugs with the explosion damage of the fire tower. Mage has become the worst Defender for towers. Making a TC with this class is a pain and it forces you to play multiple characters to remove/debuff elemental immunity. Mages was to me the strongest of DD1 and now, i just deleted it because i don't want to handle specific towers for specific elemental ennemies. A waste and barely playable solo."

Are you a kikoo fireball tower? I play apprentis and he is strong! If monster have immunity fire it's not a problem i have 5 tower and i play all.

Just up range and fire rate and he is totaly ok.

I play blockad of squire, towers of apprentis and rage aura of monk.

[Pamyu]

Originally posted by Ice:

I play blockad of squire, towers of apprentis and rage aura of monk.

And i hope you like playing this way.

[Bangarang]

Lol i have yet you use a huntress and my squire is used for walls only. How many hours have you played the game? Probably went through campaign on medium only.