Not enough Tower Defense/Strategy

[Odium]

I feel like I enjoy the combat, the visuals, I was initially impressed the first time I played. But as I continued playing I got a little bored, I understood the gameplay loop within an hour. I want to focus on tower defense more, expand the scale of the map to such a degree that I have dozens and dozens of turrets. The way you progress and unlock new turrets doesn't allow me to build up and turtle, it doesn't let me get creative with my strategies.

It seems to me that they made a mistake with making the tower defense aspect a third or fourth priority, because the gameplay and the somewhat limited weapon and character roster isn't strong enough to carry the game in my opinion. I wanna play the game and then I remember I'll just open doors maybe a dozen times or less, find the next area and sometimes easily survive the waves as my crystal robot makes his way through, or just barely survive, mostly because I can't refund turrets and I couldn't find any decent gun, and couldn't upgrade much either.

In the end, the game would have been better off focusing on the tower defense aspect just as much as the gameplay, the element mechanic is a little cheap, more of a way of making their designing job easier instead of making very unique turrets, having like 5+ AOE turrets and not much else makes it stale.

[Psyringe]

Hmm. Looks to me like you raised valid points, but they are more a personal preference than flaws in the game's design. Letting players "build up and turtle" was (as far as I can tell) never the intended gameplay experience. You're supposed to keep moving, which is actually the thing that makes me enjoy this game (and its predecessor) more than every other tower defense game I ever tried (which probably amounts to a 3-digit number by now).

In regular tower defense games, where the objective is to "build up and turtle", I usually get bored very soon because there's no exploration of unknown territory (like new rooms in Endless Dungeon), just repeating waves of enemies and occasionally new towers to build. That doesn't give me the sense of discovery I'm usually after.

I agree that more variety in turret types would be nice. Currently there aren't many useful synergies, and I'd like having more. I would have liked a meta-progression of different types of damage, defense, and support towers, out of which you could then select a group to be researchable during the run.

But generally it sounds a bit like you were looking more for a traditional tower defense game, which Endless Dungeon was never meant to be. If so, then it's understandable that you seem lukewarm on it. On the other hand, for people like me (who don't usually like tower defense games, but appreciate the mechanic when used in game that also brings other mechanics like action, exploration, and resource management to the table), I think it's a great fit. Different strokes for different folks?

[Squish That Cat]

Great answer.

[Odium]

I think an undeniable fact is that the game is lacking in content, to what degree, idk. If there were more characters, or the characters we had were more fleshed out, more distinct weapons, longer stages of map, because I can confirm this, 100% confident, no one likes progress, even short term progress wiped every 10-30 minutes.

[Odium]

As I played, it made me wanna get on Risk of Rain 2, a game where the "tower defense" aspect is many times more reduced compared to this game. I want long term progress that isn't just mild to moderate upgrades to my weapons and characters. I fear this game won't last very long, content updates won't change the fact that the foundation/base game is flawed in a way that makes player retention difficult. It will always have a cult-following probably, mostly because of the visuals, maybe I'll be wrong but going off of my own experience, I do not expect more people than right now, which is already a small population, will be playing this in the next year.