New Player Experience

[Choggo]

Played through 8 rounds (IE Deaths) and wanted to give my impressions for those on the fence trying to decide if they want to buy the game. Personally, I feel the new player experience is just horrible right now.

1. Difficulty - As someone who finished Elden Ring, this game is a lot harder for a new player starting out. I will go into more depth why in the points detail below.

2. Low Health and no healing: You start with 75 health and lowbie mobs deal 10-20 damage, so you die very quickly in this game. You also start with no way to heal yourself. Enemies occasionally drop health orbs that give 5 health, and some of the big elite bosses can heal 25.
Fix - Start players with 1 medkit and increase the drop rate of health from enemies.

3. Ranged enemies: Starting out you have no ranged weapons/attacks and there are a lot of ranged enemies including obnoxious flying ones that you need to jump to hit.
Fix - Players should have a basic ranged weapon that cannot be destroyed.

4. Losing Gear on Death - This might be controversial as I understand this is a rogue lite, but right now the loot system does not feel good and it's seems too punishing as a new player.
Fix - Make dropping gear on death a chance, lower at first and increase as you progress through difficulties.

5. Slow Return to combat: After you die, there is a very long wait to revive back at base. Starting a game is pretty quick, so not sure why exiting takes 3 times as long. Seems intentional and it's incredibly annoying. It's also annoying that you can't go right back into the open world, you have to return to camp, then run back to the portal and then click to start the match.
Fix: Remove this arbitrary delay and revive players asap, also give an option to go straight back into the open world.

6. Cost to generate new world: You get 4 deaths per "world" and then you need to generate a new one which costs currency. It's not expensive and won't be an issue for experienced players. But as a new player who dies a lot, it's a decent chunk,I'm kind of curious what happens if you don't have enough to make a new one.
Fix: This is just a stupid money sink and needs to be removed, the death mechanics are punishing enough so this doesn't need to exist.

5. No Tutorial: other than a couple of text giving you basic instructions, the game currently has no tutorial and combined with games difficulty and harsh death penalties, it really kills the new player experience.
Fix: Add a tutorial obviously.

[Ark]

Great write up. I personally refunded the game, as I felt there was to many negative aspects to overlook. The difficulty for one just felt overly punishing, resulting in a very bland core gameplay loop for me. I really hope the game does well and hopefully it improves in the future :)

[Retsubty]

I like difficult though.

Are you sure? I feel like meta progression elements will trivialize things as they usually do in these roguelite games. I'd rather the game be on the safe side and be super difficult upfront so you don't end up super trivializing it later on, just making it more manage-able.

Also they may have balanced the game more around multiplayer.

You're supposed to leave to the extraction zone before you die also. Instead of keep taking risks. If you go to an extraction zone you will keep the stuff you got.

Leave when you don't have healing items anymore.

[Theri]

I agree with your point wholly as a more casual gamer I'm really struggling to make any meaningful progression and i felt as though the game would lock me out if i was too bad it took a quarter of the money I eared when i died the fourth time which made me pretty sad.

[Mc_Dyno]

Finally someone who sees the issue and isn't complaining about the SBI bull.

Yeah tbh if this game just added more health power ups, the core gameplay loop could stay the same. I actually really like the game when I am not being constantly and unfairly ganged up on by fifteen different enemies. But I may be biased I am a diehard heartmachine fan.

[deathknightruin]

yea the no healing is def an issue. My main problem is it recommends controller, but you can only invert the view camera, not the gun aiming camera. No sensitivity settings for mouse either with keyboard controls kinda clunky. don't try to extract with no health, in for a world of defeat lol

[Elzheiz]

Honestly, the biggest point of difficulty for me are the hitboxes and framerate over anything else. Sometimes you get projectiles that get blocked by terrain, sometimes not.
Other times you dash attack into an enemy but you somehow find yourself hitting air because your sword when through the enemy by a pixel.
Auto-lock doesn't seem to work too well, especially for the guns.

It doesn't feel difficult because I'm playing terribly, it feels difficult because the game doesn't work properly.

[Choggo]

Oh to add another point.
6. Special attacks: At least the starter slash attack is slow, can't be canceled and it doesn't have iframes, I've had a few times were I started the attack only to be completely destroyed by an enemy and there was nothing I could do.
Fix: either give the character invincibility during these attacks and allow the player to cancel.

[Choggo]

Originally posted by Tygo:

I like difficult though.

Are you sure? I feel like meta progression elements will trivialize things as they usually do in these roguelite games. I'd rather the game be on the safe side and be super difficult upfront so you don't end up super trivializing it later on, just making it more manage-able.

Also they may have balanced the game more around multiplayer.

You're supposed to leave to the extraction zone before you die also. Instead of keep taking risks. If you go to an extraction zone you will keep the stuff you got.

Leave when you don't have healing items anymore.

Not sure why you got clown for this, it's a decent response. The balance is just off right now. New Player experience needs to be softened, but make sure the end game stays challenging.
As for extracting, I tried but you don't just get to leave, you have to activate the portal and survive against waves of enemies before extracting. It gives you health thankfully, but is still a challenge.
For me personally, it was just the lack of any healing that pushed the difficulty over the edge, not having even a single heal starting out seems overly punishing.

[Cha0ticInsanity]

I will say they made a few bad decisions in the dev room.

1. Not having at least one heal when starting out.

2. The placement of those red domes that hurt you after a bit. They should never be on important areas, only side areas.

3. The lighting and art direction in this game is more a hindrance than nice to look at. Especially when there are no graphical options to toy with to make it looks a little better or tone down the bloom or whatever makes everything so washed out.

[Kitten Shady]

Point 6 is exactly what I was afraid of. And paying for the creation of a new world sounds like schizophrenia. Good at least not with real money! :D

[Paladin]

Agree on all counts

[RedGuy Johnson]

lmao dude this is literally the hardest ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game I've ever played I cannot get past a group of 5+ enemies to save my life

[Amos]

Hello, hello!

Honestly great feedback and more or less what I also concluded after a bit of an hour of play.

I like what's currently on offer, a roguelite HLD is honestly cooler than I first imagined it would be, BUT yeah the early game experience is awful and makes it hard to experience the rest of the game, at least solo.

[Hungry]

Great feedback, totally agree with you.

[Ophiolith]

Quality feedback, very similar feelings on my end.