Issues with current state of Limbus

[rycallibrx]

Not a bait post, there is an attempt made to be genuine here.

Since the game was released like what, yesterday? I've been playing it a fair amount and some issues come to mind.

1. Content

Limbus Company released with 3 story chapters. There are only 3, source : finished all 3. (technically the prologue is a chapter so 4...? 3.5?)

While this isn't the main issue, considering the work put into these chapters since the production value of each of them is reasonably high (Each chapter comes with numerous drawn cut scenes, fully voiced, battle music changes, backgrounds change throughout the chapter, decent amount of enemy sprites with animations, a song at the end of every chapter)

The real issue is there's literally nothing else to do. Right now, there are only two things to spend your energy on.
1. Progressing the story.
2. Mirror Dungeons (which are a problem in of itself, which I'll touch on further)

In most gacha games, there would be additional farming stages or at least random resource drops from story stages. Said resources would then be used to level or max units to their full potential or something like that. There are two things to level in Limbus per unit/identity. Level, and Uptie Tier. EGOs have less than that, and only have an uptie tier.

Level can be increased by completing stages, and using EXP tickets (I don't remember what these are actually called so bear with me). I've noticed that the further you go into the story, the xp you get isnt proportional to the difficulty so you shouldn't be considering running story stages as a viable way to level up your units past like maybe level 15-16. The only feasible way to level units is to use XP tickets.

In which the only way is to complete Mirror Dungeons, which is locked behind completion of chapter 2(or 2-18, not sure). I believe this is actually the main reason for the complaints of the difficulty spike at 2-18, as there is no reasonable way to overlevel units before that, forcing players to rely on brain cells. (It really wasn't that hard...)

Uptie level just requires you to spend thread. (00 : 10 thread for Uptie 2 and 40 for Uptie 3, 000 : 20 and 80). Character shards are converted to thread at a 1-1, so levelling a 000 is not that small of a number. Uptie level 3 is extremely important for a unit/identity's viablility, so you should absolutely have your team's uptie maxed asap (The default sinners, which get uptie 3 for free past a certain point in the story, are much stronger than given credit for. If you dont have enough thread to max your 000 or even 00s, you should just use the default identities).

If you think about it, early access LoR did better than Limbus in that aspect (You weren't limited in the number of dupes of a page from a book, and pages had levels, which you had to burn your dupe pages to level them up).

I may have gotten a little sidetracked talking about uptie levels, but it is important to this tangent. Mirror Dungeons. I dont intend to explain how they are played, because its not really a whole new game or anything. Mirror dungeons cost 3 (enkephalin half globes...? Names are not my strong suit), which translates to 60 enkephalin/stamina/energy.

Upon completing it fully, you are rewarded with 10 gold tickets and 10 silver tickets, as well as the choice of either 5 random shard boxes or 3 character shard boxes (you get less rewards if you dont completely it fully obviously, which i did for testing purposes and not because i suck of course).

For the only source of content in the game, that's not too terrible. However, past your 5 weekly completions of the mirror dungeon, a full completion only awards you 5 gold and 5 silver tickets. No shard boxes. That basically heavily discourages doing anything past your 5 runs for the week.

As for how effective those tickets are, it takes 4-5 gold tickets to raise a unit from 1 to 20, and past that point xp spikes per leveI, it would be nice if someone chimed in on how many resources it takes to raise a unit to 30, I only raised my units to level 20-21 region so i have no idea how expensive it is.

Additionally, Mirror Dungeons are not very diverse. Past this week’s 5 dungeons you have most likely seen every question mark node there is. Enemies are recycled from the story chapters. The Boss of the third floor has a chance to be a chapter story boss or an abnormality not seen elsewhere (rare). There is also no real challenge in the fights apart from the final boss which I tried to auto and got ♥♥♥♥ on for. It’s a 20-30 minute adventure that feels like a warmup for the final boss which is over in 3-4 minutes.

If you managed to read to this point, basically you'll realize that there is nothing to do in this game. The battle pass requires both daily and weekly missions to complete and logging in every day for those 5 missions kind of isn't content.

tl:dr nothing to do, can't even call the game grindy if there's nothing to grind.

2. Gameplay

I'm going to refrain from making sweeping statements about the game play because I still don't quite get how it works so I won't definitively say if its good or not.

Main gripe boils down to how little player agency there is in encounters. In basic combat you have a grand total of 4 options. Use the bottom skill, Use the top skill, use the defense skill, use EGO skill if you have the resources. I understand they had to dumb it down for mobile, but combined with a lack of deck-building options it leads to combat feeling stale after a while.

The clash system is also unnecessarily convoluted and not really well explained so it's hard for me to formulate any sort of opinion on how good a skill is from first glance. Also, why can't debuff descriptions be explained when inspecting a unit? This skill inflicts 1 sinking on hit. Great, what does that do?. The only place I have figured out where to see it during skill selection in battle, the debuff description appears on the top left corner. The game also isn't very difficult, but I think that might just be my own opinion.

Smaller gripes I have off the top of my head are

- Tutorial is extremely lacking (but that's par for the course...)
- The story components from uptie 3 are a little short.
- The UI is a little confusing to navigate at first glance.
- The lack of player names, so the friends list is a string of numbers and you can't really tell who is who.
- There really isn't a need for the support unit to allow you to run 6 because that just makes the game kind of too easy. (OPINION, NOT FACT)
- Farming rate for shards seems a little low considering the need to uptie units for them to be viable
- I would complain about a lack of auto but there's nothing TO auto

I could nitpick the gameplay more but realistically, there really isn't anything else to begin with.

tl:dr gameplay not well explained, a little oversimplified and certain features are a little lacking...?

I didn't really think this through as there are only two bullet points. But there isn't anything else to criticize because outside of the story this is so bare bones it is hard to call it a game at all. The animations, story, visuals and music are all top notch, but you can see all of those from a youtube video.

Unlike LoR which came out in early access, this is a full release of a game that feels like it should have been in early access for the next 2 years. Then again, you did have to pay for LoR, which doesn't really change the point. Spend money if you want to generously DONATE to lobotomy corporation 2. Otherwise go buy a sandwich from HamHamPangPang.

tl:dr free early access game, please fund the next game

this got increasingly aggressive the more I typed. feel free to take this post as your own opinion

edit :
some other issues that people mentioned that should be highlighted

- shard boxes expire at the end of the season and are auto converted to thread (why?)

- zero sources of free lunacy to obtain after completing story (unable to “save” for future banners which is a sort of a staple for gacha players)

- no pity system which is compounded with the really high shard to unit ratio. if you don’t pull a 000 you are not making any progress towards that 400 count. Also segregated between units so you have to pull dupes of that sinner to make progress towards that ego/identity. and there are 12 sinners in the game.

[Hentaika]

Kinda sad, yeah, had 0 expectations but it ended up garbage despite that.

Basically a 'what if Ruina had gacha and required x10 the time to complete'.
At least by time we actually get the whole story.. or IF we ever do.

I have honestly 0 idea why they wanted to make a crappy gacha.. instead ending up a single player game with heavily extended grind for 0 reason.

[Fhoenix]

It's not necessary a bad thing if there isn't much to do. I don't particularly need another game to spend time on. You can do story and go away until there is another update.
But if mirror dungeon are capped at 5 per week. That's 15 shards per week. A little over 150 per season. And shards half after season ends. Meaning you won't be able to farm even one 3 star character per season. You don't get a lot of lunacy to gacha as a free to play. And with no pity in the game there isn't much reason to pay for lunacy either. Overall I am less angry with the game, and more worried about the future of the company.

[Skubo]

Wait, are you really telling me that there are only 3 chapters of story and you already finished it in 1 day?

[Hentaika]

Originally posted by Skubo:

Wait, are you really telling me that there are only 3 chapters of story and you already finished it in 1 day?

Yeah, it's pretty short, if you know what you are doing(using a good combo of default characters instead of 2/3 stars) - it takes around... 15 hours at worst.
Depends a bit on reading speed.

So far you don't need to grind to pass story. But it's very close to becoming required by chapter 3 end. I assume chapter 4-5 is where one will stop rushing story if starting from a fresh save file.

[shoopy]

Originally posted by Hentaika:

Originally posted by Skubo:

Wait, are you really telling me that there are only 3 chapters of story and you already finished it in 1 day?

Yeah, it's pretty short, if you know what you are doing(using a good combo of default characters instead of 2/3 stars) - it takes around... 15 hours at worst.
Depends a bit on reading speed.

So far you don't need to grind to pass story. But it's very close to becoming required by chapter 3 end. I assume chapter 4-5 is where one will stop rushing story if starting from a fresh save file.

Yeah I noticed that it seems easier to get synergy out of the base characters.

[Bishop]

Originally posted by ardiel:

Originally posted by Hentaika:

Yeah, it's pretty short, if you know what you are doing(using a good combo of default characters instead of 2/3 stars) - it takes around... 15 hours at worst.
Depends a bit on reading speed.

So far you don't need to grind to pass story. But it's very close to becoming required by chapter 3 end. I assume chapter 4-5 is where one will stop rushing story if starting from a fresh save file.

Yeah I noticed that it seems easier to get synergy out of the base characters.

3 star characters are currently a mess. Some are stupidly busted like Hong lu (and funnily enough his 2 star identity is also completely broken) while some are just straight bad (Ishmael is already meh and becomes worse after upgrading as she starts targeting her own party).

They really need to start doing something about that. As it is now it feels almost bad to waste money on this game.

[LotusBlade]

Well, lets look a little back:
1. Lobotomy Corporation upon release was in super bad state, ugly grapchics, horrible save system, lags, no tutorial, just one big mess of bad ideas slapped together. After few years it turned into unique "monster garden" game and noone even tryed to copy it Still ram memory leak tho and bugs...

2. Library of Ruina upon release was in mega bad state, no content, horrible stuttering, grind, lack of story, bad tutorial, balance problems left and right. After few years it became incredible game with lots of polish, mechanics, balance, optimisation and story alone is 14 hours long + extra texted mini-journals.

3. Now we have Limbus Company... Capish? You can't really expect it to be fully finished from get-go, not a single game is good upon first release.

[Noblemartel]

Originally posted by Bishop:

Originally posted by ardiel:

Yeah I noticed that it seems easier to get synergy out of the base characters.

3 star characters are currently a mess. Some are stupidly busted like Hong lu (and funnily enough his 2 star identity is also completely broken) while some are just straight bad (Ishmael is already meh and becomes worse after upgrading as she starts targeting her own party).

They really need to start doing something about that. As it is now it feels almost bad to waste money on this game.

I think the main issue with some of the 2 and 3 stars is that the whole set of sinners in the same archetype aren’t out yet so it lacks synergy. It should probably be fixed naturally over time

[Greefer]

Mirror Dungeons are just downright bad. You can full auto all 3 levels and they want you to complete it 5 times a week and it takes about 30 minutes per run. Sucks because I really enjoyed the story content and the difficulty and now it looks like they are toning down the difficulty.

[cANe]

Originally posted by Fhoenix:

It's not necessary a bad thing if there isn't much to do. I don't particularly need another game to spend time on. You can do story and go away until there is another update.
But if mirror dungeon are capped at 5 per week. That's 15 shards per week. A little over 150 per season. And shards half after season ends. Meaning you won't be able to farm even one 3 star character per season. You don't get a lot of lunacy to gacha as a free to play. And with no pity in the game there isn't much reason to pay for lunacy either. Overall I am less angry with the game, and more worried about the future of the company.

Thats bad, really bad. Figured the rewards were on the low side but what really did it in was the lack of a pity mechanic.
The competition is rough, can't be that damn stingy in this day and age

[Mastema]

Originally posted by cANe:

Originally posted by Fhoenix:

It's not necessary a bad thing if there isn't much to do. I don't particularly need another game to spend time on. You can do story and go away until there is another update.
But if mirror dungeon are capped at 5 per week. That's 15 shards per week. A little over 150 per season. And shards half after season ends. Meaning you won't be able to farm even one 3 star character per season. You don't get a lot of lunacy to gacha as a free to play. And with no pity in the game there isn't much reason to pay for lunacy either. Overall I am less angry with the game, and more worried about the future of the company.

Thats bad, really bad. Figured the rewards were on the low side but what really did it in was the lack of a pity mechanic.
The competition is rough, can't be that damn stingy in this day and age

Which will be even HARDER for this game to attract any bigger audience of whales that will keep this game afloat. Personally, i believe they should have rethinked some of the aspects before release, but hopefully with right feedback they'll take priority.

[Arknights]

Oof yeah, if that's all the content that's available, then that's pretty brutal. I figure even casual players are going to clear all of that within a week at most and then bail without any real updates.

What a shame. What the ♥♥♥♥ were they doing during dev.

[Nyamses]

The 5/week limit on Mirror Dungeon rewards are what got me. You get an average of 10 random shards per run, so it's around 50 per week. The 3 star Identities/EGOs from the Shard store cost 400 each, which make them rather difficult to buy with these restrictions.

And since there's currently no way to earn free Lunacy once you're done with the Story, the Shards store was the only way for us to work towards new Identities/EGOs. Kind of a bummer.

[Skubo]

Originally posted by Arknights:

Oof yeah, if that's all the content that's available, then that's pretty brutal. I figure even casual players are going to clear all of that within a week at most and then bail without any real updates.

What a shame. What the ♥♥♥♥ were they doing during dev.

This they major thing i have problem with. I mean, i play this game mostly for the story and combat. Even if combat is watered down, its still good. But to have this amount of content at release is a problem, which can cost them loosing of majority of players.

I believe they have some content completed, but unreleased yet (lets say another 3 chapters), but i expected that they will have like 5x more content on release, which require grind for few months, not days. This is still just modified LoR, so they should be able to make content fast.

I mean if you release season for 3 months with battle pass, you need to have content for at least that period of time.

[76561199278631934]

Originally posted by Skubo:

Originally posted by Arknights:

Oof yeah, if that's all the content that's available, then that's pretty brutal. I figure even casual players are going to clear all of that within a week at most and then bail without any real updates.

What a shame. What the ♥♥♥♥ were they doing during dev.

This they major thing i have problem with. I mean, i play this game mostly for the story and combat. Even if combat is watered down, its still good. But to have this amount of content at release is a problem, which can cost them loosing of majority of players.

I believe they have some content completed, but unreleased yet (lets say another 3 chapters), but i expected that they will have like 5x more content on release, which require grind for few months, not days. This is still just modified LoR, so they should be able to make content fast.

I mean if you release season for 3 months with battle pass, you need to have content for at least that period of time.

There is a problem here. 30 lvl is now the limit, and therefore we are at the peak. Even if they make the following update with a limit of 50 lvl, this will not take as much time to complete as necessary for the production of the chapter.
Remember the library where 1 small chapter went out every 2 weeks, and it was already a problem.
They really should change the game model. Work not on the plot, but on the reasons to entering game every day, if they want a Gachi game... otherwise this is the worst game design for them so far.