Abyss mode could be so much more fun than it is.

[NightmarechaMillian]

I get it, I'm posting "complaining about abyss mode thread # 12345", but I genuinely like the gamemode in spite of all of its flaws. It's just too RNG dependent and too punishing to be even close to rewarding.

Allright, gripe #1, rng. Loot is bottom heavy. You get way too many loot drops in the beginning, when there's literally *three* possible articles of clothing that can spawn, and way too few in the later modes, when it's possible to get helmets, greaves, gloves, gambesons, pauldrons, bracers, and so on and so forth. This literally wouldn't be an issue if there was a consistency to the loot drops throughout a run, but there isn't. At the later levels, the game can just *decide* to give you a single box with a helmet you already have.

Wow, thanks, game! That's really nice! How about a breastplate or something to cover my arms so I don't have to worry about the fully armored knights opening my ribcage? No? I get to fight five dudes in platemaille now? Gee, thanks. I guess I'll go back to throwing hands with naked men with shovels and tongs for the next ten minutes.

I get what was being gone for-- make there be less loot further into a run in order to increase the difficulty-- but when you get fifteen pairs of shoes at the beginning of a run, two helmets in the middle, and one helmet at the end, that's bad game design. The ""challenge"" is whether or not the random seed felt generous. It's not fun to lose runs due to circumstances entirely out of your control.

Speaking of circumstances that can't be helped, moving on to gripe #2:

People will spawn behind you. Like, consistently. As in, the bosses are quite literally the only enemies who you're guaranteed to see coming before they might or might not get a free swing (which has a good chance of being an instant kill) on you. I swear, it feels like there's a script running to spawn an enemy if you drop your weapon and you're close to an unopened box.

This isn't fun in normal games where you can regain hit points. This isn't fun in earlygame abyss playthroughs where a naked man runs up and forcefully, yet gently introduces shiv into the anatomical layout of your throat.

This *really* isn't fun when you're twenty minutes into a run and still haven't gotten a breastplate. Ask me how I know.

And, I get that there is a workaround. Before dropping your weapon to open a chest, you can just wait for the enemy to spawn. Here's the thing, though-- that's unfun, as well. You shouldn't have to spin for two minutes just so you *won't* get ganked every time you check a container. Another workaround would be having the enemies spawn, idunno, at the loot locations before you get there?

Okay, so death is a common feature. That's fine. Plenty of games have mechanics where you die a lot and you die easily. But in those games, *death isn't a big deal*.

Here's gripe #3: It takes way too long to get back to where you were. Neither of my two gripes would be as severe if I could just click a button and spawn with a randomly selected weapon at the start of commoner difficulty. Hell, I'd take it if I could spawn with worse equipment than I'd have if I started from the absolute beginning.

But I can't, and so it's back to grinding against weak enemies (who will sometimes just appear silently and slit your throat if you get too impatient a singular time before opening a box) for the next ten to fifteen minutes.

Please, devs. This game has some of the best melee combat I've ever seen. It *wants* to be fun. It *wants* to be rewarding. It *wants*, desperately, to encourage skill and clever gameplay. But it just doesn't.