Devs, what in the world are you doing?

[Key]

I just looked at the update and you made the entire game grindier across the board, reducing the exp and increasing the cost of upgrading, in a game that was already fairly grindy and repetitive to begin with. The mid-game was already tedious to get through before the update.

And you do this at a time in which you need to gain players trust, showing them that you won't intentionally make the game grindier to encourage payments in the future?

You already have a bunch of people in this forum being turned away by the F2P model, you already have a line in your roadmap mentioning you will have P2W items in your shop and you've already lost 60% of the playerbase. There's 35 players in game the time of typing this. 35 players in a game that's supposed to be balanced around multiplayer.

Are you actively trying to make this game fail? Because that's exactly how I would go about it. The fact that the game has a solid core and cool animations cannot carry the entire game when everything else is impossibly tedious.

You want to address some actual issues?

• There's currently little to no variety in builds, weapon skills are fine, but other than that, all bonuses are passive, meaning they don't mechanically change anything in how the player approaches any situation.
  
  
• It's impossible to find players for matchmaking, and the game isn't balanced around solo play
  
  
• No local coop in a game based and advertised on multiplayer.
  
  
• The hyper-armor enemies get later on is incredibly unfun and completely breaks the flow of combat in a combat system based around combos, having multiple enemies, animation lock and hyper armor just doesn't go together, either go for a beat-em-up or a souls-like.
  
  
• A lot of enemies can hit the player while they're above or below them, but player attacks don't do the same.
  
  
• Speaking of, the dodge sucks and the sentinel's parry is near-useless when fighting multiple enemies, the Shadowstriker is just better than every other class once you get to the mid-game just because their attacks are faster and they can actually move around.
  
  
• Pyroclast and Rockbreaker don't have enough meaningful differentiation, they look different, but they fit the same role.
  
  
• The upgrade system is completely uninteresting and has no actual purpose outside of obviously being designed around microtransactions. Players aren't dumb, this stuff has been around for 20 years now.
  
  
• From the second boss mission onwards, levels revolve around throwing a lot of enemies at the player, taking away from the combat and putting all emphasys on gear.

[Gannibal Kujoe]

All good points and all intended. Look at the Curios page which character has all the stand out cosmetics. Shadowstriker.

Builds? What Builds. You are picking up heal on hit, a status effect, and that's it. This was and is the game because grinding is supposed to make you want to spend. The combo variety and combat variety is the definition of rinse and repeat.

If there was no such thing as live service this developer would have to focus on game variety in biomes and stages as well as combat. But that isn't what MS wants from Stoic. I would love to see the points you brought up addressed. I just don't think they will be because the purpose of this game is to exist online F2P. Inconvenience and archaic design can be marketed as game play.

[Key]

Originally posted by MilesColtrane:

All good points and all intended. Look at the Curios page which character has all the stand out cosmetics. Shadowstriker.

Builds? What Builds. You are picking up heal on hit, a status effect, and that's it. This was and is the game because grinding is supposed to make you want to spend. The combo variety and combat variety is the definition of rinse and repeat.

If there was no such thing as live service this developer would have to focus on game variety in biomes and stages as well as combat. But that isn't what MS wants from Stoic. I would love to see the points you brought up addressed. I just don't think they will be because the purpose of this game is to exist online F2P. Inconvenience and archaic design can be marketed as game play.

I honestly can't wait for the live service model to die, it seems like players are wisening up as of late by just letting games with this type of monetization fade into obscurity, but it's still far from over.

What really bothers me is that the core gameplay is really, really nice.

Attack animations are well designed and animated, hits feel like they have weight behind them, and there's some depth to comboing attacks into weapon skills and umbras to extend the chain and going back into another combo. The basics of a good game are there, it's everything around it that feels as it's actively ruining the experience to funnel people into microtransactions once the game releases.

As you've said, it's by design, but the way you cannot know this until you reach the first enemies with hyper-armor and you immediately realize that from there onwards the combo system may as well not exists, and gear is all that will matter legitimately pisses me off.

[King Donco of Punhcistania]

They barely read the steam forums and want you to use their echo chamber discord. I don't want join discord. The steam forums is supposed to be the place where they should be active.

I like the game but it has no variety. It has no fun challenging content. Stop giving small meaningless updates. Give us real content. Give us a real reason to group up. Give us the ability to pair up. Like what are you guys doing?

[Alveriel]

F2p games don’t care about content, balance, game design. Any game where design is affected by a revenue generation is always worse. Some people just play games like addicts and thats what these business models prey on. Publishers have realized with mobile that a game doesnt need to be good to succeed you just need to trick people into thinking it is with psychological manipulation and dopamine injections and that value is equal to time played which theoretically means a f2p game would have unlimited value which is false. Every form of service type business model except subscription(without benefits but access) is a scam meant to trick people. They make you progress really fast and throw a bunch of rewards and mysterious mechanics as well as probably daily or weekly rewards to addict you, then you get to endgame or any competitive content and you hit a wall but at that point you are too far in. Should all be illegal.