Feedback on the current implementation of co-op

[Kai]

Hey guys,

I and a friend had purchased the 2-pack of Krater, and while the cost is nothing to complain about, I feel the content is - in this regard, I do believe that in the current state of co-op that it shouldn't necessarily be featured as such. Technically, yes, it does have co-op, but none that I could see anyone being invested in.

The main issue is that myself & my friend had completed the tutorial, we brought up the multiplayer UI and we hosted a game. All good, whatever. At first I thought the "easy, normal hard" options were the same as asked in the tutorial (easy = casual, normal, hard = hardcore) but soon realized as we were teleported to a lobby-like area, that he nor I would join either of each other in the actual starting town after the tutorial.

You can see where this is leading, yeah? We only get co-op missions, rather than experiencing the actual campaign in a co-op fashion. I can't understand why this route was taken, as a dungeon-crawler-like experience that we experienced for co-op, it wasn't at all immersive. After getting to the 4th easy level (as normal was too difficult), my friend crashed (I was hosting).

What did this mean? Well, when he came back, his changes in the lobby (buying, selling, applying upgrades) weren't saved as they happened. Saving only occurs during loading screens, apparently. Which couldn't happen as he crashed. This also meant, while I was trying to re-enter the arena to progress to the 5th level or whatnot, it asked me to enter the 1st. So, that's another bug? I couldn't see any other option to choose 4th again. We couldn't be bothered either, as we weren't immersed into the killing-only action.

So co-op doesn't have any value compared to some other co-op or multplayer games playable as a party specifically for killing crap for loot, and even most of those alternatives have immersion. I'm not saying the game isn't immersive for the campaign/single player portion, as I haven't experienced it. I've only seen a bit of it, and there is some personality within the characters and such, even though I dislike reading a lot of dialogue. I can feel as though the campaign experience would be better in comparison to the co-op, but hey, they're 'feels'. Lol.

Okay, so co-op aside - there were some other issues. The GUI in general seems a little confusing, and according to my friend in single player as he spoke to an npc - being given two choices "OK, I'll be on my way / Give me my quest" and "Tell me more before I accept this quest" gave him the same option - he just got the quest rather than any more details on it. This, again, was on the NPCs within the first 5mins after the tutorial. Don't know which, but assume it's a more widespread issue.

There were also some slowdowns in town while moving around, and I have a 6 core AMD processor + a Nvidia 460 GTX + 8gb RAM PC.

Finally, I dislike very much not being able to re-bind the middle mouse camera rotation - as well as not being able to click on the minimap to move, or having a much more sensitive/easier to pan camera (moving cursor to screen edges is really slow, and feels overly smoothed).

PS. If you'd like my friend's specs, I'm willing to grab that for you (in terms of the crash).

Cheers.

tl;dr:
* Co-op is mission-based only, or arena-style, and doesn't feature any campaign or immersion or anything to be invested in
* Buggy / Crashy
* Slowdowns on a fairly high end PC (in regards to the type of game)
* Likely still a good purchase when on sale, for a single player/campaign-only experience (so far as of writing)

[Bongwater Pizza]

This is good feedback, but unfortunatly don't hold up your hopes for anything to be done about it. The game has been buggy from release, and I don't think it'll get much better =/

[Kai]

Hopefully they'll at least implement the networking code in relation to the campaign, where both players view the same dialogue and recieve the same rewards - and better shared loot would be nice, rather than fighting over who gets what.

I can understand the issues plauging development, and in my view I can only assume the major issue is that of the Engine and taming it, and/or the team's flair in the direction they're trying to take this in versus how they can make it immersive and 'fun'. Perhaps a more indie-friendly engine in the future might be worthwhile for them, as I can't imagine most of these issues happening (or not being fixed with quick iteration time) on a particular engine I have in mind right now.