Review and Suggestions

[syonidv]

Just completed the game on hard difficulty. 78 hours playtime, about 85% of which I'll call "quality playtime" as opposed to hunting for items, running between teleports, trying to figure out where to go, etc., which is more "going through the motions".

First, the good:

• The ability to slow to bullet time without restriction is the defining mechanic of the game, and it's... interesting. Not quite an RTS, but not quite turn-based. On hard difficulty, especially on the later levels, I found myself entering bullet time seconds after each battle started and rarely turning it off except for intervals of 1-2 seconds.
  
  I admit on levels 6-9 I swapped back to normal difficulty on occasion not because I found it impossible to proceed but because I wanted to be able to complete a battle in < 5 minutes without constant bullet time. On hard difficulty, the champions can die so quickly and skills/attacks/movement/etc. need to be managed so persistently that leaving bullet time for even 5-6 seconds is near suicide.
  
  But altogether the system makes for some interesting strategizing. It's unique enough that I can say I've never played another game quite like this. I had to do sophisticated motion planning for the heroes, summon things just to block or channel enemies for a matter of seconds, and spend considerable time cogitating over how to bunch more baddies together faster.
  
  
• Probably the best RPG I've played in the last 25 years when it comes to having many stats with major tradeoffs between them. My experience is that RPGs come in three flavours: i) the kind that give you 20 different stats to play with, but heavily penalize you for favouring a few; ii) the kind that give you 4 stats and ostensibly require that you supercharge the 1 or 2 that naturally benefit the character class while ignoring all others, and iii) the kind that you don't care how many stats you have because each level boosts a stat by 1%, your maxed-out characters have 100 levels, and so you get a "whopping" 100% of customizability to distribute over your whole spectrum of options.
  
  ToT didn't fall into any of these categories, which is its single greatest strength. Basic DPS, health leech, mana leech, recovery speeds, recovery per hit, elemental resistances that actually mattered (!), elemental attack values that actually mattered (!!), movement speed, armor penetration, cleave (this was a stroke of genius), bleeding, status effects, skill boost, skill cooldown, raw attribute buffs, critical damage factors, knockback, thorns, and the list goes on and on. And be damned if all of these couldn't be boosted or sacrificed by huge margins without any penalty to either balanced or imbalanced approaches. Well done.
  
  Aside from the fact that "magic penetration" (a fairly important stat) is an extremely vague description (it's not at obvious how it affects damage calcs), the stat system gets a 10/10 for me.

The bad:

• Too many battles for the exploration component. On hard difficulty, because battle is basically locked in bullet time, it can take a good 10-20 minutes to complete. On levels 5+, it gets tedious to fight 10 minutes, then 2 minutes of exploration, fight 20 minutes, 90 seconds of exploration, fight 20 minutes, ... etc. I would say for hard difficulty, reduce the number of battles on each floor by 20%, and reduce the duration of at least 50% of the battles by 50%. The various types of battle, enemy types, arena types, buffs/debuffs, etc. do help immensely. I will say that much.
  
  
• The way the crafting/enchanting/forging/inventory UI is put together is clumsy. Among other things, enchanting should be as simple as clicking on an item, whether equipped or not, having the right hand panel show the available enchantments and a big "Enchant" button, and reverting back to the stats panel whether enchanting proceeds or is aborted. Likewise for forging. No dragging an item over, forging, dragging the item back (or right-clicking). Just... click on the item to upgrade, whether equipped or not. Right panel turns to forging UI. Select upgrades. Click 'Forge'. Done.
  
  If an item can be both forged and enchanted, the right pane shows the most recently activated UI and user can switch between them by clicking on 'enchant' tab/button/etc. or 'forge' tab/button/etc.
  
  Having to return to the keep in order to craft, forge, enchant, etc. is also an annoyance.
  
  This is not to say that the crafting, forging, and enchantment features aren't good features. They are. I used all of them extensively. They add considerable depth to character customization.
  
  
• The whole "scrolls are sometimes good, sometimes bad" dynamic was lousy. I was very pleased to see you got rid of it in one of the updates. Pickups should always be good. Why? Because if they're random, I have to quickload N times until I get the good one, which I and everyone else will do because we're not in the habit of sabotaging our own game. And if they're not random but bad (such as some of the fountains in the game), then I'm ticked off that the little bit of adventuring I got to do between battles has led me to... a fountain that docks 50 mana. Thanks for nothing. Quickload.
  
  Get rid of the "fountains are sometimes bad" dynamic too and you'll have taken another step towards an RPG masterpiece.

The weird (major spoilers):

• Perhaps I'm missing something, but in the entirety of the game, it's never explained why the tower is upside down and buried underground. It's the iconic mystery of the game and it's just... not explained. Furthermore, while "the tower is upside down" fits nicely with the chaos of the lower-numbered levels, on the higher-numbered levels, everything is clearly oriented as though the tower is right-side up. I'm not sure if this is an oversight, or the inversion was supposed to have happened before all the (formerly upper) levels were constructed, or if it's because of "magic", but I'm quite certain I won't be the only one wondering what on Earth is going on.
  
  Even if after the final battle with Proteus, he can say something to the effect of, "The tower turned upside down during the Great Sacrifice for some reason, and the rebel Magi built all the stuff on the upper (now lower) levels afterward," it's at least something.
  
  
• The whole arc with Magus Sleath was beyond confusing. I think he was supposed to be one of the rebel Magi, he left the tower before the Tower Avatar slaughtered everybody, then came back some 100 years later with a bunch of peasants, slaughtered them all on level 2 for no discernible reason, tried to subjugate the orcs and portray himself as a god, failed, tried a second time with another time/place, failed, then tried a third time with a past society, succeeded, founded "The Purity", returned to the upper levels of the tower in present day for no specified reason, and... I got nothin'.
  
  This is my best guess based on the little tiny scraps of information we get. I know he had something to do with harvesting the Daeva, but have no idea why, and whether it happened while he was with the Magi or with the expedition that was slaughtered by the Daeva (which is another complete mystery; it's impossible to figure out which piles of slaughtered skeletons are part of which expeditions into the tower, and there must be at least 6-7 of them).
  
  The last I saw of him was in the conservatory where he walks away with the Organthe communication components and he's never mentioned again. It's never explained who exactly he is, where he's been, why he's back in the tower, whether he's destroyed when it's overrun at the end of the game, why he interacted with the party, what was in the book he wanted (that I didn't give him), why he wanted the components for the listening device, what becomes of the Purity, what becomes of the "future orcs" I saved, why the Tower Avatar tolerated his presence, who the sarcophagus on Level 5 is for, or any one of a million other questions associated with him.
  
  
• As a general rule, if you're going to put out a story that includes magic, multiple alien races, time travel, multiple time periods, parallel universes, a tower that defies the normal laws of time and space, and the same character appearing in multiple functions in multiple expeditions into said tower, the in-game lore should fill a tome. A tome. Not little scraps of paper.

Random improvements, compliments, criticisms, suggestions:

• I very much like that the entire party is always present during exploration. I never had to worry about whether I had the "right" members present to trigger events, interesting conversation, etc.
  
• The system of panels with collapsible/expandable components needs work. Everything from small annoyances such as "Practice Grounds" always initially being expanded when "Challenges" is opened, to big issues such as the "Quests" section of the journal being almost unusable with collapse/expand toggles causing nonsensical jumps in scrolling and changes to the toggle state of unrelated items.
  
• Some stats (most notably cooldown change) are beneficial if negative in ToT. Generally speaking, though, negative stat changes have the extremely strong connotation of always being bad. Hence the player may well think that a 7% cooldown change means the cooldown will occur 7% faster, and that -7% will occur 7% slower, etc. The best way I can think of to eliminate the ambiguity, which is ubiquitous in RPGs, is to show beneficial stats in green, neutral stats in black, and detrimental stats in red. When comparing stats of two items side-by-side, the more favourable stat in each pair is shown in bold.
  
• Having many enemies with extremely high across-the-board elemental resistances was a nice touch. Most RPGs have, say, 1 in 20 enemies with 50% resistance of type A, 1 in 20 with 50% resistance type B, etc. such that attacking with a particular element will only severely penalize the player or benefit the player in maybe 1 in 10 battles, otherwise known as: why even bother? But such wasn't the case with ToT. Hence my props for this.
  
• The damage stats computed after a battle don't accurately capture skill damage in many cases. The most obvious example I found was using Maeve to serially headshot 70% of the enemies in a battle but be credited with almost no damage in the final report.
  
• In the challenge to fight "three crystal behemoths", there are only two crystal behemoths. Not that I'm complaining.
  
• It would be nice if level completion progress was indicated somewhere that didn't require exiting the level (descending a level or returning to town). Having the level progress indicated on the map would be ideal.
  
• Having the Tower Avatar become a playable character after the events of Floor 10 would be a wonderful surprise. But... I realize that ship has probably sailed.
  
• Having six champions fight in the final battle instead of one was a very nice touch.
  
• I don't know what to make of the "alignment" system. It seemed superfluous and made certain events more nerve-wracking than they ought to be because I was constantly thinking: oh crap, how do I answer this to get some sort of net positive? But it is what it is.
  
• The single most frustrating glitch in combat is that when a summoned creature finally appears (which in bullet time is approx 2-5 seconds after the skill is cast), it cancels any active skill being targeted. This may seem like a small grievance, but in a typical playthrough on hard it can happen a phenomenal number of times and is supremely annoying. Especially when the player fails to notice the glitch in the heat of battle and a character not only fails to cast but runs over to the cast point because the click is interpreted as a movement command. A simple fix, big improvement.
  
• Kaela's cooldown times are at least 30% too high on her Tesla ray and clockwork (shot enhancement), and 20% too high on her mech and Titan summon.
  
• Kaela should have some sort of healing skill. Turn the "void grenade", which is damn near useless, into a "healing grenade" with extremely low cooldown, change its colour to green, and you've instantly turned her from the weakest champion into "the champion that lets you fight without Aeric in your party for once in your life".
  
• Having a glowing effect on chests would be very nice. I missed one chest on several levels, even after sweeps and pixel hunts. They can be hard to distinguish from background clutter, and since they're needed for 100% completion, it's a bigger-than-normal deal if they're missed.
  
• Having a glowing effect on all interactive objects would be even nicer. On items critical to progressing in the game, it's a necessity. I had to visit this Steam forum to proceed on the Factory level since some of the levers and panels are completely indistinguishable from the background. Nobody wants to do a pixel hunt. If the glowing effect ruins the ambience, have it show up only when the Alt key is down, etc.
  
• For some unknown reason, Maeve's headshot skill does not reset its cooldown in some cases, despite connecting with its target (and having the perk enabled). The only factor I've been able to identify is that it seems to happen more often when a target is moving away from Maeve.

Overall, an enjoyable RPG experience. I shall keep an eye out for other games you may release.

Hopefully this critique will be of some use to you or other players interested in the game.

[Panterich]

Hey, great post. Not sure why magic penetration was not obvious for you. I do agree descriptions are not as good as they could have been, but this mechanic is simple. If enemy has positive effective resistance, reduce it by magic penetration, still keeping it positive.

Do agree about the fontains for the exact same reasons but i suggest another approach: restrict some fontains for specific champions and add some hints to it, like color/animation and description texts. For example blue-whiteish water with chill effect that raises stat for Boron but decreases it for others. And i do mean its intended for some backtracking.

Having level progress indication on the map is a great idea, i am missing that too.

Can`t fully agree about Kaelas cooldowns. Firstly, i think that lightning rod and electric cage are consistent with rapid fire. Secondly, have you tried capping cooldown reduction (thats -50%) ? However i do agree about Titan, it should be either longer to indicate its entirely single use or a little shorter (imo even 10% is fine and mana cost can be higher).
And i don`t see her as weakest champion, and i don`t think void grenade as useless and i don`t think (yet) there is any need for healing grenade. But i do think that grenade could fly 2 times faster, seeing how many other skills in this game are almost instant. Oh, Kane jumps 2 times faster.. And Kaelas 'skill cast snimation' is kind of slow. If that was not intended, it may have a need to look at.
Btw, whos phohibiting you from removing that horned dude from your party, lol.

[syonidv]

With Kaela I found that I could never get her total damage levels anywhere near Maeve's or Whisper's (the other ranged damage-dealers) in a battle, and I was constantly sitting there waiting for her skills to recharge, no matter the loadout. And this was with a 42% skill cooldown reduction. Her "void implosion" that attracted and confined enemies was useful. I found her lightning rod ineffective because many enemies had such high air resistance. I loved the titan, but realistically you could only summon him once during a battle. I found her mechs got shredded in the blink of an eye, but the summon was surprisingly useful because all the little helper mechs were useful for distracting and blocking enemies.

I almost constantly had to have Aeric in my party because of his healing totem. On hard difficulty, I don't know how anybody can stand the game without that. I had my melee/tank characters up at 90-105 armor, with health regeration at 20-30 health per second, and I simply could not keep them hacking away at a boss, etc. for more than a second (real time; 10 seconds bullet time) unless they had a healing totem pumping 90 health per second into them. Some of the Level 10 baddies would take off 100 damage a shot after armor and there'd be 6 of them spamming you with unavoidable attacks.

I get the impression that on "epic" difficulty, the player has to completely re-outfit the party for every battle and then spend half an hour playing tag with the enemies, hiding behind walls, etc. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to get the battles over in a reasonable amount of time. But to do this, I had to keep my melee characters in melee range for more than a few seconds at a time, which in turn required healing totem. Kane's ability helped, and Rakhem's mace throw, but healing totem was indispensable.

I bet if I broke down my battles minute by minute, I spent a good twentieth of the game, fists clenched, watching my melee characters' health bars shrink like ice on a barbecue, finger over the 'Q' key to spawn a totem, thinking, "Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, ...". :P

It wouldn't have to be Kaela, but at least one other character should have a group heal ability, and my vote is her. Maybe not quite as powerful as the healing totem, because it wasn't mobile, but something impressive. Something that could effectively provide 200 HP/sec amortized (i.e. average, over the long term) at the highest level.

I like your idea about having the fountains "tuned" to certain champions. That would make it a puzzle, which is fine.

The one thing I didn't like about the update with the "greater scrolls" is that if you choose not to take the tradeoff, the scroll just sits there. Then if you see it in future, you have to remember: oh yeah, this was one I didn't want. However, it was also problematic when the scroll always disappeared (earlier game version), hence my preference would be three buttons at the bottom: Accept (use the scroll), Leave (don't use it but leave it there), and Destroy (would eliminate the scroll but net the player a few crystals).

Finally: Thanks for the description of "magic penetration". I would have personally called it "resistance penetration" to be consistent with enemy resistances, but so be it. Many RPGs have it so that mousing over a stat pops up a tooltip indicating both: i) where the various contributions to the stat are coming from, and ii) how the stat affects damage calcs, e.g. "Magic penetration is subtracted from all enemy elemental resistances down to a minimum of 0%." It's a "want to have", not a "need to have", but the devs might want to consider it.

[Panterich]

I don`t see any means for Maeve to do more damage than Kaela on epic. While i may be wrong, and it probably doesn`t matter to you now, but an increase in difficulty (and that will be an increase in hp and resistances) alters meaning of damage somewhat. See, thats the point, you say you can`t tank bosses without Aeric, while Kaela can weaken them by 40% (and btw it stacks with other weakening effects) that means in situation with 100 armor and 200 incoming damage you will receive 5 times less damage, and that amount can easily be regenerated or drained. While its not that simple in reality, i hope you got my point.

Imo lightning rod is all about stuns (left variation). Stick it near 5 mages and see what happens.
If mechs are shredded anyway, they can deal good damage (and its void!) with right variation. And left variation can block slow-single-hit-melee enemy for a very long time.
Yes, thats 're-outfit the party for every battle' so yi guess its kind of not your style. Btw Kane has group healing, and not one, but two! And i suppose that 'life drain' enchants on lower difficulties can take care of healing by themselves, no?

[Mushusu]

I've played the game on epic, and am at the end of floor 10 so while I haven't beaten it yet I have to agree with Panterich and defend my main girl Kaela. I put her on my team the moment I got her and she never left my party and it's been a good ride. I admit she can't take any damage and can be 1 shot on epic and doesn't have much in terms of burst damage but her control and potential combos more than make up for that.

I felt that her void grenade was her strongest skill or at least tied for strongest. I build her with speed+mastery so I had shorter cooldowns, only like 20% at first but in the end the max 50%. My team couldn't take any hits on epic since I didn't have enough armor, not even close to what you say you had on hard, so I had no tank, healing didn't matter much since non-kane characters mostly got 1 shotted. My playstyle focused on keeping enemies from doing anything so I didn't need a tank nor healer (well Kane had his party heal skill). My party was for the most part when I had the characters, Kane, Rakhem, Boron and Kaela and that worked for 90%+ of the fights from floor 6 to end of 10.

So what i did for most of the fights was group enemies up into single or at the most 2 points with kanes' stone wall and kaelas' gravity pull and then threw void grenade with daze/extra void damage talent and that's 6s daze, when it's about to end I used Rakhems fireball and that's another 6s daze and when that was about to end I used kanes blades of justice with daze talent which is 3-8s more daze depending on talent tier. When that is about to end Kaela was ready with her void grenade again and I practically had the enemies in daze for 100% uptime doing nothing while I beat them, granted slowly but still safely and consistently. Just 20-30% cooldown reduction was enough to cycle that combo and if you had Kaela with 50% reduction you practically could cycle gravity pull (talented for 14s duration with 15s cooldown) and electric cage (same cooldows) to lockdown enemies indefinedly. Rapid fire with speed+mastery build did slow but steady void damage and made her have very high attack speed and when combined with just 1 ring enchanted with tier 1 mana siphon that you get from floor 3 (if I remember corectly) - which regenerates you 1 mana for each weapon hit and her mana was practically infinite. Now if all that wasn't enough I had rakhems blinding flash for 10s blind and Borons stunning shout talented for more stun time and attack speed buff for the party, which was 10s stun time - if all that control wasn't enough I had kanes immortaliy or stone wall to give me some time to get skills off cooldown and ready for use.

Bosses I usually just put in cage with the weakness talent and shot them from max range while controlling possible normal enemies with the same way as above and Kaelas void damage, if nothing else, killed the boss eventually. Some bosses use leap and the like but with 50% cooldown reduction you can permalock bosses in the cage while staying close enough to avoid the leap/jump and just keep shooting, sure it takes time but it's still safe. Some bosses used ranged attacks within the cage and you couldn't dodge them by moving and when that happened I talented kanes provoke with weakness to stack that with the cage weakness. If that wasn't enough and Kaela got 1 shotted then i readjusted my party, hence I said my party worked only 90%+ of the time, there's always some exceptions. I do have to say I used the floor 8 fountain sidequest to give Kaela +15 attribute points and put them all to speed to get speed to 50 but it was worth the sacrificed stats.

Now I get that my way works only with this kind of party setup and is not for everyone but my point was that while Kaela may not seem that good by herself compared to other characters, her synergy with others is really strong and makes some powerful plays no matter the difficulty level. She's just more party oriented character unlike rakhem or whisper who always work well no matter the team they are in.

Agreed on the fountain idea, seems fun and something new for my next run (hopefully we'll get 1 higher difficulty level at some point). I'm also in favor of level progress showing on the map.

[Event Horizon]

That is an excellent thread. Thanks a lot for such deep and extensive suggestions. When we will be working on next project, it will certainly come handy.

@syonidv: "The single most frustrating glitch in combat is that when a summoned creature finally appears (which in bullet time is approx 2-5 seconds after the skill is cast), it cancels any active skill being targeted." --- I am not sure I understand this point. Do you mean that when you queue two skills and you cast summon first, then instead of executing second skill, the champion just runs to the location of the cast?

I am really glad that you have so strong opinions about champions - in that case Kaela. It was our aim, to create seven distinct classes where teamplay and finding good synergies between them is more important than the power of a single champion.

[Panterich]

I think he meant this: right after summoning if you select another skill but don`t confirm, it auto cancels (cursor returns into move mode instead of cast mode) and if you were just about to confirm skill use, your champion will move instead of using skill. I`m not playing with slow time so i`m not sure, but thats how i understand it.

[Toren_S [Also Friendly]]

She's no Maeve (Really, nobody seems to come close to Maeve for me) but Kaela's been in my party almost since she showed up, her tank Titan and suicide mechas really relieve the pressure off the party and let me run Kane, Maeve, Aeric, Kaela. I'm running hard, although I do pause on space instead of slow time.

If you look closely at the screenshots you see I have 13.6 mana regen on Kaela and like -40% cooldown time. Also I like void grenade as it is, so I guess I'm weird! AoE daze on a shortish cooldown plus 500ish void damage isn't awful.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1397492904
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1397492920

[syonidv]

@EventHorizon: Panterich's description is accurate. I should have been more precise. As a specific example:

- enter bullet time
- use Aeric to summon a water lord and click to confirm
- immediately click another skill (e.g. healing totem)
- if the water lord appears before you click to confirm the healing totem, the game will summarily abort the skill; meaning you have to click the healing totem skill button again

And as I say, the main problem is that it complicates "queueing" the casting of many skills in bullet time. The player is clicking cast, confirm, cast, confirm, cast... in rapid succession for many different skills, often on different characters, and if a summon happens to appear in between a cast and a confirm, the click that should be a "confirm" is instead treated by the game as a regular click (move here, attack here, etc.). Which often means having to click again to stop the character from charging into certain doom, then again to cast the skill, then a third time to confirm.

This is presuming the player even realizes the error. I had several occasions where I was so busy queueing up skills that I didn't notice, and sure enough my champions happily charged right to their deaths because the spurious order to move.

I should mention one more minor bug: after enchanting an item and returning to the inventory panel by clicking on the inventory button at the bottom, I noticed the character stats don't immediately reflect the enchantment. As soon as an equipped item is picked up and dropped back into place, however, the stats will update to their proper values. Likewise if the inventory is closed and opened back up. I'm not sure if this affects all stats. Where I noticed it was when applying health/mana regeneration enhancements, and these not being automatically reflected in the relevant stats.

@Mushusu: It sounds like you made much better use of Kaela (and the stun effect) than I did. I didn't even realize her cage effect worked on bosses--and I never tried. The reason being that none of the other status-inducing skills I tried on bosses, like Maeve's bear trap, or Boron's shout, or Kane's charge, etc. ever had any effect. I just assumed they were immune to all status effects except slow.

@Panterich: If ever I play through the game again, I'll give the health leeching skills greater precedence. My goal through the latter half of the game was to maximize the speed with which I could complete the battles, and I tuned nearly every customization and enchantment I could get away with to dealing heavy offensive damage of the right "type".

The other thing I made a point of doing was deliberately fighting with different skills, champions, and combinations of champions. Just to change things up. The only consistent factor was having Aeric in the party most times since none of my characters had leeching ability and, whether ranged or not, they simply took too much damage for their HP regeneration and skills like Kane's group heal to keep them alive during aggressive play.

Also, Aeric was the only character able to resurrect others from KO, which isn't necessary but is extrodinarily useful.