Anybody else feeling disappointed with Crystal Hunt? (Ending and Boss spoilers)

[BlueJay5]

I've been playing this game on and off over the past couple years, with and without mods, following along with the updates and excited for new features coming to the game, and new lore being released as time went on. I was incredibly hyped for Crystal Hunt to be released, and even played it the same day it was released. After finishing Crystal Hunt, however, I feel pretty underwhelmed.

I started my Crystal Hunt run on Normal mode, as I figured that would be the standard experience that the developers intended for the community. When you die on normal difficulty, you lose half your coins. In a dungeon-crawler-like gamemode like this, this probably wouldn't seem like much of a problem, would it? But as time went on, I ended up really frustrated with this decision. A lot of the time, I didn't get hit by an enemy's blade because i forgot to block or made some kind of tactical mistake, but because I accidentally tapped against it while stabbing/cutting that enemy or stepped on their weapon by accident. When more and more enemies have weapon imbues, this becomes even more frustrating for anybody that doesn't have an especially long melee weapon. However, what I would consider an even worse adverse effect of this is that it disincentives trial and error, and trying to be creative and risky with combat. One of the biggest complaints I see from reviews of this game is that you an easily cheese the combat by waving your weapons around wildly in front of you. While for the most part ranged enemies will counteract this "strategy," it still will often be one of the most effective and least risky methods of fighting enemies, that and jumping around and dive bombing the enemies with a weapon out in front of you. What makes this even worse is that a lot of features in the game require you to learn about them through testing out stuff, like figuring out that you won't be hit by the golem's fists if you hold onto the handlebars on it.

A lot of the long-standing clankiness and jank that I had hoped would be for the most part fixed still remains, and annoying bugs and glitches in the combat system still remain. The climbing system, which suffers from the same clunkiness as a lot of the other features in the game, is pushed forefront in a lot of areas in the game. This can cause a lot of frustration, especially in time sensitive areas like when you have to hit one of those crystals that is just a bit too far away to accurately throw a weapon to so you have to try to precisely hit the rim of the hitbox in order to climb on top of it and hit it.

Magic with the valve index controls is also pretty frustrating and buggy; fireballs are rarely accurate even when I'm just throwing my hand straight out in front of myself and trying to guide it; trying to push NPCs with the gravity spell has wildly different results, whereas when an NPC does it to me it sends me halfway across the map, but when I do it to an NPC it either sends them about 5-10 feet forwards or only a few steps back, even if I charge it up and throw my hand forward with the same amount of force each time.

I still have no idea how the items in the shop generate, as it feels random whether or not whether different items will spawn or if they will stay the same, even when I don't unlock a new level. I also don't really see any reason why you shouldn't be able to bring back items from the Dungeons, it's not like you'd be totally stocked with weapons or would get overpowered weapons too quickly since the enemies scale with you, and it would be neat to be able to pick and choose in the early game when you don't have enough money to buy a ton of weapons from the shop, and even later on in the game if you find a useful weapon on an enemy that you don't own yet. Additionally, in the mid to late game when I really wanted a complete set of the best armor, I just couldn't figure out how to get it to the spawn, as I always only had the helmet, gloves, and legs, but could never find the cuirass.

(Heavy spoiler warning.)

By far what I'm most disappointed about with Crystal Hunt is the story itself and how its portrayed through the game. Pretty much the entire story is centered around these notes found around the game. The entire story. All the lore that was hyped up for months. The lore of this game that has been in development for years, is only told to us through what is effectively an essay about the world sprinkled throughout the game randomly with some occasional filler. There is little to no environmental storytelling whatsoever, aside from some corpses, the ending, the Baron, the notes themselves, and technically the Dalgarian ruin, despite the fact it doesn't really tell us a whole lot about how they lived; the ruins only show us some of the technology they used. In my opinion, this was a HUGE missed opportunity. What made games like Half Life, Half Life: Alyx, Boneworks, Bonelab, and TWD: S&S so good at storytelling is that they showed, not told. I understand why Warp-Frog likely made this decision; all of the games I just mentioned were pretty huge undertakings and were very well funded projects that had a large development team and a lot backing them. As some others have mentioned in regards to the notes, it would have been so much better to at least see some pictures of all these things described in the notes, let alone see some kind of animation and a little bit of voice acting of a few of the things that are written about in the notes. (Important spoilers) Maybe some skirmishes between Eraden and the Wildfolk or The Eye; maybe some members of The Eye corpses in a Wildfolk dungeon, or visa versa to show the conflict they had; what about the corpse of that squadron of outlaws that were supposedly sent to the player's home at some point, but got ambushed by The Eye; what about some small visual hints at the Dalgarian Preservation Society being involved with the Kingdom by having some emblems in an Eraden Dungeon, or that they had been at the tower by showing some corpses or a broken ship near the edge of the island. It's really hard to believe the world is alive if there's no evidence of living.

Overall, I just think there's a lack of quality of life features, fixes, and additions that should've been rolled out with the update. I think it should've remained in the oven for a few more months, maybe even a year.

All that being said, I really don't want to undermine all the hard work and effort the Warpfrog team has undergone in creating this finished product. I understand why they might've cut some corners in order to deliver a product that they were satisfied with, seeing as they did have a lot of great features in Crystal Hunt and the game mode on its surface is very fun to play through, but I still think that its short comings should be pointed out, and I'm curios to see whether or not anybody else holds the same opinion as me about some of the issues with the final release. Some things in particular I did enjoy a lot about this update: the map design is absolutely mouth-dropping, especially in the ruins and at the end; the boss fight was all in all really fun and cinematic; the story was really well-written even if I think it could've been conveyed in a better manner; and the music is phenomenal. I'm still excited to try out all the new spells and weapons in sandbox at my leisure, and see what new mods the community has to offer.

[Ken]

I really enjoyed it. I wish there was a little more of it.....

It's a great addition to what was already one of my favorite games though.

[HoopTheLoop]

tl;dr but you most likely don't understand the origin of this game, many years in the making and starting as something super super simple, graphics redone multiple times. This game is clearly held together with spaghetti code and it was a great decision to just wrap it up in an acceptable way (which I actually think they did very gracefully compared to majority of long running EA games) and start from scratch.

[BlueJay5]

I got this game about two years back and have put a couple hundred hours into it so far, so I am pretty far from being a long term player. When I got it I heard a lot of people touting it as being one of the best VR games and it was about right after the U11 update so the game was really getting fleshed out and the devs were adding tons of features to it. Maybe I expected too much and I thought the game would have been far more fleshed out, but I just see a lot of unfinished details and bugs within the final product and I kind of wish they had fixed them before releasing it. I can still pretty confidently say that I will enjoy my time with the product, but I was really hoping they'd polish up a lot of long-standing issues that were pretty clear to me. I do understand, though, that this was a huge accomplishment for such a small dev team and was a dream project for a lot of people involved.

[BlueJay5]

What do you mean by "start from scratch," though? Do you mean they reworked a lot of features in the 1.0 update or that they are moving on to a new project?

[Macharius Bonin]

Originally posted by BlueJay5:

What do you mean by "start from scratch," though? Do you mean they reworked a lot of features in the 1.0 update or that they are moving on to a new project?

They're moving on. They've said that 1.0 more or less marks the end of development and they're just going to be patching it to make sure nothing breaks and everything works right.

[Maximum James]

If this game had more action movie cinematic stuff with crazy set piece action levels it would be cool, but I am fine with the crystal hunt because this is the best sword fighting game I have ever played.

I don't know about magic because I only used it once or twice to see how it works, but in terms of fighting with all kinds of weapons and grabbing people and shoving them and murdering them for their precious crystals and scrolls, what better game is there?

This is the best fighting game I have ever played. A really visceral beat 'em up. SO if it's not perfect, I am okay with that because they pretty much hit the nail on the head in terms of gameplay and its a great foundation for good VR figthing game mechanics.

[Icarus]

It would have been cool if we saw more of faction interaction. Like for The Eye maybe they are introduced mid way through another faction's dungeon and you find a bunch of corpses. Or near the end have a battle between the factions in the distance while you fight for the last temple.

The biggest thing I wish they had was a training dummy in the shop, so you could try out the weapons before you buy them (because attacking the shop keeper is really buggy)

And I don't think anyone is making an archer build because arrows are limited and the aiming feels a tad wonky.

But I digress. The main reason for wanting these changes is because yes this game is really fun