So do upgrades just do nothing?

[MrDugan]

With so few ranks available, and with enemies being able to take off a quarter of your life in a single hit, I would think that spending the rather large amount of souls required to get a single rank in something like strength would take down the number of hits required to kill enemies.

It doesn't. I have two ranks in strength and it takes the exact same number of hits to kill an enemy in the starter area as it did when I had zero ranks.

The game is already kind of frustrating (not in a good way) in the area I'm in and the fact that ranking up seems to do almost nothing is completely killing my enjoyment of the game.

[Nibbie]

They clearly do, the boosts are just relatively small; I've seen someone say 10% per level, but I'm not sure if that is a guess or fact. Exactly how many hits it reduces kill time by depends on your weapon and what enemy you are hitting, but at two ranks you should definitely be killing some enemies in less, I definitely noticed it, and the difference adds up against tanky enemies like bosses.

To be fair, across the board none of the upgrades make a massive difference, this game is much more reliant on 'getting gud' than brute forcing through levels. Though, its not like those souls are used for anything else, so you aren't losing anything by upgrading.

If I keep seeing this and care enough, I might just go and actually study the upgrades. Make it most of the way through the game without upgrading, recording the number of hits for each weapon against various enemies, then killing them all again at each attack power rank to see exactly how much it matters.

[MrDugan]

Originally posted by Nibbie:

They clearly do

They clearly don't.

Enemy takes 3 hits to kill before upgrades

Get 3 upgrades

Enemy still takes 3 hits to kill

"clearly"

I literally have 3 ranks in strength and the enemies in the first area after the tutorial all still take the exact same amount of hits to kill. Even with 3 ranks in strength and equipping the hammer, the pallet swapped enemies in the jungle still take 3 hits to kill, just like their counterparts everywhere else in the game. This is laughable design.

[admiral1018]

It's not laughable, it's intentional. The game is not designed to let you bypass the difficulty through grinding. You need to develop skills to beat bosses and even some mid-stage enemies.

I agree that the boosts are minor, but they are still there. The most noticeable category is the magic power. The Strength boost doesn't do much to increase the damage (might shave a hit off the enemies), but it will double your weapon power by the time it's maxed out. And the range it adds is actually noticeable at each level, IMO. The weapon speed and movement speed are much subtler, but if you max them out and then immediately start a new game with everything at the base levels, you'll be able to tell.

[V!KiNG]

3 hits to kill still means 3 hits to kill, even if the first 2 hits leave something less than one third of the total HP. Marginal upgrades like this might save you 1 attack out of 10 or 20 for tankier enemies but have no impact on much of anything else. This is a situation where if you can't tell the difference there is no practical difference.

It sounds like you're trying to excuse a bad design choice by marginalizing the expectation that upgrades should feel like they have an impact. Small upgrades make more sense when there are more of them to accumulate.

[admiral1018]

If you try playing through this game without getting any upgrades (as I did and described in a topic below), you will see how much these upgrades actually matter. Normal enemies in this game aren't a big issue, but cutting the number of hits a boss takes in half is huge. And the speed bonus from Haste will totally change if you're able to dodge certain attacks later in the game.

It's not bad design at all. I like that this game is still perfectly beatable without any upgrades (as opposed to a similar game like Tunic, which is built around you needing to constantly upgrade your abilities). The design prevents you from cheesing through the difficulty by grinding, but the upgrades do add up by the end.

[V!KiNG]

I think the problem I and others unhappy with the upgrades have is with the disparity in how the player's health bar works versus how the enemy health bars work. It seems reasonable to me that enemy health works the same way as the player's when starting out, given the developers give us no feedback. The player has 4 discrete health boxes, and can thus take up to 4 hits before dying. An enemy that takes 3 hits to kill would then have 3 discrete health boxes. I think this is a reasonable assumption for any new player to make.

So when a player finds that upgrading attack strength still leaves you with 3 hits to kill an enemy that took 3 hits before the upgrade it means the upgrade added nothing appreciable to your attack. It's a surprise to find that enemy health seems to be tracked in finer resolution than the player's, and it's an unpleasant one to find the developers don't want to share that with the players up front.

While your reasoning is mostly sound, your argument is off base in that it requires a direct side-by-side comparison of only boss fights on separate play-throughs to show the difference. Any typical play-through will only have one of each boss encounter, but it will have dozens of encounters with all the various grunt types that fill the map. The side-by-side comparison most players are doing is between repeat encounters against the same grunts before and after upgrading. Hence the feeling of disappointment when nothing seems to have changed. Comparing the upgrades for boss fights in isolation is inorganic and thus purely academic, even if it's still valid.

Deterring players from cheesing difficulty through grinding can be done by raising upgrade costs and adding tougher enemies that net greater rewards, or by raising the upgrade ceiling so the small upgrades we now receive can eventually add up to something meaningful. And even then, grinding is a time-investment trade-off that some will always be willing to make.

[admiral1018]

The enemy/player health issue is mitigated by player recovery time, i-frames, and relatively slow enemy attack patterns. Enemies do not have i-frames, so you can get off 3 hits in about a second and are only vulnerable to a single hit yourself. ALL attacks in this game are well telegraphed and dodgeable -- to probably the greatest extent I've ever seen, as it's possible to beat this game without ever taking an unfair hit.

The upgrades might not individually take away a single hit with a melee attack, but you're ignoring everything else that they do:

- The attack upgrade also increases your range, allowing you to kill the enemy with less chance of getting hit
- Dexterity upgrade speeds up attack time and increases DPS, thus making enemies easier to kill
- Agility upgrade allows you to move/dodge better from a televised attack, lowering damage likelihood
- Magic damage boosts are huge in this game, so if you don't want to use 3 melee attacks, fewer magical attacks will provide a great substitute

I really don't think you can fully see how well designed the game's combat system is until you do an umbrella run, where you're pretty much forced into using magic as a primary source for damage and melee as a means to replenish MP. In that scenario, the upgrades become much more noticeable than when playing a melee-focused game. And it's not that you need to play the game that way to see it, it's just that it becomes much easier to appreciate.

[MrDugan]

Originally posted by admiral1018:

Normal enemies in this game aren't a big issue, but cutting the number of hits a boss takes in half is huge.

Originally posted by V!KiNG:

While your reasoning is mostly sound, your argument is off base in that it requires a direct side-by-side comparison of only boss fights on separate play-throughs to show the difference. Any typical play-through will only have one of each boss encounter, but it will have dozens of encounters with all the various grunt types that fill the map. The side-by-side comparison most players are doing is between repeat encounters against the same grunts before and after upgrading. Hence the feeling of disappointment when nothing seems to have changed. Comparing the upgrades for boss fights in isolation is inorganic and thus purely academic, even if it's still valid.

From my memory of fighting the gradma in the pot, if me having multiple upgrades to my damage actually mattered in terms of how many hits she took to take down, then there's even more bad game design to speak on, because while I have this tiny handful of hits I can take, this woman took an eternity to take down. I can't remember how many it was anymore, but I started counting how many times I had to hit her because it felt utterly ridiculous how much HP she had and how long the fight was taking despite multiple upgrades and attacking at every opportunity.

The balance just sucks. It doesn't have the balance of the old classics that basically made the sort of puzzle/exploration adventure genre that this leans into, and doesn't have the mechanical fairness of the more polished Souls games. The latter takes actual work to achieve, and most devs don't want to put that work in. This, and so many modern games like it, feel like they made something unbalanced, didn't want to do the work to make it right, and slapped "souls like" on it so that you weren't allowed to complain about it without the masochists showing up to scream "git gud."

Most of these games aren't worth the time and effort required to "git gud" within their individual mechanics. This one is no exception.

[fractalmuse]

Originally posted by V!KiNG:

I think the problem I and others unhappy with the upgrades have is with the disparity in how the player's health bar works versus how the enemy health bars work. It seems reasonable to me that enemy health works the same way as the player's when starting out, given the developers give us no feedback. The player has 4 discrete health boxes, and can thus take up to 4 hits before dying. An enemy that takes 3 hits to kill would then have 3 discrete health boxes. I think this is a reasonable assumption for any new player to make.

I'm not sure if I would call that a reasonable assumption - the playable character having discrete "hearts" while enemies and bosses have non-discrete health bars is a decades-old mechanic at this point. The game developers can't be blamed for a player's lack of experience with their genre.

[V!KiNG]

Many games tend to straddle lines between multiple genres, and this one is no different. There's a lot of old Legend of Zelda, some Diablo or Dungeon Siege (one of my favorites), and a tiny bit of something souls-ish but not quite souls. And there may be more I'm not familiar with or don't remember. So which one is this game's genre?

Citing a lack of experience with a game's genre is in line with the 'git gud' argument, since it's not about what might be wrong with the game and instead says it's all about what's wrong with the player and how they're playing. This game does a poor job of justifying the time involved in acquiring upgrades by delivering a very small number of almost insignificant improvements at a snails pace. That's what the OP is saying.

Thumb through Steam's reviews and you'll see even in the positives there are some criticizing the lack of meaningful upgrades and general lack of overall progression. This in a game with an upgrade system and the appearance of improvement. Not an unreasonable assumption, and not for lack of experience.

[fractalmuse]

I said nothing about the upgrade system itself (which is overbalanced in favour of spells), I'm talking about the implication that the Death's Door devs did something unique or unknowable with giving the playable character discrete health while enemies and bosses have non-discrete health.

Originally posted by V!KiNG:

So which one is this game's genre?

Of all the inspirations you have listed, Death's Door very obviously takes its player HP mechanic in particular from Zelda. And Zelda works the same way as Death's Door does, where *you* have hearts but enemies have various numerical HP amounts. If you are familiar with Zelda, how on earth is that a surprise to you at this point? And even if you aren't, there is a wide range of games across several genres that work the same way. Did e.g. Hollow Knight or The Binding of Isaac need to explain to the player that enemies didn't have masks/hearts the way the playable character did?

In fact, I find myself hard-pressed to mention a single popular action-adventure game where the playable character has hearts and enemies/bosses also have hearts, in no small part because it would make the game practically impossible to balance. Hearts are a "you're allowed to make X mistakes" mechanic, a concept that literally can't apply to non-human enemies or bosses.

[admiral1018]

Health is the original Legend of Zelda is not discrete though, it's just visually represented by hearts. Each heart is stored in RAM as a unit out of 255, and the game's visual display translates this into a full, half-full, or empty heart.

You can see the effects of this once you get the rings. Some attacks don't seem to reduce your hearts at all despite an obvious hit. Some enemy attacks are also fractions of a heart, like Gleeok's floating head, which does 96 damage or 3/8 or a heart. It's also possible through at least a couple of methods to have all hearts displayed as empty and still be alive. This is most commonly seen if you choose the life option in a "money or life" room in the second quest if you only have 3 heart containers max.

[lowkey]

They don't seem to do much of anything, no. It's disappointing since it feels like there is no real character progression. I'm very underwhelmed with this game. It would be much better if it had some puzzles or something, because the mediocre combat, reskinned enemies, and pointless exploration just aren't enough to make the game feel "complete".

[GWOP-W×TCH]

Originally posted by MrDugan:

With so few ranks available, and with enemies being able to take off a quarter of your life in a single hit, I would think that spending the rather large amount of souls required to get a single rank in something like strength would take down the number of hits required to kill enemies.

It doesn't. I have two ranks in strength and it takes the exact same number of hits to kill an enemy in the starter area as it did when I had zero ranks.

The game is already kind of frustrating (not in a good way) in the area I'm in and the fact that ranking up seems to do almost nothing is completely killing my enjoyment of the game.

Nibbie clearly doesn't own the game, but feels like hanging around in the steam forums. They do "something," but that something is a whole lot of nothing.

The dev can't balance or just hates the idea of having a sense of progression; think it's both tbqh. Every stat boost is a tiny decimal where you grind the entire game so your attack goes from 3 hits to 2.8 hits (rounded up to 3 btw).

[N/A]

imagine my predicament where i spend upgrade points on things like Strength but I'm trying to beat the game with the umbrella... T_T