Guy went on to complain that flies are hard to hit and bandits without combat skills do poorly.Acrux wrote: ↑ December 13th, 2024, 19:39Is there any game you'd say the RTwP is most similar to?rusty_shackleford wrote: ↑ December 13th, 2024, 19:02Also, it seems to have extensive RTwP AI options.
How accurate is this information below about the current state of the game? Considering that in ATOM skills went up to 200, I'm not sure how much of this complaint might just be poor calibration of expectations or weird early game balance. But tools breaking on use doesn't sound good, though.
► Show SpoilerStat/skill gameplay problems
Going in order of when these gameplay problems should become obvious to the player:
1) The skill effects needs to be doubled and increased by 5X in some areas. It makes 0 sense for my hit to be 50% on average in the first 2 starting zones with a weapon that I'm fully invested in with 50 points in.
I started as a bandit, so I'm just going to go over my major skills to start with.
2) Lockpicking at 50 seemed nice on game start, but do to the anti fun mechanics, lockpicks are finite, are destroyed on usage and can only be used on locks of the appropriate level. Meaning the whole skill is useless. You will open around 4 chests out of the 15 or so on the first map and be unable to touch the rest. I think you can save scum to try to save your lockpicks to get as many chests open as you can. But like I stated, that's anti-fun. The player should never be save scumming, this game has ironman mode already in game.
3) Pickpocketing is completely worthless. You can't even steal small change from unaware NPCs at night. You just get discovered. It's suppose to be based on weight and coins weight nothing so my testing just made it look worst.
4) Sneak is a worthless skill. Walking around the world map will give you encounters that you can try to sneak away from. My sneak chance to get away is 12%! My sneak is 42! It's crazy to think just how much I'd have to pump into that skill just for it to be usable, let alone, good. But it wouldn't be worth it! You don't need sneak skill to sneak, if they see you you're caught regardless, there is no "eye" indicator like in Baldur's Gate 3 for example, to give you a chance to get away, it's instant spotted!
5) In the same vein as my lockpicking complaint, crafting has a failure chance the failure can make you lose items. That isn't a problem... the problem is that you can lose your mortar and pestle! Like how hard do you need to fail a craft to break a m&p? At that point just give me a game over screen! Seriously!
You get 1 mortar & pestle at game start and there are 1 in each herbalists shop and they are fairly expensive. So they are finite, you need them to make potions and they can break on the first usage. You can flat out be locked out of making potions very easily. You can prevent this with save scumming. Again, anti-fun, player shouldn't have to resort to save scumming to play the game or maximize their skills.
On that note the game has a fairly complex crafting system involving acquiring several realistically comparative items to craft with, like a ball peen hammer for copper working. After seeing the M&P explode I didn't engage with this system because spending 500 coins to get all of the crafting items just to watch half of them explode on my first craft would have lead to this review being a lot shorter...
So basically every skill I picked was either useless because the bonus from them was too low, the skill requires an item that is destructible and therefore easily lost making the skill inert or was just plain useless in the gameplay context.
Dialog
That brings me to what I called the "10% fun" portions of the game. The dialog. The dialog is actually pretty good. I love that you don't just psychically know the name of every NPC, you have to ask like a normal person! Each character in town besides for the children has a personality and isn't a blank NPC. Obviously, for the sake of spoilers, I will not go into any more detail on the topic.
And that's the praise, the dialog instantly goes down hill if you didn't go all in on personality and get the skills. The game doesn't care if you have a 30 in intimidation, it's like 50+ or bust. In the first zone! You can't even intimidate a lad with his first chin whiskers! They are so focused on stats, that context is completely thrown out of the window.
Getting companions doesn't help because they can't help or effect dialog regardless of their stats, meaning your character is the face and if you don't invest in that, you're gimping yourself. When combined with the previous grievances with the skill system this makes the game play horribly! You invest in a bunch of stats that don't matter, then see a bunch of dialog skill checks that you can't do, while your invested stats are worthless... big ouch.
Combat
This should be the games saving grace, but as I mentioned briefly, Fully investing into your main DPS weapon's skill and stat gives you an average of 50% hit rate on the first 2 maps. That's in part to the enemies being evasive but also do to your hit rate being horrible in general.
Most combat encounters are you watching your character miss, miss, miss while getting your HP depleted. Wouldn't be a big deal if your mortar and pestle didn't explode while grinding flowers...
For a second I thought I just built my character wrong, till I got a second character with 78 martial arts (the same main weapons skill as my own character's but he was a level higher) to my 50 and his hit rate was around 9% higher... so he was almost at 60% hit rate! How fantastic! And there are skills that give you negative hit rates lol yeah, you really need that!
The hit rate needs to doubled across the board just so the player can have fun. That's not even considering that the enemies on the first few maps being evasive is a poor decision to begin with if you're trying to have a positive "new player experience."
Closing thoughts
I get that the game is in early access but none of these problems should be in the game currently. It makes zero sense to have even a single one. All of them are anti-fun and obvious! So obvious that I had to make that "devs never played a CRPG before" comment.
Cause I can't image that the devs played this game in it's current form and had fun compared to any other CRPGs that are floating around steam right now. I got Atom RPG early on, when it was super rough and it was light years better than Swordhaven! So I know they had more fun playing their past games than this one!
If a dev actually played this game before release... They'd miss verse rats, wolves and flies for a few hours and fix that, they'd break their mortar and pestle and fix that, they'd open one chest and never get to use their lockpicking skill again for hours... and fix that! I can't imagine anyone playing and not noticing these obvious problems.
Hell, they'd drink a few healing potions and notice that they only heal 7 HP 100% of the time while having a 6-12 heal various on the tool tip... and fix that!
This game isn't ready for early access.
Not because it doesn't run. No, it runs great! No, because it's not fun and will scare away customers! That's the last thing we need since if these anti-fun mechanics are gone, the game will be looking good.
The problem is that 90% of the game has an anti-fun mechanic covering it's good point! The time spent fixing all of these obvious problems, could be spent making more game! But making more game with all of these problems? Nobody is going to play that! They wont make it that far!
I don't like saying that a game should be pulled from EA, but I also don't want anyone playing this game and thinking the devs can't make a good CRPG. I highly recommend their other titles. This one needs more time in the oven and some testers to point these kinds of obvious problems out. EA can really hurt your game, we aren't beta testers, we're customers. If we all pan your game before 1.0. It's panned at 1.0!
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2108180/ ... 566827666/
This is the whole kingmaker low level cave debacle again. Certain people should not be allowed to play RPGs.
He also missed both companions…
