Hi guys, here’s my feedback on the first iCBT!
General High Level Info
I received an invite on Friday so I was only able to play for those 3 days. I was trying to get to Sapper but ran out of time, ending at Level 38/12 2nd Circle Archer. I’ve played RO for 4 years so I was already familiar with a lot of the systems in the game. Early on I played with mouse/keyboard but the majority of the time I played with a controller.
Feedback
Overall I had a great time playing, this game looks really good so far and I can’t wait to hop back in and play some more! Here’s some of the pain points I encountered while playing that I wanted to highlight
- Level Curve - While I am generally ok with the amount of grind that the game presented, I felt that it came too early. Around level 30 I really hit a wall while leveling and had to spend hours to gain enough levels to continue with my main quest. I would like to have gotten a bit further into the game, maybe level ~60, before hitting that much of a grind.
- Party Events - I really love this system, it was a really nice change of pace to what otherwise would have just been hours of grinding. One aspect I didn’t like about it though was that I had to constantly check in the party UI to see if one was available. It would be great to have some sort of on screen notification when one becomes available so that I don’t have to constantly be checking back in that UI
- Overcrowding of grinding areas - It was difficult at times to find room in a party to grind because certain areas were popular to do so. I’d like there to be a few more channels to allow more people to grind in the same spot
- Quest Pacing - The pacing for quests felt very off. I was often 5-10 levels below the recommended level for a quest and could still complete it. I also felt that there weren’t enough quests, or at least repeatable quests for me to do. I’d like to either see more repeatable quests or something like party quests where they can take a long time to complete but reward you for doing them (ex. kill 200 of this thing, collect 100 of this thing)
- Boss fights - I enjoyed the boss fights a lot but felt that they were a bit easy. As I said before I could complete quests with bosses like 10 levels above me by myself. I think a general problem for bosses is that there is too much time where they are not really doing anything, or that they have a really long animation for an attack. Speeding up the pace of the fight would help a lot. The bosses spamming traps everywhere felt kind of cheap. Like it didn’t really add anything to the fight; it just made it more annoying to move around. I liked that you telegraph their attacks with red glowing markers at early levels and do not later on. One minor thing on telegraphing, while I prefer that the bosses generally don’t telegraph their move beyond animations, for some of the attacks that hit random areas on the map (IE a boss slamming the ground and rocks falling, or shooting up acid and having it fall everywhere) it felt cheap that they were not telegraphed at all - in a lot of instances I didn’t even know what damaged me and in others I was just annoyed because there was no way to know where they fell.
- Replayability - The bosses are really cool and easily the most fun I had in the game, I would like to be able to fight them repeatedly as an alternate way to level or make money, and maybe even grind for rare items if that was a thing.
- Targeting - I played on both a mouse/keyboard but mainly with a controller and it was very difficult to target the enemy that I wanted. I wish locking on an enemy was either default or something that I could toggle to default because I would very often be attacking one thing while kiting and then suddenly be switched over to another enemy. Furthermore, I might have missed it but is there no way on a controller to lock on to an enemy or toggle enemies? For awhile I would hit ctrl on keyboard and then I just gave up and attacked whatever I was targeting at the time. In a similar fashion, I would often attack enemies while back peddling but sometimes I would lose lock on an enemy and then fire an oblique shot into the abyss which would be very frustrating
- Oblique Shot - I liked using this skill but one frustrating bit about it was that it was not consistent in which enemies it would hit. Often times I would use it thinking that it would hit the 2 enemies that were clumped together but instead it would hit the one I was targeting and another enemy very far away from the original target, pulling a whole heap of enemies my way
- Swift Step - I had rank 10 swift step and felt no difference in my rate of attack. I think only 1% atspd per rank is not enough. My only motivation to keep using it was that the attribute that gives +10% crit per attribute rank is really good
- Multishot Damage Attribute - Multishot was my favorite skill to use and the one I invested the most in for attributes, I got about 28 ranks of the damage attribute, but why so many ranks for it when the others only have like ~3-5?
- Help Menus - I don’t think that the help menus should auto-close after a certain amount of time has passed. I’m a slow reader so often when a help menu would pop for a new mechanic, it would close before I had the time to read it.
- Crafting - Some items I could very easily make and others I wasn’t going to bother with because the item needed to craft them were from mobs several levels below my current level
- Blue mobs - While I was incredibly hyped whenever I found one, I feel that the exp they give is a bit overkill. When everything else I am killing requires me to kill it for hours just to gain a level its very stange to kill one mob and suddenly gain a whole level. I think it’d be better to lower their exp but increase the spawn rate.
That’s all I can think of for now. Thanks for inviting me to the beta I had a great time!