I am aware that the current stage of the game is beta and we are testing for bugs. That doesn’t mean the game is free from criticism, by all means, it’s good if we critize in order to improve it.
There were recent changes (now reverted) that made most of the community shocked. Obviously, without a warning, it’s going to shock people. I think it’s something a lot of people have a problem with. IMC is a good company, you are decently vocal about game changes and attentive to what your playerbase has to say, but I think it could be better. It’s good, but has room to improve.
Also keep in mind that I’m not that much of a high level player, so what I have to say might not count for the higher level players out there.
As for now, we all know that the friend list is not working and I think that is one of the biggest issues we have here. I know everyone is asking IMC to address it and I imagine it can be pressuring for them to be reading it over and over. But not being able to add people to your friends list is a huge let down. It’s one of the things affecting the social aspect of the game. We can only hope that IMC will address it as soon as they can, which I’m sure they are.
-Questing
I’m the kind of person that relies on the game’s aspect of forcing to socialize in order to make friends, maybe not everyone will agree with me here. Of course questing is important. I love questing! It means gathering around with other people and getting to know each other. But the way IMC is handling questing is quite not right in my point of view. Sure, it’s super awesome that you can quest and defeat bosses together, that your quest progress is affected by other players’ actions.
But the sheer amount of… meaningless exp quests is just too boring. There is no feeling of accomplishment, there is no challenge. You can interact with the NPC and just skip the whole dialog. Just follow the colorful marker on your map and slay x amount of monsters, collect x amount of items, slay x boss (which is not even that hard) and you’re done. There is no actual reason to party up other than be able to defeat an easy boss slightly faster. There shouldn’t be so many uninteresting quests like these, they are things you can do solo. I’m all for solo content, but this is not even challenging for a solo player, it almost feels like a chore. I know you’re trying to attract the more “easy mode” playerbase but the quest system is not very captivating. You are gating your player’s enjoyment by placing quests that require not so much effort at all to complete and gating a group of friend’s enjoyment because not all of them can stay caught up with so many quests. The progression line can get really uneven here for everyone.
It’s very unmotivating to see that your exploration is dependent on how far you get into the main scenario quest so early in the game. It would be better to not link exploration to the main scenario quest, making it so it would enable players to have the freedom to explore the initial areas without the need of questing right away. Tenet Chapel and other dungeons/areas could have a mini-quest not related to the main quest in order to have access to it.
Main scenario should be something fun and rewarding, not something forced upon you because you have no other choice of progression. It has to give you a feeling of accomplishment because you decided to take on it.
I suggest making side-quests more interesting, adding text and choices to some of them that impact the quest in some way. Be it in how the NPC reacts to your choice or an alignment system (lawful, neutral, chaotic) so there is not so much of a linear feeling to it, then the text would be fun to read for possible different outcomes. Because why be able to have your own charater in a game world if you can’t even give your character a personality?
Make quest boss type monsters a little bit tougher with better AI. Make it so the quest’s difficulty and reward is scaled up according to how many players are present in the party. It would encourage more people to party and socialize.
-Boss and monster system
So far from what I’ve seen, bosses tend to glitch out a lot. Either they stop moving for too long or just stop acting altogether. They also teleport around the arena sometimes. I suppose boss’ scripts are not working properly. I’ve defeated some bosses that just stood there doing nothing. I also want to point out that traps in mid-fight are a bit of a lazy way to increase difficulty in boss fights. There are better ways to handle increasing difficulty of a fight without the need of adding elements that are completely unrelated to the boss attacks itself. I imagine it could be too hard, seeing that boss abilities seem random. For example, adding special attacks to the bosses that stay on the arena for a period of time (poison fog, lava) are a nice way to keep immersion and at the same time including difficulty to it.
As for what I’ve seen for regular monsters, they don’t seem menacing to me at all (for now). If anything, they don’t even care if you hit them. You can hit and run immediately and they won’t even care. Monsters could use a better AI. Their reaction is just too slow. Their attacks are fine, is just how slow they are to react when you hit them. It makes it so it’s really hard to group them up.
Maybe it’s intentional, but I wouldn’t know. It would be interesting to have scaled up drops/exp according to how many people are present in the party. It’s a nice way to encourage partying with other people.
Another thing, please do not put an exp or drop penalty on higher level monsters. The whole thing about taking out on a higher level monster than you is for the rewards. Why can’t a player be rewarded for fighting something that’s considered challenging? If anything, you’re keeping skilled players from playing the game at their best.
-Item and Market
Equipment right now breaks too fast. The amount of durability is fine, but the current rate that gear breaks is just too much. You might want to consider looking into that, specially for the sake of classes that choose to tank.
The market really needs a taxing system as a mean of silver sink. Another nice thing to include is extra sub-category for searching such as equipment type. For example, if I want to search for plate armor, I can’t really do that because of the sheer amount of leather and cloth equipment on the list. You could include an option to search specifically for plate, leather or cloth. Obviously, this could be applied to weapons and other things as well.
-Gamepad Controls
I know it’s not perfect, but I want to point out what could be improved about it.
Hotkeys
The way hotkeys for abilities are handled is ALMOST perfect. The way you have it set up is just kind of awkward to do. It also uses 2 buttons that could be used for something else. A lot of it seem to be inspired on how FFXIV does gamepad control, but it needs to be polished a lot.
As we all know, the D-pad is not mapped to anything but movement, which is a waste of potential 4 extra keys to bind things to since we can pretty much have movement with the left analog stick.
L2 and R2 are the only buttons needed for 1 hotkey bar. If the D-pad was assigned to it, it would be L2+A/B/X/Y/D-pad for the left side of the bar and R2+A/B/X/Y/D-pad for the right side of the bar. That leaves L1 and R1 free for other important combinations.
With a setting like this, there’s more comfort for a gamepad user like me. This way the user can keep their fingers on L2/R2 at all times without much concern. I often struggle with the current combination of buttons for hotkeys because of how weird it is displayed on screen, L1 and R1 should not be the buttons on the outside of the bar, but rather on the inside of it. It wouldn’t be a problem if the bars were usable with L2 and R2 only.
Rest hotkey bar and UI mode
Right now the only way to access the rest hotkey bar is through sitting motion. Which overall is not a big issue. There is only so much use for it though.
We really need to be able to bind the menu icons to the rest hotkey bar, making it so gamepad users are not so dependent on the UI mode. Whenever toggling a menu window, the cursor should move to the most recent opened window. For example, if I toggle inventory, the cursor would immediately be placed on the first slot of your inventory. UI mode should not be something used so often, mostly just for clicking on other players to interact for trading, add to friend’s list, etc…
I think the best thing I could suggest is looking at how FFXIV did with the gamepad. I don’t think there is any other online game that has made such smooth keyset combination. Everything is fluid, there is 0 need to ever switch to UI mode, all functions are perfectly done with the gamepad (menus, skill binding, targetting).
I hope IMC doesn’t look at this suggestion as some sort of insult, rather, I want them to have a good gamepad support since their game has a lot of potential.
There are barely any online games that have support for gamepad, and those are the only kind of games I can play nowadays since I have a terrible tendinitis that gets worse whenever I play a click-intensive game. So please IMC, make gamepad a more comfortable experience to those who can’t really use keyboard/mouse comfortably like me.
Thank you for reading.