Hi there! I’m not really an MMO player and so far I’ve only gotten my main character up to level 69 but i feel like sharing my thoughts on the game so far, specifically from a art design and controls standpoint. Now the only game I’ve really played a lot of that feels similar to this game (for me!) is League of Legends so I’ll be using it for some comparisons though I’m aware that Riot is a vastly larger company with more resources. I’ll just get right into it.
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Visuals
I love the general aesthetic of the game from the bright colours which make even a dank crypt lively to the cute anime style characters and the GORGEOUS portrait art that makes talking to the major NPCs that I’ve not talked to yet a treat. That said I do have my gripes so far.
My most visually appealing weapons so far were obtained at the very beginning of the game. I started as a wizard and my current character is armed with the geometry staff. It is a fine weapon but it pales in aesthetics to even the rod you start the game with! It lacks the beautiful pinkish gem and visual flare of the most basic rods in the game and that seems to be the trend with a majority of the level 40-75 rods and staves I’ve picked up which have fairly boring designs and are all brown sticks. The starting rod looks like a weapon that a level 200 adventurer would use while the staves closer to that actual level are bland.
The animation in the game really bothers me in a few instances. When an enemy starts its attack animation and you are close enough to it and standing still while auto attacking for example (but not close enough to actually be hit) the enemy seems to be able to teleport on top of you with the beginning of its attack animation spooling up. This doesn’t really make the game more challenging even since the attack animations in this game are pretty slow (more on that later) and only makes the animation look amateur and choppy. Player skills also lack a lot of visual flare in my opinion from both the animation itself and visual effects lacking “oomf”. I think IMC could do very well to observe the skill animations especially of league of legends where nearly every skill is beautiful and the visual effects are superb and stand out a lot, feeding information to the player (feedback is key!!!).
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The UI
I’m going to blunt here. The tooltips for skills are near worthless and don’t give players nearly enough information, simply the bare minimum. Skills almost universally say nothing about their additional effects aside from damage and perhaps a primary status condition. There is next to no information telling you if the skill hits twice (not talking about overheat, though skills lack that information as well until you have them on your skill bar IIRC), how often damage ticks for, their interactions with other skills/actions (for example you can melee attack pyromancer’s fireball if you’re using a staff to launch it forward). Some skills lack information even on their primary status effect/crowd control (wizard’s energy bolt has a knockback effect for example that is not described anywhere in the game).
Another thing that bothers me is the whole concept of AOE defense and attack ratios. I understand how it works but the whole system could be done away with if IMC just worded some the skills properly (“this attack hits a maximum of three targets in a small area upon impact” for example). Though it is my opinion that “true AOEs” like earthquake, fireball and flame ground should hit all targets in their radius (the ground you’re on is launched up but you’re okay because maths!).
Also there’s Engrish descriptions in general that are just plain weird. Dear god IMC if you need someone to write your tooltips for you just give me a “super account” and hitbox data or whatever with all classes and circles for a week and I’ll do it for free!
Finally there are the skill indicators (the circles that show you where your skills are going on the ground). These are simply terrible for the fact that they don’t accurately show you the range or area of effect of your skills. Furthermore the boundaries of skills with an AOE on them should be properly shown (IIRC League of Legends has thin red lines that show the absolute boundary of the AOE). The game completely lack indicators for “skill shots” (spells that travel in a straight line ) nor is there a “range circle” that indicates the range of targeted skills.
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Mouse controls
Another problem is that this game appears to have NO PATHFINDING at all for mouse control users. Not a huge deal but it would be very convenient. An option to move to a point on your minimap by clicking it would also be a fantastic addition.
Now going from keyboard control to mouse control in this game is pretty similar to switching to smartcast in league of legends… except clunky as hell. If your mouse cursor is hovering over ground and that ground is not in range of the skill that you’re trying to use you’d expect your character to close the distance then use that spell. Not in this game. Your character will jitter forward for a second and then stand there. Might be something to consider.
Sometimes you will try to use a skill and your character will give you the audio feedback of the spell (character says the skill’s name) and nothing will happen. sometimes my controls just lock up and nothing seems to happen when I press my buttons (sometimes even moving with the mouse locks up) for a moment and it’s not because I’m taking damage from enemies or getting CC’d.
Overall I think the mouse controls need A LOT of work.
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Audio
When I picked this game up I wasn’t expecting the trance soundtracks at all and I really like them! That said most of the non-trance soundtracks don’t stand out to me much. More trance!
The sounds skills make could use some work. When I cast flame ground I’d rather hear some nice crackling than the generic poof sounds it makes and even then only when enemies walk on it.
Not too much to say about this category. It’s pretty good.
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Final comments
Well that’s about it for now. I didn’t mention things like lack of cosmetic variety, buggy quests, commanderloadfail, limited dungeon entries, marketplace issues, easy bosses or class balance because I feel that these have been pretty well covered by others already. I fully acknowledge that other issues are far more important than the visuals and audio but these are the things that interest me and something i feel most people may have ignored. I think IMC could really benefit from observing and learning from league of legends.
As it stands I’ve been enjoying the game a lot and I can see myself playing for a good long while. Sorry for any bad grammar, it’s late!
P.S. I wasn’t kidding about writing those skill tooltips for you IMC, I think it’d be fun!