Common Suggestions and Feedback (with Dev Responses)

First off, Every beta has issues. I understand that the team is working as hard as they can on the list of many bugs, and planned features. This however, I would have expected to have been more polished. When I hit monsters, I get next to zero feedback on the hit, and when surrounded by three or more monsters it becomes quite difficult to pick myself out of the mash-up of similar colours. Not knocking the artwork, just saying that on an art level, the monsters do not stand out against my character enough to identify where I am in the mix.

Combat feels clunky and very unfinished. That's a good thing as it means there is nowhere to go but forward. Melee is as I said, little feedback. However, ranged combat seems a bit more ahead, as you see the projectile hit the target. Just doesn't mean it did damage. I'm pretty sure a shambling corpse isn't going to dodge a fireball, but the living creatures are more than capable. If I see the fireball explode, I'm expecting the target to take damage from it. This isn't always the case and I wished this information was delivered to me in an understandable way--The fireball just not exploding. My wand projectile just going through the target, or even in some cases, the target actually maneuvering out of the way.

If I have to ask myself more than three times "Where do I go?" per area, when I'm there for a quest, the information I got for the quest was incomplete, or the area doesn't reflect the flow that I'm expecting. From the sheer size of your perk list, I expect the game to have a flow far slower than Diablo, closer to Dwarf Fortress. However, the areas are rather small to fit that speed, and I'm often trying to fight the rather difficult to read map and my colourblindness to find out where I'm going.

The first area is often used to allow the players to explore your pace and what you need the player to understand, and what they're expected to know, or have had practice with. You only got one of those right in my opinion, Practice. I had some fumbling with the gem-based skill system, as it was completely foreign to me, and could have been delivered to me a bit clearer. Idea springs to mind, is a quick phrase. "I've found a skill gem." That would tell the player, that what they just found was relevant to the skill combat of the game. Because, I can only assume that these characters have lived with this ruleset their entire life.

The potion system took me by surprise. I love the mechanic of it, and it rewards the player for being successful in combat by allowing them to make more mistakes further on. However, this is definitely something that the player needs to know. So they aren't scared about having only two healing "potions" after finding out that the monsters don't drop any healing items. This can lead to some other "leaps of logic" when it comes to other items down the road.

Buying and selling items feels wholly optional. It doesn't seem to hurt me if I don't pick anything up and sell it. Had I not been told by a friend about the trade system, it would have likely gone unnoticed for some time. I am also a bit confused about the worth of items when the NPC's aren't sure what they're worth either. Market seems structured to allow for one group to basically enforce a pricefix simply by having a larger supply of more items.

Speaking of items, I am still more than willing to say that I do not fully understand what you're going for. I do understand that five fragments of a scroll of wisdom become a scroll of wisdom. How or why? I don't know. However, I do not understand why X item is worth Y fragment of other item. The bartering system isn't explained at all, when it could be as easy as "While you're out there, if you find something you don't want, Let me know. We might be able to work something out." or "I can't offer you much for what you find, but I might have a few bits of scrap around, you might find it useful." I also do not feel like the employ of these items is efficiently expressed. I had to read the "You can't do this because it's equipped" dialogue four times. Three times more than would have had to read "You can't do this while it's equipped".

The UI is simple. Simple is good, unless it is failing to provide information relevant to gameplay. The UI never tells me how to use it. I look at it, and on more than one occasion I have been reading tool tips to get to the screen I need to get to, to get relevant information on quest progression, which isn't delivered to a new player clearly if he or she has multiple quests to track. Using the waypoint based quest tracker was not intuitive. I actually had to experiment with it to understand how it worked. That isn't good conveyance. If the player has to TRY to use the UI, it isn't delivering information clearly.

I'm often finding myself in areas stronger than I am, when I am following the plot. When I left the mud flats into the cave, the monsters felt my size. I was level 5, and they gave me some decent challenge. I got to the ledge, and I felt a ramp up in difficulty right away, and I quickly identified it. Ranged attacks chipped out my health, and before I realized it, I was below half. Part game feel here, but if I'm taking hits, there needs to be something that indicates it, other than a very small section of the screen changing as you take damage, as the health and mana are at the far bottom corners, far out of the focus of the play area. But, as these ranged skeletons chipped at my health quickly, I was introduced to a new dynamic immediately in combination with another new dynamic, Enemy auras and totems. These two together were enough to get me killed rather quickly, as my only previous exposure to ranged attacks were the little crustaceans with tails that shot gravel. They didn't do much damage, even in a decent group, so these skeletons with bows, and their far larger number and higher damage, coupled with the regen aura I found first, I didn't stand a chance. I feel this ramp in difficulty could have been spaced out a bit more, as well as the first totem that attacks you. When I got to the false god totem, I wasn't expecting it to output damage, much less as much as it did. I had maybe 75 health at the time, and I didn't last more than a few seconds. Long enough to realize I was already dead. The increased enemy power via the totems, was never something I would have expected, nor was anything to the form delivered to me until it had killed me.

I am finding little reason to keep playing the game. Everything I've learned up to this point, I have had to guess for, had to be told, or killed me at least once. This deters me from playing more, because this sets the tone of the game as "To know what you need to play, you need to have either; One, designed the game. Two, Experiment with what was given to you and hope you understand how you got to where you ended up. Three, Ask in the completly chaotic global channel. Four, Die. The amazing ideas you have for us to play with, the extremely vast perk system, mixing your skills on the fly with gems, and leveling up skills outside of a UI, and the new idea of a barter-based economy are great. They just aren't enough to keep me interested in playing, when playing the game is hard for the wrong reasons.