I'm not the original poster but I'll add a few things to what Xarax has mentioned.
- Combat is kind of boring/repetitive. I know there's only so much you can do, but I pretty much click the same 2-3 buttons every fight no matter what I'm fighting.
I don't think combat is too bad. I find that I generally use the same skills while fighting the same enemies but different enemies require different tactics. Some I am very worried about their rage bar. Some don't have armor. Some have ranged attacks. Sometimes I end up fighting more than one at once. All of these things change up my combat tactics. I haven't tried all of the combat skills yet but I can say I change up what I do in each fight.
- Running out of power and not being able to do anything... sucks. I can't remember ever playing another game and fighting a monster and getting to the point where I literally was just standing there unable to do anything.
I will agree with this a bit, but I think I shared the sentiment much more when I first started playing. At first, it felt like the game was punishing me for being unable to anticipate how a fight would go. Often this would stem from a lack of knowledge about the monster I was fighting. You can't tell how much health or armor a monster has or anything about its abilities until you start fighting them. And once you start fighting there is no way to run, so the fight will only end when one of you is dead. This isn't really a very good way to go for a game that is focused on exploration and trying new things.
Now, I now longer feel quite as strongly about the problem. That may be because I have a lot more power after playing for a while., but I think it might have more to do with Dig Deep. The Dig Deep ability is a pretty good help when you have gotten in over your head. It sort of gives you one "get out of poor planning" free card when fighting something new or misjudging a fight. That said you could probably even lengthen the reuse time on it to 5 min or so which would keep it as more of a rare use than a constant crutch.
Another thing that might help is more ways to judge a monster before trying the fight it. Something like giving an idea of the health, armor and abilities on targeting it. This could maybe tie into the Anatomy set of skills.
And one other thing that could help is varying monster speeds. I may be wrong but everything in the game seems to be able to run at the same speed or at least a very similar one. I think having most monsters be slightly slower than the PCs would be good to allow them to try to run if the fight goes downhill. It would add the the exploration aspect of the game because you could risk exploring areas near monsters a little easier. That said, having a few monsters be equal to or faster than the PCs would also be a good addition.
- Armor is dumb. There's another post about it, but armor is just more health. I've always thought that armor should be something that reduces the amount of damage you take.
I think I saw you post something somewhere about wanting to improve armor. I think something along the lines of it being more resistant to certain types of damage such as slashing, blunt etc... would go a long way to it having more purpose.
Another idea is to have it function similar to the armor in Doom II where having armor reduced the amount of health damage you take but didn't completely stop it. So with each attack you lose some health and some armor until either your armor is gone and you take full health damage or your health is gone and you die. You could also stop armor from replenishing automatically. Maybe only armor patch kits, potions and specialty foods replenish it. So it is more of a luxury damage reduction than an extra health bar.
- The targeting box is terrible/awful. It's impossible to select stuff if it's in close proximity to anything else... It's hard to select moving targets.. it almost completely disappears if your camera angle changes.. it's just bad in almost every way. Please just create a static UI spot where your target is.
This I pretty much completely agree with. It is particularly annoying if you have a pet because they tend to love standing near things you have just killed and seem to always take selection priority. Instead of a whole targeting box, having to click on the actual object not including any of the space around it would be a good way to go. The name/health/armor/rage bars could just float above the target without the box.
- This game doesn't really encourage social play. It's basically a bunch of people doing there own thing.
This I agree with too. It might partly be because of the low population right now. Anyone who is online is usually a fairly different skill level or at different points in the quests/goals so grouping up often doesn't make sense. The times I have grouped up though, I have had a lot of fun. I think adding a party system would really help. It would help with chatting, dividing loot, and targeting party members with beneficial skills.
- Tombstones are useless and just pollute the environment. Entering a dungeon and seeing 50 tombstones is kind of annoying to me.
I partially agree here. They do pollute the environment but I don't think they are useless. When I turn a corner in a dungeon and see a sea of tombstones it is enough to make me consider my next move a little more carefully. That said I still find the sight of them a bit annoying. Maybe if they with much smaller it wouldn't be as big a deal. Another aspect I like of them is that I find myself constantly trying to clean mine up so as not to leave any evidence of my failure for others to find, but given the number of tombstones around I suspect that others don't feel the same. Maybe a small bonus to cleaning them up would help. Maybe a small amount of Death XP or something similar.
- There's little to no power gain from raising a skill to 50. Punch 3 does 6 more damage than punch 1. I didn't feel more powerful until I started creating my own gear. Raising a skill level should make you noticeably more powerful.. and it doesn't currently.
I suspect the term power here refers to the general meaning of power not to the power bar itself. I'll do the same in this section.
I see leveling a skill as gaining access to more potential power, not to directly gaining the power. So leveling skills fives more abilities which can be used and more equipment which can be used. I think having power come from your equipment more than your level is a good move because it puts more focus and usefulness toward the crafting skills.
- Raising skills is too easy, although I guess its good that it's not that hard to raise skills, because there is little to no reward for doing so.
I've been assuming that this is because the game is in a testing phase and that when the game is complete it will take longer.
- I personally don't really like the Diablo style loot system.
I haven't personally played Diablo for more than a couple hours so I can't say too much about that, but I don't see any problems with the loot system so far.
- There isn't enough depth to any of the game systems. I like a lot of the ideas, but there's just not enough there.
This I think is also a result of being in pre-alpha. The direction you seem to be taking will fill in a lot more of the depth. It is just a matter of time and lots of work
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To answer your question, out of Xarax's list, I would say the targeting box should be fixed first. I see it as part of the UI that lets the user play the game. You could think of it as the tools you provide the user with to allow them to play the game. If tit is difficult to play the game, people aren't going to. So I would improve the things that stand in the way of that first before adding too much content. You have enough content for people to play the game for a decent amount of time to get their feedback.
In that vein, what I personally think needs some work is inventory management. In a game with a focus on crafting, I find it difficult to easily manage my items. Some points:
- I should be able to move items to any empty slot in my inventory, even if that would leave empty space between them
- Quest items should be identified in some way without mousing over them for their description. Maybe something like a Q similar to the equipped items, or change the color of the inventory slot border.
- It would be nice to be able to select favorite recipes and have the ingredients for the favorited ones be identified in the inventory as well. Maybe an I for ingredient or different border color to the quest items.
- Getting rid of the inventory scroll bar would be nice. Either by allowing the user to resize the inventory window, or by just making it fully sized by default.
While I'm at it: A few other sentiments of mine:
- There doesn't seem to be a minimum time for things to respawn. So I can pick a mushroom and sometimes it will immediately appear again.
- Monster respawns also seem to be a bit fast. If I am fighting through a corridor, I should have enough time to fight an enemy, rest up and move on to the next before the ones behind me start respawning and attacking again.
- Monsters shouldn't be able to respawn right beside you except in certain unique cases (such as being haunted)
- The buttons on the right to open up the various windows should have their hotkey in the upper left corner, similar to the skill bars.
- The left skill bar should have many more slots. I find I use a lot of them just with the mouse when quick timing isn't as important. So they don't all need a shift hotkey. Maybe even filling up the left side of the screen would allow many more abilities to be used without having to open the persona window
- Hitting an attack skill shouldn't automatically attack something unless it is targeted or it is attacking you. I have died a number of times from repeatedly hitting an attack key, and then suddenly running off to attack something that was minding its own business while I was low health from my recent fight.
- Swimming needs some improvement. It is difficult to catch a fish that isn't at the bottom of a lake because I can't really anticipate how my character will react. Sometimes space goes straight up, but sometimes forward as well.
- A better way to loot a pile of monster corpses would be nice. Maybe have a button to open all non-empty corpses in range at once. Right now a pile is impossible to go through because you can't click on the right ones because of the targeting box, and the tab order seems to change (or at least it starts at a different point) whenever you loot a corpse.
I'm sure I have some more thoughts but I can't think of them at the moment and what I've written is probably enough for now. To summarize, it needs a lot of work but it is already a pretty great game. I really like the direction you are headed.
