meaningful systems and fun game mechanics
having put quite a few hours into phase 3, one of the biggest concerns i have about the game is who is the core audience supposed to be?, we hear all the time '' this game may not be for you '' but i am curious who this game is actually for?
The game as a base has a lot of potential and there has been quite a lot of changes since the start of phase 1, ( i don't know if i would say improvements) But definitely changes,
the direction of the game seems to be geared towards every single system being so grindy and tedious it basically removes any sort of casual player.
steven once stated that systems make games fun, and i 100% agree with him but basically every system in the game at the moment even in an alpha state is so far off being fun and engaging that people are leaving phase 3 in herds
The pve - once stated to have meaningful bosses that would change their mechanics based on how fast you killed them to become more difficult has been reduced to killing ravens and goblins for hours with nothing to show for it
Loot has been totally removed ( un sure if this is for testing or intentional) but i would guess it is more the latter this far into alpha 2, there is no way in my mind that removing loot in an MMO is a good thing, Loot and crafting can co-exist
Pvp is just dead, ignoring the absolutely Ludacris times it takes to even gear up your character at lvl 25, there are no fun meaningful pvp loops in the game to really play, i personally think that there should be some sort of instanced opt in pvp, i know not everyone agrees with this but the open world pvp is just grief city, that is just run by zergs. Unless its organized scrims its basically just whoever has the most numbers wins
the world still feels extremely dull removing any real reason to want to explore, i know that the game can look nice if you have a 5090 and run everything on cinematic, but even if it looks pretty the world is flat, dull, boring, and with tree's/rocks native to the biome they are in, it sort of ruins immersion as each zone has basically 1-2 types of trees, it feels like 90% of the world and mobs have been made and placed with AI, not with love.
i will also add that with every single material in the world gatherable it makes the world look insanely bland and basically all the biomes feel like a copy paste of the last, this feeling feels 10 fold when you add the insane travel times it takes to travers between biomes. it not only makes the world feel terrible, as nothing fantasy has really been added just boring trees from earth, but it also absolutely destroys performance, as someone pointed out in another post, unless you have a 900$ graphics card, don't bother playing this game, it really feels like anything designed on UE5 feels like an AI universe with no unique art style, no love shown for any parts of the world, even mob placement is blatantly obviously done by ai, i would also guess that the recipes and material costs are all done by AI as no dev would think 1100 copper for a sword is a good idea, wich begs the question .. if the entire world is being made/designed by ai, what is the team doing
Re watching the latest livestreams it really feels like the intention of the end game is running crates, Fishing has been turned into crates, The new corruption event is running crates, Building a node is running crates, gold making is running crates and even as per steven in his copium clinic interview, the religion system will be .. you guessed it, running crates. As a base mechanic its probably one of the most boring systems i have ever interacted with so its concerning that this seems to be the vision of the game, the new corruption event is going to flop because it is lawless, even though i would love to have lawless zones that may yield better drops, materials and exp, i don't think lawless events are a good idea in a game that cant find a way to tackle the zerg meta
and then there is the issues of player feedback being basically ignored at this point, we have had rollback after rollback, but for some reason it was allowed that the first players to hit lvl 20 could have an uncontested farm of gear for the first week, gearing their entire guild with blue armor/weapons, just to then have the system totally removed when 95% of the player base actually caught up leaving an extremely unfair advantage for basically the rest of the phase
so i really do ask and with good intentions i want this game to succeed, we all do, we all want a good mmo we can sink 100s of hours into, but who is this game for? the pvp crowd are not happy with the direction, the pve crowd are not happy with the direction, there is no meaningful lore or quests or exploration, the systems are so grindy and un fun that only someone in their 70s or unemployed would have time to actually interact with them, after 2 alphas and 3 phases of alpha 2 we should be seeing some sort of direction by now
