Same thing all over again, calling anyone who disagrees with some discussion point a fanatic. Pathetic.
The animation and lag comment is interesting. I have a couple thousand hours of logged game time into GD but I just jumped back into D3 to give the necro a try and I’m pretty frustrated with how laggy it feels in response to casting animation versus input. On occasion I literally have to force myself to pause for a split second in the middle of spamming something else in order to get a skeletal mage up because the game refuses to keep up with the fact that I pressed Bone Spikes twice, then Skeletal Mage and then Bone Spike after. More often then not I’ll realize after about four seconds that the Mage never went up because the game never registered the input and just kept merrily running with Bone Spikes.
As I said once, the game now can be bit overwhelming with newcomers, so much contents and so many damage types to grasp. It took me hundreds of hours just to understand the game mechanics.
I agree with this statement, “increasing cost to respeccing is very odd”. When you are a starter, you need to respec to a lot to understand the game, not to mention that when you collect better items digressing from your current setup, you have to respec to other damages and skills so that you can step up difficulties.
And when you begin to know the game, you don’t need to respec often and you can even use grimcal to theocraft the build before delving into the game. So, why the escalating cost, just to dishearten the newcomers?
I remember my 1st char, I unlearned nearly 500 skill points. And it’s frustrating to run around 15min to find items to sell, just to unlearn 1 skill point :eek:
It sounds more like you couldn’t make your mind about what you wanted to play. 500 skillpoints sounds like bullshit. Did you try like 10 different builds on a full leveled character or what? Unless you maxed both masteries and every fucking skill and its subskill like a madman you don’t need that amount of respeccing. It seems like you are making shit up.
With my very first character I barely used the Spirit Guide to unlearn some skills that I didn’t feel like I wanted after trying them out. And even then I found the respeccing to be extremely cheap because the price barely rised. The moment I wanted to play a completely different style of combat I just created another char. And seriously, even the most poorly thought out build can finish the game in normal difficulty. My very first char was a half-assed 2h ranged/pet hybrid pyromancer and beat Loghorrean just fine. The spirit guide was more a tool for curiosity about skills for me than a mandatory mechanic to fix a broken build.
The only overwhelming thing to newcomers is the devotion system. In my first time I spent like half an hour staring in the Devotion Window like an idiot trying to figure out what would be a good constellation to begin with. A search function would be really nice to find the stat you are looking for.
I’ll just reply point by point with my own interpretations of the game:
[Difficult bosses should guarantee a certain level of item drop. Dying over and over and then being rewarded with useless greens is actually just crappy design. That should never happen.]
MI Greens are some of the nicest items in the game. Loot grinding is a central design concept of ARPGs.
[The game needs a better entry tunnel into the game systems. It's honestly overwhelming (frustratingly so) for a newcomer. I'm willing to bet player retention is a little low, and this is why.]
If one were a newcomer to gaming in general then perhaps I would agree, but even here I would note that the developer has provided substantial documentation targeted at many potential levels of understanding.
Players experienced with RPGs or ARPGs will be familiar with the ideas in this game. And even though the implementation of a specific idea might be nuanced, or even fundamentally different, familiarity with the language of these genres alone is enough for me to contest your conclusion.
I lack the necessary data to discuss player retention.
[Animation locking! The input response time in Grim Dawn is already significantly lower than the Diablo games. Adding animation locking (i.e. no animation cancelling) on top of lag can result in a really poor, unfair experience. The number of times I have died from a combination of lag/animation locking is absurd. I understand why this system was chosen. It much easier to implement and tune, and animate for. But animation cancelling in what is essentially an action game is not a luxury, it is a necessity. This is the number one issue with the game (not a bad thing to say, and shows the game's quality overall).]
I have two versions of this game: GoG, Steam. In my experience, I failed to notice input lag until I crossed over to the Steam version. It was also some time before I learned to identify the various effects in the game, this included stun, interupt abilities.
[Respeccing cost is counterintuitive to the game and its systems. The whole point - the necessity - of the design is to experiment with builds. Creating an increasing cost to respeccing is very odd. I actually wonder why you did it, and think it hasn't been thought through. You are devaluing your own systems. Yes, we can get around it with rare potions and as a last resort, trainer programs. But why make that necessary? Just cap the cost at a much more reasonable level. Nothing else really makes sense.]
My experience of re-specifying a character, for my first two lvl 100 characters, was that I had ample resources. I had potions by the third.
Move the GD rocks blocking everything.
The indoor dungeon design reminds me of a first time DM who only had one sheet of graph paper.
Why is it mobs can get around me to surround on a bridge , but I can’t get through them. Bridges are the #1 hazard in this game.
Pets don’t understand walls.
I can bring hellfire from the heavens , yet I can’t jump over a 4’ fence.
A wayward fart on the wind can block my bullets and arrows.
Not nearly enough resistances, need to add a few dozen more.
These few nitpicks aside though, (and they are mostly for fun, I understand why they are as they are) I enjoy the game.
I do agree that respec cost is a bit much. Otherwise, most the things you point out I either don’t experience, or Don’t care about, or are a Learn the game issue.
Don’t get me wrong, when I first started playing the new expansion, even as a seasoned GD player, I was frustrated with the poison farts and poison snot globs and all that junk, as well as the stun and charge mechanics. But I learned to adapt and work past them. things that I thought were unfair and huge hurdles forced me to go back to my characters and rethink their gear and stats. Now I shrug off the stuns, and dance around the poison snot.
Plus there may be mechanics that you simply aren’t aware of that are masking themselves as things like “lag”. As an example, I’ll bet half the time what you think is lag is actually that you were stunned and didn’t realize it. There is an actual stun mechanic in the game, and many mobs use it…you need stun reduction on your gear. took me forever to figure out why my character would just stand there and not cast the spell that I was spamming, until I realized that I was stunned. Got my stun reduction up past the low teens, and suddenly gameplay smoothed out a ton.
now that my play into your concept of the Learning curve for beginners, which can be steep. But I feel that Grim Dawn was created with the idea of older approaches to gaming in mind. one of these is a more complex system that takes involvement from the player to learn and grow. There are plenty of resources available, created and maintained by players, that have the data you need. And there are plenty of new player guides and tips in the forums to get new players going, and direct their attention to the important data sites for resources.
In other words, things aren’t spoonfed like they are in D3. Character design is also more complex with more options, unlike D3 which funnels you into 4 or 5 skills, each one with a few options max, and a single gearset. This means more involvement from the players to get their design right.
There is a sizeable group of players that like this approach to gaming, and they tend to play and enjoy games like Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, etc. It’s not for everyone, I get that. And I’m OK with that too. I play D3 for about 2 weeks every time a new season comes out. It gets really boring after that. I don’t like how they spoonfeed everything to you, how character builds are fleshed out the day after a new update, and every Class had essentially 1 ot 2 builds max that you can play at endgame.
But here…endgame is endless character designs, builds, and trying new and different gear out. Loot grind is real, with crazy ideas and builds coming out all the time as players find new sets or new combinations of special green MI’s, or even random greens with special abilities. You won’t EVER find that in D3.
I’ve been playing Grim dawn for years, with a few small breaks, and will continue to do so. So I personally think they are doing something right. It just may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and your average D3 player may have a hard time adapting. But I’m OK with that. I don’t want or need a D3 clone. D3 is definitely not the standard in ARPG’s IMO. I think the real ARPG’s that carry the torch are games like GD and PoE. And I hope they keep up what they are doing.
Whether to allow animation cancelling is a design choice. If there is (post attack/cast) animation cancelling, then you are pretty much forced to do it if you want to optimise your gameplay. If there is no animation cancelling, then you are forced to work around it and incorporate the full animation time of any action into your gameplay.
Anyway (correct me if I am wrong), I don’t think in GD attack/cast times are tied to animation frames. Since there are explicit attack speed and cast speed stats in the game, those are the attributes that govern the time of each attack/cast.
The respec cost is quite reasonable for moderate changes in the build. It allows for some experimentation and so far I haven’t had a problem in it despite shuffling a few points here and there and even abandoning entire skills after trying them out a little. A high respec cost (for drastic changes) is necessary to make a build have some kind of permanence to it. Otherwise, your specially customised character class combination will feel no different from any other build of the same class combination since you will then be able to overhaul your entire build for some trivial cost anytime.