Joat wrote:
Thank you for your post, I wanted to make an account to voice my concerns about this mod and felt alone with it, nice to see someone else with a similiar opinion.
Buckle up, though, I chew the scenary alot.
Now, as for my take on the demo, listen, when it comes to visuals, sound, music, all of the eye and ear candy... It's all perfect, it has great flavour to it and I honestly find myself wanting to play the mod solely for feeling that funky snessy/Golden Sunny vibe from it.
Now... I have by now seen you warning us about the combat being hard, I have now seen the king's advisor [who I may have forgotten the name of, sorry big lips!] warning me about not having a way to get potions and such until later, I have seen the warnings... And I still think the difficulty is a bit unfair from a new player's perspective.
I won't claim I'm the best Doom player by any stretch, let alone with melee, but it feels like the game is not designed with some of the playable characters' short ranged melee weapons in mind.
Now, I don't know the name of the enemies beyond the thieves being goblins, so I'll try to be informative with what I have.
- The Goblins are hideously fast and difficult to hit, I... THINK the only way to hit em reliably is with your ranged weapons [which, unless you picked the gunslinger or sorcerer, you have super limited ammo for] during the split second that they land after hopping or some spells [the warrior's freezing spell]. This is NOT good before you reach Treetop Village, because until then, your AP is limited to whatever potions you have at the time and that's it. And your spells are not always a reliable way to solve this, especially since, with how early the game is, how important gold is and how utterly painful the upcoming dungeon is, you can't afford to lose too many potions or AP on just the road to the dungeon, as short as it is, and as easy as it is to avoid enemies.
Yes, you can warn us to put our gold in the bank or that we should just book it to the first dungeon with no stops but that's not a solution, that's avoiding the problem, I'm not saying put EVERYTHING in front of the player at the beginning, I'm saying give the player something to help him ease into the game, plus, what kind of an adventurer are we that a simple goblin thief will just wipe the floor with us due to godly teleportation abilities that we cannot have?
-The... Ropers I call them, weird tentacle things that go invisible... These things are absurd, look, by the time you face these you are probably out of AP cause you wasted it all trying to hit the thieves on your way to the first dungeon in hopes of there being any way to refill it. Either that or just starting out and you have the mispleasure of meeting these things, they're ridiculous, not only do they change their movement pace when they're invisible, but they hurt you the second you're close enough, which means that fighting them melee will just make you lose health, not necessarily alot, but this is another resource you can't afford to lose too much of, as health potions are insanely expensive and you can't just keep running back to town or a tent whenever you get a scabby boo boo.
In hindsight, I'm not sure if you can get more ham from the castle to help with healing, but the point of my complaint here is that these Ropers are WAY too difficult to kill for what they are, between turning invisible, speeding up, you needing to avoid contacting them and... Well ,they also have a pretty substantial health pool... It's just not a cool enemy.
So yeah, you got two enemies that you are forced to fight with your spells, which are usually expensive to cast, or your alchemy weapons, which you have NO way to get more ammo for until you reach Treetop Village, and that's my main concern here, you are warned that you have to savor what you have until Treetop Village... So why is the road there long and full of frustration? Challenge and frustration are not the same thing, you can make the ropers challenging by having them use their invisibility to get close and block your shots from hitting the ghosts while having a wind up before they begin to damage you, or maybe have the thieves be near impossible to hit up until they're close enough to pounce you, but after the pounce, they're tired and need a sec to get up. Anything like that. The most well designed enemy I've seen in the game so far is the most basic skeleton because they have a clear attack range, they stop for a second after swinging and heck, they sometimes flop their attack and juuuust miss you with their swing, dunno if that's on purpose, but that's not a bad thing. You don't get close to them willy nilly, you wait for them to strike and then counter, and no other enemy has this.
I'm not saying every enemy needs a strict counter, I'm saying you should not let the enemies that don't have counters be so numerous AND only be reliably combatable by way of ammo you have no way to get back in a pinch in the first... I dunno, hour of the game [seriously, it took me a while to reach Treetop].
My whining over difficulty aside, I love this mod, I want to see more, and I wish you luck on any improvements and additions made.