#Eldra's Feedback to the Developers!
toxic jay
Qol:
First off, Quality of life, and why it's important.
First impressions matter, and while after a week of playing i'm not as bothered by the smaller things as much anymore. as a new player it was a different story.
The things we might not think much of now, because we have at least over 50 hours in the game and are acustomed to it by then, matters a lot for any new player starting out. This is why Quality of life matters. as it helps to smoothen out the experience and retain players better.
Me deciding to put over 100 hours into the game the past week was all decided in my first 3-5 hours of playing the game.
While Literally everything plays into that, the best you as developers can do is to ensure that your base game, the ui, the descriptions, the way the game explains itself and the way it behaves, that these aspects flow nicely and doesn't leave the player in uncertainty.
i had a chat with elias as well and he did say this is their job. so making sure that players actually keep playing the game is important.
and QoL features, descriptions the clearer goal for what they should be doing. it all matters.
While there are so much i could get into here, let's start from the beginning.
Your starter area is okay. but it could be better
Players are sort of tossed into the game and the first thing they have to do is do a quest. this feels more forced than it has to.
In diablo 2 for instance, players pick up quests by default just by talking to npc's, and all the quests somewhat tied to unique monsters in various areas, and the rewards sometimes are very useful, like permanent stat increases, skill points, these make them feel worth doing. especially when the player finds out they've already done the quest without really thinking about it, like the den of evil quest for instance.
Quests are generally a really bad thing. unless it's done in a really smooth way where the player finds their way to it without knowing that it's a quest.
For example, making quests more a core part of the adventure rather than "additional fluff" that's really more there to distract the player is a big difference
i for example had mined a lot of ores before i found out about the quest.. and i felt upset that i now had to mine even more ore just for a quest i didn't even know what would give me or if i even needed to do it. this is pretty much just bad design as it would be smoother if the quest just needed the ores and would reward you with some more ores. it's just an example of how you could turn a quest into just an added boost for early progression.
other examples could be Warning players of needing more resists for the first boss, maybe through a quest, where if you build your gear up to get some base level of health and resists, this then teaches players the value of defense really well. and could be part of the main story if there's say, a fallen warrionr near the northern post that provides a charm with like 3% all resists when completed just to help players out a bit, but only if they've got their gear up some already
Enough with quests, let's move on
Let's talk about crafting, much in the same way, a theme for my feedback will have big emphasis on player introduction, smoothness in how it works and actual helpfulness when it's introduced
For crafting, learning how dust upgrades work early on is a bit of a mess and most players completely miss this fact all together.
again through a quest where an npc might actually upgrade their gear to teach players how it's done, if done well could be effective.
i'm talking about quests again, but making sure quests are short and sweet, there to help new players rather than overwhelm them is key.
quests like collecting monster parts pretty much just slows the player down rather than help them in any way
Crafting
The crafting ui can be confusing, because you either have to put in the exact items you need with the exact amount for it to work
This might be something you notice more on hardcore because you'll stash your items in the stash and when you want to craft it's a pain to really get it working
but even then it's not all that obvious that you can click twice on the options in the left menu for the item you put in, and then you still first have to actually figure out about mythic dust, and how all of that even works, which is painful for new players because the game just sort of expects you to look it up somewhere or find it and then remember it through the esc -> book menu,
The D2 cube crafting system is cool because it's a bit of a mystery that you find out about as you play the game, especially since you get a literal cube through a quest that you can use in various ways that feel secret
In hero siege this is different, it's more of D3's cube, which is ok at best.
but because there's no introduction to it really, you've got to remember than most players are like full adhd they're gonna literally miss everything and get lost right away, and any extra quests/systems that doesn't get carefully and smoothly introduced will just add to this feeling of being completely lost and a feeling where you feel like you're just doing something wrong, because it feels like you're supposed to just know what you're supposed to. and that's not a good thing really
a suggestion here could be to lock Cube recipes behind act progression, think path of exiles unlockable crafting options at various points in the game
this helps to pad out the initial information overflow.
Perhaps make players go into the dungeons and give them a reward for doing so, like unlocking the dust recipe, so that when they find it they'll check it out in the crafting station. Perhaps Mythic dust could drop from the first act boss, with a description that explains what it is with a hint to how to get more of it
again it's about making the player progression smoother so that people won't be overwhelmed and feel lost in what and where they should be heading
one main quest is easy to follow, and if you set the player up to learn as they go along it's a lot better of a learning curve.
Quests are never a good thing, especially if the player don't remember where they got them, where they have to go to return them etc
The same goes for crafting, If it isn't introduced in bite sized chunks with a focus on actually providing some good value to the player they're not really going to know what it is until much later.
Mining for instance, completely useless. i have yet used anything i ever got from mining in the 150 hours i've played so far, despite this i still mined a lot early on because i thought i could modify and craft my gear with it, sadly there was no such thing. i still feel lost in all of it, i think it's for jewelcrafting but for that i need to mine for another 50 hours to even get started, or at least that's how it feels like
Think about how path of exilie introduces orbs, and how players can craft on their gear with them right as they drop, that type of immediate learning moment is pretty powerful, and it helps create a sense of freedom and a reason to keep on playing
The crafting ui should work in a way where it's useful, and easy to use. where you can actually modify something on the items you find early on, like changing one stat into another or something simple like this, dust is a nice too, but it's never truly taught to the player cause players get lost instantly.
Idea for the crafting systems
Since you've got skill levels for mining and jewelcrafting, why not do a level up popup when reaching say level 100 mining where it unlocks being able to turn mythics into dust for instance, that way the player would learn about it naturally and would further seek out the thing they unlocked.
Quick note on the tutorial area: Quests are inately just bad. players learn through doing, so making quests sort of happen naturally, like for instance
if the player has to learn about belts and potions, give them a chest at the start, not a quest, it will drop a belt and a weapon,
then introduce an enemy, maybe it's a hillock type of enemy that gives you your first skill point/stat points, make it drop potions and as the player goes to pick up a better weapon perhaps these potions get moved to the belt by default, this teaches players that walking over potions puts them to the belt
Then teach the player about jumping by making it mandatory to move across, perhaps a sign that's not a quest to help any players that might be stuck.
then have them face the burning tree boss where they might have to jump to evade some attacks, once killed then give them that second level. and then lead them onwards to the town.
all these quest signs sort of just gets in the way and isn't that great of a first impression. it's not bad but yeah, it's about this kind of smoothened out experience that unfolds naturally rather than needing to be manually managed through accepting and turning in quests. Perhaps give players optional "side quests" that they can do, like picking up more potions, it would reward the player with more potions in of itself, and they could skip it if they wanted to just move ahead, and the side quest wouldn't really stick around or be there, like a progressive suggestion that goes away once the player moves onwards
i think this should be enough about quests for now, let's move on.
UI element behavior, and game clarity
So for the next thing i want to talk about it's again for the new player experience, a lot of this stuff are completely lost to players who are used to it, but to a new player literally everything down to every detail becomes pretty appearant, which is why these quality of life things that might "seem" like it's not worth the time, really can make a big difference. thankfully this will be shorter than the quest segment above
Another quick thing i need to mention, CTRL clicking items from prospector to inventory combines them into an aleady existing stack
for the stash, it doesn't work like this, and for games like these where you wanna play tetris and organize your stash, this is extremely annoying having to drag each material onto the spot i want them. this could be much improved if we could ctrl click items into stash and have them be added to already existing stacks just like from prospector --> inventory.
UI elements needs to be closed becore opening another ui element, like if i have my inventory open, i can't click any vendors stashes or prospector, i can't use skills or look at tooltips. this is clunky.
I know the Stat sheet is a different Ui element that covers the whole screen but being able to have both stat sheet and inventory open at the same time, like how you can in Most other games would also be a welcomed change. what all of this does is reduce the clunky feeling of having to micro manage menues in order to understand what's going on adds to the clutter for a new player. it's not bad, it's just sort of.. bad, it would be a good quality of life thing
By giving the player a left side stat sheet you can have different tabs for the various stats. Which is my next issue as a new player. Stat clarity.
Stat Clarity
This is a big one, Stats are the meat of the game, and being able to read a stat and then understand what it does is key, it's crucial for any new player experience to know what stats, effects, debuffs, what things mean really. In some cases the stat should be renamed
in other cases the stat should be explained.
Damage goes to
The first stat i encountered was "Damage taken goes to" Stat. This leads you to believe that the Damage you take goes to mana and gets taken there instead, or that a percentage of your damage taken gets taken, and then goes to your life instead, sort of splitting big hits into smaller chunks.
This isn't the case. The stat really should be named "% of damage taken Gained as mana/life" to explain better what it does, or "damaged recovered as" is also another option
Elemental Break debuff
This one messed with me big time because when i first encountered it i thought it was a resistance break, so this along with the ignore resist stat made it very confusing to know what did what and if they even worked together, i also found some sources where elemental break was refered to as a resist break or lowering resistances. which made it even more confusing, i still don't truly know what it does, and i spent 3 hours testing it...
This shouldn't happen. like sure, testing damage numbers is fun and all but it would be so much better if there was a page in the excape -> book (codex) that explained these stats, or if there was a second page on the stat sheet for stats like these, like "source of Lighting break" with a tooltip that actuall said what it did. like anything to help players understand what the stats actually does.
a game that does this really well would be Chronicon, it has a detailed descrition of every stat in the games help menu and it's really helpful for learning the games stats
another small thing, lighting radius says it increases base movement speed scaling, but it didn't do that through testing it
Additive damage and skill damage
These are the ones i see often asked about, basically when it comes to diffrentiating between a melee skill or a caster skill, it might not be obvious enough, same for summoners, they're casters but it can be confusing for someone who doesn't test flat caster damage so people might never realize that you can benefit a lot from flat arcane damage on a summoner necro for instance
My suggestion here is to rename the stats to be something like "[x type of damage] damage to attacks/spells" this would helps some
The other hard thing is that spells without that elemental tag won't benefit from a different element unless they're of magic type
and magic damage applies to all elements, so things can be a bit confusing here. i'm so thankful that the game has a tooltip so that i could figure out what affected what.
But having clarity here will also be a big Fresh player QoL for player retention
life/mana on hit
i thought these worked for my spells for many many hours, like probably 70 hours of playing, because i thought the life orbs i picked up was somehow the healing on hit..
so maybe call it on attack rather than hit, spells hit too y'know
Skill descriptions
This goes more back to Elemental break than anything else, but Sources like these should have these debuffs/effects etc baked in, i think elemental break might be the only issue here, most other things seems to be explained fairly well in the alt menues, being able to hold Alt on passives for resist break to get an explanation of what it does, or even for skills if some skills in the future like corpse explosion gets changed to scale with enemy corpe health, or any other thing like this really. it would be great to have that completely solid Clarity in stat, item and skill descriptions just to make sure newer players can learn ARPG's as they encounter new stats, and seasoned players won't need to second guess themselves
Item filter improvements
Aight so this one was super pain. and i can imagine new players, especially people who like to play HC modes really get frustrated with this
The issues are as follow:
You need to show items of any various rarity in order for highlights to work with them
You need to click a billion times to make adjustments to some tiers across the board, just to hide blue and yellow items
You can't filter health/mana/rejuv potions
You can't filter runes/gems - This can be bad if your pet goes for a low rune and misses out on a high rune or important key
Highlights are missing a search function
i don't know what else to say really, i think if you made it so we could toggle rarities in the first menu and didn't have to click the customize button for every tier, that would help
Or just instead of the tier containing each rarity, why not have it be each rarity with each tier and sockets, like i'm not sure, but there has to be a way to lay all of this out in a way that's easier to manage than having to click so much just to hide blue and yellow items.
Being able to filter stats for every item even if the item is hidden would be huge as well
Highlights should also be able to be set from one menu, like being able to click on a stat, and then quickly decide on what item slots you want to filter for, i'd rather have lower tiers of +1 skills show rather than have all whites of S tier items shown etc. there's a lot that can be done here and i'm not even sure how new this filter system is. it could be very early in development, i'm happy that it's there, and seeing it improved would help a lot as well
Codex
Real quick the codex needs a search function really badly, so that we don't have to scroll and get lost and feel stupid for not just seeing the item we're looking for, also being able to search ingame for items with certain stats for our builds would be massive. it's awesome that it's there, very helpful but having a search function on it would help a bunch as well
Stash tabs
Here are a few quick suggestions for stash tabs:
Being able to middle click a slot to "lock" it, so that you could autosort your stash without everything being moved
Being able to move the stash tabs around to organize would be a neat QoL feature
Some small things
I saw one player report that their portal had dissapeared when they died, this makes the point of a safety portal sort of well pointless, i think being able to get back to where you died on SC would be a good change to get players back to where they were
The "empty bottle of vodka" Looks bad when it's sideways on the flask UI, it would look better if upright imo. very small thing but it can help give the UI am better feel for players who run this flast on most builds etc.
toxic jay
Technical Audio problem
So i use a DAC connected to my speakers, and if i boot up the game with the DAC in standby mode, the game doesn't registrer it even if i switch it to the usb mode while the game is running. So being able to set audio drivers inside of the game would help with this issue i think, so that i wouldn't have to restart the game if i boot up the game first and then switch my DAC to USB mode, it's niche but for anyone connecting up audio to work sort of after booting up the game they'll have to restart the game for audio to work
Fonts not being adjustable
i've seen a lot of players be upset about how small the font is in the game, especially if they're trying to do couch gaming, which is basically impossible
Bein able to adjust Font size UI size etc would be very helpful even for desktop users who need that little bit of text clarity, the same for Font type, some people struggle with reading fonts, especially if it's small. so having options for these would be great!
Cosmetic items being unusable unless you're using spesific weapon types
This one was a bit of a let-down, i spend money for some cool mtx and i couldn't really use them, cause my main weapon right now is a flask. i really suggest changing how this works where you can let players change their weapon appearance on any 1H or 2H weapon types. this would open up the MTX system a lot and give players more freedom in personalizing their looks
The same goes for hats, i got this crown of thorns item, but using it was also a let-down when my character became bald, i wanted to use the crop ontop of my Stormweaver head to see how it would look. but that wasn't an option. i'd love for this kind of layered customization where you could mix and match MTX without it just being a head replacement for instance, at least for MTX like a crown of thorns, cat ears, etc
Some thoughts on early endgame items
i was a bit let down that there were no SS Tier Mythics, i would have loved to be able to item hunt for some proper SS tier mythics with randomly rolled stat combinations, it's something that's truly unique in Diablo 2's endgame where if you find a really solid pair of rare equipment you enable yourself to build yourself in different ways
when it comes to any feedback about stat balancing or balancing in general for all the ARPG's i play the first thing i look at is "Is this game open and free in terms of how i can scale my build" Because the more i find that a game is open and fee in the way you can scale your damage the better it just feels to play, it feels less and less locked up and cemented in place and more like having proper freedom to actually make your playstyle and build work
There are a few items in the game that has cool mechanics, mana bender's will, the elementalist augment, mystic insight for spell crit, magistriker..
Like these effects are what i live for in games like this. nothing feels better than building a proper stat stacker like a mana stacker or int stacker or life stacker, especially on a build that doesn't just have these built into their passives and skills...
There's a huge difference in letting players build their whole build around one item or multiple items that give gains from other stats. imo it's what ARPG's should strive for, and finding that balance between Dropped loot that has the potential to be really good, and having unique and rare items that truly open up for new ways to scale damage and defense is something that's really fun. the worst feeling is when i try to scale the playstyle i love and then realize it's just bad. it's as if the game would just be unfinished at that point, as if the developers just forgot about a class all together. in last epoch this killed it for me, the endgame at first felt open, but i quickly realized it was very limited. and it was awful.
what i found in last epoch was that devs really just wanted you to use the uniques they had designed for that one spesific skill, and that sort of was it, there was a huge gap between skills, one skill literally had insane mana scaling built into the skill tree, whilst thee skill i decided to play was apparently "outdated and i should not even play it.." which was like... what the actual fuck. it made me quit playing because things started to feel really locked into place, when they should have been more open for exploration and build ideas. i mean there was ideas there. but i just felt like the insane imbalance in skill design were just way too much and it discouraged me from continuing to enjoy the game. last epoch was really fun btw, but only up until things started to become too tight on stat sources. then i just couldn't scale much anymore and that really sucked.
Hero siege has more of a D2 kinda vibe going on, but i would still love more scaling options, the items and augments i mentioned before is stuff i'd love to see more of, items like the shield that converts your damage to arcane is also really cool
Torchlight infinite last year when it had aura stacking was also probably the best ARPG experience i've ever had, never has a game made me feel so free in itemization where i could craft my own gear to the point where i truly made my own custom build, on the class i was playing i made it to top 3 europe on damage and top 10 level 100 on that class as well. it was an amazing time because that game had many systems where you could get stats from, like cancle slots that gave you very powerful stats and effects, a divinity sleet system where you could get good stat rolls on these tetris pieces, you then fit those onto a board and got the stats, your gear could be crafted to perfection with powerful stat stacking mods, enchanted and more, it was just really cool.
toxic jay
Lastly i want to talk about hardcore a bit
It's clear to me that hero siege is very tightly balanced around having a high resist stat right from the start of the game. like yeah you wanna cap your arcane resist first, and get some life up, this isn't really a problem, on hardcore because of this the endgame sort of starts straight away and i really like that. i like that the first boss bonks you if your defenses aren't in check. But what i don't like is when Odin has a complete oneshot that oneshots you regardless of your defenses. Not because it's a oneshot, but because it's an instant oneshot with no indicator of where it will appear. i also dislike how anything up until that point has nowhere near that kind of danger, and i'm surprised i didn't die on my summoner the 3 times i killed him pretty easily. on my Stormweaver i died with the boss being offscreen, i had no idea what he was doing and then suddenly i was just dead to a 9000+ damage hit. that i didn't see coming
there are indicators for on death effects in the game, so why not have this for moves that will actually oneshot you. it would have saved me 10+ hours of leveling
and i just wanted to mention how you kind of want to be careful about this kind of thing, be mindful of hardcore characters, i know i'm a rare exception as a player who jumps well aware straight into hardcore on most games i play. because it's really fun. but be mindful of how bad it would feel to literally just be deleted to something that's basically invisible, and won't really give you and idea of where it will hit or appear, especially when the camera didn't show the boss, and it was my first time fighting him in that form, (the lighting form with the X cross attack that does way too much damage without any real warning.
just saying
other than this i've had a great time with the game and will keep playing here and there to try to scale my build into endgame...
toxic jay
Closing thoughts
I'll use this post for future Feedback, Right now as you can see it's extremely messy, but i'm gonna take the time to organize it and condense it when i find the time and energy to do so. i know i can write a shitton, and explain what i want to say in too much detail. but i really do care so much about Arpg's and i want games to be great. i don't care as much about fresh content or new balance, as much as i care more about the quality of life and the feel of polish in games, Hero siege has come such an insane way these past 10+ years, and i'm pretty happy to see how the project is still moving forwards!
I'm sorry for such a messy and way too much way of giving feedback. but there simply isn't any other way when i want to share all my thoughts i've had around feedback this past week or so of playing!
i'm sure i missed some things, but that's okay. i'll work on this forum post whenever i do play the game and it gives me a place where i can slowly structure and organize this better.
I'll do a TLDR later, like tomorrow maybe or something, but for now, holy shit i need a pause xd
toxic jay
text block