#Early game is terrible and hurts Vindi's reputation

78 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

severe vigil
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I feel there's not enough talk about this so I make a new publication, basically all the advertising suggestions are pointless if this aspect of the game is not improved first. As it is now, main story feels like a 10 hour tutorial where you play isolated from the rest of the playerbase and bosses that die in few hits and dont stand a chance against you. Almost no streamer makes it past this tutorial called main story, they think this is Vindictus, when it isnt.
Some key points to improve it in my opinion:

  • Starting skills: This is the easiest one to fix and very important, some characters start with crucial skills or their second weapon locked, such as Miri not being able to chainswing. This can turn away players if they happen to start with a character that has an awful set of starting skills. Make all characters start with all skills minus a few Active SP skills from level 1.
  • Dedicated tutorials for every weapon: The tutorial fails to showcase the potential of each weapon, so in my opinion it should change depending on which weapon you choose and teach the fundamentals of that class.
  • Make leveling fun and not singleplayer: Hardest but most important one to fix, main story as it is now, doesnt work, its boring and turns new players away. There should be a way to provide both new players and veteran players a way to level new chars or alts while being fun and productive for everyone.
    My solution would be** adding long, special battles that allows you to skip a section of the main story**. For example, Battle of Ainle would consists of multiple sections of Ainle where you get to fight all the Ainle bosses including blood lord at the end. They could be departed both in Solo and in Party. In Party they would be way harder but drop useful stuff that can help that character such as enhancement runes or myst shards. These battles can only be done by characters who didnt completed the main story associated to them, essentially being once per character.
swift maple
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early game is certainly a deterrent, but this proposed fix throws out the story element of the game

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which does matter

severe vigil
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the player would be presented with 2 choices, old quest format or long battle format, its not that the story is removed, its just made optional
alternatively Nexon could provide an online storybook on the website compressing all the story for people who want to read all of it

swift maple
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players would nearly always choose the faster option nomatter what

severe vigil
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and thats because most players dont care about the story dialogue, they just hold skip button, and thats the playerbase Nexon should focus on

dull glade
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I guess one solution he mentioned being a single dungeon where you fight all the early bosses in that area, you could add dialogue boxes in between each boss kill

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you can then also make them a bit more challenging, have the last checkpoint be where you defeated the latest boss

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once area is finished player is send back to colhen where the next story chapter starts and sends them to the next dungeon

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thats a way s1 and s2 can be done quicker without leaving out most of the story

true widget
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yes

flat elbow
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I think that the story should be reworked in the same way as the friendship content, in other words, purely optional, and with emote/title rewards to give an incentive to players

this way, players won't rush thru the story just to reach the point in which they will finally be able to play with people

also, new players can start from say lv 90 or something, or 5-10 levels under the minimum level for raids (currently 105, so new players would start from lv 95-100)

regarding the story, it will only become more of a burden for new players since the game story is way too long and it only gets longer

severe vigil
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what u say is also a good solution and I didnt thought about it, there would be no reason to make the early game fun if your char can join raids straight away and do story whenever u want

pseudo spoke
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well said

broken grotto
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the "LeVeLiNg ExPeRiEnCE" for most players is holding shit while clicking 1 or tab at certain points, then killing junk for a minute

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back to holding shift

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having to waste literal hours doing NOTHING other than skipping text is beyond retrded, if I clearly don't give a damn abuot the story why are you gonna make me waste hours skipping it?

flat elbow
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@severe vigil about making early game fun, it can be still done, but in another way

if the story is optional, and made like friendship content is, you can make that the story missions have a set difficulty and gear, for example, you shouldn't be able to use your normal gear

instead, the game would make you use stuff like crimson rage and the equivalent weapons, then you do the story missions in this manner

this way, you can fight raids/endgame/rars as usual (with your normal gear), and, when you feel like doing the story (for the story sake or for rewards), then you get to relive the story missions as when they were released the first time, so you also get to relive the old difficulty

broken grotto
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you'd need junk gear, to be forced into one of the og classes while also rolling those back to the state they were at that point in time

swift maple
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the content being old doesnt inherently make it bad

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i can only imagine runescape if they axed everything more than 10 years old because "nobody cares about the story anyway" and "old content bad"

broken grotto
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agreed, it just doesn't work with how classes are now though, that's the problem

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well one of the many problems

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runescape's early game is also not a massive waste of time either way and you're not even forced into it, you can do whatever you want, you can decide not to do a quest yuo don't enjoy, you can work on what you want

swift maple
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you ARE forced to do it

broken grotto
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here there's one road you must take that's also extremely boring

swift maple
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the unlocks from quests are major to pvm

broken grotto
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some quests you may really need to do, some others I'm pretty sure you don't, but I haven't played rs in ages

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and still in rs actually doing those things has a different feeling, vindictus is... holding shift

swift maple
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im just speculating, but any feedback/suggestion that essentially promotes throwing out the story of the game (either via directly calling for it, or sidelining it) is likely to be a nonstarter

broken grotto
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I mean they already put it in-game

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it's temporary and it'll cost you $34 (edited the price, thought it was $50 but it was cheaper)

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.........

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not only nexon has already considered, they've accepted it and decided they can monetize it

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problem is a new player is not paying $34 to skip the leveling process of a game they're not even sure they're gonna like

celest ember
broken grotto
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that's why you don't remove the leveling experience, you just revamp it and make it not a cancer that drives almost every new player away

severe vigil
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if there's one thing I know is that there's a wide negative feedback in the playerbase regarding this topic
the current playerbase finds leveling an unnecessary chore, and talks about how leveling used to be fun and engaging in the past
new players will very often leave the game before reaching the fun part, because leveling is a long, tedious and singleplayer task slaped on an online game
changes like this are possible, just look at the artifacts, so many years doing the boring arena trade for weeks to get one, and now you can just buy it in the MP

clear gulch
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I got like 3 or 4 friends to try the game and none of them made it past rocheste even tho I tried to care for them and leveled a char together with them dead

next dagger
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tried getting 3 of mine to play in the past and only one of them got to the max level while the other two quit at low levels because of how boring it is

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we were in a voice call watching his stream as he just one shotted every boss with raze as evie laughing at how stupid it is

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then he tried tessa because he thought evie was too easy, but he got destroyed in redeemers because of the huge difficulty spike then he also quit

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so yeah no way this game will get any new players with the current system and will eventually die

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because they even manage to make the veterans quit with bad updates

pseudo spoke
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and here u have 2 kinds, ppl quit cause game have bad updates, game is too easy, game is hard

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nostalgic s1

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there was no new content and all was hard

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now u have 1000 battles since then

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enjoy the journey

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make some amv might help chieftainbest

dull glade
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since we are at season 4, they could summarize the story by telling in the past tense

severe vigil
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I feel the playerbase would be atleast 2-3x bigger if this early game didnt existed, seeing how many people tried to invite others to play the game and those left during main story (I also failed to invite people)

pseudo spoke
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but why

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it tooks a day to go max lvl

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i failed too painHD my peeps play lineage and wow

clear gulch
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It takes like a day or a few hours for veterans but new people take way longer to figure out where everything is and how everything works etc.

severe vigil
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because every person has a different level of patience, its like when you start watching a series or anime and the first eps are bad, some have the patience to keep watching, others drop it

clear gulch
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Even if you are in a call with them to entertain them and explain stuff on the go it is very annoying only hearing stuff like "ah, don't worry, the content really does get good after you dumped x hours into the game" "ah, don't bother with drops xyz, you might need them later/you won't need them later at all, just sell" "oh that's how you play your char but you can't properly do it until you unlock skill xyz or till bosses actually take a while to die"

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Also new people take way more time to clear simple normal dungeons. I was going with a friend and I myself was just rushing through it to get it done quick which killed the fun for him even more cause there was barely any enemie left to help with.

flat elbow
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@broken grotto if you find the content fun or boring, then that's an individual decision, which each player will make if the story is made optional (like friendship content), like I mentioned earlier

since for then the story would be completely optional, if you find it boring, you can miss it completely, without worrying about missing something essential, say an artifact or a compass, or an exclusive scroll

my idea is to, essentially, keep the story away from player progression, so new players don't waste time rushing thru the story to be able to meet people, then if they want to know more about the game story, then they can access the story mode (much like friendship is accessed), and take all the time they need to get immersed in the story, in case they liked it

crude kayak
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making story optional would need good rewards to make people want to do it. no one does fruit fight anymore because the rewards aren't worth it. yes it's not a very good idea for new people, though. maybe it works for us, since we have multiple characters, but they won't know why they're doing anything if they wait to start it. Why would anyone want to sit through a 10+ hour story just to find out why they're doing an s4 raid at the very end because they're finally curious about the story? I wouldn't.

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it'd be easier for them to just revamp the story like they did when they rewrote s2, or bring back the old difficulty with an "easy mode" setting that makes it faceroll, like they had before.

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Having it be a separate mode for story shortening, maybe with the fast one locked behind having a max level character(after some kind of story system revamp, obviously) would make sure that people at least go through it once. Then there'd be the other mode if they disliked it.

broken grotto
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maybe making the story slog optional but add some good rewards to actually doing it could work

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like let the new player skip it entirely so he can enjoy the game and then if he finds he likes the game maybe story rewards could motivate him to do it

runic tendon
# broken grotto maybe making the story slog optional *but* add some good rewards to actually doi...

Base Pso2 had something like that. And I definitely would not mind a system like that in vindy

When I was brought into the game I leveled simply off of running dungeons at random and playing with friends. And they even had allocated dungeons for fast leveling. Kinda like AA but available at low level, and super quick. I'm talking maybe 1 level every 1-3 minutes.

After I was maxed and relatively geared, I went back and played through the story because I was genuinely curious how some of the bosses came to be, and it turns out that when you do story mode you have an option. You can either go in with your current gear, or get scaled for the experience and this option was available on a quest by quest basis. And you were rewarded with this with the freemium currency that you could use towards cosmetics & other perks.

broken grotto
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yeah pso2 giving premium currency and some extra stuff I can't remember was a good enough motivator for some players

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then again I decided to skip it and just enjoyed the game which was great, if I was forced into the story I would've quit

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but yeah it may even make the story more interesting to the player to give him the option to do it when he wants, sincsince the current model in vindictus essentially forces you to skip it unless you want to spend days reading

willow trellis
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The root reason people engage with any content in any game is because they have fun doing it. Even when people feel forced to grind for things, they're doing it because they enjoying working towards that goal. If the goal feels unachievable, then you end up with people rebelling and quitting, which is what happened with the latest update.

To improve the early game, they need to make it relevant to all players' goals, whether they're that's a material goal or something intrinsic, like challenging a boss just for the fun of the fight. Most players are somewhere in between; they want an appropriate challenge with an appropriate reward. For this reason, simply making the story 100% optional is unlikely to work, especially given the amount of FOMO in this game. Progressing the story wouldn't have enough of a reward, so it would just get ignored. This is also why so many people, especially veterans, skip the story text. It's not that they aren't interested, but reading the text offers no reward, particularly when it's not your first time through the story. If the option to skip is available, even people who don't like to skip will still skip. Because they feel punished if they don't.

So how can they make the early game relevant? Well, for one, they could make it provide rewards that scale to the player. Many games use battle roulettes for this. Max level players get endgame currencies. Sub-max level players get a big XP reward.

Really, they might as well just make all content equal in scaled stats, at least within a few endgame-relevant tiers, like Lv. 105, 110, and 115. They have proven they can scale things like Ein Lacher. Just apply that to every boss in the game at varying scaling levels, then offer rewards commensurate to the difficulty. There's no reason they can't make Gnoll Chieftain drop endgame materials so long as the time and effort it takes to kill him isn't worth the same as the time and effort it takes to kill actual Lv. 115 raids.

flat elbow
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imo new players leave early game because it takes them too long to meet other players, and the long story is, what I think, what makes them to take too much time to find other players

newbies, unlike us veterans, will take much more time getting to 105 (current minimum level to be able to raid with people), because for them there's a lot to learn, there's no familiarity with the game's mechanics and no new player wants to speedrun content just to meet new people

the long story forces players to have a speedrun mindset and that alone, after hours of mind-numbing content, end up getting newbies fed-up with vindi, we've seen several posts in the discords, in-game, and even in this very feedback channel, about how players tell nexon that their newbie friends couldn't stand the long story/long pre-raid game, and just left

making the story optional would allow players to take the time they need to enjoy the story in case they feel like it, so they can jump into the raids and meet new people right away, and after the daily grind, they can check the story, if you add special rewards to the story (like gacha-level outfits, emotes, etc, nothing that is for gearing nor battle content access though -like it's currently the case with redeemer raids-), all the better

about why there are no good drops in early game, it's the same reason about why they removed some good contents from ex-raids (int stone mats), and why they nerfed to the ground the inherited/sealed fragment yield from ex-raid mats, it's because (I think) nexon wants to prevent lowering the player density (to avoid "fragmentation"), so, by keeping the good drops in the same "frequent" places, this would help the playerbase in general to feel that the game is not "empty"

modest turtle
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As a new player starting in NA but I did play when the game came out a decade ago, and every 3-4 years for a bit I have to say that Early Game's biggest problem is that you don't know if you will like your class or not. Whenever you get to end game the bonus attack speed makes many characters play way more fluid, way more dynamic than what it was on low levels.

I do understand that there has to be some progression, but playing the lance lady on low level up until end game was painful. The character was lame and slow, maps took ages with that attack speed while after reaching lvl 100 and got attack speed from free gear the class became enjoyable and I wouldn't be surprised if many people would quit because the class they chose don't feel right and they won't have the 16-20 hours to invest to get it to end game.

severe vigil
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yes, I complained about the starting skills and bosses dying too fast in my first post but this is also another aspect that I forgot to cover
overall, early game fails to represent or explain how the characters will function in the true core of vindictus, and its what new players see

sullen fog
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Glad there’s a post on this. I’d just be happy if they added back the old difficulty selector system where “Normal” is the current face roll difficult and “Hard” is the original difficulty from when the mission was released. (Used to be really tough) That way, people who enjoy just playing a game because it’s fun will stick around longer and get hooked.