devtrackers.gg
Alright so a little background here :
I played the game a long time ago before the release of repeaters and when patrols and hunts were still a thing. I remember thinking back then that the game has a lot of potential but it needs a lot more work before this becomes a fully fleshed out project. Back then you went to an instanced arena, killed your target, backed to town, rinse and repeat.
Fast forward to reforged and there's 2 new weapons, a progression system, couple of new modes, quite a few new behemoths, and cross-play between all platforms. I was pretty excited to come back and try the new stuff.
I've played for about a week or two now and oddly enough tried 3 of the 4 legendary abilities, beaten the trial in under 3 minutes, killed the dauntless trial successfully on a super tank build in 11 minutes with a friend, solo'ed a couple of the hard escalations, done mostly all the "new" stuff there is so here's what I think of the game at present :
THE POSITIVES :
- Solid, engaging combat : This is a core aspect of the gameplay since you are expected to kill the same behemoths a lot of times for the weapon and armors grind and I'm glad to say that every weapon feels vastly different, impactful in its own way, and viable for the job. The technical aspect of combat creates a great sense of difficulty in each fight without making it feel overwhelmingly hard (in most cases anyway, looking at you, riftstalker). Balance-wise not everything is perfect but it's mostly in an ok spot, you probably heard this a million times before and intended it to be this way but the axe feels super OP, you've seen the oneshot builds on youtube I'm sure by now. And the repeaters feels kind of counter-intuitive by design, the main reason their base damage is weak is because of their inherent range advantage. And yet the best way of dealing damage with this weapon is using it like a shotgun, keeping super close to the beast but just out of reach of attack. Maybe rework the damage falloffs here.
- Great crafting system : every weapon and piece of armor has its own specific behemoth rendition, with its own unique effects, which allows for a lot of player expression and build diversity though I imagine this formula means significant workload for the developers since each new weapon will need its rendition of every behemoth in the game, and vice versa for adding new behemoths, it's not a huge list right now but if they intend to keep adding things for "years to come" then this is an important point to keep in mind.
- Excellent art design : This game has the kind of art style that does not age easily and enables some crazy monster designs and effects (example: thrax, shrowd, malkarion, etc.). This is one of the main separating factors from the behemoth (pun intended) that is monster hunter world and if you hope to properly compete with it then keep it up!
- Great monetization system : As with every free to play game, you'll be worried when you first login if at some point your progression's pace will be slowed to a crawl or even completed stopped and the game will ask you to pay money to go any further but no. The only thing you can pay money for here are cosmetics, which has always been a fair practice in my book. Hell, I'm not a fan of most battle pass systems but you finish this one extremely quickly and it even gives you premium currency on the free pass? Not a lot but it can add up across several seasons. I've never seen this done before so this deserves a special praise. Most good battle passes can have the premium track purchased with premium currency and have the premium currency refunded to you after you reach a certain point.
- Superb customization : You can transmog any item in the game to look like anything you own, I've had 5 transmog stones given to me for free which is not the greatest start but I'm giving it a pass since not only do you get premium currency for free in this game via the hunt pass, but after you finish the first 50 tiers you gain access to a weekly rotating cosmetic shop called the vault, and you earn 1 vault coin every tier after 50, and I've bought a couple of items so I feel very happy about the way I look. In addition to that, you can dye your armors in several areas. The initial offering of dyes to free players feels very limiting however (10 dyes?) and the drop rate of heroic dyes must be absurdly low cause I've played for about 2 weeks straight and haven't gotten a single one yet.
- Legendary behemoths and weapon abilities : There are 4 unique badass behemoths in the game on the ultra epic scale, the fights with them are hard but fun, the payoff you get for getting their weapons is great. The unique abilities tied to each of them both feel impactful and speak to the nature of the behemoth you killed to acquire them (thrax's portal slam, malkarion's speed, agarus's healing, torgadoro's rage). I do wish I could use these abilities more than once per behemoth fight however. Maybe not the agarus heal since that is very impactful or torg's rage mode since that lasts a fair duration, but thrax's slam and malk's dash need some more usage out of them. Guaranteed stagger or something. Regardless they are all excellent and I highly look forward to more of these behemoths and weapons in the future.
- The move from pure instance to open world design : Perhaps the biggest immediate difference you will feel if you've played a long time and have returned for reforged like me is how you can string together fights in the hunting grounds without having to return to ramsgate after every single one. That's a huge breath of fresh air and allows me to just have some fun in the game without going through a million loading screens.
THE NEGATIVES :
- Weapon depth and variety : There's only about 7 weapons in the game currently and while each of them have their unique playstyles, some of the weapons just have very little or no depth to them, like the war pike, repeaters or the axe. You need a bigger move list in these weapons so players have more expression not just in their appearances but in the way they fight! I understand the game is still quite young when compared to the 12 or so years a game like monster hunter world has had for development so given that the experience is a fairly positive one so far I am willing to sit back and wait for them to update the game with more weapons and some reworks to shallow weapons. On a positive note, I tried the sword rework and think it's pretty great, so if you continue this rework trend to the other weapons no main will feel left out.
- Running into other people can sometimes be annoying : I'm sure you've seen this one a thousand times before so I'm not gonna take long on this one, but people needlessly leeching xp and scaling fights for the people actually fighting is quite the negative experience. The simplest solution to this is to only scale the fight and give xp to the player if they damaged the behemoth within the last 10 seconds or so. Escalations can be carried since the scaling is only a max of 4x but in hunting grounds a scale of 6x is just too much for one player to handle when the danger meter keeps soaring to 100% in a matter of minutes because of the people frequently dying to the danger.
- The cells and perk system need some love : If you look up every meta build for every weapon in the game nearly all of them are identical with either maximum half health damage cells or maximum tankiness and lifesteal. Having only 2 effective builds to go with nullifies all of that armor and weapon variety and their unique effects since a lot of them (more than half) aren't really that great. This extends to the cells you slot in said weapons and armor as well. This could be a tricky one to address.
- There is no way to practice against or even farm specific behemoths : This is important enough to mention since getting good at this game requires practicing enough against your specific target. But since hunts and patrols have been removed completely from the game you can't really hunt for a specific target anymore. And jumping from instance to instance of hunting grounds hoping for your behemoth to spawn is not fun. This is more of a quality of life problem than a core gameplay problem since spending more time with the game ultimately solves this eventually, but still, newer players will appreciate this one more than you think.
- Pace of progress is way too fast : I've already mentioned this but I've reforged more than half the weapons at least once and acquired more than half the weapons and armors in the game in about 2 weeks. I may be in the minority here, but it happens that I've gotten used to warframe's pace after putting 2500 hours into that, but I will ofc admit warframe can get a bit too grindy. This is on the other end of the spectrum though and while being generous is nice, you definitely need to make players work a bit more for their gear. This is not easy to get right but right now I suggest bumping the material requirements and slayer's path nodes up by about 25%. I expect people to react negatively to this point if they do and as such you may safely ignore this if the majority opinion is against it.
Suggestions for the future :
- Hammer time : The hammer is outclassed by the axe in just about every aspect. So aside from bringing the damages on par and adding more moves to the move list there's also some missed opportunity for mixing the swinging and the firing in the effect of priming attacks. Currently when you prime a swing the weapon just....glows. I'd like this to be changed so that if you prime a swing you physically fire a shot and increase the attack speed of the swing. We also need a viable ranged attack on the weapon since you know, every other weapon except the hammer has one? This is an easy fix by adding a new special that fires a projectile at range like the war pike at less damage than concussive salvo.
- Endless escalation : I've seen this mentioned before but don't think it caught on well so basically this is another form of endgame you can implement, like warframe one of the good ways of truly "challenging" yourself is to take your build and last as long as you can against an endless tide of enemies. This can be made into a new mode but it should be just an added option under the 10-50 option of every escalation. You need to think about how many amps can a player be allowed to gather since allowing the collection of every amp would be way too overpowered. If you want to really get creative with the power levels here than you can possibly fight 2 of the same legendary behemoth at the same time if you choose to let the player collect more than 4 amps.
- Fantasy weapons can be a great fit in dauntless if implemented correctly : You made a shotgun/hammer, but why stop there? The gunblade is the most classic blend of sword and firearm there is. If you want inspirations look to squall from final fantasy 8 or lightning from final fantasy 13, or warframe. It should feature faster attack speed like the sword but less damage than the hammer, I also think throwing glaives and nunchucks can be an excellent addition to the game.
- More ways of avoiding damage : The sword gets an inherent safety advantage because you can parry attacks with the correct timing with it. But I think the parry mechanic should be available on every weapon, with its own animation depending on the weapon. If you want to give an inherent safety advantage to a weapon then it should be making sense based on the type of the weapon. An example of this is adding a block mechanic to a sword/lance and shield weapon, other weapons don't have shields so they can't block. This is especially true for the axe and the hammer since they are absurdly slow. Implement this so that parrying an attack costs "weapon meter" and if successful, restores some stamina, or vice versa. And that some attacks can't be parried like the thrax cannonball or some hard hitting attacks in general for balance.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
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