I liked the first game and I like the ambition of this game. Right now it feels pretty janky; after I spawned the nearest village was right on a hill and both villagers walked immediately to their deaths, eliminating their faction . Meanwhile I can see the text for battles going on several km away from the player. On one level it's cool to be airdropped into a world that is "happening" absent of the player but on the other hand it can be pretty chaotic and unbalanced. I'd like to see some more nuance in the combat; I get that the player is slow and weak until you level up but it stills feels bad to have morrowind style combat where you just kind of click and watch a linear and slow animation that hits like a sponge. The levels also seem a bit random; I went into a dungeon level 1 and handily beat a level 5 and level 11 bandit. Meanwhile level 25 and 50 merchants are running around beating on monsters of even more different levels, so its hard to gauge what the power level of a specific level is. There are other small things like having to max out the coin quantity when looting (should default to all coins instead of 1). That being said, the amount of stuff you can interact with and interactions between all the different things in the world is really engaging. Horse taming, fishing, crafting, settlement building, stealth, etc. leaves open a ton of stuff to do, especially in a proc gen context. The concept sells the game for me and I'll be following the project.
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Thanks for the review! And glad you liked it!
NPCs spawning near cliffs is a problem I'll have to tackle sooner or later, but might not have a decent solution. We'll see. But there's no real way out of a game like this not being chaotic and unbalanced, but I hope that's fun to mess around with!
And about combat: You don't have to treat it 100% like a numbers game, as you can use not only attacks and defending, but also kicks and dodges to gain a huge advantage: Kicking blocking enemies severely drains their stamina, and dodging heavy attacks instead of parrying them can net you a nice stamina advantage.
On levels: enemies and the players are 1x1 on all accounts, plus modifiers to make the game easier or harder, that'll be customizeable in the options menu coming soon. But because your own ability and build matters a lot more than 2 extra points in strength, levels are more of a suggestion than an absolute in terms of what you can handle.
Oh, and you can just right-click when looting to get all items instead of going through the amount selector.
Hope I can meet your expectations in the coming updates!
Thanks for the tip on the loot, I must've missed a tool tip. I like the philosophy of ability mattering more than raw numbers; I found that instead of dodging attacks I could just kite most enemies but having different strategies is certainly interesting.
Thinking about it more, I think you're right about the chaos being more enjoyable than otherwise. Getting a quest from a guy who immediately walked off a cliff was a memorable gameplay experience to be honest. In general there aren't enough games that stretch the sandbox open world concept to these kinds of scenarios, so your direction is really appealing to me