Post by Layzl in Cycle of the First Dawn comments

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Alright caught up to the First (or is it second?) Region. Interesting direction, this domination of tyrants seems like an interesting direction to go. The soul forging may look like there's player agency at the start but it really just forces you to go train the aspects till you can do 100% of the expression.

I know this entire region is a WIP and will be polished much later when Act I is in a good shape enough to allow Act II development, but I'll make some comments for the eventual polishing.

The complete activity stop when training an aspect or filtering miasma unless you press stop goes against the user experience from Act I. My two cents would suggest changing it to allow user choice of action freedom by pressing another action or lock that ability behind a trinket or certain miasma tier with some lore that once you channel miasma you can't do another action unless you take the time to stop etc.

This also goes for exploring paths like the complete lock and inability to do anything is kinda jarring. I'd also like for the challenging fights to follow some system similar to willowbrook and wildernesses as its hard to grind them out when you have to manually fight people.

Great start to Act II though, very vested in where the story takes us. For now though, I will refrain since I have to go complete Act I and leave nothing.

DoorWatchers6 days ago(+2)

Huge WIP. I deliberately pushed a bunch of the Act II concepts out early because I wanted people actually hammering on them before I built 7+ entire regions on top of bad assumptions.

You're right about the complete-stop behaviour feeling jarring after Act I. There may still be a few actions where deliberately stopping first makes sense, but having to hit Stop constantly just to change what you're doing is not something I want as the normal Act II experience. The challenge fights are in the same category. The current manual handling is scaffolding, not the intended final grind loop, and I want repeated fights to eventually behave much closer to the automation players are already used to from Willowbrook and the wildernesses.

Soul Forging is also much less complete than it looks right now. It isn't supposed to boil down to "train an Aspect until expression reaches 100%, then equip the obvious thing." There are a lot of surrounding systems and actual things to spend/use Aspects on that simply do not exist yet, so at the moment the optimal answer naturally collapses into "cultivate more." That is one of the bigger things I'm working on now.

Basically, you have wandered into the construction site while the walls are still arguing about where the doors go. Keep the comments coming though, because this is exactly when those problems are useful to catch.

Layzl6 days ago

It’s reassuring to hear that the stop-button friction and manual fights aren't the final vision. Really excited to see what Soul Forging looks like once the surrounding systems are plugged into it. Going to knock out the rest of Act I, and I'll be back to break things again on 1.2.1 once I've finished the wildernesses (wildernessi?)

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