I have been patiently waiting for this game for years and years and was so glad when I finally had a chance to play it. And after putting some 10 odd hours into it, I have some feedback that I hope you guys consider. I really do enjoy it and see that it has so much potential and I really do appreciate all of the hard work you guys do. And I know you guys have put so much work, time, sweat, and blood into it, which is why I'm even giving these critiques, because I'm not generally the person to go write reviews or offer feedback. So I hope you guys consider some of these things (and I'm sure you already have).

KEYS

Firstly, what the hell are keys even for? I remember when you guys made the video for Indiegogo and you said .rar files would be chests, but I have yet to come across any chests anywhere near my rar files.

ENEMIES

Secondly, the monster improvements (which I know you're working on) is very, very needed. Many of the monsters don't do anything, and even if they were big, they weren't difficult to take down. What is difficult is getting mobbed by 20 things and not being able to escape when you're low level. So it's either really easy or really difficult.

The other thing I thought was supposed to happen was that if there are a lot of a file type, they combine to make a harder enemy (or this was the plan from the indiegogo video). What REALLY happens is that you go into your system32 folder and end up sitting there for LITERALLY 3 HOURS killing the 12,000 enemies pouring out of the rift. I don't mind this rift style of play, but eventually just send a big bad boy out instead of the remaining 10,000 enemies. there needs to be something like minibosses for stuff like this to prevent monotony.

TALENTS

Another issue I had (which I see others have already suggested) was the skill and level system needs re-tweaking. I actually think it needs a bit of an overhaul. I don't think you should "make it like skyrim" but I think it would be better to have more options like in the skyrim skill trees. For example, if I'm making a magic character, let me get some magic talents. Ranged? Let me improve my ranged talents. And making tiers for a specific talent would be good too. For example, for that one talent that gives you HP and Mana when enemies die, just make it so that I can level into that talent 10 times to get more out of it as I do it (if I want that option) or even split them into mana leech and vampirism (hp drain). Personally, once you get to the end of a tree, I think it would be interesting to offer talents that are a double edged sword. Big improvements with drawbacks. All of these things would add a lot of personality and sustained character progression.

Some talent suggestions?

Melee: Increased melee range, increased damage, enemy knockback, double jumping (should be in this tier), berserk (low hp damage increase)
Dagger / rogue: crit chance, backstabbing, bleeding, evasion,  dashing (should be in this tier), etc.
Magic: reduced mana cost, increased damage, range, twin elements, status effects, etc. explosive magic? (spells do less but spread/explode)
Defense: base armor, base hp, life-steal and mana-steal (should be in this tier), shield bashing maybe? Juggernaut (never get knocked back)
Archer/ranged: increased accuracy, range, power (projectile speed), quickdraw, piercing arrows (the more you level this the more enemies it goes through, etc.)

When I played through the game, I really did enjoy it, but at times it felt very empty and there wasn't a lot to it. I feel that if I had the option to invest talents into things like this it would have improved the play experience a lot more. I know having too many options is bad, but I feel like there were no options here other than what I equip. Some kind of expanded talent system would make a huge difference and allow for better progression.

INVENTORY

okay this one was a bit of a big one for me. Please please please make separate inventory category pages. For consumables, armor, shields, weapons, books, etc. because scrolling through the whole list is just monotonous. And the option to double click items to either equip or vendor, as dragging them gets a little monotonous too.

MISCELLANEOUS

-Gold is useless and I pretty much never used it
-There was no real bonus for entering those cursed doors
-The adventurOS folder key easter egg is a little much. I killed one out of the four bosses and then found the key and went to the end. Maybe make it something else? Or maybe make it random for each playthrough. Make 10 possible options or special things you can get from it but don't give a free pass to the end boss

Also, I went and played my high level character, and after the update, I pretty much got insta-gibbed by those reappearing dudes. I barely stood a chance. I'll probably give it another play through to see how the progression is now, but the sudden change just hit my character like a truck.

Hello, and thanks for your honest feedback and good words!

 I remember when you guys made the video for Indiegogo and you said .rar files would be chests, but I have yet to come across any chests anywhere near my rar files.

Do you say that rars are not being set as chests? or that there are not a lot of chests other than on .rar files? The chest thing is one of the main elements that we noticed how hard is to use a computer structure and try to make a game out of it. We were way too focused on the main user directory and that is only a small percentage of the filesystem. We wrote about this kind of things on the blog before.

ENEMIES Secondly, the monster improvements (which I know you're working on) is very, very needed. Many of the monsters don't do anything, and even if they were big, they weren't difficult to take down. What is difficult is getting mobbed by 20 things and not being able to escape when you're low level. So it's either really easy or really difficult.

As you said, we are working on improving the monsters in generals because it is the most important thing of the game. We hope to get them in a much better spot soon. We are still working on getting the game working 100% in Mac and Linux so it is taking us longer to get to that.

The other thing I thought was supposed to happen was that if there are a lot of a file type, they combine to make a harder enemy (or this was the plan from the indiegogo video). What REALLY happens is that you go into your system32 folder and end up sitting there for LITERALLY 3 HOURS killing the 12,000 enemies pouring out of the rift. I don't mind this rift style of play, but eventually just send a big bad boy out instead of the remaining 10,000 enemies. there needs to be something like minibosses for stuff like this to prevent monotony.

We have a few ideas in mind about how this can be fixed. On the indiegogo we said about merging bosses but later we discarded that idea because of it removing the individuality of each file as a separate entity. After getting the monsters on point we would love to have time to improve those kind of rooms.

TALENTS Another issue I had (which I see others have already suggested) was the skill and level system needs re-tweaking. I actually think it needs a bit of an overhaul. I don't think you should "make it like skyrim" but I think it would be better to have more options like in the skyrim skill trees. For example, if I'm making a magic character, let me get some magic talents...

On our initial design we had way different trees of talents, each one of them with steps and improvements but as you can imagine, it is a lot of work to implement. The only reason why this version is already playable is because we had to cut out a lot of features. We wrote more about this issue a blog entry that can be summarized to: "Easy to say, hard to implement"

INVENTORY okay this one was a bit of a big one for me. Please please please make separate inventory category pages. For consumables, armor, shields, weapons, books, etc. because scrolling through the whole list is just monotonous. And the option to double click items to either equip or vendor, as dragging them gets a little monotonous too.

We want to make the inventory better and filtering by categories could be one of the solutions. We first need to make the same items to stack, but because of a few bugs with that it is not working at the moment.

Gold is useless and I pretty much never used it

I agree, making NPCs more gold friendly should fix this and balance things out.

There was no real bonus for entering those cursed doors

The cursed doors are a way to avoid the player into getting deeper than it should before he/her is ready to get into those dangerous places.

The adventurOS folder key easter egg is a little much. I killed one out of the four bosses and then found the key and went to the end. Maybe make it something else? Or maybe make it random for each playthrough. Make 10 possible options or special things you can get from it but don't give a free pass to the end boss

I'm not sure what you mean about the first part here. About giving a free pass to the end boss is intended. If you think you are ready to face it, why make you jump through more hoops?

Also, I went and played my high level character, and after the update, I pretty much got insta-gibbed by those reappearing dudes. I barely stood a chance. I'll probably give it another play through to see how the progression is now, but the sudden change just hit my character like a truck
Woops! Yeah, things are a bit more difficult now, but not that much.

As you can see, the game is too big and every change generates a butterfly effect that make it difficult to tune properly. We hope to keep ironing this stuff out until the game is in a good place for a big release. For now, we will keep doing everything we can to get it into a better place than it is right now.

Thanks again!

Thanks for the reply!

Just to respond to a few things:

Most of my rar files were in my desktop and download folders and there were none. I can check again here, but I eventually collected hundreds of keys and never came across a single chest. I'm not sure if this is just a bug or something. But I will double check when I get the chance.

About the key, I feel like if there was a better way to find the totems, then maybe you could place the key in a completely random folder, and after finally knocking out the 4th totem, you can have something in-game give you the location of the key. Or at least maybe if you kill each boss, you get a segment of the file path to look for, and once you beat all 4, you can go to that location. Which means you could still randomly stumble upon it. I just figured going to my adventurOS folder was something I had to try, and personally would have liked to have gone through and fought all the bosses first prior to obtaining that key (which as I see others say it was purchasable, I don't think that should be a thing either). I just think something other than the boss key in that folder would be interesting, and that something that literally unlocks progression shouldn't be rushed. Games that give pathways to the end goal right away generally leave it up to the player to find a reason to play and I think a lot of people want to be given something they can work with and play within the boundaries of. Personally, if I knew there was an option to go fight the end boss without doing anything else, if I decide "lets go fight the other bosses instead" its just basically being a tourist. There's no real point in going to the other bosses if killing them doesn't offer actual progression. I don't know if this makes sense, it's somewhat hard to describe.

Also thanks again for your guys' excellent work. I know you guys consider and respond to the feedback here and that is really awesome and I have really high hopes for you guys and this game.