Some feedback (quickbar, etc.)

[GrimToadstool]

So, a little bit of Feedback from my side. First, can you make Secrets of Grindea into a liquid, so I can inject it into my bloodstream while not beeing at the PC? It's that good and addicting. So, there's so much done right in this game, mentioning everything good would make this thread too long, so I'll just point out what can be improved. I bought the game a week ago and have 40 hours listed on steam and played through the beta story a couple of times.


[Bugs]

- For whatever reasons, my story savegames get corrupted over and over, sometimes without an error message and progress and entire characters are randomly lost, equipment gets unequiped and so on.

- Lags can cause some aspects of the game to bug out. For example, in the Seasons temple I got knocked out of the room into the wall area. On another occasion I threw my Claymore, without and it just vanished and never returned.

- If your playing the story in multiplayer and have solved the mirror puzzle in the flying temple, if you push one mirror towards the other, while one player is standing next to the chest, he can't return and you can't exit the room or reset the puzzle, you have to restart the session.


[Demo]

While the arcade mode is phenomenal in the demo, I wasn't hyped for the story mode at all. Your descending a mountain and are thrown into an arena, this looked very lazy to me. I was blown away by what came after, especially the area design and puzzles, but though every mechanic was in the demo, the quality of the game didn't shine through.


[Inventory and Quickslot management]

So, in some cases, the quickslot system works really well and in others it doesn't. For example, if I use a build, which uses only two skills and a melee weapon, everything is quite alright. However, if I use a mage, I might not want to have one more spell in the quickbar, instead of the basic attack. If you play a build that uses multiple weapons, changing between them becomes a pain. My suggestion is to make Basic Attack and Defend a Skill (which can't be improved) that is as freely equipable as everything else.

I would also have each of the three skillsets have a slot to equip a weapon to the skill set. For example, if you have a 2handed weapon on “right” and a wand on “left”, every skill you use in the right skillset is treated as having the 2hander equipped, while everything in the left uses the wand. This allows for faster weapon swapping and thus more interesting builds.

Lastly, similar to the quickskill-bar in arcade, I would love to have a quick-usable-item bar. Press one button, lists all usables. It's kind of annoying equipping them over and over again.


[Cosmetic stuff]

-I would love to have more options to customize my character in arcade mode. And also to save these changes. For example that, if you find or buy one item in story mode, it gets perma-unlocked as cosmetic-only item in arcade mode. Also save the name of the character.

-That black cap seems to have one rogue red pixel.


[Balancing]

-So far I found a use for every skill. Some combos are better then others of course, but overall though it can be improved I think the balancing is okay. However there's one skill I found utterly useless and that's the insect swarm. It's slow, it enemies can cause it to fail, if they go fly or invulnerable, it does never crit and what have flying insects to do with earth again?


[Future skills]

- I'm mostly satisfied with the skills that are in the game now, though some seem to be copies of one another. However there's something I noticed. Though the game does draw some inspiration from MegaMan, one key aspect got overlooked and that's the angulation of the skills. Some weapons in MegaMan were particularly useful, because of the weird angles they use, for example, airman's weapon, stoneman's, quickman's.

Grindea utilizes the four directions, so skills with angles will make the gameplay much more interesting.


[Personal note]

-There's much fauna slaughtering in the game. Please do not do a rat-dungeon, like sewers or stuff. I love this game and I got trigger problems with that. If a game wants me to kill rats, it gets deleted and never touched again. If you're planning to anyway, how much do I need to bribe you with?

 

[The G-Meister]

can you make Secrets of Grindea into a liquid

Just melt your hard drive! Sorted! (I'm joking of course, please don't do that ._.)

However there's one skill I found utterly useless and that's the insect swarm.

The main point of that skill is it's long range and low damage, so people can essentially use it as an easy way to get through arcade if their dodging is up to scratch.

I'd disagree on the balancing being up to scratch. Certain combinations wipe the floor with others. I think the main one is frosty friend, as it can be used to take 1/2 to all of your hits for you in Arcade mode, and give you more 1 on 1 combat opportunities, which are far easier to handle. And that's just one skill, I won't list all of them.

I would also have each of the three skillsets have a slot to equip a weapon to the skill set. For example, if you have a 2handed weapon on “right” and a wand on “left”, every skill you use in the right skillset is treated as having the 2hander equipped, while everything in the left uses the wand. This allows for faster weapon swapping and thus more interesting builds.

I don't think this would do the game much good. It's a great idea, but it makes you vastly more overpowered when it comes to switching between magic and melee, as it's like you can have a +ATK and +MATK buff from your weapon because it insta-switches, and there would then be relatively little point in not doing a combined magic-melee build. The whole fact that it's another button press makes it much less practical, and only useful if you can pull it off reliably, usually through a lot of practice.

 

[GrimToadstool]

As for balancing,
well yes, I think we're on the same side, we just come from a different perspective. When I'm thinking of unbalanced, I'm thinking of games like Arcanum, in which you could powergame in such a way that you could actually have around 100 attacks per combat round or Neverwinter nights Shadows of Undrentide, where several really indestructable builds or Smite when Amuzencab was released. Yes some builds are very strong, but for a non compeditive rpg, it's actually decent. I've seen far far worse.

On the weaponswitching.
Well, in the current build, I can just macro that and have a build that switches completly from mage to brawler and vice versa. However, what you didn't consider is that all the other gear has also influence on the stats. So switching from having a magebuild and a staff to sword, makes you just a moderate swordman, not a full dedicated one. I think that's pretty fair. So if you make all equipment stuck and only allow weaponswitchin in this way, I think it will work decent. Switching between two-handed and one-handed melee weapons is more of a discussion as you can outfit your character similar for both.

 

[The G-Meister]

However, what you didn't consider is that all the other gear has also influence on the stats.

Battle mages are already vastly superior in both arcade mode and story if you get a good build, as there are so many talents giving them the buffs for doing so. Furthermore, it means that in Arcade mode, practically any piece of gear they pick up is useful to them. +DEF, +MATK, +ATK and all the other stat boots all help out the build in one way or another. So they're already massively favoured.

You could just use a macro, but that will take most people a while to do, and is just as bad as cheating in my opinion.

And yes, good point, there are a lot of game which are massively unbalanced to a broken degree. I'm glad that in Rocket League the only difference in the cars is their hitbox

 

[GrimToadstool]

On Mages: So, I found that builds that can manage energy very well are boss in story mode. I build a mage around element change, a swordsman build around clones and summons, a melee mage and a two handed fighter with berserk. All these worked very good compared to other builds. The summoner swordsman was the strongest build. Most enemies didn't last longer than 3 seconds, he just meleed the toy machine, beause it was faster than using the trains.
In arcade I use far simpler, spike based builds. For example almost just Spirit Slash. Works just fine. Since enemies don't respawn and you have full energy when entering a new room, you don't need to conserve anything and can and should go all out at right from the start of a room battle, so reducing the enemy amount as quickly as possible is king.
I would not say that the mage is superior. The mage is superior in skills, but if you also account for basic attacks it's more balanced again.

About macros, well you can argue in favor of cheating as you somewhat use an external program to gain an advantage. But I have kind of a different stance on that. For most games, I use a Logitech G13 instead of a keyboard. (I use a gamepad for Grindea, but I want to make that point anyway). So this is a device, which is more comforable than a regular keyboard. All keys for that device are configurable. You can put anything on that, a keystroke a macro, mouseclicks, anything. Usually, binding keys is sufficient, but every now and then, you encounter a design decision in the game like "smash that button as fast as you can". So should I artificially wear down my hardware, because the game tells me? No, I macro that. Hey macro, emulate smashing that key, done. Other games make you use the same keystroke combo over and over again, for example, buying weapons in CounterStrike or switching first and second row in Eye of the Beholder or having a fixed skill row in an mmorpg. That's also stuff you macro for convenience. Now, there's no skill involved in these things, it's just do the same thing over and over. So that's either poor controls or bad game design. If you however need actual skill to use a skill, you can't macro that away. In Grindea, you've got to always dodge, you need to time skills properly, this is absolutely excellent, it's action rpg at it's best. I sometimes don't know if the devs realize how far superior their game is in terms of mechanics. Having unneccesary buttons is a bit jarring. It's not a huge issue, but it is one.
Grindea doesn't pull you out of the game, with crappy inventory management, like other rpgs do, where you have to port back to town every 3 minutes, manage your inventory, sell crap, then port back. It does not spam with quests. In combat you have to dodge enemies, you've always got to actually play the actual game. The only moment when I'm put out of that flow, is when I have to manage the quickslots. I believe it is the one area, where the game experience can be improved.
So no, in my oppinion, if you can macro something, it's not cheating, it's a very lightheated mod to make the game better.
If the gamebalance depends on that, it's worth thinking it over.
To make things even more absurd, you could actually build a physical macro, basically "cutting" out the buttons of several cheap keyboards and glueing them over each other. Is that cheating? Is the choice of my input device something you need to balance around? If you can macro something it just means that the game can be improved.

Rocket League has put itself into an interesting position. The only way to influence the game is the shape of your car model. Some may say, it's basically nothing, others say it's something. So with the cosmetics having and inherrent game effect and some models beeing payed dlc, are you actually paying for power or not?

 

[The G-Meister]

If you can macro something it just means that the game can be improved.

I get the way you're thinking, but I would disagree. The game can be improved, but it detracts from the experience the developers are trying to make. I found it extremely difficult to beat Marino in the festival race, but when I did, it was incredibly satisfying. My arm had practically died, but it was fun worth having - intentional fun. I guess it's not fun switching weapons all the time, but it's a sacrifice that probably has to be made to make sure a battle mage doesn't become the only good skillset to run.

The battle mage is really the only build I've yet to experiment with, so I can't really give you much reliable data. Having said that, I've just taken my 1H build to Winter in Arcade mode, so it'll be the next thing on the list

So with the cosmetics having and inherrent game effect and some models beeing payed dlc, are you actually paying for power or not?

You technically are, but practically anything you want to do in the game is possible with any of the cars. Apparently most if not all of the real pros use the Dominus (which is a paid DLC car) because of it's low hitbox and boxy shape as "what you see is what you get" when it comes to the hitbox. However, this has relatively little impact on gameplay and may as well be nothing compared to some of the things other games have done to make them pay to win. It's much more of a "pay to give you a bit more choice over your hitbox", as the Backfire practically has the same size hitbox anyway. Calling that pay to win is a massive overstatement.

 

[GrimToadstool]

This is way too constructive. We have different oppinions, we should be insulting each other, like normal people do on the internet. Well about satisfiingly smashing a button and stuff, let me tell you an anecdote. Back in the days, about 15 years ago. (wow, suddenly I feel old). So back then when I still went to school in my teens, I spend an evening at my best friend's and he pulled out Mario Party on the N64. That game had a lawsuit in Japan after it had to come with a glove, because stupid children would hurt themselves over the game, and we were about to go full into that. So it had a seperate minigame mode for easy penis length comparison. Effectively, you were to wind up a Jack-in-the-box. The one who got more faster, wins. Simple enough. Now to do that you were to twirl around the analog stick in a circle. The fastest way to do that is putting your palm on it. The friction gets that hot that it actually burns your skin and make it peel off. Next day, I came to school with a patch on my palm and a classmate stared and you could read his mind "Dammit Patrik, did you hurt yourself by jerking off?" so he asked what had happend. And I replied: "Oh I played Mario Party against Stefan". Stefan, who stood next to me and lifted his hand, which was completely bandaged and said "I won".

 

[The G-Meister]

This is way too constructive. We have different oppinions, we should be insulting each other, like normal people do on the internet.

If this wasn't a constructive conversation I wouldn't be taking part As for the stick twirling, I'm glad that's not a thing any more xD