CLARIFICATION I've been thinking about what I said in this video, and after reading what Reynad had to say in the Discord, I came to a few conclusions. First of all I want to say that I made a mistake. Your level is displayed on the victory screen. However, your level has the same icon as the prestige. Therefore I didn't recognise that at the time. Secondly, I came around to the idea of having more skills. I accept that skills and stats have sort of combined and that can lead to fun interactions. Shame the healthbar is so heavy with numbers, but maybe moving them to the sides would be a quick fix? I'm sure Tempo team will cook something up. The game looks amazing and I can't wait to try it out. Let me know what build you are going for first. (I want to do burn so bad.)
In my estimation the game is reaching for a place where 'knowing' becomes unworkable and rather you must estimate your way through the winding streets of vendors and encounters. This i think is a fairly new concept and creates a more dynamic, curious and re-playable experience. In the real world you generally also dont get to know the answers to hard questions, but must make uncertain estimates and test and adjust to get better and better outcomes. The game will reward sensitivity to subtle factors, and the skill cap will be effectively infinite. You wont be able to master the game by copying, but rather will have to learn more optimal thinking processes.
I think we will soon get to understand the game fully. I just mentioned all those things in the video, as they were news to me and I wanted to bring them up.
I think the visual clutter looks bad because most of the fights they've shown are late game final day fights. I imagine as you build your board you'll get used to the clutter your making and as we learn what these items do and memorize them it will be easier to tell whats happening on an opponents board. That said i don't like the pop up damage numbers that cover the health bar. There's a lot of info displayed on that bar so covering it up seems bad.
In my opinion, I see your point with the visual clutter but it's not real a problem since you don't have any impact on the fight while it's playing. So usually even if you end up not seeing the bar for a moment it's not that frustrating since you're not in an active state at this point.
i will not purchase cosmetics that are just 'decent looking .png files', and i am positive a lot of people will feel the same way. as of now, hero skins are the only cosmetic they ever showcased or alluded to that even has a chance to convince me to spend real money on. that doesnt bode very well for sustainability through monetization in my opinion. but lets see.
I'm pretty sure the cosmetics will be fairly popular in general. If you don't really see the value of the cosmetics, you can still enjoy great gameplay.
Yeah the health bar annoys me the most. The only way to follow how you are performing during the fight is through the health bar and I'm fighting through flames and shields to see it. I'm hoping there is some kind of damage log to check after fights to see what's not working in your build.
id note that in relation to skills you will be worried about them, like you will ant skills that work with items you have, like a 30% crit item would love a skill that doubles crit or whatever, and this is easy to work with while shopping. Its difficult for me to understand your view on this. Perhaps if you thought of skills as 'very small' items it would be more obvious why they matter. Say you spent your money, a skill maybe is low cost or no cost. Also the balance will force them to matter and it will reward players who have better game knowledge because it creates a higher skill cap. Think about going shopping, so much to look at, hard to know exactly whats the right choice, but trying to generally make good buys.
It seems like skills have reduced complexity now. Although I feel like having it this way has its own advantages. I'm already thinking about trying a challenge run where you can only get skills.
I think this game looks very promising but share some of your concerns too. The visual clutter is too much - opponents board and your board are far too close together. The visual effects all have the same green or red glow and it's hard to distinguish what is happening in a battle. All the status effects being horizontal across the health bar is super hard to track. I hope feedback from the Closed Beta is please fix the UI!
