Hello there FS and the Forums!
Having now levelled up my Veteran to 30 and starting on the Zealot over the weekend, I have managed to get a grasp of several, rather crucial aspects of a game of this type that will most likely be detrimental to the longevity of the game.
I’ll start by addressing the biggest elephant in the room, the progression.
While gaining levels is not slow and getting to max level isn’t excruciatingly painful even if you only do lower level missions, the major issue is how the balancing has been done, which links to the weapons themselves. Having weapons be fully 100% random what you get with no information when you can even start getting certain weapon types, timegating the acquisition of these items and having absolutely no guarantees you can even get the weapons you would like to use or see, it becomes outright demoralising to do other classes. It doesn’t help that you tend to get the “fun” weapons once you are done fully levelling.
The core of the issue links to the second major sticking point, the balancing in the game, but the other one comes straight to giving players incentive to try out different classes and not giving up on them outright because of how painful it gets. As an example, having played the game much like an addict for the whole weekend and Friday, I got my Veteran to 30 while my friends are anywhere around 15-25 with their levels on their characters. Now doing another class to not make it incredibly dull for them while also giving me some more diversity is just outright agonising to do. I think it very much unfair to be asking them to also do new characters purely because I started out a new one myself when they haven’t even gotten to the end game with theirs.
The issue comes from the weapons themselves and how they significantly affect the balancing in the missions and levelling in the game. When we played together on the same level with roughly the same weapons, things were very much equal though there was clear disparity in class’s identity between the Veteran and Ogryn against the Zealot and the Psyker in the early game due to lacking a lot of the fundamental abilities that makes those classes unique as the Sharpshooter in the early game hardly changes in the way you play the class on a theoretical level since you start as the elite/ranged enemy sniper in the early game with your accurate weaponry and end the game with the same, only thing changes is how well you can contribute to the crowd control aspect. Ogryn continues to be the meatshield until he gets the actual shield, but otherwise hardly changes.
Zealot on the other hand goes from single target eliminator to a horde clearing lord of war that makes your average Khorne worshipper jealous, but only once you get there. The basic sword doesn’t quite literally cut it to give you the capacity to sustain it in a manner that is any better from the Veteran or Ogryn, making you even in some cases a liability until you can get the weapons needed to deal with ALL melee enemies, or at least be able to hold them back.
Now, it would be an entirely different beast if all classes had access to all their weapons from Level 2 onwards in some shape or form. If the Zealot would be able to use the Eviscerator or Thunder Hammer from the get-go or something that comes even remotely close to it that allows you to do the somewhat unique part of your class, you’d be able to not only enjoy your class from level 2 onwards all the way to the end, your experience only getting steadily better as you level up, gain more gear and feats to play around with. Now however there are major slumps you must get over before you reach the fun spot, and that fun spot is not consistent. My friends playing Veterans got the Power Sword at lvl 19, I got mine at 22. That is a difference of several missions worth of missed out fun that thing is letting me have.
So the suggestion would be to allow people to access ALL the weapons in the game in some shape or form. Let them get those Grey tier weapons at the very least so that they can test out to see if the class is something they might truly enjoy down the line, give them the ability to switch their loadouts around, try different weapon combinations and so and so forth, there is no real reason to deny players this from gameplay perspective. Obviously story related reasons are there, but there are ways around it, like I said, give players a direct, but crude, alternative to different weapon types so they do the same thing but are not as great as the ones you get when you reach max level.
This brings us to the balancing. It is painfully obvious that the difficulties are balanced out the notion that players have access to all the weapon types, feats and can coordinate which classes they are doing. The jump from Level 2 to 3 is so much more staggering than 1-2 since 3 starts to throw armoured enemies at you like candy, which you can’t really do enough against before you get overwhelmed unless you have a team with flawless coordination, or you have at least one player with a weapon that can easily deal with them.
We went from failing them miserably to enjoying a fun challenge the moment I got my Boltgun. Suddenly being able to one-tap most basic Elites ranging from Gunners to Flamers and being able to take out the Crushers by mag-dumping or popping my ability and hitting 6 times in the head really helped out when dealing with the massed Elites the difficulty throws at you. It is truly wondrous how much more interesting the difficulty got when we had the tools needed to deal with the enemies on that tier.
This also brings us back to what I mentioned before, fun for the whole group as a factor. Currently playing the Zealot with none of my unique equipment and being limited to the most basic of equipment has made me basically just tag along through the level, killing a handful of basic enemies where and there while I let my friends with their significantly more powerful weapons slice through everything with impunity. I might as well just AFK the whole run until the end for how little I can, or even need to, contribute. This of course won’t even change for me until much later before I even have a little more than a chance to get my class equipment which will bring me to the level with them.
What use do I have with horde clearing when my friends with Power Swords can do that exact same job better than me? What point is there for me to try and rush in to take out an Elite when they can just tap them in the head? The only role I am there to fill is item carrier, avoid making them have to play with a random, and occasionally kill the random enemy that was spawned behind them. Beyond that, my contribution is non-existent for the massive problem caused by the balance. I don’t see it as a fair solution to tell them to drop their cool new weapons they have been grinding for and finally able to use just so I can have a little bit more to do during a mission, all because I have already enjoyed those weapons myself and would like to enjoy even more new weapons.
Finally, as this post is already too long, is customisation. Obviously this is a beta and obviously there is going to be more in the full release, but for the love of the God Emperor, do give the players significantly more stuff to wear and change. Aside from the faces, we all looked identical for 90% of the game, with the only actual difference being that I had progressed farther than they had and as such had the later level outfits. The customisation SHOULD START FROM THE GET-GO. I can understand the stuff we have to begin with being what they are, but there should be so much more variety for what we are able to wear, and no, just being able to switch colours around or making the Flak Vest look shiny instead of matt is not that. It really hurts immersion when we are meant to look different, akin to what we obviously see in the cover art for the game, but then in-game watch a hundred identical people walking around the hub.
Obvious fix is to give players more outfits from the get-go, and NOT MAKE THEM RANDOM. Let people choose, make them pricy for all I care in the game but let people choose what kind of clothing they want to wear. Unlocks obviously can be there, but at the core of a game like this, what should be critical is the ability to make your own character, which involves being able to individualise your appearance in more ways than just the face, gender and voice while the rest are either locked behind blind luck, stupidly difficult challenges or an unreasonable amount of grinding.
Minor tidbits I’d like to see in general would be the ability to see what enemy we will be facing, Traitor Guardsmen or the Cultists, as that does have a minor effect on the equipment you might want to bring to the fight.
The rest are things I can’t really provide feedback for due to this being indeed still a beta. Mission variety, map pool, etc. All those can only really be answered later on when the full game releases and we have access to all the zones, missions, mission types and maps.