I’ve been playing for a solid three weeks now, and I’m hitting the point where I’m butting up against the limits of what the current game offers in terms of character progression.
Level 30 was pretty quick and there is no further use for XP. Crafting doesn’t really exist yet so getting good items is pure luck. I’m having fun just playing a match or two here or there simply because the gameplay is good. Stockpiling the various currencies and squaring away high base stat items for when crafting launches is the main reward for playing right now though.
Playing at higher than difficulty 3 is not really fun for me because the enemies have so much health that I don’t feel like they die when it feels appropriate for them to die. I’m also just not ambitious about beating it just because it’s there if I don’t enjoy it.
I’m also someone who comes at this game more from the RPG side of gaming than the shooter side, so to me the fun in tackling higher difficulties in games comes from getting enjoyment out of optimizing a character to be a match for the challenge.
So that’s sort of where I am with this game. I’m thinking about what would it take to keep me playing heavily. I am having fun just playing a mission or two to unwind, but that’s not going to keep me logging in every day forever if the reward systems in the game reach their limit after only a few weeks of play.
So, there are a couple really big things that I think would help drastically.
For one, implementing the crafting system obviously will make a huge difference, because we’ll be able to actually optimize our equipment. There are a few things that I would like to see get a bit more emphasis, because optimization shouldn’t just be about what is most powerful, but also about what play-style you enjoy. For example I would really like more blessings for psyker staves that scale with charge level, because I enjoy dealing a devastating blow with a fully charged staff over just spamming it, but there aren’t enough blessings that reward that.
Another really important thing to me is allowing some use for XP past level 30. Perhaps it can be as simple as awarding items every time you fill another XP bar, but random items are not necessarily all that rewarding.
A huge thing for me would be expanding the crafting system to allow reconfiguration of the stat bars, either by moving points between them one at a time, or even by adding points. Since the items are capped at 80% right now there is definitely room for some kind of system that allows raising those stats further. Upgrading the base level of an item would also be a good system if it’s a slow and steady process.
I really want systems that allow me to just sort of “tinker away” at things to slowly make them more powerful. Of course there should be a cap in place, maybe the maximum base level of items goes up with each new content update or something, but being able to keep your items updated by pooling some kind of resource into them would be nice.
Maybe you could extract points for bars by breaking down items, like you could raise a bar on an item by one point by sacrificing an item with a higher base item level. That way loot and items don’t lose their value simply because you have a way to tinker with the things you have to improve them.
A big thing beyond that would be having some kind of shared vault for your character that you can use to pass items between them. Just make it so that items that another character can’t use don’t even show up in the vault even if they are in there. I’ve had a lot of instances where I found the perfect item for one character while playing on another, and I find that immensely frustrating. Various currencies should also be account wide, because right now it seems like you can really only dedicate yourself to one character at a time.
Cosmetic unlocks are important to me as well, and I feel like there is a bit of a lost opportunity there by making a lot of cosmetics only unlockable by doing absurd challenges while in high difficulties. If there were rewards for simply playing on high difficulties I would be much more inclined to do so, because doing difficulty 4 or 5 is already very tough for me, doing weird challenges on them is absurd.
Game balance is a big thing, there are too many things that currently don’t really work, but my opinions of that are all over this forum in other threads.
Another thing I would really like is if the difficulties were tweaked a little, because I really hate the increase in health that enemies go through. The health increase in particular is an issue for me because that’s what makes it feel like higher difficulties are not challenging because I can make fewer mistakes, but are simply a version of the game where things don’t work the way I’m used to.
For example, dodging a mutant so that he runs into a wall, powering up my force sword and executing him with a charged strike to the back feels great in Difficulty 3, but in Difficulty 4 that simply doesn’t kill him. So the strategy that I perfected on difficulty 3 to defeat this enemy simply doesn’t translate. Playing on a difficulty where I can’t do that deprives me of one of the really fun ways to best an enemy. I don’t like it when the game comes at me like “This really cool thing you just did perfectly wasn’t good enough because hitpoints.” Let me do the cool thing, just kill me harder when I don’t do the cool thing.
Of course future content is going to be a big thing that keeps people playing. I’m hoping we will see a new class early next year. I would really like to have a Gunlugger Ogryn first, because I really like to go whole hog on the Ogryn heavy weapons. I’d also really enjoy some more Psykers. There are some very interesting ideas in the names for the costume colors. A telepath who can make enemies kill each other would be pretty awesome.
Anyways, this is just a collection of thoughts about what I would like to see addressed to keep long term motivation up with this game.
