Finished the game with (one of) my co-op buddies today. Really liked it, and it’s probably in my top 5 for the year. And even if not, it’s definitely the most surprising game of the year; who would have expected something like this from a game that at a first glance looks like a typical Steam asset flip?
The level scaling was a non-issue for organized co-op. Today we wanted to try the last boss but our gear levels were 9, 11, and 15. There was such a big spread since first player had only played about a third or half the game, the second one had only played through his own campaign, and I’d played through the second player’s campaign, half of my own, and maybe an hour or two of pubs. 45 minutes of playing in my world, and my friends were at averages of 13.5 and 14.(Though this only worked since my save wasn’t where we wanted to do the final fight on, so we had basically an endless supply of level 15 areas to grind for galvanized iron on).
The structure of the game still feels really weird even at this point, and even after deciding the level scaling doesn’t matter. It still feels like the randomness vs. fixed parts are exactly the wrong way around. The fixed drops are annoying when you play with the same group, everyone always has exactly the same build options available, so you don’t really get as much variety within the party as one would want. But then on the other hand you can’t even get the benefit of the fixed drops by finding the encounter that gives you the drop you want, since those are randomized and you need to play through big chunks of the game just to figure out if you got lucky and had the right boss get generated. The level procgen isn’t really varied enough to support extra plays; I’ve gotten bored of some specific biomes and prefab pieces much faster than in games with hand-crafted levels.
The issues I had with mods went away in the mid-game. Early on it felt like they charged so slowly that it was impossible to rely on them, and I mostly forgot about them. But then in the late game challenging fights were all about working around the mod recharge rates. (It helped that I mostly ended up using mods with multiple charges).
I hate how stingy the game is with Luminite. The boss weapons are cool; but there’s no way I’m upgrading more than two of them to a useful level. I really like the moment to moment gameplay, and have basically played through the game 1.5 times by now. 'm quite likely to finish at least this current playthrough. But that still won’t get me to max level on even a single boss weapon.
The player count scaling on the final boss is indeed total bullshit. It was totally impossible with three players, in three runs (and with two players knowing the mechanics from previous runs) we only got the second phase to open up once. The one of the players left, and we could quite consistently do it on every single trip to the other dimension. We just got screwed a few times by one player dying to the boss and the other player being teleported out before they could res. Having both players use Ruin took care of that, but it required a bit of equipment juggling and meant we needed three teleports.
And holy crap what a nightmare the final boss is with randoms. I got matched with randoms just entering the final battle for the first time in half my attempts to play pubs. There’s no way I’m going to baby sit somebody for half an hour while they learn how to not die to the trivial first phase, and then however long it takes for them to grasp how the second stage works without any communication.
