I ended up buying the game before playing the demo because I figured I would anyway, and because I wanted to get 30% off before my discounts expire.
I put 90 minutes in tonight, but I’m still learning a lot of the basics.
I don’t know if you’ve played other Spiderweb Software games, but this one is a bit of a departure because Vogel’s made a concerted effort to streamline the game in certain areas. This has left some players feeling like the game was dumbed down, and others feeling like a lot of the tedium has been greatly reduced. In fact, there’s a good thread (linked below) on the Steam forums where a few players hash out what they hate and like about how things are done in this game, and the developer himself even chimes in.
In response to some players arguing in bullet-point fashion over certain features, the developer chimes in:
-Spiderweb
I don’t want to get involved in a big angry thing. I just want to make a couple quick comments.
- Grinding is boring and lame. This game doesn’t have grinding. If you find a dungeon, you can almost always beat it and move on to exciting new stuff. Haven only rewards winners, though. You have to enter every dungeon determined to WIN. Coffee is for closers.
Whatever else you can say about Queen’s Wish, it’s determined to not waste your time.
- Part of the reason for the free respec system is because you need it. On higher difficulty levels, you will have to make hard decisions about which situational abilities you need to take to beat a dungeon. Most people who think the game is simple and dumbed down have barely left the low level zones.
He’s responding to this thread:
One of the stand-out differences in this game to the prior Spiderweb games I’ve played is the fort upgrade system. As you adventure you will accumulate resources you can use to build shops and fort upgrades at various location you take over, and these shops will have various bonuses and items to provide and sell to you. There’s also a bunch of cosmetic stuff you can build if you want to make the place look nice too.
Other differences are the free respecs mentioned above, which basically means that rather than toying with stats, you’re able to assign and reassign skill points to various skills on the fly so your party is best equipped to handle certain areas. And as mentioned by Spiderweb software above, apparently this becomes a very important feature later on. I’m not sure how I feel about this just yet (potentially needing to respec every other encounter), but I’ve always like Diablo 3’s skill system more than Diablo 2’s incremental stat system–so this will probably be more to my liking.
The developer does actually address player concerns that the frequency respeccing might be too high, stating what his goals are for various difficulties and asking for feedback:
-Spiderweb
I’d be interested in some feedback about this. How far in the game are you, and on what difficulty? On normal, the balance is very fine so that, with care and strategy, you should be able to beat about any dungeon without respeccing.
On higher difficulties, respeccing tends to go by region, not individual dungeon, so it’s not a case where you have to spend hours on every dungeon swapping stuff out. (Remember, this game had a LOT of testers. It’s very carefully balanced.)
So where are you in the game that the dungeon is completely unfair? Tell me the dungeon, and I can look at it and rebalance it.
There’s some back and forth in the thread linked above regarding the following quoted post made by a random player. Perhaps some of their debates will sway you one way or the other. And there’s always the huge demo to try out too:
-Random Player
XP grinding – removed, now you get experience for doing things like clearing forts and dungeons which is much more fun than random battles
Character development – more meaningful. It is no longer about just putting points into strength and melee for your sword person, putting points into healing for your cleric, and putting points into magic for your mage. Instead, you are encouraged to look for traits in different trees that combo together.
Looting mechanics – stripped. I’m not very sad to see this go. My least favorite part of Avernum was the third or fourth trip I made to the cleared out slith fort to see if there were any more iron daggers and slith spears to grab and take home.
Base building mechanics were added that provide an extra upgrade path for your characters. And interesting new kinds of loot to find.
Combat is more strategic with an emphasis on distracting and incapacitating foes, spreading energy-using abilities around the party, and interesting abilities for all classes. It is no longer the case that warriors and archers just attack and mages and clerics do ‘magic’. Now everybody has useful special abilities.
They also brought back the requirement to clear out a dungeon entirely in one go. Combined with energy regen that only happens gradually for every few foes you kill. This adds an interesting tension where your potions and spells must be conserved.
There’s still loot in the game, but you find it in chests on the other side of encounters, and you can purchase items from the shops you build. The big difference is that you can’t grind monsters for loot or experience, because you get that stuff at the end of specific encounters in a zone (that I’ve seen so far).
I might make a thread (and move some of this info there) for this game if I don’t see one tomorrow.
