Yea, the bones of a great game are there, but right now I can’t do much with animal taming or trade skills/crafting. Animal Taming is stupendously expensive early game, and has such a low base chance of success that it costs hundreds of thousands of gold to skill it up to the point where you can start unlocking passive abilities that affect your chances. This is supposed to be addressed in the patch, but the Xbox (and maybe other consoles, dunno) is behind Steam in terms of update version.
And the same goes for all other crafting skills. Problems include the cost and key component scarcity compared to how many combines one must do to make any appreciable skill experience. But to compound the issue with these other skills is that the experience you earn for bulk/batch combines is broken and only giving you the experience for about 1.5~2 combines no matter how many are in the batch. Shitty lesson to learn after combining/crafting 40 items at once, especially since this game won’t allow you to reload a prior save on Xbox (dunno about other platforms).
The work around is to do each combine individually, but players are forced to navigated menus and re-select the item they want to craft for each and every attemot, this is quite time consuming with a controller.
Another issue is that the companion(s) you find start off at level 1 (that I’ve seen so far), and they level up at the same rate as a player character. I unlocked my first one at level 24, and I will have to spend an extraordinary amount of time leveling these guys up to match my hero if I don’t want them dying within the first 60 seconds of a dungeon, because unless you can resurrect (I can’t yet… but might need to think about dumping stats and ability tokens into the spell), once they’re dead, they’ll stay that way till you go to an overworld save point and reset the dungeon.
And finally, although the world and dungeons are hand crafted, of the 4 dungeons I’ve 100%ed and the other 4 to 5 I’ve explored to 50% or so, the progress for each has been exactly the same: kill enemies to reach a switch and unlock a gate, go through gate and kill enemies to reach another switch and unlock another gate. Sometimes you have to find another entrance to a dungeon and unlock a gate from the other side, but except for these cases the dungeons mostly play through identically (the latest dungeon I’ve found so far has traps though, so perhaps there’s a lot more variety later in the game world).
So with crafting and animal taming off the table until an update addressing them hits Xbox, and companions being a massive time sink for very little return, all I’m left with is the main campaign and dungeon running, but because after 19 hours hours with the game I haven’t seen any huge differences from one dungeon to the next (except for creatures), the game starts feeling really repetitive without much else to do. But like I said, I think most issues can be fixed with significant quality of life updates, not a complete redesign of the game or anything.
