ひげ
reading some critiques people have with my game is really interesting. sometimes things pop up where i'm like, oh yeah i definitely should change that, why didn't i think of that? other times, it is extremely indicative of the type of game that i made and how divisive it can be. it has its roots in old school JRPGs where there isn't anything insane going on with the combat and it has an extremely open structure. i understand why things like yellow paint and quest markers are a thing now lol.
there are also a lot of things going on with the story that require you to slowly accumulate information over time if you have questions. some things just aren't answered, on purpose. it seems like some players don't understand that, and it does partially mean that i haven't made the core gameplay interesting enough to make it worth it for some people to dive deeper into the world. something like dark souls has extremely deep story telling that isn't available unless you really look for it, but the gameplay is highly engaging so it forces people to engage with it. i think if i had focused more on that aspect, it could have attracted more people, but at the same time it wasn't something i was necessarily looking to do. i actually wanted the combat to be simple as a design choice because i value world exploration more in an RPG and i kind of just wanted to make a game i would enjoy lol.
I need to find a better way to communicate to the player right from the beginning of the game that sometimes they might need to come back to a place later when they are higher level, and sometimes they might need to do a bit of exploring to find the next quest location. I can't think of a good way to do that though without just outright stating it, because I've tried to do it with more diagetic means and it hasn't really worked.
I think in the next update I might include warning messages on some higher level areas until the player hits like level 30 or something. Maybe I can have the main character say something like "this area looks dangerous... I don't know if I'm strong enough for it yet." Of course I'll still let the player continue if they want to.
@beardalaxy That's a problem a lot of games struggle with honestly, I can't count how many times I've thought "am I not supposed to be here yet or is this just really hard?" in a game.
@pettanko that's why a lot of more relatively recent games have things like level scaling or just straight up tell you the level of the enemies in the area. I didn't really want to do either of those though. I wanted to make a world that exists beyond the player's direct experience of it and imo that naturally means that there are going to be areas that are just too difficult at a lower level. I want the player to be able to see that too, instead of just artificially locking them out of it.
You would think that if you get killed by an enemy in one hit, you would think yo u aren't supposed to be there quite yet, but if I've learned one thing about players through stuff like D&D too, it's that they are extremely stubborn. If they want to do something they are going to ignore everything else and bash their head against a wall until they either manage to do it or they give up on the game entirely. That's not really an indictment, just an observation and one that I have a lot of trouble reconciling with when trying to build a world that feels alive.
I'm honestly happy that people are playing the game enough to critique it to begin with though. My main desire has always been that people play the game so I'm happy if that's happening.