Had a blast with the beginning of LoX but the game lost its steam around level 11-ish, playing on the middle difficulty level.
My current party is Gaulen, Paladin, Arcane Soldier, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue. For the past five levels or so every single combat played out the same, with the only choices being:
1) Use abilities for stronger attacks or conserve SP and just use normal attacks
2) Use shurikens or not
3) Use Spark to strike the front row or stone arrow to hit the back row. Later on this got subbed with using Flames to hit a column or using Blizzard to hit everyone.
4) Prioritise damage dealing.
Other than that it's gotten samey to the point I really struggle to keep playing. I invest in the same skills each and every level. Attribute choices are mostly no-brainers, and don't really feel like they matter a lot since stat-boosting gear is widely available. Loot is unrewarding and I've had 10k gold stashed for a while now, not feeling the need to splash it on anything since my party is perfectly capable to handle appropriate fights.
Basically yeah - after a really nice and challenging early game it turns into a repetitive King's Bounty like-fest - but KB at least gave you an option to swap troops and tinker with different ability synergies etc. Out here you chargen and that's it; you just keep pressing the same buttons. Not saying it's bad per se, but the mechanics simply are too simplistic to soundly support a game of this scope and length.
Couple of thoughts for the sequel (edit: more like a wall of text):
1) Give different characters more utility so that they have more options in combat and outside of it. Penalise overt specialisation so that you really need to think whether to put these skill points into weapon skills or boost something else.
2) Rework the loot system so that killing things and opening chests is actually exciting. A new piece of loot should have the potential to feel gamechanging instead of always being just a tier upgrade. That said - I think 95% of my gear is currently vendor-bought as what i found was mostly vendor trash. Opening chests quickly lost its appeal.
3) Make the game smaller and focus on replayability instead of sheer length as the mechanics will work better with that.
4) Instead of focusing on damage potential increase make the players invest into a broad number of options to cover different scenarios. Instead of making enemies tougher by HP/DPS bloating them introduce more enemies that require different tactics. MM10, for example, had enemies who would gain strength with each melee blow directed at them or were highly resistant to magic, preventing the player from getting used to, say, spamming the same abilities or attacks over and over again.
5) If you introduce a forced character again make him more customisable. As it stands the choices between optimal builds for Gaulen are very limited. Also, Gaulen's combat options are laughably limited (IIRC it's aimed strike and envenomed strike, axes or bows) making him one of the most boring characters in the game - which is a Big Thing considering he's supposed to be the protagonist.
6) Avoid 'must-get' skills and dump skills
- As it stands boosting weapon skills at every level is too desirable as skipping out means that soon enough the to-hit chance becomes very low. Conversely, there is barely any reason to invest in weapon skills for classes like cleric or wizard. Suggestion is to make weapon skills give less of a flat boost to accuracy so that it's no longer essential but make them unlock options (say, pole weapons on lvl 5 give a special attack that hit two enemies in a column, or axes on 10 unlock a cleave attack hitting an entire row etc, or daggers unlock a backstab that always hits etc)
- Thieves are massively gimped if they don't invest in the almighty shuriken. From my experience the shurikens are an I Win button (or, more aptly, a 'pay 20g to win' one, hurr) in many encounters.
- Every reasonable player will max out Gaulen's knowledge of herbs as it's one of the best skills in the game and dirt cheap.
- Plenty of cleric spells for the paladin and wizard spells for the AS are painfully redundant or unviable due to the low mana pool and prohibitive skill point cost. These classes should have their own separate spell lists.
- Identification skill and mercantile skill are wastes of skill points unless the player is constantly wasting gold.
- Armor may be worth a few points here and there but heavy armor weight is ridiculous; instead of leveling up armor a lot to keep up the player can be better off dropping points into endurance or evasion should he need more defense.
Instead of making armor restriction based on the weight allowance solely, you could make weight allowance less restrictive but make heavy armor bulky instead (so heavy defence comes at the cost of speed).
7) Different weapon types should differ more from each other and weapon effects (bleed, stun etc) should be more distinct as well so that players have a reason to invest in different weapon skills.
8) Remove the +XP gear and skills from the game. it's a bad case of "be more powerful now/get more powerful later" choice that turns out to be fake as you end up in a relatively similar spot anyway. It's an annoyance as minmaxers will feel tempted to go very +XP heavy while other players will feel they might be missing out/gaining strength too slowly while it seems like it doesn't really matter whether you pick up learning and appropriate gear or just put skill points into immediate boosts and use stat boosting gear. If levelling opened access to lots of different options this wouldn't be the case, but as it stands levelling is mostly a relatively flat boost to proficiency in combat. So do i pick a flat boost in combat proficiency from more levelling (hence more +skill +stat) or a flat boost in combat proficiency from boosting more combat skills and using +stat gear? Not really a choice and mathematically speaking the difference it makes comes too late in the game to be pertinent to the player experience!
Let's say you invest 10 points into learning and wear + XP gear while I never spend any SP on learning. That's 22 SP spent on learning. Let's assume the 10 points and gear pay off in 10 bonus levels (although it's probably a rather generous assumption). That's 40-22 so 18 skill points and 20 stat points. I am 18 points behind you but for most of the game I've been wearing stat boosting +All Stats gear that more than made up for it (later on a single item can give +2 or even +3 to all stats so 10/15 stat points respectively - and I have had all the slots open for these) and that probably made much of the content easier to blast through. I'd say I'm better off overall.
9) Allow for precombat buffing and add more buff/environment interaction spells to add utility for casters and give more options for tackling different encounters. What's the point of running to an altar to get a +RES buff? Let me cast it myself if i choose to but make it resource intensive enough so that i have to weigh my options carefully.
10) Considering the party has 8 slots in combat, 2 of which are never used unless a Summoner is used (or unless a melee char needs to swap places to hit someone on the far left or far right), it might be a good idea to introduce hirelings with special abilities that could be hired out for a set duration (e.g. 2 fights) for gold.
11) Rework the skill system so that every couple of levels a special ability unlocks to make investing in skills more interesting and important build-wise rather than merely providing the player with a +1 of this or +5 of that every single time.
12) Rethink the use of timesinks. Why introduce cereal grinding? Why force the players to run to altars for heals/buffs? Similar thing as with the +XP gear - the minmaxers will obsess over this, other players will get annoyed that they're penalised for not wanting to suffer the pointless tedium of hitting town every ten minutes or spending ages clicking on plants.
Another example is the XP bonus for clearing all random encounters. It's a good idea on paper but encourages grind instead. Minmaxers will repeat the same unchallenging fights to squeeze out all the XP available, others will stop doing it cause it's boring but feel penalised for having fun and progressing further into the game.
13) Rethink the economy a bit. Why would I pay more for food in the 2nd town if I can teleport to the 1st one and buy it cheap? Why would it even cost more if it's exactly the same food? Why would i buy a shield that adds +1 to a single stat when I can buy a shield that adds +1 to *all* stats for the very same price? These things make no sense.
14) Puzzles relying on the players lore knowledge are a bad idea considering that 98% of the game is combat and lore+plot seem like an afterthought in comparison. All it encourages is alt+tabbing and googling. I've opened three gremlin chests and still can't remember the names of most of the deities. Why would i care about the lore and the plot when the world is a setup for combat encounters and there's merely a handful of interactable NPCs, who are then copypasted across towns?
Fingers crossed they learn from their experiences and totally smash the sequel as even though i'm rather critical of LoX i can see loads of potential for greatness there
Still feel it was worth my 15 quid.
