u/Bubbly-Advantage-937

Note: This is going to be a long post. Please do not downvote my post based solely on your being unwilling to read it. If you don't agree, thats fine, but please don't use "too many words" as an excuse to afford my opinions less visibility, because I'm posting this solely in the hopes of seeing change.

I've played basically every action RPG (please don't make me list all of them. I will if you want me to) and am particularly a fan of games in this style. I believe Soulframe has the real potential to be the defacto standard for action RPGs going forward, as it does away with a very huge list of seemingly nonsensical tropes that exist in a lot of other action RPGs and for the greater part of the gameplay aspect of this game, puts the fun back into a genre that was otherwise being bled dry of it.

All that being said, I'm very sad to see some very overdone tropes of RPGs still present in this game. Most of these things I'm going to mention are behind-the-scenes type problems that most players don't really notice, they just end up frustrated. I want to bring these problems to your attention in the hopes that this may be the game I finally don't ever get bored of, because it is so very nearly there I have all but no choice to make some kind of attempt to talk to somebody. I understand this is in closed alpha, so there is a long way to go, which is why I am attempting to get this information into somebodies mind as soon as humanly possible before it becomes much more difficult to solve.

1. Rewards feel almost meaningless after about 100 hours. This is the biggest complaint I have. The beginning of this game was ripe with "Woah, what does that thing do?" and it really hooked me into the looting aspect of this game, but at this stage, i have almost no motivation to go into a dungeon of any kind if not to grind for one specific thing I already know is in that dungeon. Every single dungeon from Neathuns to Dermak has a giant glowing golden chest at the end that only has ever given me dracs and 2 onyx, if that. I still haven't used Onyx once. On top of that, the big giant at the boss at the end of the dungeons are always so well designed, sometimes very challenging to learn, and really makes you feel a sense of accomplishment when you finally beat them, just to be slapped in the face by the 40th consecutive reforging attunement item as your big reward. At this point I don't even look at weapons on the ground anymore either, I just dismantle all of them because theres a 90% chance its a Falx, Mace, or a Blitzel, and a 10% chance its one of a small pool of other weapons I already maxed out. That brings me onto the next point.
2. Grinding in this game is often times entirely forced. I know this takes a lot of inspiration from Warframe for its design, but this is actually the exact reason I left Warframe after over 1000 hours. In an effort to provide the maximum amount of playtime out of the game as possible, virtually every stage of everything takes forever to accomplish. A good example of this is the path I had to take to get to a nice looking red dye in this game. I chose tethren because I thought it would be red, but after grinding the dye and crafting it myself, I find out the dye you get from Kith of Kings is more of an orange despite looking red on the icon. I looked it up and found out that for some reason, the blue option, Sirin, was the option I should have chosen during character creation to get the red dyes from Silent Rose. Odd, but no matter I'll just change factions. Except in order to do that I had to grind Kith of Kings, the faction I don't want, all the way to level 3 to earn the right to start back over at level 0 in Silent Rose, then I had to grind Silent Rose up to Level 1 to get the crafting recipe for the dye, then I had to run around corruption zones for an hour looking for Sinods Maidens just to craft that dye. I intended to start the game with a red character, which I don't feel is a huge ask, and ended up getting hours and hours of grinding before I got to accomplish the color I wanted. Almost every time I felt like I was "done" with something in the first 100 hours of my playtime, it turned out that I was in fact not done at all, and had way more hours of running around looking for random spawns. Which brings me to my next point
3. RNG based resource acquisition is provably flawed. I have a scientific theory for this. Not a lot of people know that most numbers in computers are not actually random so to speak in the sense that they are pulling random numbers out of thin air. Because computers are purely deterministic as a technology, a lot of software chooses to rely on minecraft-esque seed-based random generation. If they don't use that, a surprising number of "Random numbers" in computers, though less common in video games, are generated from Hardware Random Number generators that exist on the computers CPU. They pull "random numbers" by measuring seemingly "unpredictable" data like thermal noise. I legitimately feel like whereas in a typical scenario, these numbers are unpredictable, they can become more consistent under certain conditions, like when playing an intensive video game inside of a hot room. This could very well lead to a sense of "Infinite Luck" in RNG based video games or a sense of Infinite "Bad Luck" depending on what type of consistency was created coincidentally from either a specific seed or a specific set of environmental circumstances affecting the HRNG. This would not be an affect felt by any more than 20% of the population of people playing the game, and would be perceived entirely as a random consequence of the system.

To illustrate my point, let me talk about Squirrels. This Orlick quest completely eluded me for literally two weeks because no matter how hard I looked for however many hours, I could not find one single squirrel. I complained about it countless times in chat, and many people were claiming it was absolutely no problem for them to complete that quest, and that they see squirrels everywhere. Do you know how I ended up completing that quest? I used the Orengall wolf form to crouch walk past the giant metal barricade at the unfinished siege castle in the center bottom of the map out of pure curiosity as to what was inside. Much to my surprise, there were a massive amount of squirrels inside of this unfinished area. I ran around the interior of the area for less than 15 minutes and completed the quest. How do you explain that? Were all the squirrels just hiding from me in the castle? Squirrel castle?

The alternative is world-based acquisition for all of my last 3 points. For example, Silistavf could be at the end of a dungeon as its sole reward. That is something that really gets the players blood pumping, to walk into a room and see a single weapon on a pedestal. You already have procedural dungeons, an alternative that sees a guaranteed better weapon on a pedestal at the end of harder dungeons and less valuable weapons for early dungeons procedurally determined by the exact same system you already have. This would eliminate the feeling of pointlessly grinding through a dungeon just to get absolutely nothing, whilst still giving the player a reason to replay the same dungeons for different items. This would extend to armors too, but they would be way more difficult to acquire. The circade armor is a great example of what I want to see more of. That is a very difficult to solve possible that if you don't know somebody who knows about it, you wouldn't even know to look it up to begin with. Puzzles, Buttons you have to shoot with a specific element, maybe jumping puzzles that don't tell you they are impossible with the jump blessing, there is a whole myriad of ways to get creative and apply challenge to the concept of acquiring weapons and armor that is not the same overdone "fight this same guy 20 times and maybe you get lucky" method of acquisition. For resources, the clear solution is to just let us buy them with Dracs. I have so many dracs that I would love to spend on the 1 hymn rose I can't find anywhere because RNG won't give it to me, and dracs are by no means an infinite resource, so you would then actually have a reason to grind specifically for dracs. I know some people run out of dracs, but the things I do in this game afford me tens of thousands of them.

4. End-Game enemies consist mainly of explosions.
   This to me is the most overdone method of creating "end-game enemies" in the world. The Mendicant King is one of the coolest bosses in the world to me but its very difficult to focus on how cool he looks with the Lantern Shrimp and he himself shooting a different projectile that explodes on impact with an unclear blast radius literally once every 1.5s. Even raids like the Mirifuir raid devolve very quickly into a bunch of giant multicolored explosions that make it very difficult to even tell which of the 40 enemies are the boss you are fighting. Whats worse is that this almost never kills me unless I'm focused on something else, its incredibly easy to avoid all the explosions, and coupled with the huge power spike you get late-game allowing you to easily kill almost anything, it just ends up feeling like a big clusterfuck rather than a difficult end-game experience.

5. Enemies are seemingly designed to frustrate new players.
   I have a very bob-and-weave playstyle that for some reason is very punished in almost all action RPGs nowadays. Almost every RPG forces you to walk slowly backwards whilst facing a giant mountain of enemies that walk up one-by-one to fight you whilst 2 or 3 stand behind him waiting for an opportunity to cheap shot you. I dream of a game where I can jump into a giant group of enemies, hit one guy two or three times, then dodge to the next person and do that again whilst dodging attacks, but there are a great number of "features" completely preventing me from doing that. Enemies consistently wait until the last third of their health and then block forever basically, I've gone through 4 or 5 combos to see how long it would take and I almost never get them to stop blocking before I have to break their stagger. And again, the solution is incredibly simple, which is stop attacking for literally less than 1 second. That might seem like no big deal, but it completely throws a giant wrench into like half the playstyles that could be enjoyed in this game to have to pause your dashing and hitting things every 5 seconds because somebody has put up a shield. Additionally, a good number of enemies just slide along the ground to close any gaps between you. The Mendicant Knights for example during every attack in their combo just slide on the ground despite their legs not moving to close massive distances between you and them. This means you can't truly "dodge" their attacks, you have to use the "dodge action" at the right time. For somebody like me, who relies heavily on positioning to keep myself just out of reach of enemies whilst remaining close enough to counter attack them, this is yet another giant wrench thrown into my playstyle.

Speaking of giant wrenches, I cannot tell you how tired I am of this game spawning enemies off-screen. It is hands down the most annoying aspect of this game to be literally 1 sword swing away from killing a Sinecure Officer and then suddenly a random blue swirl from off screen comes to heal him back to full health because the game spawned 1 single healer off screen to heal him. They are never hard to kill, they are purely there to be an inconvenience to you. I do the smart thing and clear out all the healers and ads before I start fighting the boss purely to avoid this type of result, but the game literally forces me to watch all my work fighting disappear in an instant. Similarly, I am very tired of being lazer-focused on what I thought was the last enemy only to have a random enemy come out from off screen full-charging at me to knock me down. Which brings me to my next point.

6. Recovery time for a lot of animations is way, way too long.
   For example Bromius Jump. This is not a long range ability, so cannot really be used as a reliable engage, it primarily operates as a reliable crowd control and short-range mobility tool in fights. Or at least, it would be, if I did not fully stand still for more than enough time for enemies to recover and hit me after I'm done with it. Same thing with getting knocked down. The amount of time you just stand there staring at the guy running at you with a deadly weapon is more than enough time for him to reach you and hit you with said deadly weapon. It is extremely frustrating to be spamming the dodge button, my character is standing up and nothing is stopping him, but the game says "actually you need to stand there for a little while before you can do that first"

7. Enemies need to have a shorter detection range than their attack range.
   After you enter combat with somebody, their posse should then be able to attack you at their current range. But the current system that sees all enemies with a detection range at the same range as their attack range results in a lot of extremely pointless combat with one single guy way off somewhere. I have countless times been standing in the middle of an empty woods, check my map to see where I want to go next, and then suddenly I'm being attacked by some guy who was taking a leisurely stroll on a street a mile away. Similarly, very often I manage to escape a near-death scenario with a sliver of health and no potions left, only to get shot by the 100% accuracy of a random archer that saw me from a neighboring city-state. This "always be on your toes!" type of gameplay does not feel difficult, it just feels annoying to have to deal with after a marginal amount of time playing.

8. Player power is a bit unbalanced.
   I've seen this complaint a lot, and I do like that its easier to kill things in this game than say Elden Ring, but I also agree its just a bit too much in some areas whilst being very abysmal in other areas. I currently use Purity which is my favorite sword I've ever seen in any game ever, but very often I have to switch to my offhand odiac because for some reason my main hand in addition to its 4 times longer attack animations, is 4 times less powerful than my odiac. I can kill just about any ad in 3 shots with my odiac and its by no means got amazing tempers, but my Purity with tons of stagger damage tempers cannot reliably take on mirifuir on its own. The Odiac I got 15 hours into my playthrough still consistently one shots everything, but my 5 star greatsword of the Mendicant King cant? It doesn't make a lot of sense.

TL;DR: This game has a huge amount of potential, solves a lot of problems I had with other games, and I will undoubtably be playing it for a long time. I just want this to be the game I never have to put down. If some design changes are not made, I will have no choice, and so will many many others. If the team chooses to abandon some of what they chose to implement because either Warframe or other RPGs have it and come up with a new solution like they have so famously succeeded at before, this can be a beautiful thing. Otherwise, it might just be another cult-fanbase game that its hard to convince people to play IRL. I have never once been able to keep somebody interested in Warframe, despite it occupying my time for years. This may seem like a long list of complaints, but I've never played a game where the problems with it can be condensed into one reddit post. This game is unfathomably close to perfection, they just need the feedback to understand what is working for the players.

Before I get into this let me say this: I know not everybody is going to agree with me here, I'm just asking for those who don't to look at what I am saying objectively. Look at the games themselves, the numbers, and the data I bring up before immediately typing a hate comment that I'm just bad at video games or whatever.

I have been playing MMOs for 15 years now. I have played 100% of every MMO there is to play that is worth a crap, with the sole exception of franchise based MMOs like Star Trek Online. I'm sure that's a great game, but have no interest in Star Trek, I'm sorry. I have 2,000 hours in Black Desert Online and was the owner of the guild that owned the Mediah region like 7 or 8 years ago called Shaolin. (I'm sorry if you remember us as a group of newbie killers, I only found out that was going on years later after I logged in and got mercilessly hunted down for once being the owner of that guild.) I had so, so much fun in that game, but eventually the game started becoming beholden to a lot of the same things we see everywhere else. The "No P2W" motto was dropped and people who paid massive amounts of real money were given gigantic advantages in PvP through the use of outfit smelting, and half the playerbase left including me. Now, its important to note that the reason I play MMOs is because I have a gigantic amount of problems when it comes to making friends and being social. I had a bad home life growing up which, long story short, resulted in me being basically terrified of face to face contact. So MMOs have been my only source of friends for a while. That may be sad, but it is what it is.

I've gone through every MMO or even slight resemblance of an MMO there is to go through. And I mean every one. Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, ESO, Eve Online, Star Citizen, Destiny, Destiny 2, Warframe, Soulframe, Runescape, Adventurequest Worlds, Adventurequest 3D, Lost Ark, Throne and Liberty, Phantasy Star Online, Phantasy Star Online 2, Planetside 2, Foxhole, Everquest, Tibia, DC Universe Online, Champions online, the Ragnarok games, Dragon Raja, EARTH, Where Winds Meet, Maplestory, Realm of the Mad God, and even games that aren't MMOs but have so much as vague multiplayer functionality like ARK: Survival Evolved, Conan Exiles, Rust, V Rising, Soulmask, No Mans Sky, Space Engineers, Terraria, and thousands and thousands of hours in minecraft. The list honestly goes on, but I think you get the point. I've been around the block. I've spent easily a third of my entire life in a multiplayer video game experience.

Now let me get to the point. There was a certain comradery and friendship I used to be able to find in these games, even after I left BDO. You really never knew who you were going to meet, where they came from, or what type of conversations you were gonna have if you logged onto Guild Wars 2 in 2019. While MMOS were far past their hayday, the few people like me were enough to keep most MMOs thriving at some capacity, even nearly empty ones like Blade and Soul. In addition to that, the development of the games themselves were largely centered around player freedom, "what can we let players do in THIS game?" was the big question every game was asking themselves. I felt like whilst there were shortcomings or the occaisional cash grab, the development of games was largely focused on the magic and wonder of being inside of a completely different universe with different rules, and what they can do to capitalize on that.

But now, every single thing I have relied on throughout my entire life has been slowly drained from all of these games. Every new game that comes out, no matter how good it looked in the videos, is always some vague shell of a video game with over a third of the budget spent on cosmetics. Games like Where Winds Meet are unplayable in MMO mode because every cosmetic has a trillion different particle effects and it crashes my GPU. But Where Winds Meet is a great example of what I'm talking about. For those that did not play that game, there are cosmetics in that game that cost 25 thousand REAL dollars. You would want to believe they made no money on that, but brother I'm here to tell you they sold a virtual boat for 25 thousand dollars multiple, multiple times. We can outcry all we want about developers using their games as a cash grab, but I am failing to see any instances where they are anything but highly rewarded for it beyond marginal reprimanding.

The same thing extends to the rest of the design, not just the monetization. In Lost Ark, a game I waited upwards of 5 years through thousands of delays for, which has at this point been released for 4 years in NA, you cannot play as an assassin or a mage unless you want to play as a scantily clad female character. 10 years of development total and not once have they found it worth it to allow men to play as assassins or mages. You might be inclined to say "Just play as a scantily clad female then!" and what, get a weird look from my roomate every time she walks past my door? No thank you. Beyond that, I just don't want to. I dont have fun playing as characters I don't identify with, which is the common reason for the inclusion of class systems to begin with. But they sell more female skins than male skins sooooo... time for a 14th female class! Same thing for black desert online. There are over double the female classes as there are male classes. Which to the greater population of weirdos who say "If im gonna stare at a butt for an hour, I want it to be a nice one!" is a huge plus, but for me it means I can't play the class I want to play in Lost Ark. I play almost exclusively assassins, but if I play lost ark I either have to shoot people, punch people, or be a giant hunka hunka mountain man who lift big heavy thing and groan.

For years I assumed these types of things were either phases, or things that specific mega-corps were abusing to drive profits like Tencent. But at this point, its unignorably the entirety of multiplayer gaming as a whole. As time goes on, people are not making better decisions, they are releasing Marvel Rivals, chock full of as many overpronounced features in as little clothing as they can fit into a game made by MARVEL. Its not just big corporations either. Go look at r/indiegaming or r/solodevelopment for 20 minutes and come back and tell me you don't see somebody use their amazing tech skills to program a badass movement or combat system just to slap a japanese schoolgirl in a short skirt as the character you play as? Why is it at this point always japanese schoolgirls that are advertising every indie development? The answer is more views and clicks by any means necessary. The issue for me, goes way deeper than oversexualization though. Because there are things called demographics. When you put a bunch of scantily clad women into your game and throw out a wide net to any and all people to play it, you're not gonna catch a bunch of respectful, intelligent, or otherwise beneficial members to include into your community. To watch that content, and by extension play your video game, you have to be a person who is willing to stare at scantily clad women on the internet for hours, which is certainly not me. Let me ask you a question, do you want to hang out with a dude who spends 4 hours a day staring at scantily clad women on the internet? Do you think they are gonna be enjoyable to hang out with? Do you think they would react to things in the appropriate manner, considering they react to their sexual urges by wide-eyed oggling the nearest available female body, real or not? I would wager you wouldn't.

Which brings me to my final point: Erosion of the community. Years ago, I would get on games like BDO or Warframe that have a "Global Chat" feature and be there for hours having conversations with random people about random things. Sometimes we'd see eye to eye, sometimes we wouldn't. Thats okay, were all different people who live in different countries, we don't need to agree on literally everything in order to be nice to each other. Now? Absolutely fucking not. Over the last 3 years specifically, at least 30% of every single thing I say in a global chat is immediately chastised, insulted, or otherwise demonized in some way whilst the vast majority of other people flood the chat with absolutely nonsense and emoticons. 100% of any non-glowing feedback I ever give on any game in that games community is immediately jumped on as me being bad at the game, or it somehow being my fault. For instance, the other day I was playing a game that forced me to do the tutorial quests a good 300 hours into my playthrough to learn a bunch of things I already knew because I had been playing already for 300 hours, I just didn't manage to walk in the right direction. Thats okay, the entirety of the rest of the game, save for one item I need to progress was available to me despite the fact that I skipped this tutorial, and skipping the tutorial did not hinder me at all while playing. Despite this, I was still forced to go back and do several tutorial quests to get the one item. I said in the games world chat; "I wish they didn't make me go through the tutorial quests to get this item. I purposefully avoided it for the last 300 hours because I like to learn by experience"

That is a perfectly valid thing to say. This developer decision has negatively impacted my playthrough, so it would be nice if it got changed. You'd think I'd at most get a "Eh I don't really care but I see why that would be annoying for you" but instead I got an angry mob of 5 people telling me I'm bad at the game, its my fault, and a bunch of other things that didn't even really make sense in the context of my feedback. Likewise I was in a different game, talking to one person, was asked what I do for work, I said "Well I do a lot of things but primarily I work in marketing" and as a result of saying that, got 2 seperate individuals not even involved in my conversation chastising me, insulting everything I said, and saying "Go away, uninstall the game, we don't want you here" I'm not even lying to you, because I said I was in marketing. They were saying "We don't want your marketing garbage!" all because they read less than one sentence I typed in response to somebody elses question to me.

This is pretty much every world chat now. And it seems to be seeping into the greater community of gaming as a whole. When somebody sees, hears, or otherwise is made at all known of something they don't 100% agree with, they start relentlessly attacking you until you have to block them. Every time I see somebody say ANYTHING negative about a game, which is IMPOSSIBLE TO BE PERFECT, I immediately see 5-10 individuals barking total nonsense at him until he gives up. If they were being truthful, which sometimes they are, I'd agree and be like ok, but in a staggering majority of the cases, its just a bunch of people looking for reasons to get mad at somebody.

People don't like this behavior. It turns a vast majority of the laden individual off from even trying MMOs, and leaves an overwhelming majority of bad apples left in the basket. When those bad apples immediately chase off any good apples that don't conform to their version of a "general consensus" no game community will ever be even slightly enjoyable again. This, for me, equals a devastating loss to my mental acquitity, as my primary form of socialization has been reduced to a safe haven for bigots who get exiled from real life.

This is a lot bigger of a deal to me than it is to you. I know you maybe don't care, but I'm begging you, reading this right now, to just be the bigger person on the internet. If you see an angry mob of monkeys throwing poop at a dude just trying to walk through the jungle, go help the dude out, don't just let them harass the guy, and certainly don't join in on the harrasment. If you come into a situation where multiple people are already jumping a guy, feel free to go "woah woah woah guys, what did he do?" before you let them continue harassing him. It won't hurt. And No you can't see the other persons face, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to insult, demean, marginalize, or otherwise harass them or anyone else in any way because you don't agree with what they agree with. That is the dictionary definition of the word bigot. Look it up.

Edit: Despite the positive comments over half of the people who see this still downvote it. How can you downvote a post calling for people to treat others with respect? Are we really in that much of a minority here? Or is it too many words, brain hurty?