This is a contrast of PR from the previous entry regarding Echtra Games with Torchlight Frontiers.
I last posted about Warlords Awakening 10 days ago after PLAYWITH published their developer roadmap. Since then, the company has been dead silent (with no one higher up than the game masters communicating or interacting with the shrinking player community). The login trend on this is a slow but steady decline.
https://steamdb.info/app/838330/graphs/
Yes, the above is just a snapshot where during primetime, theres at least 160-200; but these numbers are just unsustainable (and PLAYWITH are not doing themselves any favors with their lackluster community involvement). I posted my initial early access review a few days ago because it didn’t make sense to wait until even the first month,
I don’t have an issue with slow updates since I realize it takes time to code and then test things. What doesn’t add up is how we heard some glowing stuff from the ambassadors pre-early access (about communication and responsiveness to “changing” things); none of that has transpired to date once early access began. Maybe they are doing like what so many companies are doing now which is communicating only on select mediums. PLAYWITH only has their own official forum, Steam discussions, and Facebook as official channels. I know they have a Discord only for their ambassadors which leaves everyone else out (since there is little if any information coming out from most of the ambassadors). Basically, their current setup is not working and utilizing a chat based medium like Discord is not the best way to deal with feedback that entails providing “walls of text”.
It’s like the 70+% positive reviews; most which do not do this game any favors in terms of not just stomping out the issues, but actually improving it to where the quality and state of the game will be a huge selling point. This overwhelmingly positive recommendation isn’t translating to increased visibility because this is plain analytics; the sample size is way too small (taken together with actual licenses along with the other usual metrics including play time).
Besides my “can’t recommend purchasing it during early access” review, I’ve left feedback on both their Steam and official forums. Some may wonder why I waste the time (when I know a lot of this sort of feedback ends up in the trashcan). I do it for the simple fact of “speak now or forever hold your peace” so that I can say that I at least tried (similar with D3, Devilian, and to a lesser extent, MU Legend when I filled out their survey) and point back to that feedback as something that was not actioned upon.
I’m offering critical feedback because I wouldn’t mind seeing Warlords Awakening being able to survive and carve out a niche. Guardians of Ember managed to hang on as a B2P for a long while (with some equally low CCU’s) and by comparison, the combat and movement is just plain better in the former compared to the latter. Warlords Awakening has helped to scratch that a small bit of that itch which has been missing for me since Devilian shutdown (it’s not as good in the combat, movement, and graphics). It does have some game play issues caused by the design changes PLAYWITH made to the base ELOA design though.
And it would help if their Korean development team took the time to address why they made those changes; you know like how Neowiz’ producer does his nearly weekly letters. I know PLAYWITH isn’t a big operation but there is a point where the person in charge has to at least do this thing called public relations.
I’m not going to stop playing since I want to get all the classes to level 40 (which itself, is an utterly boring grindfest from 30-40 (with most of level 34+ ones being kill 50+ of this one particular mob that happens to have other different mob types mixed in; so you are actually killing hundreds only to complete that objective, and then have to kill 50 of the other type). It’s not like the mobs have different abilities either; it is just artificial filler which for many players, will be boring and unfun.
I know some folks “power leveled” by having a max level kill mobs (since just tagging a monster will give anyone who does that credit). But I am grinding it out myself to get an idea of just how drawn out the process is (I don’t expect them to change this since Korean game designers find this kind of leveling alright). That was one of the core problems with Devilian past level 52 for newer players where there was no questing content for each subsequent level cap increase (easy for veteran players getting there two levels at a time).
Grinding I have no problems with if it is both fun and rewarding. That whole aspect with Warlords Awakening is messed up though (there is literally nothing that feels like a positive reward loop with how things are tuned right now). Gold acquisition is horrible and there are things that make no sense from a cost perspective when it comes to crafting. It takes 10 gold to open most of the slots in both warehouse and personal stash. It’s these things that need to be tweaked if they want to actually the game to feel fun and rewarding past the initial low levels. And right now, they’ve proved incapable of providing minor updates in a timely manner and offered a very vague roadmap that doesn’t address a lot of the more pressing feedback that many players have left since early access began.
