This is jank, and not the good kind. I'll start off by saying that I've never played the Dark Souls games or any games like that. I don't like games of that type but I do like Dungeon Siege and Diablo so you can take all this with a grain of salt. Feel free to ignore anything that you think I've misinterpreted about your game or your intentions for the game.
OVERVIEW
First off, out of every single game this Demo Day, this seems to be the one that unambiguously has the most impressive production value, presentation, and sheer scope. Even judged against other Demo Days it's still in the top 10. The game successfully captured a very fitting atmosphere. The cutscenes at the beginning are very well made and wouldn't feel out of place in a AAA game from 2002. The UI art looks very stylish. These things are a good reason to give the game a break over its many shortcomings, but they also set the expectations enormously high. The intro sets you up for a complete and polished experience, and then the game starts...
This is the most bug-ridden game I have ever played. Somehow that never resulted in a crash or anything serious breaking, but there's so many bugs here that I don't even think it's possible to cover half of them. The game's most impressive accomplishment is also its biggest shortcoming -- it's clear that the game's development focus has been on content development when it would have been much wiser to first ensure to make the gameplay as bug-free as possible. The scope is grand, but it's easy to forget that even AAA studios with thousands of employees struggle with the sort of thing you're trying to do here. It's admirable, but the mountain of bugs speaks for itself. The fact that you manged to pull off a working 3D combat system is great. The fact that you implemented over 10 distinct classes is great. The fact that your presentation is outstanding is great, but it feels like your priorities are backwards. To me it seems that you should get a single class working without any problems before you start adding the other 10.
PRESENTATION AND GRAPHICS
Presentation and graphics are amazing if looked at on a macro scale. The individual models, animations, UI design decisions, and so forth are questionable. They get the job done as temporary assets.
If the lore presented in the game is anything to off this might be one of the most unique and unconventional fantasy worlds I have seen. Using something that unique as a base for an straightforward action game where the lore is nothing but background flavour seems like a massive waste. There are no opportunities to engage with the story. The dialogue system is clunky and sparsely used. The choice to put the dialogue box at the top of the screen is baffling and makes the dialogue screen unpleasant to use. The (click to continue) prompt requires you to click on the text itself rather than to just click anywhere -- the wording is misleading. Sometimes the continue dialogue option is (click to continue). Other times it's just (continue).
I don't understand the obsession with taking the deepest most fleshed out fictional worlds and making action games or movies out of them.
The rock theme in the intro doesn't fit the game.
Not a fan of the depth of field blur. It makes the game look cheap.
Breakable containers are nice but the way they shatter looks weird.
The tooltips that you get in the item and character menus are positioned in a nonsense way and seem way too big for their purpose.
The eyes option during character creation doesn't appear to do anything. For this sort of zoomed-out game a "face" option would be much more appropriate. That's besides the option for facial hair.
Hair looks strange but then you notice the transparency effect that it uses can be seen almost everywhere. I don't understand why it's made that way because it doesn't look good.
GAMEPLAY
When you're creating a character for the first time you are given 0 information what each stat does or what they affect. This is a horrible game design mistake that turns off people who actually like these types of games immediately, since they are left to guess.
Why are the controls only viewable in the tutorial starting area? Ideally you should be able to look over an overview of the controls at any time, especially for a game that uses more than 5 keys.
I'm not sure if the tutorial works. It tells you some specific controls like the jump in a good contextual moment (when you actually need to use the jump to get over the tecnch), but a lot of the tutorial text just seems placed at random intervals and can easily be overlooked. The first few popups just show up one after the other. The tutorial does nothing to teach you about the significance of the character screen or the upgrades there, or even the character skills as a whole. It's very easy to completely forget the skills exist with some classes.
The loot drop system is bad. I'm going to assume this is probably how the Souls games do it but this type of loot drop approach is usually associated with MMORPGs where they do it out of efficiency. Dungeon Siege and Diablo have much better drop-pickup systems and while those systems are more complicated to implement they compliment the flow of gameplay much better and help avoid the type of confusion that the Great Ordeal creates when you have 100 enemy drops stacked in the same 50 square centimeters. The fact that interaction targets are automaticlaly selected and very difficult to control by the player makes in even more diffcult to target a specific loot container which means some loot might not be even possible to get to unless you also pick up all the loot around it first. I just stopped caring about the loot after a while, and this is a bad sign, since your primary audience with this game is loot junkies so if you can't appeal to them with more clarity in the loot system it's a huge missed opportunity.
The level layout is extremely jagged with a lot of steep inclines. Given that the character doesn't seem to be able to climb slopes too easily this makes traversal frustrating and sometimes makes you wonder if you're even supposed to be going the way you're going.
The combat feels nice to engage in occasionally and there's definitely the foundation for something good there but it's completely broken and spastic in its current state. Constant rubberbanding; lag spikes every time there's more than 40 npcs on screen; lack of any clear difficulty progression -- the way the gameplay works right now is just constant trial-and-error. There's nothing particularly challenging or strategic about the gameplay loop and there's nothing particularly satisfying about the combat encounters besides the enjoyment of dispatching the enemies one by one, and watching the occasional head fly off.
Enemies spawning out of thin air in the tutorial is obnoxious and doesn't look right. Consider having them run out of some kind of tunnel or something similar
The way that enemies spawn is ridiculous. The player is close enough when it happens that it's extremely obvious they generated out of a single point you see them rubber band away from each other.
BUGS AND ISSUES
Too many to list, but I will mention the ones that stood out to me the most.
Visual glitches constantly. Animation poses don't load sometimes. Skyboxes turn black sometimes.
The game makes my PC's fan enter overdrive mode. This is standard with Unity when the FPS cap is removed in the editor but I have never seen it happen on a game build until now.
The intro doesn't end on its own. You have to skip it manually once the cutscene ends.
The interaction prompt is weirdly coded. It shows up when you're 1-2 meters away from the thing you need to interact with but not when you're standing right next to it. Sometimes you can't get it to appear and have to move around like a crazy person trying to activate something.In some very rare cases clicking the interact button when the prompt is visible on screen does nothing and you have to leave the interaction range and come back. I remember this happening with the map at the camp. Interactions in general are really unreliable since some times you can't seem to even get some of them to activate the prompt, so you're blocked from interacting with them.
You can't enter the menu when character is locked-on to an enemy and a lot of times when you are in combat in general. Ignore if intentional.
Characters switching to T-pose for a few frames every time they are switched on the "continue" screen.
Opening the battle summons screen makes the cursor disappear your only option is to back out with ESC.
After you change your hair from bald to any hairstyle for the first time you can no longer go back to bald. The character model is stuck with a basic hairstyle while creating a character. It's possible that the default setting is not supposed to be bald but that is another bug also and it just activates the default hair for the first time only after you switch hairstyles.
During the intro cutscene the character controller is working and you can hear your character attacking when you click.
Exiting a save and reopening it changes the time of day. You can exit in the middle of the day and when you come back it's early morning. Why? Speaking of which the transitions between the times of day happen instantly which gives a strange impression.
One time when I loaded into the world the game was stuck in "cutscene" mode for some reason. This is just loading into the world, no cutscene was played before that. I could still control the player character but the UI was disabled, there wa a "skip" button in the corner, and all interactions were blocked until I clicked space to skip.
At all other times opening some menus (such as the map selection screen) which seem like they should freeze the character controller also allowed me to just use attacks and skills to my heart's content while the screen was open.
After jumping into the first "mission" a dialogue interaction is displayed but you can walk around while it's on screen. I don't think you should be able to move around while in dialogue. When the point captures happen this also starts dialogue interactions but in those cases you're in the middle of combat usually so you almost immediately click out of dialogue by accident or don't even have time to read anything because you're being attacked.
The healthbar of every single enemy that has taken even the slightest amount of damage is permanently visible no matter how far away from them you go. It doesn't seem like it should be that way.
You can still hear the outdoor sounds of rain and the horn ambiece while you are inside the Nonman's Well
The levers start twitching after you use them.
Broken or missing display on the geography underlay of the minimap in some locations.
The summons just keep hitting the air after there's no more enemies to kill.
Some enemies spawn stuck in the level geometry. This is the Scrancs at the bottom of the Nonman's Well and the big guy enemy in the first level.
Odd choice to allow players to access the missions after the first two considering they are unfinished levels.
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Great work on what you're accomplished but the issues need a lot of attention. The game's scale is grand but the polish and attention to quality is not there.