Grimrock

I've not been so addicted to a game in a long long time. LoG2 was a real gem of a find. I really hope there is a third coming! With that said, I'm certain if there is a third coming, you guys are looking to improve this title even further. So just wanted to give some feedback in that regard.

The most disappointing aspect of the game is easily the race/class/stats/skills/items balance. It's kinda lousy. I've thought about it a decent bit and tried to pinpoint source issues. Because I see a number of people around the community have commented on issues of balance, but often times those issues truly spawn from other issues entirely.

• Alchemists skew the entire balance of the game. They completely devalue more inherently tanky races, classes, spells, and gear. Sure, I could reduce damage taken. Or I could just chug infinite potions and not care. In the same vein, they completely devalue wisdom, mana regen, and mana size boosts, since all of that is largely unimportant when it's raining etherweed. I love the alchemist fantasy and hope it returns as a class. But it needs adjusting.
• Weapon skills were poorly designed. This is a really really big deal that had a huge impact on the game overall through a ripple effect.
  • The charge up system crippled how interesting weapon skills could be. Sure, they could still be used by preemptively charging them or dancing while charging, etc. But all in all it felt slow and clunky, and while charging the skill, your other characters were twiddling their thumbs. I could charge this weapon skill. But it will ultimately make the fight take longer. Which... why would I bother then? The only times I felt it worthwhile to charge a weapon skill was when I was getting the drop on something with a backstab. Or the fight hadn't started yet. In addition, the charge up system was entirely unnecessary! Weapon skills already had a balanced and intuitive limitation. Energy. That's the whole point of the energy system!
  • Styles of skills were also very restrained, boring, and often pointless. Part of what made the charge up time feel so horribly unnecessary was that the skill I was charging was simply going to do some bonus damage. I could have dealt more damage by not using the skill and not tying up my cursor! If the skills did more unique things and served more unique purposes, that would change this dynamic of the system. Not that I feel charge up time should return. It shouldn't frankly. It feels clunky and always will feel clunky. But it doesn't change that "It does more damage hurhurhur" is incredibly boring, and that this was a big opportunity missed for more cool and engaging combat.
  • This effected the game in huge ways. One thing easily noticed is a complete lack of value for energy in this game. Wisdom is a total dump stat (I'd rather have strength on my caster just to carry stuff for pete sake...) This is partially due to the alchemists. But I've seen a play through with no alchemists and it still feels pointless. One could argue there are just too many ways to regenerate your energy. But I'd argue that it's because the caster is the only one using it! If weapon skills feel largely a waste, that's generally 3 other characters that are simply not feeling any urge to consume energy potions. Not feeling any desire to boost energy regen rates or energy pools. This decimates the value of energy, wisdom, energy regen, etc. Which in turn greatly impacts race and class balance. Mage might look a lot more appealing if energy actually felt like a valuable resource. If I felt that an innate boost in energy regen meant more of a valuable resource to go around my party. But as it stands in LoG2, I just throw any and all magic I want at anything I want, my mage drowns in energy potions, and I use Wisdom elixirs to do my laundry. (Gotta have dat blue glow on my shirt)
• Magic was largely underwhelming all around. Probably in part because of a complete lack of scaling. But it really could have benefitted from more diversity as well. I spent a very very large portion of the game only using a single spell. And in total over the course of the entire game, I only made real use of 4 or 5. What is worse, on a second play through I felt no motivation whatsoever to try and do something different with my spellcaster. Because the options other than what I used the time before were all lousy.
• Firearms were a disaster... They had far too many gimmicks. Non-renewable ammo. Failure chance. Damage that doesn't scale. If the goal was to make firearms a distinctly different weapon set to the other options, it succeeded. But it just made them distinctly worse since every gimmick it had was a negative. You generally balance the pros and cons... I'd suggest making the damage scale in the future. (non-scaling is almost always bad in an RPG. RPGs are very centered around feelings of growth and progression. Systems that say "Your character growth doesn't matter" rarely feel good in an RPG. *points to magic*)
• Enemy diversity played a part in some issues as well. When what feels like 50%+ of the enemies in the game will be immune to poison, earth magic clearly becomes a poor choice. etc.

All in all LoG2 was a fantastic experience and I am recommending it to anyone and everyone I know. I just wanted to offer the feedback I could in hopes of seeing such an incredible title continue to grow. It does amazing things already and I really feel that looking in to advancing the RPG mechanics more is the best improvement that could be made.

also it would be nice to change the combat system or AI so it's actually possible to get hit occasionally, since anything other than damage/realtime won't really be visible until that happens

Good reading.