Greetings! First, let me start by saying I am LOVING my time with Requiem so far. If I listed the things I thought were great or had no concerns with, I'd spend the next few days writing, so understand this is the rather short list of things *I* think could use some tuning.
Other people will likely disagree on some of these and that is perfectly ok! These are just my personal thoughts, although I'd love to see others' below as well.
In no particular order, and I'll add new posts as I discover more.
- Darkness - I'll start with one I think will have the most conflicting opinions ... I think the current Darkness system is too harsh and doesnt make RP or mechanical sense to me. I took my moose-of-a-2yo outside last night and found he didn't weigh any more in the dark, nor did I feel any weaker
I get where we're going with the Darkness concept and like it as an idea, but I feel it would make more sense to apply it to skills rather than attributes. My character would definitely have a harder time shooting a bow, writing a book, making things, etc in darkness and that makes sense. But I can still carry the same weight, run just as far, and think just as well at night as I can during the day (if anything, a INT debuff in the morning before I have coffee is probably more accurate )
- Early Exploration – This might just be my experience, but I wish there were a few more things to find when you run out of town. I’m an “Explorer” player type, and while I love finding the areas, I’m finding myself missing the little things that are useful to a new player but useless to an experienced one.
The perfect example of this in OldUO is the Reagents on the ground. Running around grabbing Black Pearl, Mandrake, etc as a new player made it feel like I was accomplishing something, even if I quickly moved on to buying my regs. I get that scarcity here is supposed to play a larger role, but I’d appreciate some similar mechanic that made me feel like I’m making progress in the early game as a non-powergamer/experienced player in Requiem
- Newbie skills & Skill Gain – This is probably a confusion thing, but understanding how the skills work and how to use them has been very difficult for me. I’m not sure if prior experience with OldUO has helped or hurt, but I feel that clarification on not just how to use the skill , (always told it is in the skills tab) but also *what* I should be using it on would be helpful.
For example, as a ~10 skill Horticulture – what should I be doing to raise skill? I ran to the farms but there was nothing I could pick. I tried clicking on glittery things in the wild, but they all wanted at least 30 skill. Some general guidance on what I should be doing, especially at first/low level would be great. World lore is another great example of this – what do I do to raise that? The wiki often says how to *use* the skill, but not what to use it *on* at low levels.
This is probably something that we, the players, should address in the Wiki (and I'll try to find time to do so), but it is a pain point early in the game, especially with limited play-time.
As for skill gain – it seems discouragingly slow at very low levels. I macro’d hiding a bit last night (~1h playtime) while running around and went from 0.0 to 3.4 at log out. In OldUO the early gains would come a bit faster up till some useable number (20-30… 50?). Again, maybe this is just comparison to old systems, but that felt painful and like it would be weeks before I could do anything even basic with that skill – and that assuming I remembered to start the macro at every login. Trying to gain hiding through natural use would mean a *very* long time to get even to 10-20. Other skills seem similar, but I haven’t tried them all – interested in others’ thoughts here.
The confusion around how to raise certain skills is still a bit of an issue, but some nice people on discord pointed me to the Archived forums here: viewforum.php?f=25 , which contains some good guides. I think most of them are still relevant
- Animus – This goes hand-in-hand with the above (and is probably the “answer” to the above), but the issue here is probably slightly different. I don’t have *any* feel for when it is smart to use Animus. The conversation on Discord and guidance online made me feel like using Animus for skills I plan to train up actively was a bad idea – but in the hiding example above it seems like *not* using Animus means the skills will functionally never reach viable levels. I feel like some light guidance to new players (pop-up, on page, whatever) on situations where it is smart to use your Animus makes sense. Having a extremely limited supply of something that feels so important makes me, personally, afraid to use it when I’m new and nerf myself later.
- Item Weights – This is probably my personal pet peeve right now =). Carry space is *very* limited, storage space equally so, which means I’m paying critical attention to how much individual items weigh. This makes sense thematically, but leads to situations where I feel unfairly punished for choosing certain skills based on the current weight values of items.
Example – reagents. *every* reagent I’ve found weighs a stone. Two units of “dust”? Two stones. One sapphire? One stone. Spider’s Silk? One stone!. This makes it ridiculously hard to carry my items to and from crafting areas and leads to unnecessary running back and forth from storage to do so. Non-crafting items share the same problem – 41 coins? Three stones. Ten loaves of bread? Ten stones. A key? One stone. Etc etc.
I’m being forced in the early game to throw out items I know I need, items I was given *at character creation* because of their nonsensical weights and it feels bad. I’d love weighs to be rebalanced more similar to OldUO where dust (for example) weighs something like .01 or .001, whatever. This kills immersion for me as the game is more about managing all the 14lb spider’s silk and 28lb coins than playing with the more interesting mechanics.
- Stackable items – This is similar to the above, but there are some items that feel like they are “must have” and “must have more than 1” that aren’t stackable and it makes inventory management a chore. Water bottles, dyes, etc would be awesome if they could be reworked to be stackable. I imagine this is a *big* change since those items also have unique values associated with their remaining uses, but a combination of making them one-use each and decreasing their weight, along with stacking would make the system feel a lot cleaner
Again – having an absolute blast and can’t wait to play more tonight, but thought I’d share my current pain points as a new Requiem player. Nothing but respect for the work the Devs have done thus far – this is the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
