I plan to do a comparison this weekend but I havent inventoried it yet. However, it feels underwhelming even with the additional tiers.
Right, that’s certainly possible but it feels like a bit of a bait and switch if someone jumps right in and spends money on a shortened Quest Pass window.
Seems reasonable, but “things” certainly sounds like it should include shards and loot tickets.
Does anyone at this company understand what the term ‘Quality of Life’ actually means?
I’m so pleased to see they have continued to ignore the playerbase, and decided to tell us what we need to make things more enjoyable, rather than actually listen.
Inventory / Inventory / Inventory!!!
FFS
Lyranica updated and I took a look a the new tiers for a minute or so for a quick first impression before she walked out the door.
As a super quick off the top-of-my-head hot take, the new passes have had their rewards severely nerfed. Going to do a deeper analysis later tonight, when I can access her phone again or after I update mine. That said, my initial gut reaction would be to not buy the new passes.
So, in the name of “increasing value” of the passes, what we really mean here is that the majority of the good rewards were removed and replaced them with a whole bunch of high-priced shop items to claim that the value offered was increased. (Example, somewhat made up numbers: A 250 gem (200 paid + 50 free) tier was replaced with a random piece of rare armor “valued” at 500 gems in the shop plus 10 major shards. Value of the offer “doubled”, while still being objectively a downgrade from the previous offering).
Most of the Gems from the pass are gone. The few left (500 in total, I think?) are all on the paid side of the pass.
The mythic relic at the end of the pass has been removed, and that’s a borderline dealbreaker for me. Fuzzy memory for now, but I think the pass gained a few follower crystals and 1 Glyph in exchange (3 random on paid step 50).
Screams intentional newbie trap, with little value for advanced accounts. Will have to ponder these developments further.
It does yield 6 total random Follower Crystals, which is the one thing that looked “better” on first look.
Starting with the first of the problems - the update itself. This caused a series of issues even getting the game to start. First downloaded a 400+MB update from the Play store, then try to launch the game.
Initially error messages about a lack of space - no - got more than 100GB of onboard memory free (Google Pixel 6). After a few of these, force closing the game and relaunching it progressed - to a Unity failed to initialise message.
Reboot of phone, try again - Unity failed, try again - oh game loads, but it wants to download another 500MB update… okay. Then a 0.89MB update. Then a 0.89MB update. Then a 0.89MB update. Close and restart the app. Unity failed. FFS. Try again, and hey, we’re in… finally.
#facts #relicsarelesscommomthanunicorns
From the UI design before this update, and the changes made in this one, I really have to ask whether the devs test on their phones at all, or work purely on 24" monitors via emulators. Because if you played the game on a phone before releasing these updates you’d already have a better design.
Chests
The new active running chests has a spend gems to speed it up, right above the row of buttons to access the different menus - totally getting clicked by accident.
Minion select on chests - a backwards step in several ways
Why remove the options to sort and filter minions?
Your default choice of fastest is not the preferred option, particularly since the removal of dungeon marks for chests in the 0.38 update.
Horizontal scrolling is slower and lets you see far fewer minions at a time when looking for the one you want. Trying scrolling through them on your phone to find your Pussbags, Snack Rats and Octoghouls which are now pushed somewhere off to the right.
Honestly for this area it should be reverted back ASAP. By all means work on a better design than the existing one, but this, this is not it. This is just a hinderance.
Graphical issues about minion stats not being visible already mentioned in comments above - Epic has purple text, which on a Yellow background is impossible to read. Considering the default sort order you put in, that really should have been noticed and addressed in house testing.
Changing loadouts - the list was already in such tiny font that it was hard to click the right one before the update. Now the position has moved but it seems you didn’t make the box even big enough for the loadouts so it has a scroll within it. Make it big enough to click on and make accurate clicks ON A PHONE.
Consistency of design.
Compare the Store page to the Equipment loadout page.
One has a few large buttons on it - easy for fat thumbs to mash and spend money. The other has a dozen small buttons crammed into the same space given to the single “BUY VIP OFFER” in the store.
If the store has big buttons because it is user friendly and easier for player to make the right selections - that logic applies to the other windows too.
Overall pretty disappointed with the patch. Around the 4th patch in a row that doesn’t address much of the fundamental issues within the game.
I would say the biggest issues still present are:
Point of food is to show us that we are very wasting as we are IRL. (not all humans but alot of food goes to waste so why not mimic life)
Agreed with @RubiconX ! Quality of Life definitely should have included a major increase in Inventory (and no, an additional 20 slots isn’t a major increase).
Here are some other true Quality of Life issues from an active player:
Increased ore production. At least double the current production levels or better yet triple.
Also, stop having the game timing out during PVE battles. Going down from 6 to 5 enemies hasn’t fixed this issue.
Also, please stop nerfing gear without including it in the Patch Notes (I’m looking at you Runic Rings - your effect was lessened by more than 50%!).
Why have you continued to ignore the desperate need for additional sources of Gems income for long-term players?
Also, where are ANY Kingdom management tools? Active Kingdoms with max players are still being penalized.
And while I sincerely appreciate that they are trying to allow the Rewards from opening Chests to not take as long to be shown, right now it moves so fast that it gives me a headache.
I much prefer what happens during Daily Siege or Event Dungeons or PVP where all the Rewards are shown at the bottom in a single screen. This is a much better time saver without potentially causing seizures to occur from the extremely rapid flashes from item to item.
You also CREATED new Quality of Life issues with this update:
With PVP one of the most important pieces of information is the score from the battle but that isn’t listed at all along with the other information on that screen. Why? Please include it.
Sneakily changing Battle Pass during an Active Battle Pass term was really shady. And I never received all the Rewards I am still due from both Completed and Unreached stages.
Even worse is telling everyone the new Quest Pass is for 4 weeks when, according to how you coded it, you’re already a week into the new term. That’s really sneaky and cruel and it is definitely not providing players with what you said you were providing. (Also making it pretty much IMPOSSIBLE to complete the Quest Pass in the abbreviated time given.)
Also the new Quest Pass is much more unfavorable towards players - you have seemingly completely removed one of the most important Rewards - GEMS!
You completely removed a player’s ability to sort Minions in any way before selecting them to send on missions to open Chests.
And the way the Minions are shown below the Chests makes it really hard to read their information. It is also way too easy to accidentally select the wrong Minion for the mission.
The whole concept and implementation of Stars is both frustrating and useless. Why do I want to know the rarity of the chest I am going to receive if absolutely nothing I do has any impact on said rarity? It’s clearly something that the Devs thought would look cool but it’s just really annoying. It would only be helpful if it revealed the final rarity much, much earlier or if your actions during the battle impacted the eventual rarity.
It’s also pretty obnoxious that each enemy battle within that Dungeon or Skirmish doesn’t earn Stars.
Also, half a Star feels especially ridiculous.
All that being said, I do appreciate that the game is making more of an effort to better communicate what’s actually happening during PVE battles.
I also like having a LOT fewer screens to click through to access information in quite a few areas.
I did count and there’s 900 gems but they’re all under the paid/premium side. Sigh. But if you’ve got 1500 Crowns lying around, then you’d get 1800 gems in 4 weeks if you can complete all the necessary Quests.
Over on the GoW forums, I wrote a post last week regarding the state of things and monetization here in PQ3.
To that extent, I asserted that development of the general game here is frozen until the devs settle on the monetization scheme for the game as the foundational cornerstone of the game.
And now that 0.39 is out… the update is almost entirely about monetization again and little else. 0.38 twisted the monetization screws fairly hard on the early and mid-game crowd. 0.39 turns those screws even harder with the downgrading of pass rewards and removal of keys from both the elimination of Bounties and from Story mode stages.
Nine months into beta/early access, I have to wonder at this point when the game will finally move on from monetization schemes onto finishing the rest of the game.
It’s even worse now in 0.39 because the mythic relic source from the Battle Pass did not carry over to the new Quest Pass. That leaves the only sources of mythic relics in the game being 280 Diamond Marks, the $50 USD VIP Mythic Bundle, Eveline upgrading (3 Legendary Relics + 2000 Gems + 3 Eveline Crystals), or the once-a-month-ish jackpot roll on the Challenge Board.
With the removal of the guaranteed mythic relic from passes, mythic anything is pretty much whale territory only,
It’s a psychological trick to possibly persuade younger account players to buy a continue on a boss, if they know that there is a high-value chest at stake.
The game rolls the chest before the run in 0.39 , instead of after the run ends. There’s no rhyme or reason to how the stars are distributed during the run, except that the game knows how many stars need to be distributed in total before the boss fight to match the rarity of the chest that it rolled.
All the star system is a bunch of smoke and mirrors that are ultimately meaningless in the long run (at least as it exists in 0.39).
Thanks for counting those.
True, but 1500 Crowns is a $30 USD purchase. If a a player wants Gems, it’s more economical to directly purchase 2000 Gems in the Shop for 1000 Crowns.
Excellent point! Thanks for sharing because I hadn’t realized how “overpriced” those gems are in the end.
Yes, I know that the Quest Pass provides more than Gems but what I really need right now are more Gems, Tier II and Tier III Relics (aka Greater and Major Relics), Shards (every level except for Superior with the exception of Superior Weapon Shards), Ore, and Marks.
And while the Quest Pass does provide some of those (if you are wiling to pay for the Premium Quest Pass), the amount of those items is pretty paltry for the cost.
Know what I don’t need? Random Rare Gear. I need Legendary Gear or Mythic Gear.
And I don’t need Lesser Relics. I’m very well stocked on that end.
I definitely don’t need Food or Gold. Ugh.
I am good on Runes and Scrolls too.
Tested this out this morning, and I am glad I saw the second statement suggesting that the new implementation of the story mode is likely incomplete in 0.39. Going to give the benefit of the doubt here, as the partial new implementation of story mode really destroys the immersion of the experience as nothing more than 9 skirmishes + 1 dungeon run per chapter, with some narrative interleaved between the chapter steps.
Yes, the reality of the matter is that story mode has always been like this since the beginning. It’s just that the implementation is so cold and mechanical in 0.39 that the experience no longer feels like a RPG, like it did pre-0.39. As noted in the patch notes, hopefully this user experience is addressed in 0.40 or 0.41.
Same situation here for the downloading.
So what this is telling me is that now that I’m at the beginning of chapter 14 I can’t even finish the game without missing narrative…? WTF!!!
EDIT: After reading Lyrian’s last post just before mine it seems like maybe I’ll get the narrative but not the experience of “traveling the map”.
I really like the event dungeon rewards screen. It’s fast and sums up the reward/info in one screen.
I like the in-game match notifications of gem
creation/destruction/etc. It just feels good to see the effects.
I like the quicker chest opening. Only thing missing here is a salvage all button.
I heavily dislike the minion select system. I don’t know how to find my desired minion in the scroll. I scroll, scroll, and said eh forget it, and select random minion.
I heavily dislike the gear upgrade screen. At some point, the upgrade button is default set towards upgrading to the max level it can. I did not want to level my item 15+ levels, just one. I don’t want to worry about oopsing away some needed shards.
Thought the battle pass offered good value before change. Mostly cause it had a superior relic and gems. I did give the original a whirl and bought that. Not really interested in this quest revision.
Edit: Can we add back the how many loot tickets are available in the ticket usage screen? That was a nice minor quality of life thing I liked.
I agree with your points, for me personally the two which really bother me are the lack of ability to choose a pet style (focused on speed, keys, etc.) and the fact that they absolutely gutted the value of the quest pass.
The previous pass I bought and it felt at least relatively reasonable of a fee to pay, this one I will never consider buying.
This is a major drawback to immersiveness and wanting to play. Before, even if I’m not paying attention I can tell we’re going places, having an adventure. Now it just seems like I’m stuck in the same place, and things are coming to me, or I’m generating boring fight scenarios. The story feels much less special. I wonder what it feels like for a new player.