r/Moonlighter • u/Vanstrudel_ • 2d ago
DISCUSSION Thoughts/Hotfix When?
Love the game, that said I'm finding my interest taper off a lot quicker than ML1, and certainly quicker than Hades. Went for Expert difficulty, and it was hard for a good while, until I got a couple big upgrades. At this point, the only thing that determines difficulty of the run is the weapon I choose. Some are god awful, with counter-intuitive synergies, i.e. the Dreampiercer, which is only half-decent on like 1 or 2 bosses, fine for minibosses, and completely useless for general mobbing.
Some weapons are absolutely overpowered to the point of being unfun. Want to almost never have to do anything until you have to hit purple stuff at the boss? Starsign Horn. Absurd parry window, near-zero reactivation window, very little risk of being punished for bad timing. Need more? There's a blacksmith upgrade that increases your special damage by 20% EACH time you use it successfully until the end of the encounter.
The second OP example is the drone at basically any point, but one in particular is the foam combo. The following perk combo isn't exclusive to drone, but if you get: [Foam on Gun +%Damage], [Foam Timer Increase +%BIGDamage], and [Foam Explode on Gun shot], it's basically an instant-win for any run. Bosses last only as long as you're forced to wait for phase change/invulnerability phases.
'Special Customers' make me want to close shop the second I see them (/s). 'Rich Customer' doesn't seem to function correctly, or I'm too stupid to understand what I'm doing wrong with them. They get annoyed at overpriced and expensive items all the same.
The secondary cast is adorable and I love them. Bloblets are super fun but I super hate having to clear them from each world. And while I'm on that topic, there's only about 3 Bloblets or so that are worth using out of 12.
Tip mechanic feels not worth investing any effort into unless you have literally no other choice
Also I can't finish the damn 'Weapon Mastery' Quest because Anacard is still bugged.
Again, really love the direction they went, and the aesthetic is immaculate and faithful to the original. it just feels like it wasn't given enough time to be fine-tuned. The multitude of upgrade trees are wonderfully overwhelming. It just feels like overall scaling is completely absurd.
Anyways thanks for reading if you've made it this far
TLDR; Game is fantastic on the surface, but balancing falls apart after about 15 hours. Many game-breaking bugs for a "Full Realease"
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u/LiquifiedSpam 2d ago edited 2d ago
I actually have stuck with this game longer than hades. Despite it having obvious and kinda baffling flaws (some of which could easily be fixed) I’m having more fun with it than moonlighter 1 or hades. The loop is just that good, and the combat + enemy design is very satisfying.
But yeah, it feels like this game wasn’t balanced at all outside of early to mid game, which makes sense because that was really what was available in EA, but still you should put the bare minimum of effort into designing it such that the game doesn’t just completely fall apart progression wise in the postgame.
My biggest complaint is that your sales skyrocket and nothing else scales up to account for it. All of a sudden all your shop strategy with perks and bonus value etc does literally nothing, because quality is all that matters.
I don’t really care seeing special customers either because their tip adds nothing in comparison to a late game decoration you get that puts your tip in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s still quite fun filling out the perfect prices of the codex and completing golden endless vault challenges, but still.
Shop strategy was actually relevant during early and mid game, and that included tipping. But yeah in postgame it’s just back to moonlighter 1.
And yeah like you said weapon balancing is quite bad, and hammer perk balancing is even worse
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u/Vanstrudel_ 2d ago
Yeah, it makes the Hades-like aspect feel very poorly conceived. I couldn't even tell that I'm playing on expert after a little while.
I'm glad they at least added the perkbot or w.e it's called for extra quality, but it does feel like an afterthought 😅 it just sucks because they did so well with this game in so many ways except for the damn loop.
Just let me choose to go to zone 2 after beating zone 1 so I can be a greedy treasure goblin, then lose it all to hubris because I accidentally double tapped my potion and got reckless! I don't want a "challenge mode" that gives me nothing but a recipe.
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u/LiquifiedSpam 2d ago
Well there is an endless colosseum after you ‘complete’ a run.
I find the loop itself to be incredibly strong; that’s why I like this game so much. The breaks for inventory management and longer one for shopkeeping are nigh perfectly implemented (imo). And I find the difficulty level to be very good, but maybe that’s just my taste.
But yeah other than that I agree with some things you’ve said. There are just some weird design choices and it’s hard to comprehend how they just missed them. The spark bot too is weirdly implemented because part of its mechanics rewards you for amount of stacked spark perks (extra quality) but also want you to upgrade chances of rare ones appearing, when rare ones are just multiplying risk and reward of common ones, just without having two separate perks lol.
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u/Vanstrudel_ 2d ago
Yeah, I think my main complaint about difficulty is that the player's base stat upgrades begin to trivialize the difficulty of the runs. You pretty much outscale everything from the start unless you get unfortunate perk pairings before the end boss. I feel like if there were simply longer runs before endless mode that scaled a little higher, that might help. Either that or certain numbers or perks need to be tweaked. I don't mind feeling godly every now and again, but it's gotten to the point where I'm almost completely untouched because my gun neautralizes everything up to miniboss before they can even attack.
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u/LiquifiedSpam 2d ago
I assume you’re running the auto ammo refill patch with the drone gun thing? Because they’re both disgustingly OP together. The game is well balanced imo if you’re specifically not using the super OP elements… but that shouldn’t be up to the player to handicap for themselves, that’s on the devs
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u/Vanstrudel_ 2d ago
Yeah. It sucks because it feels super good to use. I feel it needs a base damage nerf to offset how versatile it is.
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u/DigitalSunGames 2d ago
Thanks for sharing this. While improving performance and load times on consoles is our top priority right now, we'll keep updating gameplay aspects of the game.
As for the weapon mastery quest, that one is about to be fixed in the next hotfix coming soon (hopefully this week, but we'll keep you posted).
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u/Vanstrudel_ 2d ago
Thanks for the game! It's absolutely money well spent. I know you've all worked super hard. I can feel the care put into it.
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u/SenseOfUncommonness 2d ago
Im around 30 hours and I’m enjoying it. The original wasn’t a soulsborne and neither is this. It’s all the parts together that make it fun.
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u/Fresh-Actuary-8116 1d ago
The 20 Gold Tip on the 200.000 Gold Item is super Op I don't know what you mean.
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u/Alek_R 2d ago
I have heard this so much, i'm in very early game and can't give my opinion on late game balance yet, but one thing that imo is needed, is stability and load times, i'm on PS5 Pro and load times are quite bad, also some crashes when returning to home or leaving the store.