Despair Feedback

This is kind of late, but yesterday I went to Despair for the first time. I didn't really have any goal in mind other than to just run around spamming lightning and check the place out.

I really liked the entrance area with all the wrecked/burning ships. It kind of reminded me of some old Ultima stuff, like going to the abyss or whatever it was. It's a lot cooler than just starting in some random hallway.

Not a big fan of the petrified zombies just inside the entrance. It's not a big deal, but it just makes that area into a run-through for most people.

I found the wolf/bear caves to the right of the entry hall to be pretty boring. It's just a couple of parallel hallways with caves at the end. The larger bear rooms with the frost effects looked pretty cool, but other than that, it's super dull.

The animal bosses themselves are also super boring if you're not there to tame them. They're just normal animals with a ton of hit points, unlike real bosses like dragons, trolls, and daemons that are more interactive. They're just big punching bags that don't do anything interesting or pose much challenge.

Spoiler: Polar Mutilator Fight

The next thing I tried was the little spider cave down by the water. This fight is more challenging since there are so many mobs. You have to beat two 9k hp spiders, two 27k hp spiders, a 28k hp spider, and continuous waves of smaller spiders. The biggest spider also has a special ability that teleports you, but it doesn't really add anything at all to the fight since you're in a tiny area and can't really go anywhere anyway.

The big problem with this spider fight is that it's fairly challenging and takes a while, but there's virtually no reward for non-tamers. It took me 9 minutes to finish the fight, and all I got was a little bit of stuff that I could have got from brown spiders in some 1 skull zone. I didn't even get to skin most of it before it disappeared.

Spoiler: Spider Cave Fight

Next I tried the black dragon, which looked pretty interesting, because there's a bunch of other mobs there. That area of the dungeon also looks super awesome with the big stone stairs and platform and the light coming from the tower.

The black dragon fight isn't bad or anything, but 95% of the fight was just like fighting any other dragon, but with some spider hitting me that I just ignored. It's also incredibly annoying to try to loot the dragon when it dies if you're alone, because another dragon immediately spawns on your head along with the spiders in the area. You either have to stun and try to get in a crit gather before you get hit, or you have to run/blink and try to get in a crit gather before you get hit. It's not super hard or anything, but it just feels ridiculous to have to do.

I'm also a little big confused by being able to just kill dragons non-stop. It's fine by me, but I don't really get what the point is of adding wave fights to a bunch of old bosses to slow down farming while at the same time adding new super farmable bosses.

Spoiler: Black Dragon Fight

After that, I wanted to go through the gate and check out the dragon room and whatever else is there that I haven't seen yet. I couldn't find a switch for the gate, and killing Elrin and the other stuff by the gate also didn't seem to do anything. (How many Elrins do we really need, btw?)

All I was able to find was a youtube video of a dev stream where the designers did a walk through of Despair. The dev was able to just click the gate open, but said that he didn't intend for Despair to be soloable and wanted to add something like pressure plates so that groups would have to split up and work together to open the gate. I don't know if that ever actually happened or if I simply failed to figure out how to open the gate, but I really hope it's the latter.

I'm totally fine with having content in the game that's very difficult or maybe even impossible to beat solo when added to the game, but people should be able to at least see everything by themselves in a game that's intended to be playable as single player. Devs usually underestimate what players can do, too.

 

Kill warp spider and run. The gate closes after a short time.