Drop your controversial takes on the game. It can be about anything ranging from balancing, content, story, features, etc.
I’ll start off with a few.
AO should have stuck with the original seven magics from AA
I feel like all the extra magics were just a carryover from the Create Your Own Magic game that Vetex eventually turned into WOM. I say this as someone who has two of my magic slots on Snow and Acid respectively. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it’s been for the balancing team, (notice the change and revert values every patch). Fire, Water, Wind, Light, Lightning, Shadow, and Earth from AA just felt like the perfect balance to me and each magic filled its own niche. The other magics could have easily been lost magics.
Lady Carina deserves the hype Iris has/had
Don’t need to really elaborate on this one. Strong Muscle Woman >>>>> She’s also an infinitely more interesting character but that can change depending how Iris progresses in the story.
This game desperately needs keybinds
The PvP and sometimes even PvE has a surprisingly high skill floor* and I think this would be slightly alleviated by letting new players set their own key binds.
Eh disagree, it’s not like much will really change if it’s just the OG 7 Magics because most of the oppressive magic we have/had was part of the OG 7 Magics (Light, Shadow, Lightning, Wind, Water), it’ll just remove like 1-2 other busted magics with a lot less uniqueness overall
It is my theory that the first important female character encountered in any game becomes the main one that people focus on. Carina mostly just gets attention from the people who actually care about her and not the fact that she is female, unlike Iris
Normally I’d agree that muscle woman is good, but Carina is an absolute joke. She shows up, insults us, insults her younger brother who was an objectively harder boss, then gets the crap beaten out of her and either dies or disappears.
I always think that vetex just said “screw it, she is not important anyway in the story”
The fact that she was killed off like that just ruins a good path about the siblings joining us (forgive elius) or a punished carina boss fight (kill elius). That would’ve been cool in the future.
I find it takes a little too long to get to the different regions in the dark sea. I get its to show high risk high reward but I find it boring when me and my friend have to sail like 20-30 minutes after a long haul just to get back to the bronze sea
WHY are the loadout slots a game pass. It’s such a nice feature especially with the new dark sea items so you have to tweak your gear if you want an optimal build. But having to switch and remember gear is so annoying. All other game passes kinda make sense being paided for but this one is so dumb. I hope it can become free sometime down the line.
Game balancing sucks, I know it’s in early access and I dont care for pvp that much but yea balancing sucks.
The game should be more PVE/exploration based. This game is being advertised about exploration and adventure yet theres so much in this game that kind of forces PVP sometimes which can be a bit draining.
We need vitality soon, either in the next update or soon after that. I would not care as much if the Vitality route was disabled until spirit weapons and stuff were added but you can do hybrid builds which just feel a bit unfinished. Again I know it’s in early access but Im pretty sure people are getting a bit antsy about seeing what Vitality can become.
Neviro should have been introduced a bit better in the story. I genuinely forgot who he was when I saw him rescue me in Ravenna. I do like his character tho and I wish he was introduced better.
Overall I love AO and want it to succeed so badly. Even with my complaints I can’t wait to see what the game becomes in a couple years down the line.
Yeah uh this probably isn’t a hot take but those level progression gates we are forced to go through is pretty annoying.
Like the entire point of AO is to choose your own adventure, why are you DELIBERATELY forcing me to level up to a certain point in order to progress? what if I want a challenge or I’m trying to speedrun the game? It just goes against the point of the adventure as a whole.
Anyways an Earth ram deals the same damage as a metal ram with an additional .1 ram speed
Next Earth is slightly faster than metal while doing around the same damage if you ignore metal’s bleed.
Finally Earth and metal give the same bonuses from aura.
This means Earth and metal are nearly identical, the only difference being earth exchanges bleed and terrain destruction for slightly better speed.
The dark sea update added a pretty big powercreep which I don’t know how to feel about
Water and acid are probably the worst looking magics visually
Fame and reputation need a rework especially after deckhands don’t need fame now. I want to see prisons you can do activities in with escape routes and shit instead of sitting in a cell for X minutes and kidnappings for positive rep players as well
I know vetex has worked very hard on this game but honestly I think he needs a dev team ngl
Okay, real hot take: Level requirements are finnneeee…
Only saying this because of how I ended up progressing on my second file, I decided to take my time and actually explore and do ALL quests whenever possible and didnt end up worrying too much abt level gaps at all.
(…I ended up skipping the lvl 75 gap.)
What I realized is that the ALL quests ARE part of the story and game overall, theyre just side quests instead of main story because they dont affect the bigger narrative, but they actually still happen.
Theres specific timeskips in the main storyline that you may have missed, in which the quests are most likely done. These two timeskips are also where the bigger level gaps are. Chapter 1 and 2 actually has a timeskip of 17 days, they didnt follow Iris immediately. Then Morden disappeared stating to meet him in 2 weeks time, MC went to Ravenna 2 days earlier. (Need to actually check thr quest desc to reconfirm this part tho, but Im pretty Morden’s note says this, so…)
Thats actually enough time for MC to actually do the seemingly “useless” sidequests on the islands and explore. In fact, theres already signs they actually do them as in one part of the Awakening chapter, you meditate in the ancient cave thats only discoverable through some random sidequest.
What Im saying is that the level gaps are there to make you stop and do all the other side quests and actually touch grass. They’re part of the story’s overall progression. You can just skip the rest when you reach the level requirement anyway. Im currently way overlevelled from doing random stuff (lv 110) and I STILL havent done a single Ravenna quest. Yes, this is including main story. And I only did a repeat quest 2-3 times the entire time, and they were the banana quests.
Though, I do agree with the notion of at least having a much bigger notification telling you that theres new quests at a certain town… seriously, why arent they like the big tips that make it noticeable for the player to see?
Wait… choosing your own adventure? Doesnt that mean the stuff you outside of story since the story is kinda set in stone?
idk what to say to you
( im going to get murdered by earth mains )