i think this is far and away the largest problem with ao’s postgame and the main reason that the playercount is dropping so low. the moment you’ve run out of things to just simply progress toward and the moment you just want to play to have some fun, all of the game’s ‘minor’ issues start compounding on each other and become completely inexcusable…
as an example, i’ve tried like 3 or so runs in order to take down the elusive ancient dragon, so let’s see all of the inconveniences that i have to deal with in order to get to that point:
- since i don’t keep playing after i die to an ancient dragon (since i’ve sank about an hour into this already and i don’t care to do it again), i’ve got to repair my boat at the shipwright. for immersion reasons, it takes about 30s-1m for the shipwright to slowly nurse it back to full hp
- once i actually reach the dark sea, i now have to sail forty minutes in order to get to the boss arena
- the dark sea weather presents two major ones: the waves are completely unavoidable and sometimes take off massive chunks of ship hp, and the tornadoes are often times completely invisible until i am directly inside of them
- also, the sound mixing of the dark sea is actually so god awful to the point where i think it counts
- water poisoning
- after i reach the middle of the dark sea, sensing now becomes completely unreliable. this means that when i reach my destination, it’s really hard to tell whether or not i’m going further into the dark sea or not
- when i actually reach the dragon island, i have to take off my perfectly fine vanity and replace it with knight metal armor vanity in order to avoid ruined armor and like 50% of the dragon’s physical attacks for some reason
- add on all of the bugs you will inevitably encounter and things like dirt that also serve to just generally degrade the whole experience
no other game on the site i can think of (other than maybe deepwoken) goes to this length to irritate you when you’re playing it just to have fun. when fighting pilgrammed bosses, genuinely the only thing i can think of for that game is the boss runbacks.
it’s no wonder people don’t want to play this game for purely the love of the game when it goes to this length in almost every aspect to annoy you, and then the developer goes out and says it’s all intentional
oh well