Enshrouded

I love this game, and I just want to leave some feedback behind in the hope that the devs see it. I primarily play ranged builds, and I mostly focus on combat, exploration, and production, not so much building. The game is pretty grindy, and not just because you have to mine a lot of different materials. It's also because you have to collect so many different material types, and many higher tier items rely on materials from lower level biomes. You'll often be crafting a high tier item, only to realize you need to go back to one of the first biomes to mine or gather materials, craft intermediate components, and then finally make the item you actually wanted. That's just one example, but production in general has a lot of hoops to jump through before you can craft certain items. The pain I'm describing here is the oversight required to keep track of it all really. This could perhaps be adjusted by implementing some sort of an automated chain, along with some kind of overview of all the materials you need to spend for the final outcome instead of interacting between all your crafting stations. Maybe an NPC could even fulfill this task. For context, I already have my difficulty settings customized to give me the maximum amount of materials from the world, and I still feel this way. Combat is definitely something else a lot of people have been calling out, saying that it feels clunky or lacking. I partially agree. I think combat is in a bit of a tough spot due to the attack animations. You often feel locked into them. In many other games, your attack direction feels much more "free". You can stand still and attack in any direction (looking with your camera) forward, above, or to the side without your character automatically moving. In Enshrouded, however, melee attacks move your character forward automatically, especially when chaining attacks together. I wouldn’t have much to say about the other classes, as I don’t have experience with them. Another movement issue is that you can't immediately cancel the glider. This forces the player to keep flying forward with a lot of momentum, especially with the Legendary Glider. Often you would want to glide a short distance and you would land at the edge and roll off or something. It feels counterintuitive and falls into the same category of movement issues. The new skill tree is very extensive, and a huge improvement to the previous. I've seen mixed feedback about it. Here are my two cents. Personally, I really like that the skill tree offers many different options. At the same time, I think that's also what slightly takes away from it. Some sections of the tree don't feel equally important. For example, if you look at the Ranger build, the Ranger tree is essentially mandatory as your main class. Then you'll usually branch into the Assassin tree depending on your playstyle, while also picking up useful perks from the Beastmaster and Survivor trees. Those trees have valuable skills, but they're not really "primary" trees that you actively build around like Ranger. Despite that, they're placed on the same level in the hierarchy, the same amount of prominence, which makes the overall structure feel less focussed. Overall, I really enjoy this game, and I wouldn’t have written all of this if I didn’t care about it so much. That’s why I’m writing this feedback, it’s this good, even with these issues. These are just areas that I think could make an already great game even better. I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve.