Have to agree, a vast amount of information he posted strongly resonates with my opinion of the game. OP hits on many major flaws. However it gets a bit boring and a waste of time to be a broken record with the various glaring issues. Just deleted like a small essay on the various problems lol.
Any problem on Orbus can almost be summarized as bones with no meat, and lack of visceral gameplay (like a good melee combat system, or fun guns, or enemies with strengths&weaknesses etc). Shaman may be the best example of this, throw totems onto 1 spot and spam grip key. I agree with most things OP wrote but yes you shouldn’t be dying. Wind bolts/death-explosion/smash will kill someone not paying attention though. Level scaling is dumb. As for kill speed they are clearly a loser, but that may be somewhat understandable. The crime is that they are not fun or interesting at all, the xylophone also looks terrible and is a bad choice overall. Bard should have never been created. Musky gameplay is literally about waiting for long cooldowns and aoeing mass mobs to be effective, shaman(spamming short cooldowns) /scoundrel(managing cooldowns), and pally also very super slow waiting for charges to do any real dps. No -natural- enemy weak spots(not ranger stuff), slow walking, low base damage without abilities, combo reliant, etc… Pally/Shaman/Scoundrel were huge letdowns, not that warrior was better (ranger is borderline o-kay because shooting a bow is fun but it’s missing a lot). VR Physics combat have a clear advantage but mobs in this game for example don’t even attempt to block warrior swings (or at least certain mobs). Fighting is statically spamming wound to match a learned, unnatural hitbox, maybe a provoke here and there, while doing low base damage. I’ll stop before I mega-rant again lol. Everything but runemage has been done 1000x better somewhere else. Except for bard, because nobody has done bard but that’s probably for a good reason. I have difficulty even thinking of what a good VR bard might look like without full finger and hand tracking, unless the instrument was a tool and their main weapon was actual weapons like swords. Plus, a xylophone? ugh.
I have a lot of respect for Orbus and the challenges it’s been through, but even with it’s built-in weaknesses much of the gameplay could be salvaged, but it’s not been despite many suggestion threads on ways to exactly do that. Quality over quantity always. In some ways they’ve been producing quantity that could be smooshed into quality instead but separate two ideas that should be connected, and it’s weird and painful to see. Some of the most basic examples: Alchemy overleveling bonuses and alchemy. Less dye loot, more dye crafting. Tinkering and house system to build alchemy table, etc… or use dram to buy a tradeable alchemy table from players. Scoundrel and musketeer. Shaman and Paladin. Warrior and ranger. Axe-throwing berserker and warrior + the bard’s stick throwing capability (rather than hitting red dots…). The dev’s seem afraid or uninterested in just totally changing some of the poorer underlying aspects of the game because they are so core to the game. As new ideas are implemented, they are not often tied in with the older content. Look at how drastically WoW, for example, changed it’s combat and classes? Talent systems completely reworked. With some community communication, they could easily afford to make large changes to the core of the game with support. If they do it at the drop of the hat then some rage may be expected since the game is released, technically.
Here’s what I see when I watch bard gameplay. Heavy music accentuates the lameness. Not taking a jab at you Meeshka lol just available footage.
Also to OP, if it’s not clear, there are only two major reasons the population has recently shot up, and three minor reasons. Firstly, coronavirus. Secondly, price-point lowered. The three minor factors are half-life alyx drawing a wave of attention to VR, the spring event, and the upcoming mini dlc (calling it what it is). We’ll also be entering summer soon, so more (mostly) kids can be expected to be seen. Orbus could have not asked for anything better than a highly infectious global pandemic right now lol, and it’s cheap enough to say “what the heck” to and play for awhile until interest is lost. It will be interesting to see how long this will hold which will vary on the amount of incoming players over time. It could be awhile, but hard to say without thinking a lot about it. This would be a potentially valuable time to capitalize on the number of players and instill faith and hope in them, though I am sure many are looking forward to additional new releases by competitors.
I mini-ranted but this is tiny to what I wrote from the beginning lol.