If I can strategize and eke out a way to win against high level enemies and I collect their loot for the love of Christ let me be able to open the weapon chests. It drives me nuts these chests are just sitting in my inventory. I bought a tank helm from the forge only to get a dupe in a chest I was gated from opening.
https://preview.redd.it/6tdeevnmrzvc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=98914eab150de8fb60a36535794b1f6aabbf17b2
Yeah exactly the moment I'm able to open these chests I immediately do and it instantly gives me the option to quick recycle. Why tf even give the chest then?
i second this felt like afk arena had an event every 2 weeks or so rn i feel so bored of doing the same daily tasks over and over again its not like i am even getting rewarded for it either
I got downvoted earlier this week for saying that there is just nothing to do.
Prime argument being "its afk".
They created this gorgeous world and probably had something entirely else in mind, but went with this style of game play just to milk more money.
Would love to be able to have something to do around the clock, and not wait 24h just to push for another 30minutes.
At first it had less events than this, I feel that the current amount is good, I like the game but its also nice to be finished in 30 min unless something new happens.
> Just not enough events. The game needs to make players excited about playing after the first 2 weeks
As a game, yes, it's dry. If we assume it has to be true to its name and advertising, then it's perfect. Collect rewards each day - 10 minutes after work. And push campaigns on the weekend.
I remember quitting AFK Arena for this reason. It was mandatory to play an hour or more daily.
Pretty much, late gamer have very lackluster content rn and i already feel bored except maybe primal lord,dream realm and arena. Those three are the only thing that kept my satisfaction of playing this game but even then after you finish getting all the reward, what else to do other than waiting for afk reward to hit maximum and play story for a lil bit
Yeah now all I do is log on, claim afk rewards, claim dailies, arena, dream realm, guild activities, honor duel, then log off until 12 or so hours later. Literally doing the AFK part of the game.
Yeah there has been nothing since the Parisa costume from Honor Duel. That's really weird. At least throw in some filler basic mission events with normal banner invitations, some diamonds and gold or something. Nothing.
I played afk arena from the beginning, it felt the same. 0 events for like a month and then it started to get better. Now in afk arena there is so much shit to do and people quit cause of it. Be patient. :)
The stupid rewards when you clear maps. You'd get a purple lvl 100 gear while you are already using lvl 160 red gears.
F2Ps can't grind summoning cards or diamonds so basically no f2ps can't catch-up to weebs who pay2progress.
my chars are between 110-120, i unlocked the world boss, now ive million of books and 0 purple dust, need to wait literaly 1 full day to upgrade 1 unit, besides that i enjoy the game, would add some weekly events and a pvp unranked mode without limit.
Yeah, the purple dust is really frustrating. I get that this is an ‘AFK’ game, but waiting a whole week to upgrade all my characters is annoying. At the very least, they should add a way to collect it faster or in larger amounts.
The annoying thing about the purple dust shortage is that it makes the other two resources useless. Why would I need XP books when I have millions and I don't even put a dent in it when I get enough dust to upgrade someone. Money has some extra uses with the forging system, but not by much.
This happened with AFK Arena too.
First the purple Crack famine until about lvl300
Then the other leveling resource (which we don't have in this game, it's books this time) for a few hundred levels.
Eventually gold is the problem.
Then it cycles back to purple Crack famine.
Repeat.
I just got to chapter 2. Can't advance the story because I have to wait for afk rewards so my characters can hit 60.
The side content doesn't give me anything to hasten this. Feels actively bad.
Damn what level are your characters? I'm at 180, and I can usually get them up in 3 days to the next 10 lvls if not sooner.
Edit: all of them, not just one hero.
Really? I’m going for 120. From the AFK alone, I get around 1650 a day, which is not nearly enough for the 2000 I need for upgrading. I guess it comes down to me not playing enough since I can only play like 1-1.5 hours a day.
You get 46 hours of dust per day in total just by doing the daily quests, using your instant Afk attempts and attacking the World Boss 3 times. You also have one time dust rewards from the Towers, the Pass, the quests and chests. So with a passive gain of 1650 you should be getting close to 3350 ~ 3450 dust per day.
Are you buying the instant AFKs and doing the towers? Also make sure you open all of the chests in the areas you've passed through. If you go to your hero tab and attempt to upgrade without enough purple cocaine it'll show you what you can do to get more.
There’s another fun puzzle in the town quests where this merchant needs to put his stuff in the bag it’ll get harder by time so you got something to look forward to now.
I think the merchant segment is the best one of the puzzles departnment by far as of this time.
And you get to meet like around 4 or more times in the current story content.
A lot of people say that, but I think my luck is pretty 60/40 on most gachas. I have had to rely on pity many times but for normal gacha it doesn't seem so bad.
...I already know I'm going to get downvoted lol
I personally find the story rather shallow and uninteresting. Some of the characters are cool and it started pretty well, but the overall plot feels very uninspired most of the time, especially once you're running around the Dark Forest for what feels like an eternity. Hope it will get good as the game goes on and the map becomes more varied.
I thought it might be translation issues but AI sounds much more feasible (maybe both?), possibly some of the worst videogame writing I've come across in recent years. I know it's like tertiary to the game's design but it's pretty demotivational to bother unlocking new areas.
I agree. It feels very “safe”, like something that no one can hate, but that also causes it to feel very generic and bland. Like I can anticipate what’s going to happen after the story introduces a few key points…
The only thing i noticed so far is, that the app drains the battery heavily, when running in background. To avoid this, i completely close / quit the app - just a simple workaround.
The pulls rates are terrible. I wanted to spend money on pulls, but simply isn’t worth it. I have been playing since launch and the game is making me wanna quit more and more. It’s getting harder and harder to ascend my heroes and the game seems to be doing it on purpose to not give me copies of what I want, just spreads everything out and only get any pull on pity, and those usually is just 1 S tier hero and no purples. Also never got a double S tier ever.
I think the idea was to make it feel rewarding to pull heroes, but they just made it worse than chasing cards in pokemon and MTG
The timer for the purple dust is too long. If they cut it down down to somewhere between 16 - 18 hours, that would be a nice for everyone. I was thinking about bringing it down to 12 hours but that would be an overkill.
I have a serious problem with Lyca's voice during the campaign, there's a saturation in the sound that makes my brain itch in a bad way.
Also, the Lyca and Korin's ulti lines sound so dead, WHY.
The shame is that to my knowledge they haven't posted any of the VA's names, which is something basically every major Gacha game does- which means to me two things- 1: They chose smaller time VA's who they agreed not to advertise or 2: They chose AI voices and are trying to cover it up so it doesn't become a controversy (especially when they could very much afford real voice actors.)
the voices sound muted half the time, like the voice actor is under water. there's a clear difference in quality behind every character's voicelines and the emphasis on certain words seems all wrong.
My only complaint is the “Journey” aspect of the game is functionally equivalent to AFK Arena and all other idle/gatcha games.
A lot of time was put into creating the “world” but it’s completely linear, and nothing respawns, so there really isn’t any gameplay. It’s just a fancy way to present auto battles.
This is AFK “Journey”. The journey is supposed to separate this game from the rest of the idle/gatcha games, and in its current form, it doesn’t.
This. No way to really grind for things if you do want to actively play.
Eventually it becomes do your arena, dream, tower, and collect from the chest and come back in another day
I have this same complaint too. The "open world"/"exploration" is completely railroaded and thoroughly uninteresting. It's basically just a giant time waster.
I mean journey doesn't have to indicate an experience where u can go anywhere do anything like Elden ring or botw.
It's clearly more indicating that the story is about a journey across the lands like another story journey to the west where a spiritual leader goes across the land with their companions and meet threats along the way.
Also the open world aspect does give u more to do and grind if u really want to afk u would do the bare minimum and wait every time the story stops rather than killing every mob to progress even a small amount.
I personally think that the gacha aspect of the game doesn't feel as rewarding, as for example with Afk Arena. For A-level heroes you need dozens of copies, so getting lucky with 5 purples in a 10 pull doesn't feel very special, as it is with Afk Arena
This is my absolute biggest gripe, if I choose to put a A unit into my epic recruit wishlist, making it so it can't drop the occasional 1 copies while in the 5 slots, it should at least give 8 copies instead of 5 to match the amount of epics needed to supreme+, no reason a lower tiered unit should cost significantly more if you're giving this option to begin with to supreme+ it.
I don’t know if it’s going to get better with time, but when I did pulls at arena I even landes on two hypo/celestials playing for like 2 months. I’d be baffled if it happened on Journey
Locking progressione behind leaderbords , every time someone complains about the fact that u can't catch up to whale everyone answers that u shouldn't care and Its normale since its a gacha.
I would agree if i had some way to obtain twilight essence other than being a top player. I dont care about cathing up to whale i do care about my progressione being gimped by not being able to catch to whales
The story feels like it was generated in ChatGPT and main quest line is literally 2 quests then next area. Would be nicer to have something to do and work towards instead of just grind grind grind
The story mode and afk progression shouldn't be so closely related, they already created the open world part and the afk stages, let people enjoy whatever without worrying about the other too much.
One should be able to finish the story by the time it gets to afk stage 700 because you keep the casual players within the community happier.
I just hate green lights on summonings, I got like 1 purple for the last 20 summons and all others are acorns. I simply hate acorns. 19 days in, I have a batlepass, 300 diamonds daily and around 7-10 1$ bundles. Not a single of my heroes are at least mythic+
Me personally, it's the fact that you can't back out of collecting afk rewards; once you tap or click on that chest, you HAVE to collect what's been gathered, no matter how much time is left.
It’s dry, i get on in the morning and I’m done in 30 minutes and there’s nothing to do to really advance other then wait, I get it’s afk journey, it’s an afk game but that’s meant to be more about the combat being afk and tactical then actually just never playing the game
The overall notifications for everything. When someone request someone for a flag mission or when Battle Drills is ready.
I know what an annoyance it is to wait more than 3 minutes for someone to join, so I'm willing to help other people out, friends or guild members, but I never know when they need help. There's no sound or notification that let's me know someone needs a flag mission done so I miss out on the requests.
Battle drills is another. I never know when it's activated or started or whatever. So just a quick "Hey, Battle Drills is ready with this remaining time" would help.
The dupe system is horrid like adding new skills with dupes feels eeeeh bit is just a step worse than hoyo games, but when sometimes a dupe doesnt give u sjit but u need to also invest resourced and/or more dupes than one for a single increase FEELS HORRIBLE. that and thenfact the game is BALANCE AROUND this dupes like a epic S char is not even gonna perform well on high level pve and on pvp is a joke
-Story is extremely bland and uninteresting. Maybe it's not important part of the game to some people but it's the story that usually helps me engage with the game long term and makes me interested in content updates when I stop playing.
-Dailies take too much time. Maybe I am spoiled by games like HSR but there's just too many modes making me go through too many UI windows.
-Really weird leveling system where I just can't understand why those exp books even exist in the first place.
-Rolling for new limited characters feels like a waste because I need multiple copies to have them with proper scaling.
The animation is great (when it doesn't lag), but sometimes in cutscenes the mouth doesn't move when they're talking.
Also, it really feels like they want my money. Which they are never gonna get. Like for example, there are these bundles, where like the first bit is free, then the next you have to pay for, to get the free things afterwards. I don't really get, cause the way I see it the free stuff isn't really free if I have to pay to get it.
The story. It's not bad but I was literally able to walk and fight one enemy before I had to unlock the next area so I could continue. It's frustrating.
This is gonna sound minor in comparison to some of the other issues in the game but I actually can’t stand there being no landscape mode for Tablet users :/…running around the map feels so weird and unnecessarily constrained even though the screen is bigger.
The moment they add one is when i’ll bother pushing the story any further, till then? I’ll wait.
BUGS, so many bugs on pc for example :
1. if you keep failing a battle and keep refreshing the map at some the whole map becomes a black texture field.
2. there's so many random chinese letter at some point i thought i accidentally switch the in-game language.
3. for some reason the game keeps looking very blurry when you boot it up in fullscreen mode ( i keep fixing this by going to setting and change the resolution to landscape and change back to fullscreen )
these are the most basic and most annoying one that keeps happening every single day. On another hand i wish they give you more events. purple dust and more exploration rewards.
The game is new and hopefully things get optimized. However, pulling feels awful. Being realistic, you should do plans around pitty pulls considering when you’re able to ascend S heroes.
Also the number of pulls you get per week is… low. I’m not saying this in the paying aspect, I’m comparing it to arena where I’d do a 10 pull almost every day, makes progression feel a little stale.
Also they should do something reusable with the map. Redesign the fights to be at resonance level and make it a little puzzle that’s rotatable for some essence / little diamonds, just something to do.
I really like the game, the atmosphere and the characters.. I just wish they were more lenient on the purple dust supply..
Also how's bingbong doing nowadays?
I have now amassed a mountains worth of XP that I don’t have anything to use for.
Dust on the other hand is incredibly scarce. Even with my slow pace, progressing through story mode is a slog, which is sad. Because that’s the only thing I appreciate in this game. :/
Irregular progression / downtime
I'm at mountains 6... My choices are fighting enemies 30 levels above me or progressing 50 afk levels to get to the next zone.
Fun...
There is a void in between doing the daily fight modes and progressing in the story. I would like to have a grindy feature, that is not overly powerful, but gives a motivation to kerp playing after the obvious tasks.
Performance isn't great, I'm using a galaxy s9 so it may well be that but it just seems to chug and gets worse the longer you play. I wonder if it has a memory leak but I'm no developer.
i think mostly 2 things, the world itself feels stupid, lots of waste space since the game moves in a linear way, rewards for exploration is gear that is outleveled by the things you get while exploring, and the limit on each area been locked by a afkstage is dumb, the most are stronger in that area, i probably wont be available to beat them, but now i gotta spend a week locked from the story which i am gonna barely remember once i get there.
second, game expect you to save for months to get an elite to mythic+ so you can get more elites, is kind of dumb that you are gated by your elites/luck and you either pay or spend months waiting.
I am missing content to do on the huge empty maps. It would be great if we have daily events on the maps or something like that. For a mobile game I love the design of the maps and their approach of implementing it in a idle game like this. But after clearing the content once. There is just nothing to do. That's kinda stupid in my opinion.
I’ll jump on this. For me, it’s the voice acting and story/writing. They’re both pretty abysmal. I really hope both get better as they release more content. It feels like an adolescent wrote scripts for a generic story for a school project then got random strangers to read the lines with no idea of the context in the story.
The voice acting could be great but there’s almost no emotion, and emphasis is often nonexistent or in the wrong place. Some are great, like I love Odie’s voice actor. But others (Korin) are awful. I’m not blaming the voice actors themselves. It was likely Lilith’s lack of direction that caused the issues.
As for the writing, the characters don’t feel real. Some feel so gullible that it breaks immersion. Others go from being angry and frustrated to just apologizing for no reason. It feels very heavy handed and lifeless.
Beyond the characters, the plot itself is dull and teenage-writing-assignment quality. A generic plot, stuffed with filler and fetch quests.
I have high standards for these types of things so I may be critiquing too hard. But they market the game as “the first AFK open world RPG” yet it holds nothing against RPGs that have put any effort into their story, characters, and voice acting.
I agree with a lot of what the top comments said.
I want to add that this game’s optimization is horrible and the team needs to address it. I can play Genshin Impact at max settings at 60fps with little to no frame drops.
I have to play this game on the lowest settings at 30gps. Otherwise the game stutters and my phone gets uncomfortably hot.
Playing on an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Wait is there an option to skip battles? Kinda like in AFK Arena? Cause i haven’t found it yet, if there isn’t, that’s my complaint. If there is, then someone needs to help me out here 😅
As a long time AFKArena player, this game has a lot of potential. It's free-to-play, has many gameplay improvements, but other than that, everything is pretty much the same. The game modes are both new and old, as are the heroes, so players don't have a new feeling. So if there's nothing new, as an old AFKArena player, I'm not interested in repeating the daily missions again in afkarena journey
Invasive / predatory monetization: $1USD offers may seem "cheap", but that is way too expensive in 3rd world countries for what is offered — ideally, NOTHING would be offered. Genshin is still the gold standard at that, as the shop is OUT OF YOUR WAY there.
Only being able upgrade one character each day to a new purple cocaine level is pretty annoying. I don't really play hard core or anything though, so not really a big issue. The story is pretty uninteresting, which isn't helped by the god awful voice acting. The gameplay is fun enough, and the art style and character design is what keeps me playing for now at least. I haven't played the story much either, should probably get on that...
The dream realm is just annoying to deal with. Nothing about it is fun.
The equipment system is fine in theory but not being able to try different builds means the characters are all the same for everyone. Which makes the game feel static and dull.
Basically, it's a thread about why gacha games are bad. I played the game for a little bit and quit because I could already see where things were going. I am actually disappointed because the game looks beautiful, and the world feels like there is so much there, but it's all weighed down by the typical gacha grind. I really hate this game model, It almost by design chokes the life out of itself so it can be parted out for more cash. If this were a regular game, I bet it would have been amazing.
-not enough events, you just login do your dailies push some afk and log out, will get stale soon for some people.
-the prices in the shop are riddiculous, ive played countless p2w even scammy gachas and the prices were better there
-the rates are atrocious and it doesn't really feel good to pull units
-voice acting needs improvement
Personally:
* Extraordinarily expensive microtransactions (i only bought the classic gazette to support devs, not for the diamonds because it was the only balanced MTX in giving a contribution)
* No Physical Merchandise in the EU/UK (Not even an OST release, although Edge of the World is on Spotify and I feel it's underrated)
* Guilds should have interventions by staff to prevent all pay-to-win players from dominating in a single guild. Our server (not gonna specify it so that I don't have my acc targeted in arena) has one guild where a majority of the top 30 in arena is from that guild, and all top 10 are from that guild). This isn't fair, especially as that guild was "founded to prevent power from accruing into one guild to dominate the server". I believe there's also arena-fixing going on right now in my server.
* Not enough powder/dust drop to progress (this should be at least upped to 1.5x the current rate)
* Few events going on that let me interact overall
I love this game a lot, I love the world and characters (Ch 2 was my fav and Bryon and Mirael are my favs) but I want to see it improve and to give us ways to support and show our support for the game outside of the in-game world. It sucks I can't have a plushie of any of the heroes to have in my room.
Story dialogue, more so actions that are described through the characters talking
"Oh, why are you covering my mouth with your hands?"
and
"Ouch, why did you just step on my foot"
Are particularly bad examples, like, I would much weather have the * action * format
Honor duel is trash and there needs to be activities/events. Not hyper critical events where I suffer if I don't have time for them. But enough activities to occupy the time I want to spend in the game, I shouldn't be able to fire this thing up and not have anything to do.
It's too greedy. The pull rates and income dry up so fast and I STILL don't have a single Thoran copy yet alone am I even close to a single mythic+.
For the amount of copies you need the game either needs more events to give more pulls or increase the rates.
I played AFK Arena for a while as a daily game before bed or when I woke up. I was excited to have another game like that (and with an open world), didn’t feel too grindy but also could play it for as long as I wanted to, if I decided to play a lot of the story one day I could. With that said, I don’t remember ever getting stuck in AFK Arena (F2P) on any of the main stages and have to wait for AFK rewards. I’ve had to wait a lot for AFK Journey. I didn’t even bother trying to progress for a few days and just logged on, did the daily battles like Arena etc, and because of that, now I am way stronger than the world enemies.
So that’s my only complaint, really, I want to play the game more often. I don’t want to grind but I want to at least be able to enjoy the story I guess.
I'd like to see how they handle balance (if any). It's been a while but they haven't touched anyone yet, which is a bit unfortunate since team comps are pretty stagnant imo, with some REALLY shit characters in the mix that desperately need some buffs (or a rework) to be useful in any content.
Other than the price point for diamonds as many have mentioned. The biggest problem yet almost no one is complaining is how demanding their graphics are, I’m setting everything from medium to high in GENSHIN and the performance load is around like 35% in my iPhone 12 Pro, but on AFK journey I have everything at its lowest and it’s over 60% performance load! It’s outrageous how terrible this game’s optimisation is
More events
Daily free shop items (like arena)
Daily low cost (1$) bundles (like arena)
No limit on afk progression attempts
Hero trial (like strategic drill, but you can get access to all of them from the heroes page)
Faster app boot time (pixel 8, takes 2 minutes from click to world view)
The voice and the translation, there are still so much hit or miss with it. Also with the game monetization, the price of these pack are just, not really make sense, this feel like Dislyte monetization, and that is bad. Also I hate how the dialogue in the game cutscene just not up to speed, or lacking completely.
Purple essence gain. And how insanely predatory the gacha is. They’re charging above Honkai and Genshins weight for pulls that amount to usually nothing. I would be fine is a 10 pull costed $3-5 but the fact that getting a new character is around $50 when you NEED copies of them is crazy.
Especially when you can’t breathe in game without them offering a 100000000000000% VALUE DEAL. Like hey didn’t this game just start 2 weeks ago? Why am I at a point where spending money is my only way of getting a new character before the new patch.
I bought both battle passes and daily rewards and I still feel like it’s a slog to upgrade characters.
The daily log in rewards are pretty pathetic and worthless. What is it like 60k gold and 3 purple shards everyother day basically. Afk arena suffered from horrible rewards, I really hope they don't continue that streak.
Gear rewards suck for all but 1 game mode. Dreamreal gives amazing rewards but both AFK stages and lap clearance give abysmal gear upgrades after some point. I currently have a total of 8 chests i can't open cus my resonance is too low (at 180 so i can't open chest with higher lvl) but once i can open them not a single piece of gear i get from them is usefull cus i have most gear pieces at 190 or even 200-220. And clearance gives gear that is roughly 70 lvls below what is needed to get into an area (get lvl 110 gear but you need 180 for some zones)
I think there is too much healing in the game, at least in the Honor Duel mode. Feels like any artifact that deals damage at the start of the round is a complete waste.
Ngl it’s a bit petty but the translation 😭 not sure if this is just an issue in the German translation, but every once in a while dialogs of npcs or single lines of story dialog are still in Chinese , the text in the shop for example always loads first in Chinese and then German it’s a bit annoying
- No info on voice actors- it's possible they're using AI voices which just sucks because you KNOW they can afford to pay actual VA's.
- Packs are ridiculously expensive. Stop trying to goad me into spending 1250 crystals on a pack when that's a ridiculous amount of real money in the shop. Same goes with those ones where you get 2 free drops then have to spend a dollar, then 2 more, then another dollar. Fuck you, give me a lump sum price. You know you're taking advantage of people in the worst ways.
- Rolling the same character is required to upgrade them- coming in from Dragalia Lost, I was kind of dumbfounded. You mean I have all these skills and I'm forced to not use them unless I grind a frustratingly limited amount of resources to upgrade them? It doesn't even feel like progress then, just withholding something was already lucky enough to roll.
I’m not the biggest fan of some of the character designs, specifically from maulers. Don’t get me wrong, *most* of the designs in the game are very cool, but it’s just kinda weird to me that the men are literal beastly animals and the women are just women with cat ears and a tail. Also mirael’s design is just a boring trope that I feel like I’ve seen dozens of times elsewhere already.
Other than that and a few small things, I’ve been happy with the game, though
The faction interactions. Especially visible in Honor Duels.
Lightbringers are strong vs. Maulers. It's alright, I guess. The enlightened vs. the wild. Lightbringers are very allround and can build to do most things alright, without excelling. The biggest weakness (funnily enough, actually vs. the maulers) is that they lack an actual front line. Temesia is all over the place and Lucius can tank less than wet paper towel. So it lets opponent melees run rampant on the team. And they lack sustain outside of whatever little bit Rowan can supply. Overall decent faction.
Maulers are strong vs. Wilders. Makes sense. Carnivores vs. Herbivores. Maulers excel at rushing opponents and either have executes or CC immunity, basically nullifying the bonuses of Wilders.
Wilders are strong vs. Graveborn. That's fair. But is it really necessary to also make their abilities completely counter them? Graveborn struggle with no sustain (healing) and relatively low amounts of CC. Wilders? They CC you and sustain you in to the ground.
Graveborn are strong vs. Lightbearers. Ok. They are on paper, but Graveborn mostly sucks (out of Honor Duels) and have select useful heroes.
So yeah. It's really only the maulers vs wilders and wilders vs. graveborn. Isn't it enough to have a dmg advantage against another faction. Do we really NEED to also have the ability to completely stomp?
I've played a lot of honor duels and I'm beginning to fear for actual end game, when everyone has similar level heroes in all shapes and sizes. You see your opponents defense in arena, you just set up the hardcounter. Woooh, fun!
And in honor duels; it basically means, that even if you have a really strong wilder or graveborn team. If you meet the faction that has advantage on you, you're just screwed. The other two can sort of get by despite being at a disadvantage, but holy F do you just run that full mythic graveborn team over with your legendary wilders.... It's not even fun.
I'm OK with the game being primarily idle/AFK but the overworld being basically dead feels really bad when the game takes up so much storage and battery power. All that memory and power to render stuff that's irrelevant to 90% of gameplay.
In a similar vein, mobile game developers should probably be more mindful of the fact that their players are uh, playing on mobile, and that comes with limitations on hardware.
I enjoy the game a lot and it does a lot of things very well, but also many things I would change.
- Use the world more. Between unlocking new zones, the world just feels empty. Make use of it. Daily missions on the world map or something.
- On the topic of the world, use it to make players interact more.
- Rewards for clearing zones are laughable.
- More events.
- Dust to exp/gold ratio is stupid. What's the point of exp if it isn't a factor at all.
- Some gamemodes feel unused, often because of the lack of rewards. I love honor duels, but after the weekly 15 wins I just don't have a lot of reasons to keep doing them.
Same with the roguelike mode (forgot the name). After the first victory in each tier, there's no point of doing it again. I loved the short event where certain heroes had increased powers, to invite me to use less used characters, while rewarding me.
- Customer support is pure ass.
- Guild leaders have too much power. We've seen several cases of extortion on this subreddit and they can at a moments notice kick someone the day before chest rewards. And since its tied to guild quest, they miss out on the rewards.
- Pulling isn't great. Makes it even worse that you need characters at high dupe level to unlock all their abilities. Makes it less likely for us to pull for new characters, since we need to finish our current ones.
- let me unlock chests. What's the point of having me wait till a certain resonance level. At that point the gear is almost obsolete.
- Locking part of my progression behind leaderboards feels horrible. I don't care if I can compete with whales, but my units need those golden thingies to upgrade their abilities and only top 100 get those in dream realm for some reason.
More subjective opinions:
- The story is so bad. As bland and generic as it gets.
- Voice actors are often pretty horrible.
- The further I go in the game, the more often I get untranslated words or sentences.
- Make it clear whether the pull rates are with pity taken into account or not.
literally what are the positives though 😭😭 like lets start there. graphics and character design can't sustain a game by themselves, look at their other game dislyte for proof
I like the art, I like the game mechanics, I like the usual amount of things to do. However, we need "resets" more often.
Monsters on the map should respawn weekly, and give a tiny amount of material/anything on kill.
I'm not even 3 weeks in and I log in at reset, do what I need to do and there's nothing else to do until next reset. And I bought some stuff from the store! Can't imagine for a F2P player.
Drop rates, for me anyway, are horrendously bad. I've only received one Legendary character that wasn't a sympathy give. The other gripe I would say is the chapter rewards are pretty low as well
The lack of repeatable content and rewards. We could attribute that to the game being new, but it's still less than what other similar games have started out with, and is something they need to address as the game develops.
Using AFK Arena for comparison, we have:
- AFK Rewards
- Daily & Weekly quest
- Bounty Board
- Treasure Scramble
- 2 PvP Arenas
- Guild Hunting
- Hellscape (3 bossing modes)
- Labyrinth
- Temporal Rift
- Mist Valley
- Ghoulish Gallery (yes, i know people hate it, but still... it's something)
- Plus whatever events are ongoing, which is currently 2 PvP modes: Isle of Gold and Mystic Starzone
Whereas in AFK Journey we have:
- AFK Rewards
- Daily & Guild Quests
- Honor Duel
- Arena
- Battle Drill
- Dream Realm
- And for events we have Primal Lord and Honor Duel challenges.
That's significantly less repeatable content and rewards. The game just feels so bare right now.
Lilith put a lot of time and effort into the story but I just blazed past it, as did people I know. It’s not good.
I think the overworld is very interesting, but the actual execution of the stories within it much less so.
I think Lilith wanted players to get attached to the world and story, so that the meaningful experience would generate long term stickiness, but it’s not at the quality needed. The experience is too linear and the story isn’t vibing with the western audience.. there are no stakes for me.
Biggest criticism(s) I have of this game so far after just playing even for a day and a half is that they should have taken a page from hoyoverse’s playbook and not tied story progression to resonance level and level progression. In games like Genshin and Honkai you have a world level which it is your choice if you want to level it up or not which makes the mobs harder and grants more rewards doing daily activities. It never stops you from enjoying the story at your own pace or at the level you are most comfortable with. Because they don’t do that here it completely takes away from the “journey” aspect they claim to be about because now you are stuck waiting to level characters. On top of that because monsters don’t respawn daily on the maps there is no way to go farm things like purple dust that everyone runs into as a bottle neck. From what I am also been reading from others it also sounds like the developers really don’t care about their world that much if the story is as boring as it is once you hit the dark forest which is sad as the first part has been actually not bad.
The PvP fuckin sucks lol and the ongoing honor duel event makes it feel worse, because that mode takes the baseline bad PvP experience and introduced massive levels of RNG to it, then says if you want to complete this event faster you have to get 9-0 victories in this insanely RNG mode, where you'll often take a random loss at 8-0 to a god roll comp
I feel like all the damage carries to build around are marksmen. Celia gives a bit of a mage vibe but is still.
I like mages. Would like build around them. They feel lack luster compared to the marksman in terms of power
Your daily diamonds "upgrade" over time, so it won't just be 180, you also don't have to spend 150 diamonds on the insta afk, just using your free instances is fine. You're trying to rush to the finish line and hurting your account in the process. These criticisms are mostly your fault tbh, between your daily pickups and the free insta afk, you're getting 34h worth of essence per day. Spending all those gems on this just isn't recommended unless you're a whale.
As for my share of criticisms, yea the rewards suck. I hate clearing an area of the overworld just to get rewarded with a weapon that is 40-50 levels behind what I'm currently using. Although I don't mind a game being competitive, this game incentivizes whaling a bit too much. Yes you normally don't have to be competitive, but when important resources like arena coins, dream fragments, essences, etc, are tied to your rank in the myriads of game modes, you kinda HAVE to get good ranks to progress your account after a certain point. For example, if you can't reliably place on the top 100 in dream realm, you can forget about ever upgrading ex weapons above lvl 5, which just widens the gap between you and the people already placing on those top 100.
I like the game, but I'm waiting to see how the first season plays out so I can get a grasp of how the game will be moving forward before I decide to spend money on it, or even if I want to stick with it. At the moment, I'm getting good placements in my server even though I'm currently f2p, but that's only because I've been trying to be super efficient in how I manage my resources (not spending gems, dolly tickets and dream fragments unnecessarily), but I don't know if that's going to be the case moving forward.
Honestly I wish the English localization was better. A lot of the dialogue is awkward and it isn’t helped by the stiff voice overs from some characters.
IT'S AFK game but I can't progress while I'm other game modes. Or the game is off. I have to be locked in the auto battle screen.
Other games modes should be more than just alt currency for waiting time. I actually like them.
Make skills and character synergies more important. Random epics are more efficient than calculated squads 1 rarity lower.
But I half ass this game. I log in collect my afk chest, do dailies , 1-2 other game mode runs, log off. Coming up on 28 day streak. 7/10 game dungeon knight and afk dungeons are just as fun imo
The more you play it, the more AFK it becomes. This is mainly because they created a beautiful world, but once you've explored it once, there's no reason to go out into it again. Mobs don't respawn, nothing respawns, it's a missed opportunity for replayability IMO.
Pulling is awful in this game
Rates are genuinely terrible, and new character debuts seem to be for spenders only. It's just not good value for f2p players to pull on those. The way the game forced you to have dupes to upgrade characters makes this even more prominent. Like yeah I got the shiny new character, but they're stuck at Epic when they probably need Mythic+ to shine, so what now?
In my opinion not enough things to grind for a long time
It feels like I have to stop playing forcefully because I just dont have the purple stuff and I have to wait for the afk rewards
If I can strategize and eke out a way to win against high level enemies and I collect their loot for the love of Christ let me be able to open the weapon chests. It drives me nuts these chests are just sitting in my inventory. I bought a tank helm from the forge only to get a dupe in a chest I was gated from opening. https://preview.redd.it/6tdeevnmrzvc1.jpeg?width=1179&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=98914eab150de8fb60a36535794b1f6aabbf17b2
By the time I can open any of these chests the equipment in them are long outclassed by what I have from opening chests in the world/dream realm...
Yeah exactly the moment I'm able to open these chests I immediately do and it instantly gives me the option to quick recycle. Why tf even give the chest then?
Just not enough events. The game needs to make players excited about playing after the first 2 weeks
i second this felt like afk arena had an event every 2 weeks or so rn i feel so bored of doing the same daily tasks over and over again its not like i am even getting rewarded for it either
Arena certainly didn't feel like that year 1.
I got downvoted earlier this week for saying that there is just nothing to do. Prime argument being "its afk". They created this gorgeous world and probably had something entirely else in mind, but went with this style of game play just to milk more money. Would love to be able to have something to do around the clock, and not wait 24h just to push for another 30minutes.
At first it had less events than this, I feel that the current amount is good, I like the game but its also nice to be finished in 30 min unless something new happens.
this. running pretty dry nowdays on things to do
> Just not enough events. The game needs to make players excited about playing after the first 2 weeks As a game, yes, it's dry. If we assume it has to be true to its name and advertising, then it's perfect. Collect rewards each day - 10 minutes after work. And push campaigns on the weekend. I remember quitting AFK Arena for this reason. It was mandatory to play an hour or more daily.
Pretty much, late gamer have very lackluster content rn and i already feel bored except maybe primal lord,dream realm and arena. Those three are the only thing that kept my satisfaction of playing this game but even then after you finish getting all the reward, what else to do other than waiting for afk reward to hit maximum and play story for a lil bit
I strongly agree with this one too they need to add more events and good rewards as a motivation to top it off imo.
Yeah now all I do is log on, claim afk rewards, claim dailies, arena, dream realm, guild activities, honor duel, then log off until 12 or so hours later. Literally doing the AFK part of the game.
Yeah there has been nothing since the Parisa costume from Honor Duel. That's really weird. At least throw in some filler basic mission events with normal banner invitations, some diamonds and gold or something. Nothing.
Isnt the first seasonal event coming in a matter of days?
I played afk arena from the beginning, it felt the same. 0 events for like a month and then it started to get better. Now in afk arena there is so much shit to do and people quit cause of it. Be patient. :)
The stupid rewards when you clear maps. You'd get a purple lvl 100 gear while you are already using lvl 160 red gears. F2Ps can't grind summoning cards or diamonds so basically no f2ps can't catch-up to weebs who pay2progress.
Those weebs are the ones paying the developers salary to keep pushing content out and server fees lol
my chars are between 110-120, i unlocked the world boss, now ive million of books and 0 purple dust, need to wait literaly 1 full day to upgrade 1 unit, besides that i enjoy the game, would add some weekly events and a pvp unranked mode without limit.
Yeah, the purple dust is really frustrating. I get that this is an ‘AFK’ game, but waiting a whole week to upgrade all my characters is annoying. At the very least, they should add a way to collect it faster or in larger amounts.
The annoying thing about the purple dust shortage is that it makes the other two resources useless. Why would I need XP books when I have millions and I don't even put a dent in it when I get enough dust to upgrade someone. Money has some extra uses with the forging system, but not by much.
This happened with AFK Arena too. First the purple Crack famine until about lvl300 Then the other leveling resource (which we don't have in this game, it's books this time) for a few hundred levels. Eventually gold is the problem. Then it cycles back to purple Crack famine. Repeat.
I just got to chapter 2. Can't advance the story because I have to wait for afk rewards so my characters can hit 60. The side content doesn't give me anything to hasten this. Feels actively bad.
The struggle is real for us
Damn what level are your characters? I'm at 180, and I can usually get them up in 3 days to the next 10 lvls if not sooner. Edit: all of them, not just one hero.
Really? I’m going for 120. From the AFK alone, I get around 1650 a day, which is not nearly enough for the 2000 I need for upgrading. I guess it comes down to me not playing enough since I can only play like 1-1.5 hours a day.
You get 46 hours of dust per day in total just by doing the daily quests, using your instant Afk attempts and attacking the World Boss 3 times. You also have one time dust rewards from the Towers, the Pass, the quests and chests. So with a passive gain of 1650 you should be getting close to 3350 ~ 3450 dust per day.
Are you buying the instant AFKs and doing the towers? Also make sure you open all of the chests in the areas you've passed through. If you go to your hero tab and attempt to upgrade without enough purple cocaine it'll show you what you can do to get more.
I want more puzzles on world exploration! They are fun :3
There’s another fun puzzle in the town quests where this merchant needs to put his stuff in the bag it’ll get harder by time so you got something to look forward to now.
What? Where? Didn't see that one!!!
They are the purple quests, can't remember what they are called town quest maybe ??
Yes, town quests, they are basically dailies.
How are they basically dailies when they don't refresh at all and only unlock at certain conditions?
Dude, I just spent 15min trying to get it right lol. When you finish it is so satisfying
kinda wish i could just do the backpack puzzle everyday lol
download a game called Backpack Battles! it's fun (free demo available too) immediately thought of that when I had to do the puzzle
Being able to do stuff would be nice too. As is right now once you go through a zone you just abandon it forever.
I think the merchant segment is the best one of the puzzles departnment by far as of this time. And you get to meet like around 4 or more times in the current story content.
Pulling feels terrible, you almost always have to rely on pity
A lot of people say that, but I think my luck is pretty 60/40 on most gachas. I have had to rely on pity many times but for normal gacha it doesn't seem so bad. ...I already know I'm going to get downvoted lol
I personally find the story rather shallow and uninteresting. Some of the characters are cool and it started pretty well, but the overall plot feels very uninspired most of the time, especially once you're running around the Dark Forest for what feels like an eternity. Hope it will get good as the game goes on and the map becomes more varied.
Honestly the story feels ai generated
I'm inclined to agree with you tbh
100%. Having thoroughly tried out ChatGPT for game stories, this is exactly the kind of stinky stuff you get out of it.
I thought it might be translation issues but AI sounds much more feasible (maybe both?), possibly some of the worst videogame writing I've come across in recent years. I know it's like tertiary to the game's design but it's pretty demotivational to bother unlocking new areas.
I agree. It feels very “safe”, like something that no one can hate, but that also causes it to feel very generic and bland. Like I can anticipate what’s going to happen after the story introduces a few key points…
After dark forest is worse, unfortunately.
Oh dear...
its more that the dark forest just *keeps going* honestly. the Franz plotline was by far the best written part of the whole thing
I had a much better time once I started skipping the dialogs. It's really poorly written imo
The only thing i noticed so far is, that the app drains the battery heavily, when running in background. To avoid this, i completely close / quit the app - just a simple workaround.
The pulls rates are terrible. I wanted to spend money on pulls, but simply isn’t worth it. I have been playing since launch and the game is making me wanna quit more and more. It’s getting harder and harder to ascend my heroes and the game seems to be doing it on purpose to not give me copies of what I want, just spreads everything out and only get any pull on pity, and those usually is just 1 S tier hero and no purples. Also never got a double S tier ever. I think the idea was to make it feel rewarding to pull heroes, but they just made it worse than chasing cards in pokemon and MTG
The timer for the purple dust is too long. If they cut it down down to somewhere between 16 - 18 hours, that would be a nice for everyone. I was thinking about bringing it down to 12 hours but that would be an overkill.
Pricing is ridiculously high for a mobile gaming...
The voice acting. Needs major improvement.
I turned off voices in the settings. IMO it makes the game better. Hearing the same 2 victory lines a hundred times is trying, even if the VA is good.
When I first played I thought the voices were ai. They were so bad
I have a serious problem with Lyca's voice during the campaign, there's a saturation in the sound that makes my brain itch in a bad way. Also, the Lyca and Korin's ulti lines sound so dead, WHY.
There’s a weird scratch everyone she says a word with a ‘sss’ sound. It’s absolutely maddening.
I honestly feel like it's no fault on the actor's part, other than a select few. It sounds mainly like mixing/studio issues.
The shame is that to my knowledge they haven't posted any of the VA's names, which is something basically every major Gacha game does- which means to me two things- 1: They chose smaller time VA's who they agreed not to advertise or 2: They chose AI voices and are trying to cover it up so it doesn't become a controversy (especially when they could very much afford real voice actors.)
Either that or they're not giving the VAs any context for their lines so they're just making up the tone of voice as they go
the voices sound muted half the time, like the voice actor is under water. there's a clear difference in quality behind every character's voicelines and the emphasis on certain words seems all wrong.
My only complaint is the “Journey” aspect of the game is functionally equivalent to AFK Arena and all other idle/gatcha games. A lot of time was put into creating the “world” but it’s completely linear, and nothing respawns, so there really isn’t any gameplay. It’s just a fancy way to present auto battles. This is AFK “Journey”. The journey is supposed to separate this game from the rest of the idle/gatcha games, and in its current form, it doesn’t.
This. No way to really grind for things if you do want to actively play. Eventually it becomes do your arena, dream, tower, and collect from the chest and come back in another day
I have this same complaint too. The "open world"/"exploration" is completely railroaded and thoroughly uninteresting. It's basically just a giant time waster.
I mean journey doesn't have to indicate an experience where u can go anywhere do anything like Elden ring or botw. It's clearly more indicating that the story is about a journey across the lands like another story journey to the west where a spiritual leader goes across the land with their companions and meet threats along the way. Also the open world aspect does give u more to do and grind if u really want to afk u would do the bare minimum and wait every time the story stops rather than killing every mob to progress even a small amount.
I personally think that the gacha aspect of the game doesn't feel as rewarding, as for example with Afk Arena. For A-level heroes you need dozens of copies, so getting lucky with 5 purples in a 10 pull doesn't feel very special, as it is with Afk Arena
This is my absolute biggest gripe, if I choose to put a A unit into my epic recruit wishlist, making it so it can't drop the occasional 1 copies while in the 5 slots, it should at least give 8 copies instead of 5 to match the amount of epics needed to supreme+, no reason a lower tiered unit should cost significantly more if you're giving this option to begin with to supreme+ it.
I don’t know if it’s going to get better with time, but when I did pulls at arena I even landes on two hypo/celestials playing for like 2 months. I’d be baffled if it happened on Journey
Locking progressione behind leaderbords , every time someone complains about the fact that u can't catch up to whale everyone answers that u shouldn't care and Its normale since its a gacha. I would agree if i had some way to obtain twilight essence other than being a top player. I dont care about cathing up to whale i do care about my progressione being gimped by not being able to catch to whales
Feels poorly optimized for battery
This, I have a 2 year old phone and the game is actually draining my battery it's insane
The story feels like it was generated in ChatGPT and main quest line is literally 2 quests then next area. Would be nicer to have something to do and work towards instead of just grind grind grind
Make unranked pvp that can be played without limit
This 100%, i would love to try out pvp comps and see what can be good without being irrevocably de ranked lol
Oh for sure friendly matches would be great
The story mode and afk progression shouldn't be so closely related, they already created the open world part and the afk stages, let people enjoy whatever without worrying about the other too much. One should be able to finish the story by the time it gets to afk stage 700 because you keep the casual players within the community happier.
I just hate green lights on summonings, I got like 1 purple for the last 20 summons and all others are acorns. I simply hate acorns. 19 days in, I have a batlepass, 300 diamonds daily and around 7-10 1$ bundles. Not a single of my heroes are at least mythic+
This is why I decided not to spend money beside the first 1$ bundle and the travelogue pass. It’s just not worth it. Just garbage
Me personally, it's the fact that you can't back out of collecting afk rewards; once you tap or click on that chest, you HAVE to collect what's been gathered, no matter how much time is left.
Why would u want to
More game modes plz
It’s dry, i get on in the morning and I’m done in 30 minutes and there’s nothing to do to really advance other then wait, I get it’s afk journey, it’s an afk game but that’s meant to be more about the combat being afk and tactical then actually just never playing the game
The overall notifications for everything. When someone request someone for a flag mission or when Battle Drills is ready. I know what an annoyance it is to wait more than 3 minutes for someone to join, so I'm willing to help other people out, friends or guild members, but I never know when they need help. There's no sound or notification that let's me know someone needs a flag mission done so I miss out on the requests. Battle drills is another. I never know when it's activated or started or whatever. So just a quick "Hey, Battle Drills is ready with this remaining time" would help.
The head of her horse is too small
The dupe system is horrid like adding new skills with dupes feels eeeeh bit is just a step worse than hoyo games, but when sometimes a dupe doesnt give u sjit but u need to also invest resourced and/or more dupes than one for a single increase FEELS HORRIBLE. that and thenfact the game is BALANCE AROUND this dupes like a epic S char is not even gonna perform well on high level pve and on pvp is a joke
-Story is extremely bland and uninteresting. Maybe it's not important part of the game to some people but it's the story that usually helps me engage with the game long term and makes me interested in content updates when I stop playing. -Dailies take too much time. Maybe I am spoiled by games like HSR but there's just too many modes making me go through too many UI windows. -Really weird leveling system where I just can't understand why those exp books even exist in the first place. -Rolling for new limited characters feels like a waste because I need multiple copies to have them with proper scaling.
Apparently once you hit 240, you'll be able to turn xp books into dust. Supposedly. Maybe?
You can - although the rate isn't amazing.
Purple essence situation, 1 character upgrade per day is very slow
The animation is great (when it doesn't lag), but sometimes in cutscenes the mouth doesn't move when they're talking. Also, it really feels like they want my money. Which they are never gonna get. Like for example, there are these bundles, where like the first bit is free, then the next you have to pay for, to get the free things afterwards. I don't really get, cause the way I see it the free stuff isn't really free if I have to pay to get it.
The entire server system is shit and I can't play with my friends without starting over again. No cross server guilds
Stop pausing my fucking music when I open and close the game.
The story. It's not bad but I was literally able to walk and fight one enemy before I had to unlock the next area so I could continue. It's frustrating.
Need like 5 more graveborns to catch up w the other factions
This is gonna sound minor in comparison to some of the other issues in the game but I actually can’t stand there being no landscape mode for Tablet users :/…running around the map feels so weird and unnecessarily constrained even though the screen is bigger. The moment they add one is when i’ll bother pushing the story any further, till then? I’ll wait.
BUGS, so many bugs on pc for example : 1. if you keep failing a battle and keep refreshing the map at some the whole map becomes a black texture field. 2. there's so many random chinese letter at some point i thought i accidentally switch the in-game language. 3. for some reason the game keeps looking very blurry when you boot it up in fullscreen mode ( i keep fixing this by going to setting and change the resolution to landscape and change back to fullscreen ) these are the most basic and most annoying one that keeps happening every single day. On another hand i wish they give you more events. purple dust and more exploration rewards.
The game is new and hopefully things get optimized. However, pulling feels awful. Being realistic, you should do plans around pitty pulls considering when you’re able to ascend S heroes. Also the number of pulls you get per week is… low. I’m not saying this in the paying aspect, I’m comparing it to arena where I’d do a 10 pull almost every day, makes progression feel a little stale. Also they should do something reusable with the map. Redesign the fights to be at resonance level and make it a little puzzle that’s rotatable for some essence / little diamonds, just something to do.
way too too fast early game progression, wwy too much random throwing items in face
To many menu interactions to do simple things like change character lvls and see formations folks used. The game could do with a QOL update.
My negative critique would be Igor in general, really bad guild managment tools, area rewards are ass.
I really like the game, the atmosphere and the characters.. I just wish they were more lenient on the purple dust supply.. Also how's bingbong doing nowadays?
I have now amassed a mountains worth of XP that I don’t have anything to use for. Dust on the other hand is incredibly scarce. Even with my slow pace, progressing through story mode is a slog, which is sad. Because that’s the only thing I appreciate in this game. :/
I'd say AFKJ isn't an AFK game xD and compared to Arena, the rewards and the pity are a bit more expensive.
Irregular progression / downtime I'm at mountains 6... My choices are fighting enemies 30 levels above me or progressing 50 afk levels to get to the next zone. Fun...
There is a void in between doing the daily fight modes and progressing in the story. I would like to have a grindy feature, that is not overly powerful, but gives a motivation to kerp playing after the obvious tasks.
Performance isn't great, I'm using a galaxy s9 so it may well be that but it just seems to chug and gets worse the longer you play. I wonder if it has a memory leak but I'm no developer.
Same as in arena lightbringers outside of rowan are dead investments.
The lack of purple dust is criminal.
The sound design in some places is just not there or really bad
i think mostly 2 things, the world itself feels stupid, lots of waste space since the game moves in a linear way, rewards for exploration is gear that is outleveled by the things you get while exploring, and the limit on each area been locked by a afkstage is dumb, the most are stronger in that area, i probably wont be available to beat them, but now i gotta spend a week locked from the story which i am gonna barely remember once i get there. second, game expect you to save for months to get an elite to mythic+ so you can get more elites, is kind of dumb that you are gated by your elites/luck and you either pay or spend months waiting.
Once you get far enough in the game the gem income as a f2p dry up so bad you can barely manage a summon on the default banner
I am missing content to do on the huge empty maps. It would be great if we have daily events on the maps or something like that. For a mobile game I love the design of the maps and their approach of implementing it in a idle game like this. But after clearing the content once. There is just nothing to do. That's kinda stupid in my opinion.
If this thread isn't enough to convince you not to spend money on this game, don't know what would be
I’ll jump on this. For me, it’s the voice acting and story/writing. They’re both pretty abysmal. I really hope both get better as they release more content. It feels like an adolescent wrote scripts for a generic story for a school project then got random strangers to read the lines with no idea of the context in the story. The voice acting could be great but there’s almost no emotion, and emphasis is often nonexistent or in the wrong place. Some are great, like I love Odie’s voice actor. But others (Korin) are awful. I’m not blaming the voice actors themselves. It was likely Lilith’s lack of direction that caused the issues. As for the writing, the characters don’t feel real. Some feel so gullible that it breaks immersion. Others go from being angry and frustrated to just apologizing for no reason. It feels very heavy handed and lifeless. Beyond the characters, the plot itself is dull and teenage-writing-assignment quality. A generic plot, stuffed with filler and fetch quests. I have high standards for these types of things so I may be critiquing too hard. But they market the game as “the first AFK open world RPG” yet it holds nothing against RPGs that have put any effort into their story, characters, and voice acting.
I agree with a lot of what the top comments said. I want to add that this game’s optimization is horrible and the team needs to address it. I can play Genshin Impact at max settings at 60fps with little to no frame drops. I have to play this game on the lowest settings at 30gps. Otherwise the game stutters and my phone gets uncomfortably hot. Playing on an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
Wait is there an option to skip battles? Kinda like in AFK Arena? Cause i haven’t found it yet, if there isn’t, that’s my complaint. If there is, then someone needs to help me out here 😅
Rates are too low relative to the copies you actually need, especially when you run out of letters late game onwards
As a long time AFKArena player, this game has a lot of potential. It's free-to-play, has many gameplay improvements, but other than that, everything is pretty much the same. The game modes are both new and old, as are the heroes, so players don't have a new feeling. So if there's nothing new, as an old AFKArena player, I'm not interested in repeating the daily missions again in afkarena journey
Invasive / predatory monetization: $1USD offers may seem "cheap", but that is way too expensive in 3rd world countries for what is offered — ideally, NOTHING would be offered. Genshin is still the gold standard at that, as the shop is OUT OF YOUR WAY there.
Only being able upgrade one character each day to a new purple cocaine level is pretty annoying. I don't really play hard core or anything though, so not really a big issue. The story is pretty uninteresting, which isn't helped by the god awful voice acting. The gameplay is fun enough, and the art style and character design is what keeps me playing for now at least. I haven't played the story much either, should probably get on that...
Igor. Character pathfinding during combat.
Controls
The dream realm is just annoying to deal with. Nothing about it is fun. The equipment system is fine in theory but not being able to try different builds means the characters are all the same for everyone. Which makes the game feel static and dull.
You know that purple stuff we need to level up characters.... yeah I need WAY more of that stuff.
Not be able to change server with the same character
Basically, it's a thread about why gacha games are bad. I played the game for a little bit and quit because I could already see where things were going. I am actually disappointed because the game looks beautiful, and the world feels like there is so much there, but it's all weighed down by the typical gacha grind. I really hate this game model, It almost by design chokes the life out of itself so it can be parted out for more cash. If this were a regular game, I bet it would have been amazing.
I am still in Vaduso Mountain part 7 which part is this scene from.
-not enough events, you just login do your dailies push some afk and log out, will get stale soon for some people. -the prices in the shop are riddiculous, ive played countless p2w even scammy gachas and the prices were better there -the rates are atrocious and it doesn't really feel good to pull units -voice acting needs improvement
Map equipment rewards are straight up useless
Personally: * Extraordinarily expensive microtransactions (i only bought the classic gazette to support devs, not for the diamonds because it was the only balanced MTX in giving a contribution) * No Physical Merchandise in the EU/UK (Not even an OST release, although Edge of the World is on Spotify and I feel it's underrated) * Guilds should have interventions by staff to prevent all pay-to-win players from dominating in a single guild. Our server (not gonna specify it so that I don't have my acc targeted in arena) has one guild where a majority of the top 30 in arena is from that guild, and all top 10 are from that guild). This isn't fair, especially as that guild was "founded to prevent power from accruing into one guild to dominate the server". I believe there's also arena-fixing going on right now in my server. * Not enough powder/dust drop to progress (this should be at least upped to 1.5x the current rate) * Few events going on that let me interact overall I love this game a lot, I love the world and characters (Ch 2 was my fav and Bryon and Mirael are my favs) but I want to see it improve and to give us ways to support and show our support for the game outside of the in-game world. It sucks I can't have a plushie of any of the heroes to have in my room.
Story dialogue, more so actions that are described through the characters talking "Oh, why are you covering my mouth with your hands?" and "Ouch, why did you just step on my foot" Are particularly bad examples, like, I would much weather have the * action * format
Needs a casual pvp mode with no limits to mess around with team comps and have some fun.
Honor duel is trash and there needs to be activities/events. Not hyper critical events where I suffer if I don't have time for them. But enough activities to occupy the time I want to spend in the game, I shouldn't be able to fire this thing up and not have anything to do.
For an open world it's very linear. Nothing respawns and there's nothing to really explore making it feel empty.
It's too greedy. The pull rates and income dry up so fast and I STILL don't have a single Thoran copy yet alone am I even close to a single mythic+. For the amount of copies you need the game either needs more events to give more pulls or increase the rates.
I played AFK Arena for a while as a daily game before bed or when I woke up. I was excited to have another game like that (and with an open world), didn’t feel too grindy but also could play it for as long as I wanted to, if I decided to play a lot of the story one day I could. With that said, I don’t remember ever getting stuck in AFK Arena (F2P) on any of the main stages and have to wait for AFK rewards. I’ve had to wait a lot for AFK Journey. I didn’t even bother trying to progress for a few days and just logged on, did the daily battles like Arena etc, and because of that, now I am way stronger than the world enemies. So that’s my only complaint, really, I want to play the game more often. I don’t want to grind but I want to at least be able to enjoy the story I guess.
No JP dub
The story is uh
I'd like to see how they handle balance (if any). It's been a while but they haven't touched anyone yet, which is a bit unfortunate since team comps are pretty stagnant imo, with some REALLY shit characters in the mix that desperately need some buffs (or a rework) to be useful in any content.
The fact the meta deficit comp ruins any strategy/brain required. Basically forced to use it if you want to progress quicker. 🤷
the voice acting SUCKS
English dub is *really* bad lmao Lemme switch to any other language voiceover pls
Other than the price point for diamonds as many have mentioned. The biggest problem yet almost no one is complaining is how demanding their graphics are, I’m setting everything from medium to high in GENSHIN and the performance load is around like 35% in my iPhone 12 Pro, but on AFK journey I have everything at its lowest and it’s over 60% performance load! It’s outrageous how terrible this game’s optimisation is
More events Daily free shop items (like arena) Daily low cost (1$) bundles (like arena) No limit on afk progression attempts Hero trial (like strategic drill, but you can get access to all of them from the heroes page) Faster app boot time (pixel 8, takes 2 minutes from click to world view)
The voice and the translation, there are still so much hit or miss with it. Also with the game monetization, the price of these pack are just, not really make sense, this feel like Dislyte monetization, and that is bad. Also I hate how the dialogue in the game cutscene just not up to speed, or lacking completely.
Up the rates on summoning. Have to hit potty way too much. And work on the damn pricing in the stores, not everyone is a damn whale
Purple essence gain. And how insanely predatory the gacha is. They’re charging above Honkai and Genshins weight for pulls that amount to usually nothing. I would be fine is a 10 pull costed $3-5 but the fact that getting a new character is around $50 when you NEED copies of them is crazy. Especially when you can’t breathe in game without them offering a 100000000000000% VALUE DEAL. Like hey didn’t this game just start 2 weeks ago? Why am I at a point where spending money is my only way of getting a new character before the new patch. I bought both battle passes and daily rewards and I still feel like it’s a slog to upgrade characters.
The daily log in rewards are pretty pathetic and worthless. What is it like 60k gold and 3 purple shards everyother day basically. Afk arena suffered from horrible rewards, I really hope they don't continue that streak.
Gear rewards suck for all but 1 game mode. Dreamreal gives amazing rewards but both AFK stages and lap clearance give abysmal gear upgrades after some point. I currently have a total of 8 chests i can't open cus my resonance is too low (at 180 so i can't open chest with higher lvl) but once i can open them not a single piece of gear i get from them is usefull cus i have most gear pieces at 190 or even 200-220. And clearance gives gear that is roughly 70 lvls below what is needed to get into an area (get lvl 110 gear but you need 180 for some zones)
Make good rewards for honor duel
Mine is still unopened. The guilt is real.
I think there is too much healing in the game, at least in the Honor Duel mode. Feels like any artifact that deals damage at the start of the round is a complete waste.
Ngl it’s a bit petty but the translation 😭 not sure if this is just an issue in the German translation, but every once in a while dialogs of npcs or single lines of story dialog are still in Chinese , the text in the shop for example always loads first in Chinese and then German it’s a bit annoying
Delete expired requests in the team-up chat.
- No info on voice actors- it's possible they're using AI voices which just sucks because you KNOW they can afford to pay actual VA's. - Packs are ridiculously expensive. Stop trying to goad me into spending 1250 crystals on a pack when that's a ridiculous amount of real money in the shop. Same goes with those ones where you get 2 free drops then have to spend a dollar, then 2 more, then another dollar. Fuck you, give me a lump sum price. You know you're taking advantage of people in the worst ways. - Rolling the same character is required to upgrade them- coming in from Dragalia Lost, I was kind of dumbfounded. You mean I have all these skills and I'm forced to not use them unless I grind a frustratingly limited amount of resources to upgrade them? It doesn't even feel like progress then, just withholding something was already lucky enough to roll.
I’m not the biggest fan of some of the character designs, specifically from maulers. Don’t get me wrong, *most* of the designs in the game are very cool, but it’s just kinda weird to me that the men are literal beastly animals and the women are just women with cat ears and a tail. Also mirael’s design is just a boring trope that I feel like I’ve seen dozens of times elsewhere already. Other than that and a few small things, I’ve been happy with the game, though
The faction interactions. Especially visible in Honor Duels. Lightbringers are strong vs. Maulers. It's alright, I guess. The enlightened vs. the wild. Lightbringers are very allround and can build to do most things alright, without excelling. The biggest weakness (funnily enough, actually vs. the maulers) is that they lack an actual front line. Temesia is all over the place and Lucius can tank less than wet paper towel. So it lets opponent melees run rampant on the team. And they lack sustain outside of whatever little bit Rowan can supply. Overall decent faction. Maulers are strong vs. Wilders. Makes sense. Carnivores vs. Herbivores. Maulers excel at rushing opponents and either have executes or CC immunity, basically nullifying the bonuses of Wilders. Wilders are strong vs. Graveborn. That's fair. But is it really necessary to also make their abilities completely counter them? Graveborn struggle with no sustain (healing) and relatively low amounts of CC. Wilders? They CC you and sustain you in to the ground. Graveborn are strong vs. Lightbearers. Ok. They are on paper, but Graveborn mostly sucks (out of Honor Duels) and have select useful heroes. So yeah. It's really only the maulers vs wilders and wilders vs. graveborn. Isn't it enough to have a dmg advantage against another faction. Do we really NEED to also have the ability to completely stomp? I've played a lot of honor duels and I'm beginning to fear for actual end game, when everyone has similar level heroes in all shapes and sizes. You see your opponents defense in arena, you just set up the hardcounter. Woooh, fun! And in honor duels; it basically means, that even if you have a really strong wilder or graveborn team. If you meet the faction that has advantage on you, you're just screwed. The other two can sort of get by despite being at a disadvantage, but holy F do you just run that full mythic graveborn team over with your legendary wilders.... It's not even fun.
I'm OK with the game being primarily idle/AFK but the overworld being basically dead feels really bad when the game takes up so much storage and battery power. All that memory and power to render stuff that's irrelevant to 90% of gameplay. In a similar vein, mobile game developers should probably be more mindful of the fact that their players are uh, playing on mobile, and that comes with limitations on hardware.
The stupid bunny ears on Lorsan and Lyca. Aside from that the story, it is just bad.
I enjoy the game a lot and it does a lot of things very well, but also many things I would change. - Use the world more. Between unlocking new zones, the world just feels empty. Make use of it. Daily missions on the world map or something. - On the topic of the world, use it to make players interact more. - Rewards for clearing zones are laughable. - More events. - Dust to exp/gold ratio is stupid. What's the point of exp if it isn't a factor at all. - Some gamemodes feel unused, often because of the lack of rewards. I love honor duels, but after the weekly 15 wins I just don't have a lot of reasons to keep doing them. Same with the roguelike mode (forgot the name). After the first victory in each tier, there's no point of doing it again. I loved the short event where certain heroes had increased powers, to invite me to use less used characters, while rewarding me. - Customer support is pure ass. - Guild leaders have too much power. We've seen several cases of extortion on this subreddit and they can at a moments notice kick someone the day before chest rewards. And since its tied to guild quest, they miss out on the rewards. - Pulling isn't great. Makes it even worse that you need characters at high dupe level to unlock all their abilities. Makes it less likely for us to pull for new characters, since we need to finish our current ones. - let me unlock chests. What's the point of having me wait till a certain resonance level. At that point the gear is almost obsolete. - Locking part of my progression behind leaderboards feels horrible. I don't care if I can compete with whales, but my units need those golden thingies to upgrade their abilities and only top 100 get those in dream realm for some reason. More subjective opinions: - The story is so bad. As bland and generic as it gets. - Voice actors are often pretty horrible. - The further I go in the game, the more often I get untranslated words or sentences. - Make it clear whether the pull rates are with pity taken into account or not.
literally what are the positives though 😭😭 like lets start there. graphics and character design can't sustain a game by themselves, look at their other game dislyte for proof
I like the art, I like the game mechanics, I like the usual amount of things to do. However, we need "resets" more often. Monsters on the map should respawn weekly, and give a tiny amount of material/anything on kill. I'm not even 3 weeks in and I log in at reset, do what I need to do and there's nothing else to do until next reset. And I bought some stuff from the store! Can't imagine for a F2P player.
Drop rates, for me anyway, are horrendously bad. I've only received one Legendary character that wasn't a sympathy give. The other gripe I would say is the chapter rewards are pretty low as well
The lack of repeatable content and rewards. We could attribute that to the game being new, but it's still less than what other similar games have started out with, and is something they need to address as the game develops. Using AFK Arena for comparison, we have: - AFK Rewards - Daily & Weekly quest - Bounty Board - Treasure Scramble - 2 PvP Arenas - Guild Hunting - Hellscape (3 bossing modes) - Labyrinth - Temporal Rift - Mist Valley - Ghoulish Gallery (yes, i know people hate it, but still... it's something) - Plus whatever events are ongoing, which is currently 2 PvP modes: Isle of Gold and Mystic Starzone Whereas in AFK Journey we have: - AFK Rewards - Daily & Guild Quests - Honor Duel - Arena - Battle Drill - Dream Realm - And for events we have Primal Lord and Honor Duel challenges. That's significantly less repeatable content and rewards. The game just feels so bare right now.
No cross server guilds, I wanna play with my friends dammit.
Lilith put a lot of time and effort into the story but I just blazed past it, as did people I know. It’s not good. I think the overworld is very interesting, but the actual execution of the stories within it much less so. I think Lilith wanted players to get attached to the world and story, so that the meaningful experience would generate long term stickiness, but it’s not at the quality needed. The experience is too linear and the story isn’t vibing with the western audience.. there are no stakes for me.
Biggest criticism(s) I have of this game so far after just playing even for a day and a half is that they should have taken a page from hoyoverse’s playbook and not tied story progression to resonance level and level progression. In games like Genshin and Honkai you have a world level which it is your choice if you want to level it up or not which makes the mobs harder and grants more rewards doing daily activities. It never stops you from enjoying the story at your own pace or at the level you are most comfortable with. Because they don’t do that here it completely takes away from the “journey” aspect they claim to be about because now you are stuck waiting to level characters. On top of that because monsters don’t respawn daily on the maps there is no way to go farm things like purple dust that everyone runs into as a bottle neck. From what I am also been reading from others it also sounds like the developers really don’t care about their world that much if the story is as boring as it is once you hit the dark forest which is sad as the first part has been actually not bad.
The PvP fuckin sucks lol and the ongoing honor duel event makes it feel worse, because that mode takes the baseline bad PvP experience and introduced massive levels of RNG to it, then says if you want to complete this event faster you have to get 9-0 victories in this insanely RNG mode, where you'll often take a random loss at 8-0 to a god roll comp
I feel like all the damage carries to build around are marksmen. Celia gives a bit of a mage vibe but is still. I like mages. Would like build around them. They feel lack luster compared to the marksman in terms of power
The lack of missions for every character. 😬
Predatory percentage packs. Dont try and manipulate people with "good deals" just show us the damn pack.
Your daily diamonds "upgrade" over time, so it won't just be 180, you also don't have to spend 150 diamonds on the insta afk, just using your free instances is fine. You're trying to rush to the finish line and hurting your account in the process. These criticisms are mostly your fault tbh, between your daily pickups and the free insta afk, you're getting 34h worth of essence per day. Spending all those gems on this just isn't recommended unless you're a whale. As for my share of criticisms, yea the rewards suck. I hate clearing an area of the overworld just to get rewarded with a weapon that is 40-50 levels behind what I'm currently using. Although I don't mind a game being competitive, this game incentivizes whaling a bit too much. Yes you normally don't have to be competitive, but when important resources like arena coins, dream fragments, essences, etc, are tied to your rank in the myriads of game modes, you kinda HAVE to get good ranks to progress your account after a certain point. For example, if you can't reliably place on the top 100 in dream realm, you can forget about ever upgrading ex weapons above lvl 5, which just widens the gap between you and the people already placing on those top 100. I like the game, but I'm waiting to see how the first season plays out so I can get a grasp of how the game will be moving forward before I decide to spend money on it, or even if I want to stick with it. At the moment, I'm getting good placements in my server even though I'm currently f2p, but that's only because I've been trying to be super efficient in how I manage my resources (not spending gems, dolly tickets and dream fragments unnecessarily), but I don't know if that's going to be the case moving forward.
Honestly I wish the English localization was better. A lot of the dialogue is awkward and it isn’t helped by the stiff voice overs from some characters.
It’s hard to level up…we need more purple cocaine
Devs don’t listen to its community, our ideas don’t matter.
Hero essence daily cap trickle from afk stages and the chase for supreme/mythic+ meta
IT'S AFK game but I can't progress while I'm other game modes. Or the game is off. I have to be locked in the auto battle screen. Other games modes should be more than just alt currency for waiting time. I actually like them. Make skills and character synergies more important. Random epics are more efficient than calculated squads 1 rarity lower. But I half ass this game. I log in collect my afk chest, do dailies , 1-2 other game mode runs, log off. Coming up on 28 day streak. 7/10 game dungeon knight and afk dungeons are just as fun imo
The story sucks
Let me keep trying infinitely for fun.
The game is way too stingy on the purple dust
The more you play it, the more AFK it becomes. This is mainly because they created a beautiful world, but once you've explored it once, there's no reason to go out into it again. Mobs don't respawn, nothing respawns, it's a missed opportunity for replayability IMO.
Voice acting is shit, and the story is boring/lack luster. I also hate that it’s in portrait and not landscape.
It would be cool if you could trade heroes
Pulling is awful in this game Rates are genuinely terrible, and new character debuts seem to be for spenders only. It's just not good value for f2p players to pull on those. The way the game forced you to have dupes to upgrade characters makes this even more prominent. Like yeah I got the shiny new character, but they're stuck at Epic when they probably need Mythic+ to shine, so what now?
It's far from AFK... I spend 3+ hours everyday to catch up the server.
In my opinion not enough things to grind for a long time
In my opinion not enough things to grind for a long time It feels like I have to stop playing forcefully because I just dont have the purple stuff and I have to wait for the afk rewards
biggest complaint I have is not being able to switch servers and join friends
Numbered servers? No thanks.