Character development oddities

Developing our swashbuckling warrior-style character (graphics settings at "Low").

As your hero gains levels by chopping up various hostiles and completing quests, you can allocate points to four main stats - strength, constitution, intelligence and agility. Additionally, you will get skill points to allocate to a set of skill trees to specialize your character. Your options include melee and archery combat, plus shadow-, light- and elemental-based spells. You can also allocate your points to race-based abilities, and to nature or technology-based abilities once you have chosen your alignment.

The character development in Silverfall is full of quirks and oddities; some of these smell like a lack of game design experience. For example, the game uses a power pool to fuel both spells and melee attacks. So even for a sword-swinging warrior, you need to put points to intelligence to increase the size of your power pool just so you can fight in melee, which feels counterintuitive. You also find out soon that you pretty much have to pick up couple of light-based skills (such as Resurrection) or end up seriously gimped, regardless of your character build. In the long run, you are pretty much forced to become a hybrid of some sort. Luckily you can visit a NPC to reset your skill choices, so there is no need to restart the game if you end up mis-spending your skill points.

The cost/benefit ratio of many skills is also seriously out of whack - while most skills only moderately increase your overall capability to decimate the monster hordes as you add points to them, some single-point abilities can give massive boosts in the ability to take or deal damage. Since Silverfall is a single-player or cooperative game, the lack of skill cost balance is not a huge deal, but it does mean that anyone wishing to min-max their characters will end up playing one of only handful builds - and they all tend to be melee/spellcaster hybrids of some sort. This coupled with the linear main story greatly diminishes the replay value.

Hmm, that guy was carrying some major phat loot.

Items and treasure are also doled out in massive quantities - a bit like in Dungeon Siege, except in that game you could actually obtain mules to haul all the loot back to town. In Silverfall, many monsters feel like pinatas - you pop couple of bad guys, and the ground is littered with enough crappy weapons and armor to outfit a small army. Even if you leave all grey items behind, you will have your limited bag space full pretty quickly. While there is a bank to store items, it's mostly useless as you level up so quickly that all items are constantly being replaced. Treasure piles also mean that you will be spending a lot of time comparing item statistics for each of your three active adventurers - some enjoy this kind of stat-comparing to maximize their character potential, but having to re-evaluate your gear choices after every pack of enemies gets a bit repetitive in the long run.