What I think After 300,000,000 Days (Gacha and Strategy Veteran)
No I havent been on for that long but Ive been playing collector games including this one long enough to give an honest review with NO FLAMING.
To start off, the art is unbelievable. The textures, the character design, the way the story is told. I have talked to concept artists about how they create fantasy art and its not easy to do. Extremely creative work and the artists are really top tier.
What i think goes unappreciated is that they have built the game to deal with the problem of getting duplicate characters. Really smart how they did this. Normally you have bad characters that arent really good for end game content but Raid solves this in several ways while still maintaining the clear divide between the different character rarities.
Despite this solid foundation, Raid is probably going to crash before the end of this year.
I'm sure all is good right now with the player numbers. Game looks good, there's heavy marketing, players are coming in to check it out. However all that is going to change very quickly because of the way rewards are being set up.
Everything im going to say next is based on two things: Effort should be rewarded and RNG is fine there is nothing wrong with RNG but it should be reasonably used.
The MAIN PROBLEMS with Raid are:
Too many barriers blocking progress- If I want, 5* epic defense body with def % primary, I can farm dungeon for a week easily and not get it because of the number of gear and stat combinations. What was the goal of flooding the loot table with so many gear/stat combos? There are so many champions to try out plus secondary stat combinations matter. If I want just three of that def body it would easily take weeks. If I wanted that epic body plus the right secondary combination, that may never happen. At some point I would lose interest in farming all together.
The legendary drop rate. I'm not sure it is a good thing indirectly telling people, you are probably not going to get any of the best champs in the game unless you spend more money. Plarium's stance on this is the rates are an industry standard, which is true. 6% as the highest chance to get the best units is normal and it is an ideal rate, but other games give players way more attempts at 6% chance.
Personally happy enough with my team, but what keeps me interested is being able to get the shiny thing from time to time. Even if RNG is not on my side when i summon, just knowing that the luck will turn soon enough is why i play gachas in the first place.
With Raid, i am 95% sure I am not going to get a legendary unit for at least a year. I know what 6% is. The epic gear with the stat combinations im looking for may take up to 5 months even if I farmed everyday after work.
Its not about if my team can be viable or not, its can I get one of those cool things over there or not. This is why Gacha games release new characters often and give players opportunities to get them.
The progress mission system is too linear. They are basically achievements. Last I checked you got an achievement after completing a task not if you have completed a previous task as well as that one. This is such a bizarre design choice. I assume it was to help teach new players what to do. Just make players a long list of achievements so they can choose which to focus on.
Swapping gear costs. You deliberately built a pvp system that could take advantage of people being able to swap gear to counter specific teams. The gear costs make it very difficult for people to test out builds. This is the kiss of death for strategy games.
Im pretty sure there is no strategy game on the planet that discourages people from running different iterations of their ideas. Because trying new things is what keeps people playing. Its part of the reason why the Civilization franchise is so popular. You can easily switch up the experience
If i cant test out ideas quickly, I am probably not going to play long term let a lone recommend the game to people.
Lastly content. Lack of content is what kills games. This is probably why Plarium built this great wall of RNG. maybe in time that will get sorted.
Raid is very strong on gameplay and the devs are very communicative. It should be a 10/10 experience if the effort reward structure and content is figured out. Im really assuming here that squeezing people for cash wasnt the main goal. There should be some balance.