I love the game, but the devs hate me.

The foundation of the game is good. The game is beautiful. But the decision makers of the company are constantly ruining the game and player's experience. Let me explain by briefly listing things that they have changed in the game (that I know of) through out the years.


Generally speaking, playing with friends can make everything easier in open world survival games. It is very reasonable to scale up a boss if there are multiple players present. However in this game, upgrading weapon is extremely costly. In the final release of the game, it takes tens of hours to max out a single weapon. In this aspect you can't speed things up by dividing the works. It doesn't matter if you play solo or with friends, the upgrade resources are limited, meaning that it can take up to a hundred hour to max out multiple weapons. It makes the game actually encourage soloing the bosses. Soloing is way easier and faster than fighting together, because you only have to max out 1 weapon to fight a boss with 1x health, instead of making 4 maxed weapons to fight a boss with 4x health. This is what I do with my group of friends, whenever there's a boss standing in the way of the story progression, they will have to log out and let me solo the boss alone before they can join back. It's not a skill issue, it's just the unbalanced scaling. Which shows how inconsiderate the devs are. This is a pathetic, inhuman, boring and annoying multiplayer experience and it should never happen to an open world survival game.


Lil Fist is a build that utilizes fighting bare hand without any weapon, thanks to the perk with the same name "Lil Fist". Every time your punches land on an enemy, the next punch will deal additional damage, and it stacks indefinitely until you get hit. Normally this build is pretty useless because of the pathetic initial damage, you need to land ~10-20 punches to kill a weak mob. It's way easier to kill a mob with a normal weapon with just a couple of swings. However Lil Fist is viable for killing bosses because of the long health bar. The only catch is that you have to play perfectly in order to stack Lil Fist damage, and this is extremely difficult, you basically have to Sekiro everything to make Lil Fist viable. This makes Lil Fist no where near top tier. However, Obsidian still decided to take the fun out from the players and nerf this unintended build. In addition to the Lil Fist nerf, they also nerfed many low-tier builds through out the year just because they have creative usage on some very specific unintended situations. This is the only game I know of that constantly nerfs low tier (but fun) stuffs.


IBM, the Infected BroodMother, is the hardest boss in the game. I believe in an open world survival building game, creativity and freedom are the most valuable aspects, players are meant to play however they want, as long as they don't cheat. In this game however, whenever someone comes up with an unintended strategy for IBM, the devs will nerf it IN A BLINK OF AN EYE. Bug fixes? Forget about it. They spend most of their times sniping on reddit, youtube and twitch, to witch-hunt whoever destroys their original intention: To make players Sekiro IBM. Yes, you have to Sekiro all the way through. Palworld on the other hand embraces the community, even their official twitter account appreciates how players cheese a mid game boss by building bonfires underneath it. This is the difference between hating and loving their players.


There's no instant fast travel in this game (before the 1.4 final release) and I'm fine with it. Grounded introduces an interesting mechanic to fast travel by building zip lines. A zip line connected from an extremely high point A to a ground level low point B, will let players travel from A to B in no time. The only problem is that it still takes a considerably long and boring time climbing from the ground to A. Players came up with the idea of elevators, by building trampolines in a vertical chain. This allows you to bounce from ground level to as high as you build. However these elevators are not easy to build. It takes serious effort to build a tower touches sky. And guess what? They nerfed it! How exciting!


In the final release of the game, Grounded introduced new game plus to the players. All the bosses will receive additional health, attack and defense buff, as well as a random passive ability. Many of these random passives can deal unavoidable, unblockable, one shot damage towards max geared players. The only workaround is to reload the save to reroll their random passive. For example if the first boss in the game (BroodMother) receives the sour buff, it shoots out 100 half human sized electric balls which any single one of those can one shot you. How in the world would this be put into the game? Now I do believe this is going to be fixed, but the problem I want to show here is not the unbalanced bosses themselves. It's the inconsideration of the devs. At this point it's extremely clear that non of the devs or the decision makers have tested their new genius idea. The company is corrupted.

[h1]TL;DR Obsidian hates their players.[/h1] I love the game, but the devs hate me. The foundation of the game is good. The game is beautiful. But the decision makers of the company are constantly ruining the game and player's experience. Let me explain by briefly listing things that they have changed in the game (that I know of) through out the years. [h3]The Multiplayer Imbalance[/h3] Generally speaking, playing with friends can make everything easier in open world survival games. It is very reasonable to scale up a boss if there are multiple players present. However in this game, upgrading weapon is extremely costly. In the final release of the game, it takes tens of hours to max out a single weapon. In this aspect you can't speed things up by dividing the works. It doesn't matter if you play solo or with friends, the upgrade resources are limited, meaning that it can take up to a hundred hour to max out multiple weapons. It makes the game actually encourage soloing the bosses. Soloing is way easier and faster than fighting together, because you only have to max out 1 weapon to fight a boss with 1x health, instead of making 4 maxed weapons to fight a boss with 4x health. This is what I do with my group of friends, whenever there's a boss standing in the way of the story progression, they will have to log out and let me solo the boss alone before they can join back. It's not a skill issue, it's just the unbalanced scaling. Which shows how inconsiderate the devs are. This is a pathetic, inhuman, boring and annoying multiplayer experience and it should never happen to an open world survival game. [h3] Lil Fist Nerf [/h3] Lil Fist is a build that utilizes fighting bare hand without any weapon, thanks to the perk with the same name "Lil Fist". Every time your punches land on an enemy, the next punch will deal additional damage, and it stacks indefinitely until you get hit. Normally this build is pretty useless because of the pathetic initial damage, you need to land ~10-20 punches to kill a weak mob. It's way easier to kill a mob with a normal weapon with just a couple of swings. However Lil Fist is viable for killing bosses because of the long health bar. The only catch is that you have to play perfectly in order to stack Lil Fist damage, and this is extremely difficult, you basically have to Sekiro everything to make Lil Fist viable. This makes Lil Fist no where near top tier. However, Obsidian still decided to take the fun out from the players and nerf this unintended build. In addition to the Lil Fist nerf, they also nerfed many low-tier builds through out the year just because they have creative usage on some very specific unintended situations. This is the only game I know of that constantly nerfs low tier (but fun) stuffs. [h3]The Impossible IBM [/h3] IBM, the Infected BroodMother, is the hardest boss in the game. I believe in an open world survival building game, creativity and freedom are the most valuable aspects, players are meant to play however they want, as long as they don't cheat. In this game however, whenever someone comes up with an unintended strategy for IBM, the devs will nerf it [b]IN A BLINK OF AN EYE[/b]. Bug fixes? Forget about it. They spend most of their times sniping on reddit, youtube and twitch, to witch-hunt whoever destroys their original intention: To make players Sekiro IBM. Yes, you have to Sekiro all the way through. Palworld on the other hand embraces the community, even their official twitter account appreciates how players cheese a mid game boss by building bonfires underneath it. This is the difference between hating and loving their players. [h3] The Elevator Nerf [/h3] There's no instant fast travel in this game (before the 1.4 final release) and I'm fine with it. Grounded introduces an interesting mechanic to fast travel by building zip lines. A zip line connected from an extremely high point A to a ground level low point B, will let players travel from A to B in no time. The only problem is that it still takes a considerably long and boring time climbing from the ground to A. Players came up with the idea of elevators, by building trampolines in a vertical chain. This allows you to bounce from ground level to as high as you build. However these elevators are not easy to build. It takes serious effort to build a tower touches sky. And guess what? They nerfed it! How exciting! [h3]The New Game Plus Impossible Bosses[/h3] In the final release of the game, Grounded introduced new game plus to the players. All the bosses will receive additional health, attack and defense buff, as well as a random passive ability. Many of these random passives can deal [b]unavoidable, unblockable, one shot damage[/b] towards max geared players. The only workaround is to reload the save to reroll their random passive. For example if the first boss in the game (BroodMother) receives the sour buff, it shoots out 100 half human sized electric balls which any single one of those can one shot you. How in the world would this be put into the game? Now I do believe this is going to be fixed, but the problem I want to show here is not the unbalanced bosses themselves. It's the inconsideration of the devs. At this point it's extremely clear that non of the devs or the decision makers have tested their new genius idea. The company is corrupted.