THE Deepwoken Review: is it Worth it?

[Music] he [Music] [Music] deepwoken has a um colored history in the past of this channel for those who missed out on the woken joke which is unfortunately coming to a swift end at the release of this video uh rest in peace woken probably my favorite running joke on the entire Channel um people have been asking me to play deep woken for like a million years now I had my reasons for not playing it which I'll be talking about in just a second but uh in order to get under people's skin and because I thought it was funny every time someone would ask me about deepwoken or tell me to play it or ask me why I wasn't playing it I would simply respond woken and never explain why did I do this well I just told told you I thought it was funny uh and it made people get upset and boy did it make people get upset over the years which is why it is a real shame that unfortunately I have to put it to rest and for all of you who fell for the woken ruse over the years despite the fact that previously to this video I had never even touched the game uh gotcha and sorry about that anyways why didn't I play deepwoken well it's pretty much entirely just due to Roblox Jank and the the way that the game works the way I understood it at the time and the way I still understand it today on screen right now you can see a great example of Roblox Jank unfortunately because of Roblox engine itself which is unfixable the player character itself is not handled by the server and the reason that it's not handled by the server entirely is because if it was then you would lag in rubber band everywhere and 90% of the people who play Roblox on terrible connections wouldn't be able to do anything the side effect of this is that everything you do in Roblox is always going to be significantly delayed that's why when you see an attack here and then I turn my character around you see it significantly linger behind my character this gets further emphasized at higher pings and it's a reality of Roblox that makes playing just general combat games potentially really not fun so when you look at my history of playing video games especially those relatively similar to deepwoken such as Dark Soul which is a trial and error game uh when you take a Dark Souls trial and error level game and you include it with Roblox Jank and things that don't work the way they should on top of having a Perma death system that's extremely punishing yeah uh it wasn't looking great for this game then you take into consideration the fact that you have to pay to access the game meaning that if I wanted to roll around Incognito in a game where Incognito is really important because people can just go out of their way to look for me and kill me I'd have to pay even more money outside of the initial upfront cost so I simply just couldn't be bothered with all that being said it was 50% for Cyber Monday SL Black Friday so I figured I might as well jump in because eventually I'm going to have to review this game and because I've been saying that I wouldn't play it for the better part of a year now I figured people wouldn't be looking for me so I wouldn't have to worry about getting ganked or chased around by random people so now I've played it is it the best game on Roblox a masterpiece that puts every other game on the platform to shame uh maybe that's a cop out I know but I can't help it it's clear to me that deepwoken is definitely one of the most well-made games on the platform but I think it has some seriously crippling flaws that hold it back substantially and talking about all of that is what this video aims to do I'm going to be going through all of the things I liked about the game then looping back around to the end of the video with my criticism we're going to be kicking the positives off with the atmosphere and level [Music] design it's clear to me that this is the strongest part of deepwoken by a large margin and consequently it's probably something that flies under the radar for most of the edgy 14-year-old void Walkers looking to boot up the game with the express purpose to Slit your throat but on the real there was clearly a lot of work that went into this part of the game and it shows booting up the game for the first time and you as a player feel like an insignificant spec when compared to these massive sprawling Maps each explorable island is jam-packed with quests Secrets enemies and so on that make the world really feel lived in and Alive towns themselves are filled with people shops and otherwise with guard NPCs occasionally walking around patrolling the streets the attention to detail in almost every single aspect of the game world is something that I doubt will'll ever see in any other Roblox game ever the point is in the context of the world you're playing in everywhere you go feels real in a sense it's believable in the world that you're currently in everywhere you go all of these things are Amplified by the absolutely fantastic soundtrack composed by noonis sorry if I pronounced your name wrong this guys got some serious talent and if you don't believe me I'll play just a few of the tracks here [Music] e [Music] remember this is all original music created for a Roblox game if I were to Simply Be raing games based on their atmosphere alone deep woken would easily have scored a 10 out of 10 but the atmosphere and level design isn't all there is to games so let's move [Music] on unsurprisingly the main pillar of deepwoken is of course fighting enemies whether it be a lowly Bandit a massive monster or another player without combat the game cannot function on the whole deep wen's combat succeeds by always making the player feel in control of their character and when damage is taken most of the time it's your actions or in action that lead to that result there's definitely a significant learning curve when it comes to combat in this game game knowing when to Parry attacks how to react when others Parry understanding when it's best to roll how best to break free when you inevitably start taking damage Etc these are all simple mechanics in their core but brutally punishing nuances to the combat that until you start getting the hang of all of them working together you will die this is an aspect of the game that I have heavily mixed feelings on so we'll go into it further down the line when we get into the issues that I have but overall combat mechanics are implemented well and feel good to interact with the most surprising part of combat though was how competent and mostly well-made the AI was sure sometimes it has its issues getting over Ledges and such as well as the fact that the AI sometimes just will not give up causing 30-year stalling matches where you just run in circles over and over and over again trying to get the AI to leave you alone when you have a sliver of Health but usually the AI works great they fight more like a player would than any Roblox game I've played or likely ever will play with humanoid enemies making use of almost all the same tools that you would because well they're supposed to be just as intelligent or competent as you are in the world the other pillar of combat that elevates it is the sound design I don't know what it is about deepwoken and music and sounds but they've got this down pat combat sounds violent and visceral and there are several audio cues that make the combat easier to understand and use once you start picking up on them having an understanding of timing things after an enemy parries or blocks your attack as well as which attacks cannot be blocked or parried and so on are all executed to Perfection with the combat and sound design at the end of the day deep fen's combat plays into almost all of the aspects of combat that I harp on time and time again when it comes to Roblox anime games and that's why the overall package I feel is extremely solid and also almost certainly one of the reasons that so many of you have recommended this game to me it hits all those bases that I look for in a combat system so they've done a bang up [Music] job as I said earlier one of my big reasons for avoiding deepwoken was the idea of perade death in a high stakes Roblox game where at any second Roblox Jank can simply just take your life that being said after playing I think deep wen's death system has its merits and its drawbacks the best thing about deepwoken permanent death system is that it gives you the ability to try the game again but this time experiment with an entirely different way to play the game when you consider that you can choose between three different weapon classes six different Mantra styles 11 different oats and the list continues with all of those respective things having a variety of weapons and spells at their disposal that you can't be using all at once that all do different things yeah there's a lot to work with here what the death system succeeds at is encouraging you to try new things after your character's been killed off but it's not as if All Is Lost when you die either there are several permanent upgrades that you can acquire through different quests that will activate When You Reach certain Milestones on a new character without the need to completely redo the quests associated with them adding on to this when your character does fully wipe you gain resonance points based on the power level of your Dead character which can apply passive bonuses on any subsequent lives as well as the ability to pass down two of your items to your next character as for death itself I think it definitely has some flaws that we'll be talking about later but for the most part I think it's executed well and adds a lot of tension to each battle if at any point you understand that if you screw up and die you have the potential of losing everything it adds a lot of stress and I think that stress ends up being a good thing rather than a drawback for the game but that wraps up our positive section so now it's time to get down to where the game loses [Music] points yep well I was right about one thing so I said earlier that Roblox Jen and latency turned me off from this game and well I was right the realities of this game being a Roblox game at the end of the day absolutely creep their way into this game and can be the cause for extreme frustration the simple fact of the matter is that you cannot always assume while playing that a fight will play out with its mechanics intact as it should because there's a laundry list of things that can go wrong ping just Flatout changes the timings for some moves the difference between playing on 60 ping compared to 100 is absolutely staggering that means that for people with poor connections the game probably quickly borders on completely unplayable in terms of actually finding servers with quality ping that also poses itself as a problem the server browser might as well be completely worthless in this regard as the regions it's showing on your screen are not the regions that you're going to be playing in plain and simple I live in New Jersey that's on the east coast of the US for those who don't live here if I'm connecting to a server in Texas which is around central us there is no no way I should be getting over 300 milliseconds of ping consequently a server in California on the other side of the country should not have less ping than a server in Texas Texas is closer why do I have worse connection to Texas basically joining a server through here is a total crapshoot and because ping is so important if the server that the quick join option puts you in isn't ideal which for some people can and will happen you have the potential of spending 10 or more minutes searching for a good server on the server browser which is miserable now listen I understand that this is a Roblox issue and it's Roblox related the developers can't fix it but it takes away from the overall game experience and it matters at the end of the day but even if you are in a halfway decent or good server because it's Roblox if someone near you is loading in a ton of effects or playing with a lot of people on and on and on the Ping has the potential of spiking because that's just how Roblox works and if this happens in a critical moment well yeah you're screwed I had countless I dodged that or I parried that moments while playing this game and then I would look back on the footage and I'd be like yeah I did but the game screwed me anyway which is exactly what I was afraid of going into this game when everything in deep woken is working at its best the game is phenomenal but the second that some aspects start to crumble the ENT enre experience has the potential to fall [Music] apart right so um the new player experience it's awful they might as well rename deep woken to Wiki woken or maybe Google woken because this game is unplayable without it to be honest even with the wiki it can be be a struggle sometimes to figure out where things are or what you need to do I got pulled back to my days when I still played tarov with an internet browser filled up with like a 100 Wiki tabs so I knew what the hell I was doing there is a tutorial in the game but it leaves out several integral incredibly important aspects of the game that you need to know about making it honestly borderline useless in the grand scheme of things for the purposes of this review I played the game in three distinct ways the first was that myself and two of my friends all basically complete newcomers to deepwoken logged on to Simply play together it was as you'd probably expect a complete disaster we didn't know what we were supposed to be doing we had barely any practice in terms of combat or fighting and most of the day consisted of running away from things with a sliver of Health left because it's not explained at all when we got sent to the depths it was a death sentence eventually we caved and just used Google but even then nobody got out of the depths a single time during this section not once after about an hour and a half we called it a night and I don't really see either of those people logging on to play again and that's kind of a shame it's just not super fun to have absolutely zero Direction other than sail to Island and then when you get there die to the first three things you see the second time I played I Enlisted the help of my good friend MMD a who's been in a bunch of videos and his brother Mike huge shout outs to them for helping me out because without them well I don't know if this review ever would have even come out in the first place these guys are deepwoken veterans who actually know what they're doing and instantly my experience with the game turned around with them basically carrying me through sections of the game and explaining how different systems in the game worked it gave me the chance to learn about certain enemies and how to fight them without the constant threat of being killed in three hits in the process of trying to learn those things I was also able to put together a makeshift build with a better understanding of how my levels impacted gameplay how traits were tied to levels and skills and so on the point was these guys were basically doing the games tutorial for them and that's well that's not how games are supposed to work like I said without them I don't even think I'd be playing deepwoken I'd just be in deep I said I played three different ways though and that Third Way was hands down the most effective in terms of learning the game I paid for another character slot with the sole intention of completing the trial of one for those who don't know the trial of one is a hidden area of the game that can only be accessed at level one it strips you of all your belongings and puts you in a gauntlet against a huge variety of different monsters that you'll be fighting throughout the game and if you complete all of the trials it basically jump starts your character to around level six as soon as you start if you manage to complete four of the nine trials it it also unlocks an entirely new origin in the game which for those who don't know an origin is basically where you start and this origin starts you directly at the trial of one allowing you effectively Limitless attempts without any real risk and without the need to sail all the way to the corner of the map where this is located it took me roughly 2 hours to complete the trial of one in its entirety but here's the thing during those 2 hours I was taught the ins and outs of several monsters that I wouldn't have stood chance against in the open world these monsters in the trials killed me again and again but I got to keep trying and there in sort of Lies the problem I've beaten Dark Souls 1 and 2 those games for all intents and purposes are what I like to call trial and error games it's often not realistic to win on your first or sometimes even 15th attempt deepwoken is definitely a trial and error game but for a lot of players they'll just never even have a chance to get past the error part if every time you run into a Megalodon it you up in 15 seconds how are you supposed to learn how to fight against it the trial is a great way of doing that but it's tucked away in an obscure area of the map that you just flat out will not find without someone telling you or a Wiki I understand that a lot of these Rog likee games are designed around players finding things you've added and having a bunch of Secrets but here's the thing that's only really interesting for the first week or something that something is introduced after that it simply becomes gatekeeping where those with the knowledge flourish and those without either Google a guide or drown figuratively and literally in this case the other major flaw when it comes to being new is that despite having a functioning Quest log and waypoints no Quest that I came across in the game actually gives you any of these if you talk to an NPC and they ask for umbrell obsidian and you don't know what drops umbrell obsidian uh that can be a problem that becomes an even bigger problem when you forget who asked you to get the umbral obsidian so even if you do get it you don't remember which NPC you're supposed to be giving it to even if there were no way points in the game the game could have at least given you the common courtesy of logging which quests you have active in some sort of quest log and what they require from you but nope you get nothing it exists at the very beginning of the game but that's seemingly it it says go to lower Arisha you that's all you get It just strikes me as really odd and it feels like purposeless gatekeeping to funnel you towards the wiki I think it's okay to have certain things be hidden from the players as long as it's easy to pick up on or not that impactful to game playay but deepwoken feels the need to hide everything and all that ends up doing is making the barrier for entry higher than it otherwise should be and turning players away from an overall good experience I was so taken aback by the general design decisions here that I decided to go out of my way and was able to get in contact with one of the owners and head developers over for deepwoken Ark Mage I asked him a whole bunch of questions that honestly won't really fit super well into this video so they'll probably be put in their own separate video but for the sake of this one in terms of the player onboarding experience and the fact that everything's hidden while he agreed that the player onboarding was pretty bad which I think it would be hard not to he doubled down on the fact that everything is hidden and it's impossible to find anything out but then my question to archage would mostly be do you think that it's hard for people to go on Google and search up deep woken umbrell obsidian or how to get Shadow cast and deepwoken like do you think that those things are difficult and they add to the game cuz I don't think they do that's not hard so I'm not entirely sure what the thought process Behind these things are but they're here and they take away from the game that's about all I have to say on [Music] it so we've talked about the good we've talked about the bad so now it comes down to the score deepwoken is a far cry from the general complete and total garbage on this platform and because of that I'll be rating it based around the standards of real games rather than against Roblox games because if you were doing that I would just give it a 10 out of 10 and move on honestly pretty much any game that I play on this platform would get a 10 out of 10 on Roblox standard scale just because of how awful the general games are here as a though I feel like deep woken scores an 8 out of 10 simply put this is a great game for the cost of $5 this game puts a lot of modern $70 AAA releases to shame there is a lot of game here and it would take you hundreds if not thousands of hours to explore all of it the hard part with deepwoken though and the reason that it loses points is simple it's that difficulty towards the beginning of the game and the fact that it's flat out unplayable without outside sources I can only imagine the sheer amount of people who boot deep woken hearing about how good it is and then never make it past lower ratio I bet that number is in the upper hundreds of thousands if not millions of people I don't know how deepwoken monetization works in the long run but I think if they can get their new player experience under control and open the game up to everyone with a removal of the current pay wall there's a 10 out of 10 game to be had here but for right now a very high eight is the highest I can go I hope after creating this video a lot of you who have been absolutely begging me to play deepwoken will be relatively happy with this it had all the problems that I thought it would had but overall like I said it's a really good game and I'm glad I played it I don't really know if I'm going to continue to play it because well now that I've played it once there's going to be people looking for me in servers and I really don't want to be dealing with that but I had a pretty good time especially when I was playing with some of my friends so if I do decide to play it more let me know if you want to see some stuff from deepwoken on the channel anyways that's all from me for today so if you enjoyed the video you can leave a like And subscribe if you didn't don't and with all that being said have a wonderful day and night wherever you are and I'll see you next [Music] time [Music] [Music] ah

Channel: Eclipse

Views: 107,107

Keywords: Deepwoken, Roblox

Id: Z2L0JbeGN1w

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023