izigame.me

I had a lot of fun with Stoneshard. That’s why, I played more than 400 hours and tried to give the developers constructive feedback and even crunched the numbers to improve the meta. But with each update since the introduction of the troll, the game gets less fun to play. The developer’s either doesn’t care or are unable to properly develop their game. Updates take literally years to publish and don’t take player feedback into account.
Here are the things, which make the game not fun or outright tedious to play:
- Once fun gameplay mechanics, like hunting and skinning animals for pelts, got gated behind perks.
- Choosing survival or utility perks is punishing to the player, because you will have to foregone a badly needed combat perk. Survival perks will gimp your build.
- Magic got nerfed into oblivion and is not fun to play anymore.
- Some perks and builds are much more powerful than others. Respecing is impossible, and thus the player can get permanently punished for trying new perks.
- The economy doesn’t make sense. Equipment is worthless, when you want to sell it and treasure, when you want to buy it.
- With the save system, I had no problem before. But with the expanded map, dying means hours of gameplay lost upon death.
- The most glaring fault of the game for me is the map. The game is huge and has over 1000 tiles to explore, but nothing to make exploration worth it or fun. At this point, the game is a pointless walking simulator. Even the caravan update only slightly addresses this issue. The map remains mostly empty and exploration pointless.

TLDR: The game is a walking simulator with incredibly slow development. Wait until development has finished in 10 years and then maybe pick the game up.

Edit - 19.02.25 - reply to the developer
@Wayfinder Thanks for taking the time to write a reply. I want to address each of the points you made.
1. Review based on previous version: I watched gameplay of the changes made in the recent updates to decide, if I wanted to give Stoneshard a spin after all those disappointing trials after other updates before. The gameplay convinced me, that not enough has changed to warrant another unsatisfactory test.
2. Skinning: Skinning is challenging for a modern day person, but not for a medieval person. Every farmer, knight, hunter and many more people knew how to skin an animal, because it was necessary in everyday life. Mercenaries had to forage almost daily, and skinning was a regularly occurring activity.
The less reliable way to receive hides is just a stopgap for the missing ability to skin. The community complained a long time about the missing skinning feature, before the development acted upon it.
There is no need to decrease the price of pelts, when skinning is a common skill. Wild animals in Stoneshard are extremely dangerous. Good pelt prizes would make fighting them worth the risk of losing one’s live. Normal farmers would never risk their lives for a pelt. This makes them a rare and valuable commodity. Right now, it's better to not engage animals most of the time, making a whole class of enemies almost obsolete.
2. Fan base & development: The current community consists mostly of diehard fans. They accept pretty much anything the development of the game decides. Almost all other supporters have left by now, because the development is so incredibly slow, and it takes ages (sometimes years) before player feedback is acted upon. In the past, instead of acting upon player feedback, like implementing custom characters, new mechanics nobody had asked for like bird hunting or nerfs to magic got introduced.
Clearly, the developers have a vision for this game. To realize this vision, player feedback can only be implemented as long as it doesn’t collide with it. I can respect a vision. But my point about not acting upon the roadmap and feedback is clearly shown in the course of the development and past updates.
3. Pathfinder: That pathfinder is considered a must-have skill for all builds underscores my point, that the skills are not well-balanced. If every build needs a certain skill to be viable, it constricts the build options and the ways, the game can be played.
4. Survival perks: because of the still occurring difficulty jumps, some combat skills are necessary to survive. Picking a survival perk instead, even with some good passive bonuses, will negatively impact the combat performance of the player and thus gimp the build. From the gameplay I have seen, this has not changed. It is just not as pronounced as before, because the survival skills are not as useless for combat as before.
5. Magic: You give no argument, just state a different opinion. Magic was nerfed hard in comparison to past versions. For beginner’s magic is much harder to get into, than melee oriented builds. With magic, the player must know how to kite, how to let spells cooldown while keeping the distance from enemies. It's a much more skill intensive play style at the beginning of the game.
6. Economy: Just because many other RPGs do the same, it doesn't make a feature good nor necessary.
7. Losing progress upon dying: My review explains what new players can expect to happen on a normal play through. Stoneshard doesn't explain many of its mechanics very well and is a hard game to begin with. I would estimate a new player needs at least 20 hours of gameplay to learn about the game, to not die regularly. Dying regularly means losing hours of progress in the course of a play through, even with careful use of all possible save points.
Stoneshard being a mercenary RPG rather than a roguelike, has no need for the restricting save system. It only punishes new players.
I personally very seldom die. But I have over 400 hours of experience in the game. It's not something that can be expected of regular players and is one of the reasons I can't recommend Stoneshard to people considering buying it.
8. Exploration couldn't have been worse before. It was an almost empty map with nothing of value to discover. There were bandits with worthless gear, wild animals without any substantial loot and some dungeon in between. The dungeon is better tackled with a contract anyway, because then there is a payday at the end.
Very few places explain more about the world and let you connect to the people of Stoneshard. The only difference to before the last update is, now there are some places sprinkled in between with something worth looting.
It would have been better to either keep the map small but engaging, like it was before the troll update. If Stoneshard has to have a big map in the developer’s vision, it would have been better to have gone the way the game “Kenshi” has gone before – a carefully crafted map with secret lore to uncover, different biomes and cultures to interact with. But this would have been a lot of additional work. Stoneshard right now has the content of a small map stretched over a big map. The result is a world which feels like it lacks engaging content to make it feel alive.
9. If in the future the game will be finished, I'm willing to give it another try and even change my review to positive, if the game deserves a recommendation. Right now I don't think the game is worth the asking price.