Hunter’s Arena: Legends is currently competing with 24 Entertainment’s Naraka: Bladepoint for the title of best battle royale for people who don’t like battle royale. Like Naraka: Bladepoint, it switches battle royale’s usual shooting mechanics for melee combat, offering up an accessible fighting system with many hidden layers and tricks, a little like Ubisoft’s For Honor.
The premise is certainly promising, and Hunter’s Arena: Legends is attracting a lot of players (partly thanks to being free to PS Plus subscribers), but the game has launched with a lot of issues in its design and technical execution. Fans are hoping that the biggest of them will be fixed in the next update.
10 Remove Phantom Hunters
During its beta, Hunter’s Arena: Legends solved the problem of its servers being underpopulated by spawning phantom Hunters. These were ghosts of player characters that showed up and started causing a ruckus whenever the map started looking a bit empty.
But now that the game is out and matches are full of real players, phantoms are still showing up, particularly near the end of matches, and they’re not really achieving anything except annoying players who’ve managed to survive that long. It’s time for phantoms to go!
9 Restore The Replay Feature And Ban Cheats
Hunter’s Arena: Legends' beta had a replay feature, which made it relatively easy to catch, identify and ban players who were cheating. However, the launch version of the game has no such feature, and cheating is once again rampant.
The most popular forms of cheating are players teaming up in Solo matches, and stream sniping. Both are officially against the rules, but there are no in-game features designed to deter either. At least with a replay feature, players can provide proof that they’ve been victimized.
8 Add PvP And More Customization Options To Training Mode
Hunter’s Arena: Legends has a lot of different characters, each of which has a completely different move set, requiring a completely different play style. So for anyone really wanting to get to grips with each character, the Training mode is an absolute necessity.
Unfortunately, it’s currently very limited. Players can select their own character and that of the bot, but then have a choice between having the bot do nothing at all, or else fighting at one of three difficulty levels. There are settings for stamina and health, but nothing that enables the player to select specific behaviors for the bot.
7 Improve UI And Overall UX
There’s currently a lot of really counter-intuitive design in Hunter’s Arena: Legends, particularly when it comes to navigating the various screens and menus. Simple options such as unlocking new characters aren’t necessarily found in the most logical places.
Even the in-game pause menu is hard to find for some players. There is actually a prompt that tells you to hold the button to pause the game, but it’s written in such a tiny font that it’s no wonder players miss it. The tiny font is one of many problems with the UI design. Another major one is that the icons for special abilities are mostly plain white, and don’t look very different when they’re cooling down or ready to be used.
6 Make Basic Attacks More Basic, And Special Attacks More Special
A bit of button-bashing is part and parcel of any hack & slash experience – it’s all part of the fun – but in Hunter’s Arena: Legends, repeatedly tapping the basic attack button generally feels like the most effective “strategy”.
Apart from a few overpowered exceptions, the special moves are all a bit too tricky to pull off effectively, and most characters are able to string together long, inescapable combos without any need to remember complex sequences or execute precise timing. It would help if the block function worked properly, but that’s a separate fix.
5 Make The Controls Fully Customizable
There are two controller presets in Hunter’s Arena: Legends, they’re almost the same, and both are a little bit weird. These things are subjective of course, but a lot of players have been voicing frustrations at not being able to customize the control set-up.
Given that the main UI has a bunch of prompts on it, many of which include button icons, it’s true that making the controls fully customizable would be a major ballache for the dev team. But overcoming ballaches is what good game development is all about, and the current state of things is a ballache for many players.
4 Balance The Characters Better
As with any game that boasts a wide variety of characters, getting the balance right is tricky. But it’s also very, very important. Mantisco has been tweaking the characters throughout the beta, but the balance is still a long way from even.
At the time of writing, Wu Kong is blatantly overpowered. His Earth Cleave attack makes opponents airborne and draws them close from long distance, making them defenseless against his long juggle combos. And many players are employing a cheap tactic with Dalgi, whereby they launch her unblockable Dark Storm attack then run away while it cools down. Not much fun for anyone, but annoyingly effective.
3 Make The Ranking System Fair, Logical And Transparent
Mantisco hasn’t yet published any details on how Hunter’s Arena: Legends’ ranking system works. But some players have been paying close attention to the number of ranking points they get after their results, and have collectively concluded that the system makes no sense at all.
Players have reported getting more rewarded for beating lower ranked players than for higher ranks, and are complaining that the number of kills achieved during a battle royale match doesn’t seem to affect ranking points at all. There’s also currently only a 2-point difference between coming second and coming first. Surely being the best of the best should count for a lot more?
2 Balance Stamina Consumption Better
Right now in Hunter’s Arena: Legends, attacks cost no stamina, sprinting costs a little, and both blocking and dodging cost a lot. There’s a logical theory to this. It’s designed to encourage an aggressive style of play, which is usually more fun for everyone.
In practice though, it encourages a lot of really spammy chain attacks, followed by running away from opponents who can’t keep up because their stamina just got drained by blocking all those chain attacks. It also means that running out of stamina leaves players with no other options, and is pretty much a death sentence.
1 Make Blocking Reliable And Effective
An effective, fair and responsive block and parry system is an essential to any good hack & slash fighting system. Naraka: Bladepoint has one. Hunter’s Arena: Legends currently does not.
The weirdest thing about the blocking system, and the thing most urgently in need of fixing, is that pressing the block button doesn’t immediately bring the block into effect. Instead it triggers a slow animation, during which the player character will inevitably get hit by whatever they were trying to block against. And it’s currently close to impossible to pull off a successful parry.