As the topic says, we have recently tried the Arena of the Gods for the first time with a friend of mine. I really like the concept of the mode and we had a lot of fun playing the actual scenarios, but 2 big issues were immediately apparent to us:
Gauntlet - as it was me hosting, my friend would never actually see the gauntlet map and the progress through it. Yes, they would have the blessings available in missions, but they would never actually see and “feel“ the progress themselves. This was a big surprise for us as it is very counterintuitive and it really dampened our excitement for the mode. I understand the reason for this implementation probably is that the game is lacking any general party system, it’s just players connecting to shared lobbies. But in this case it severely hampers the enjoyment of playing this mode full co-op with another player. What I would expect is to be able to fully share a gauntlet run with another player, not just the particular mission lobbies. The missions themselves are fun and the mode in general is very promising and has a lot of co-op potential, but the way it works now is really killing it for us.
Story mode - the progress in story mode only registered for the host (me), but not for my friend, even though we started from the very beginning. I have seen on the forums that this is a known bug for some time now, here’s hoping that it will be fixed soon as we won’t be playing story mode again until this is fixed. The reason is basically the same as with the gauntlet mode, it sucks to not see the progress as the non-hosting player.
I feel like these kinds of randomized roguelite modes have a lot of potential in RTS games in general, and playing it co-op can be even better, so here’s hoping that the above things will get sorted out we will be able to enjoy the mode to the fullest.
Cheers.