I want to first and foremost tell you guys that I appreciate your work on all the games you have developed so far. I will also try to address the issues as unbiasedly as I can and give you an honest opinion from the perspective of my experience so far with both NRFTW and other ARPG or Souls games. To add credit to the previous statement, I have spent quite a few thousand hours in Path of Exile 1 and 2, and I have also played Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, Diablo, Van Helsing, V Rising, Wolcen, etc, as well as Elden Ring, the Ori games, Hollow Knight and so on.
For ease of readability, I will bullet point my opinions.
- I know this is a common aspect from many souls-like games, however, the clunkiness in the combat is unappealing and diminishes the enjoyment potential to a substantial degree - see Ori or Hollow Knight, where a faster combat made the game more dynamic; sure certain heavy weapons should have heavier combos but being stuck in certain animations and not being able to cancel it is something I am not sure it’s necessary.
- I think adding certain weapon archetypes only later in the game, also taking into consideration having access to respec later in the game and through a not-so-easy dungeon that also shares the resource with the most valuable crafting resource, makes it all counter-productive - I would urge you to consider adding all weapon archetypes early in the game either through the first starting regions as drops or the vendor upgrades.
- bounty hunting rewards are lacking incentive, the rewards’ RNG is bad, and IMO it should reward you with more than just the xp, maybe with the aforementioned weapon archetypes you have not yet discovered or iterations of the gear you have with possible better stats?
- weapon recipes should not only display images but also information about the said weapon’s archetype, otherwise you spend currency on a recipe that you only later at the anvil discover not to be one-handed or two-handed, for example.
- unless it’s a unique legendary weapon that has some lore connection or intrinsic relation, it doesn’t make sense for weapons of the same archetype to have different stat requirements, at least I don’t understand the reasoning behind it.
- maybe I have not yet discovered a way to bypass this[?] but it doesn’t make sense if I charge an attack [that, for example, sometimes would even stun the enemy] before their attack starts to take the full damage, and they counter my attack even if my attack is faster, I can understand low poise would stun me from their attack but surely if I attak first my stun should take precedent in the who-stuns-who order of combat actions.
- I hope that as the game develops further, we will not have to replay previous regions to reach the level requirements for the next regions, it breaks the flow of the game, unless it’s an intentional reasoning for us to over-grind same areas on and on again, besides focus grinding certain resources/weapons.
- the colour scheme for damage and healing numbers displayed is confusing; healing numbers should always be well differentiated from the damage ones (green or blue, etc).
- the lack of food recipes/food items that have a lingering effect is to be desired, as long as you have DoT damage and also cursed items with DoT modifiers, you should also have consumables with countering effects.
- Item-durability-related modifiers are weird.
- certain weapon archetype should benefit from being heavy, I think its a reasonable proposition, if you’re wielding a two-handed heavy archetype, the damage or the stunning potential should increase proportionally to the character’s weight.
That’s all I can think of for now. I like that game so far, but some aspects that I mentioned, sadly, make me put the game down again and wait for other updates, since I find myself at times not having fun in the game. I like it but really want to love this game, and I still have high hopes, the game has huge potential, and I like most of the work you guys invested so far, needless to say, I have faith in you!
Sending you much love and positive energy!