Hey there Cerims,
So we finally Breached the Nameless Pass’ Gate on April 30th and I have since played around 32h of the newly revised NRftW. As many of you know, it sadly wasn’t as smooth as we all hoped it to be, but the dev team have expressed their regrets and are already working hard to course correct some of the issues that’s been “Plaguing” this update.
We will not discuss issues that were already fixed in HF1, so Backstabs, stagger, Fallen Embers, damage taken etc.
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Let’s get the Ugly part out of the way.. The Bugs, thankfully none of those I experienced were gamebreaking or progress haltering, but they are annoying none the less, here are 3 that my saves still has to deal with ;
1- Lowland Meadow Windmill Collision.
This one breaks my heart, since the announcement trailer I’ve been long awaiting to climb up and see what kind of views awaited me, to my surprise, after pulling the lever and walking up the boxes.. I phased through and never had the opportunity to see what lies ahead. Many voiced they also couldn’t climb up, some could at first and later were unable to, as if the blades were back to their original position. Perhaps allowing to use the lever to turn it on/off would provide a fix to this issue?
2- Graveyard gate.
For some reason, whenever you open the door using the key, the key will be consumed, the door will open, but after the zone resets, the key will spawn at its pickup location and the door will shut itself once more. This does not break or hurt the game, it’s just mildly annoying.
3- Bounty Target parties
I’m not sure if this is even a bug or by design, but dying during the weekly task respawns all of its entities, so you must clear the encounter in one attempt. If this is by design, Great, it adds some challenge to certain encounters, but it wasn’t very intuitive as it generally goes against the game design of enemies never respawning during a clear.
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Performances ;
My overall frames went down quite a bit, I would sit on a comfortable 100 FPS with 70 low dips, but I would say I averaged close to 50-55 fps this time with noticeable stutters, a few freezes and 3 complete crash, averaging 1 every 10h ish. (Please understand that playing 15h in a row is bound to cause issues, I am aware that this played a part.)
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Feedback ;
As someone who already had well over 100h on the initial version of the game, who keeps up with the project daily and already knew what I was doing heading in, this felt much more challenging.
-ENCHANTS
I found that most of the affixes on gears really weren’t interesting, and only a few ever truly impacted my run. Health gain on perfect dodges is probably one of my new favourite roll and I hope to see more of these creative ideas over “Dmg increase at max/low focus”, you simply cannot rely on those and ends up feeling tedious and pointless over a flat DMG buff even if the raw value is lower.
-GEMS
I’m loving these new gems, I appreciate that certain gems excels on specific armour pieces and it overalls brings a lot of value to Masterwork items. I hope to see more gems down the lines with perhaps more niche effects that enables more and more playstyles.
-DIFFICULTY
I’ve always cleared the Black Trench before entering the Nameless Pass, it being in an old area, it always felt like a side quest you could do before entering the pass, and used to enable housing, which you wanted to get ASAP. Seeing it being a higher level and more difficult was a shock, I remember first timing Darak around level 12-13, this time, he was a proper challenge and I had to come back after a few extra levels. The Backstabs being so unreliable made crowded encounters much harder to deal with as you could no longer discard weaker humanoids to focus on Elites and thankfully the Witches were fixed and are no longer the bane of my existence.
-NEW BOSS
2/3 for me here Moon.
The Bear is an amazing boss in every way, the presentation, the story, the fight.. Chef’s kiss. It can be hard to see your character at times beneath the huge model of the boss and I’d say the vomit spray lingering on the ground is hard to see on the green herb. Perhaps a colour change would help. I never got frustrated fighting him.
Them Flying crawlers is a great gank boss, understanding that you must kill them as fast as possible before they overwhelm you doesn’t feel too punishing and fighting the 2 larger birds afterwards feels good as well as the 2nd one usually arrives when the 1st is near death. I never got frustrated fighting him.
The Caretaker. I am sorry to all those whom were in the VC on the night I had to spend 1h15 killing this guy. I had never, ever felt this frustrated playing Wicked. And it still stands as one of the worst boss fights I ever had the displeasure of fighting. Let’s break down why!
Camera. Your first target being a large fellah who’s whole gimmick is to push you around into incoming projectiles or simply charge you, the last thing I need is some mage teleporting around the edges of the map changing the framing of the encounter every 3-5 seconds. I lost sight of my characters many, many times.
Phase 1 needs some work. Apparently the hotfix helped with this, but I will state it none the less, the mage should NEVER teleport on top of the player in phase 1. We are already timing nearly one shot moves from Tusk, I do not need a mage to appear next to me sending 3 quick projectiles offering me 2 losing scenarios. 1 : I ignore the mage and take 150dmg, 2 : I ignore Tusk to dodge a projectile and get instantly slammed to death by a one hit combo from good old Tusk.
You thought I was done? Oh no. For some reason, on top of all of this, they thought Tusk should leave a trail afflicting you with a slow debuff, making dodging and navigating the fight even more of a pain. Oh and did I mention that a theme song starts playing when tusk goes below 50% HP? And that this music sometimes causes all sound effects to go mute, making it near impossible to understand what is going on..?
Phase 2 is ok. I don’t like his entire kit being a 2-4 ground pound with odd timing that can one shot you, but I wouldn’t mind dying while learning a timing if Phase 1 wasn’t the least fun activity one could do in the game.
Here’s my suggestion : Remove the slow debuff from Tusk, it provides nothing to this fight. Apparently the caretaker will not teleport on the player anymore; this should already fix a lot of problems I had with this fight.
Ok now I’m done.
-WORLD/ LEVEL DESIGN
This keeps on being the best part of wicked. I am always amazed at the seemingly endless possibilities to traverse this world. Riding the gondolier from the low-lands to the Marine keep had my jaw drop. (The curved perspective making the cable arch up is a bit jarring but nothing too criminal) The Lowlands quickly became my favourite area in the entire game. To me it’s simply a much better and expanded version of the Orban Glades. The isolated caves are a mot of fun, the Marin woods are beautiful, the return to the nameless pass was executed beautifully, and man, must I say why Caylen is shaping up to be the greatest zone in the game so far? I stared in awe for at least 10minutes, sitting next to the Madrigal, just as amazed as she seemed to be.
We are still very much in the Early Sacrament days, where sacrament has 4 distinct ways you can go and enter a level from, making traversal fairly manageable, nothing is ever “too far” and being able to jump down from the Lowlands cliff into the shallows where we first washed ashore feels amazing. I cannot wait to see the map go full circle, allowing us for many more creative ways to navigate the island.
-ECONOMY
I like the Vendor changes, I’ve been preaching for this since day 1, limited inventories on daily refreshes helps balancing the game, not allowing players to buy 50 of the same weapon and enchanting to no ends, encourages players to travel outside the city wall to gather supplies AND makes crafting more valuable as it is now the best way to mass produce specific weapons of you have the goods to make’em. (please give us a blueprint for every weapon and armour sets outside legendaries/boss armours) Repair costs were fine, I had a decent amount of repair powders that saved me time and money and I also could have used the repair rune.. But I couldn’t bring myself to waste my oh so precious focus that is so hard to gather in the earlier half of the game.
-HOUSING
Nothing to say here, the new stack limits, tier 3 stations and whisper stones makes housing the coziest its ever been. Can’t wait till we get new furniture sets and cosmetics to make our homes even prettier, even if I know this is very much so at the bottom of the priority list.
-COMBAT
Ok, I know, putting combat last might be criminal, but honestly.. It hasn’t really changed, it’s more weapons, more runes and more ways to create chaos on the island of Sacra. Yes, I am loving the fists weapons. These Crescent Moon claws are the highlight of my first Breach run. Wands will be next.
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Well.. that about covers most of what I wanted to say. Pardon the Caretaker Rant, but this is by far the biggest stain on an otherwise very clean release. This content is how I would have hoped EA had launched and offers more content than we could possibly ask for. Thinking that this is barely 30%-ish of the island leaves me optimistically excited for what’s to come. But for now, let’s prepare for Multiplayer and PvP, where I’ll gladly go back to the Shallows with as many friends as I can, as many times as it takes.
Final score for Breach : 7.5/10
-CtrlAltDlt