Hi, I have some thoughts on the timing aspect of combat and how I think it might be causing a bit more friction that it should be.This is just how i feel so I’d be very interested to hear other folk’s thoughts on this, maybe I just need to “git gud” here which may be fair enough but I’m personally struggling more than I ever have in any other timing based game.
Some background for context - I’m a huge fromsoft fan so I love precise, timing based combat. I usually go pretty deep into ng+ with all of them. I also love challenging combat and I think this game is well on it’s way to being a great example of one of these games. In a Fromsoft game even when I’m banging my head against a wall trying to beat a boss, when I die, i know exactly why and what I did wrong. In NRFTW however I feel like I should be getting the timing correct but often I’m just not.
I have a theory as to why that is and I think it’s at least partially related to the audio queues vs the visual queues. Visually this game is stunning but the camera view plus all the detail in the environment means that it can be hard to pick out queues visually when you’re in the thick of combat. To be clear, I don’t want to change this, I love the camera, I just think that because of the camera we need more than just the visuals to convey the correct timing. In Fromsoft games you can use both visual and audio queues to get a feel for timing but here I’m unable to do that in this game. There seems to be a disconnect here because the timing I feel is too early. I need to dodge before I hear the sound quite often, or at least it feels that way. I feel like audio is throwing me off, the timing does not feel intuitive. I also feel like it’s inconsistent, when dodging projectiles like fire bombs, I feel like I need to dodge later than I’d expect. It doesn’t help that the timing is very unforgiving, the window seems tiny. The small timing window for i-frames etc is a separate thing however, I’m not opposed to having this be super tight but only if the timing makes sense and feels intuitive, right now these 2 things together are compounding the issue. Just my 2c.