Context
I have played through the Act 1 story, the Cerim Crucible and defeated the Echo Knight boss, and have begun a second playthrough. I also have considerable experience in other soulslikes and arpgs.
Art Direction and Sound
Positives:
- Overall artwork, animation and sound design are excellent.
- The cinematics and voice acting for each individual character are also outstanding.
Negatives/Suggestions:
- None aside from the need for further optimisation.
Gameplay/QoL
Positives:
- Combat is responsive and fluid, and the commitment to each action works very well, requiring tactical choice and adding strategy (at least in the early game and against bosses).
- The variety of weapons, each with their own differing attack animations are great.
- Sacrament, with its ability to upgrade specific buildings/vendors and all of its unique characters is appealing as a central quest hub.
- Boss fights so far are well-designed. All of them have attack patterns that can be learned and avoided, with opportunities for counter-attack.
Negatives/Suggestions:
- The inventory system. This needs work, especially the limited slots for crafting materials. This is alleviated somewhat by the shared stash and ability to craft storage for your house, but even at maximum ichor upgrades, I was frequently hitting capacity while out adventuring. Given the sheer number of crafting materials, this is an unfun mechanic that adds nothing positive to the gameplay. Increasing the stack sizes significantly and/or removing the inventory limit for crafting materials and/or allowing players to craft from storage would help to resolve this.
- Ichor. The ichor system is poorly designed and easily subverted. The limiting of inventory sizes at the start of the game is frustrating (and remains so the whole time for crafting materials). Having to kill bosses to unlock more inventory space is not fun or rewarding - I spent every ichor on upgrading the crafting materials inventory before I felt like I could unlock anything else. Plus, as stated, this system is easily subverted by starting a new realm, rushing the first boss and two weekly boss bounties, then rinse and repeat. This is also not fun or rewarding, but felt necessary to actually enjoy the rest of the game for me.
- Difficulty. The difficulty curve of NRFTW is kind of all over the shop, in that it’s actually hardest at the beginning of the game. Enemies take longer to kill early on, require more strategy to defeat and do much more damage compared to your max health at the start. Once I hit the mid-game (probably from around level 10ish and above) and as I progressed towards the end of the current story quests, I no longer needed to even really bother with strategy because I either one- or two-shot every normal enemy and nothing did enough damage to trouble me, and that was with a light equipment load. It was only once I reached the Crucible that I needed to get more armor, upgrade some gear and spend some unused stat points. Even after this, the only real challenge in the Crucible has been the Echo Knight (mostly because of its large health pool) and making sure I don’t accidentally fall from a height on one of the levels.
- Enemy variety. At this point, there is limited variety of enemy types, and even when they are different models, many attack patterns are just repeated. This, as well as the relative easiness, made the mid- to end-game feel quite repetitive to me, as my approach never changed.
- Whispers/Fast travel. Being able to fast travel to any previously visited whisper would be better, or if this goes against your design philosophy, being able to designate a specific number of whispers to teleport to would be beneficial and make it feel like less time is being wasted simply running back and forth.
- Respeccing. I know you’ve already commented on this, but a way to respec needs to be added.
- Stat requirements on weapons. Many of the stat requirements on weapons don’t seem to make any sense: why does a large club require Dex and Faith? Some better/more consistent planning of this system would help address this.
- Ability to re-enchant, re-socket and re-infuse items. I don’t think this needs much explanation.
- More unique voice lines and interactions for townsfolk. The voice work and dialogue are so good; adding more changing lines as players progress, more dialogue in general as well as hidden quests or developments (kind of like the guy you can convince to go to the inn), would set NRFTW apart from other games and add to the feeling that it’s a living, breathing world, rather than a theme park.
- Rebinding of controls. I think you’ve also commented on this, but it’s a no-brainer.
- Boss balancing. I was able to one-shot all of the story bosses without much difficulty. Of these, Warrick was definitely the most challenging (see my point about difficulty above).
- The Crucible. While interesting in concept, the limited number of level-types, and the fact that you have to repeat them every single time you want to attempt the Echo Knight makes it not a particularly fun system. More level types/randomness and the addition of more bosses/mini-bosses would make me more inclined to keep coming back to it. The Echo Knight itself is a pretty good fight, but seems like it’s maybe a bit too much of a damage sponge. I was Level 24 (I think) when I beat it, so it might be that you’ve tuned it for Level 30, but it just felt like it was an unnecessarily long fight.
- Stamina. I put two points into stamina before the change to stamina in the first hotfix, and have never felt like stamina has been an issue since. This might be unpopular with some people, but I think the current adjustment needs to be scaled back slightly to provide more incentive to actually spend points in it.
- Durability. After the hotfix and especially the upgrade to tool durability, the whole durability system has been a complete non-issue for me. Even after multiple deaths, nothing is broken and the cost to repair everything is so negligible, that it ultimately doesn’t really serve much of a purpose at all as it stands. I know it’s also a very unpopular system with some sections of the playerbase, so it’s probably something that warrants further consideration in terms of its role in the game.
- Crafting and Upgrade Timers. I don’t understand what purpose these serve, other than to frustrate players. It strikes me very much as an annoying mobile game mechanic. Consequently, I found myself simply exiting the game after starting some of the longer upgrades. Replacing these timers with corresponding animations to show the upgrades or show the player character crafting would be more effective and far more enjoyable (as well as showing the player what exactly has been upgraded and where).
Overall, No Rest For the Wicked is a good and enjoyable arpg, which has so much potential to become a masterpiece.
EDITS: formatting + added feedback on Stamina, Durability and Crafting/Upgrade Timers.