Information from the 6th March Q&A Stream with Patrick, Corey and Thomas
Can we break down items or recycle them for materials?
In general, we would like to kind of like add more things from a design perspective, give us a more natural or organic kind of like tutorialization. So things like Fillmore being able to salvage. You would help him out a little bit and organic progression occurs as a result of it.
Are you planning to change resource gathering? When chopping and mining, you have to spend time picking up the scattered drops. Will it be possible to make it more like fishing where you receive the loot instantly?
We’ll have to see. We will have loot tool rarity in the game and enchantable tools. For example, something like an enchant on a pickaxe that would automatically pick things up. Enchants on tools will open up freedom of choice.
There are rune slots on shields. Will we ever see runes on shields?
Yes, absolutely. We also have new off-hand weapons coming beyond just shields. Pipes for example! We will detail more on this as we finish it.
Have you considered changing the daily quests and vendor refreshes from real life days to in game days?
My god.. we’ve had that conversation many, many, many times so we will have to stick ‘we’ll have to see’. Again, its one of those things that is not as simple as it may seem. We’ve talked about the potential of a system where maybe you pay an in-game resource to speed them up. But we recognise that there are pinch points on either side of the spectrum (e.g missing the vendor time window due to IRL circumstance vs in-game clock is a lot shorter but oops, you missed the window by a couple of minutes and everything has refreshed etc)
What is the single feature of the game you are most proud of and/or excited about?
It’s alway the last thing you’ve worked on. The beauty of working at Moon is that everyone is so passionate about the game that nobody is being forced to make something they dont really feel passionate about. You can really feel that translate in the game.
We know there will be classes but is it expected to have more class-bassed experience where you need tanks, DPS, healers?
Well we are going to throw a shit tonne of challenge at you and we aim to design it in a way where it makes sense to ask your friend to play a cleric and heal, you tank damage or try to parry, other friend dpses from a distance. But we are not going the traditional route of an MMORPG where you design the challenge around ‘you must absolutely parry this boss or you cant defeat it’.
Will we be able to buy houses and land in every major hub like Tir, Marin, Havenport, or only in Sacrament?
Yes but not in 1.0. We don’t want to spoil!
Will the character details UI get more detailed information?
Yes, absolutely. We want to expose everything to the player.
Would the compendium explain all the unique enchants, like what qualifies as low health, what additional damage does lightning on a burning enemy, etc?
Yes, absolutely. That’s the whole idea behind the compendium. We always wanted to have our own little wiki in there. Something I’m always pushing for is will there be a library with various librarians that will reward you for using the compendium. We shall see on that!
Why are the next tier chests twice the size of the world but offer only a fraction of more space? Whats up with that?
I think they mean the house chests right? If so, yeah, that’s something that we are working on. We’ve got to make sure the amount of slots is readable on all platforms in the UI (and avoid scrolling!)
Can dummies become furniture that you can place in your house and test things more comfortably?
Absolutely. We 100% should do that! Would be fun to be able to buy it or craft it.
Can we please have the ability to drop items instead of needing to wait for friends to accept the trade or simply letting anyone with their inventory space pick up the item?
Probably not. We once had the same approach as when your inventory is full and a bag appears on the ground. The problem with this is that people would end up dropping hundreds of items all over the map. This is bad for performance but it’s also not really the experience we want with trading. We would have to despawn those bags (for performance) eventually and how we decide when that should be? Because if we do, what if my friend wants to pick up that item now but I dropped it 30 minutes ago and now its gone? We want trading to be more collaborative and more conversational.
Will there be a way to tone down allied visuals? It’s often hard to see with some quivers magic flying around. (VFX)
Yeah, our VFX team are aware of it. Unfortunately I dont have an answer on where that is or if its in Patch 1. We definitely need to pull back on the VFX a bit, especially with the quivers.
Wicked promised visceral souls like combat, new systems, difficult settings, crit chance, percentage, gems, broader ARPG experience. This game does not give the unforgiving combat many of us would like. Will there be anything for us in 1.0 or beyond?
Combat is going to always be centred on being intentional, tactical and strategic. Timing, positioning and spacing should always matter. Some builds were making these core essentials redundant. We are making sure the combat stays true to these visceral core factors. Even with Patch 1, we are making adjustments to pull it back to that.
Will there be dungeons in the game other than Crucible that have more of a classic MMO format like in WoW, a long traversal of one large location with several bosses designed for co-op, player interaction?
Well, we will have to see right. Theres gonna be new zones created and so on. Crucible will get new stuff. I dont want to give away too much right now about what we are doing for 1.0 yet.
Are there plans to diversify the quest system with more varied objectives and activities beyond traditional fetch quests and errands across the map or simply kill X enemies task?
Absolutely. So one thing with the class system that is also coming is that we are introducing factions. Severed Hand faction for example, is all about becoming a murderer or an assassin, or a rogue. We’ll send you on quests that really lean into this playstyle. Even story-wise, its set up that way.
Are there plans for adding more advanced elements?
We’ll have to see. People ask this a lot- Are we going to add more like Holy and so on. There is… there is a huge thing planned regarding gems. Let’s leave that for next time.
Transmog or glamour system?
I don’t love transmog systems if they are unconstrained. If it’s literally ‘hey, Im playing a plate build and I look like a cloth build’. Especially for things like PvP where it really screws things up. For PvP, we could get around this by not displaying your transmog. Though I do agree, running around as a mage but Im visually displaying like a sweet knight armour. It feels kind of weird in Wicked as a lot of our items are tied to the enchants that are on it and the upgrades you put on them. You could just have like a level one transmog that sort of changes the way you look.
The idea of dying armour is also a bit difficult. Our armours are designed to look a certain way and our artstyle is not as simple as Minecraft or something where it’d probably be a lot easier to do something like dye. But we have a lot of details and even shading in the colors is difficult.
Favouriting and Locking items
Not at the moment. We would like to! We would also like to mark items for trash. These are Quality of Life things we would love to put in but we just havn’t had the time to focus on those. But yes, we are hearing you! We like these ideas.
Do we want to tie armour to classes?
That’s something we are still playing with. Not necessarily but its definitely something we have set up. Also our systems guy wants to introduce set bonuses for the items and this may also make transmog very difficult. So we’ll have to see how things play out. Give it a bit of a test.
‘No guns!’..
.. gunbows though… I mean, yeah. Little crossbows. We had those in the game for some time but we just couldnt finish it. Little bow guns shot with one hand, something like that I’d be okay with. I just dont want to open Pandora’s box of introducing a gun into the game.
Any plans on pets or an animal team or class?
We’d love to do this. The difficult thing about pets is 1. Having them pathfind around player placed things. So lets say its just a pet in your house.. And you have furniture or a path where it cant quite move. It might look janky. Or even the pets following you around in Sacrament would introduce the same issue. So we’re trying to figure that out if we do pets. Also figuring out how we implement them – Do they just sit in the house and give you a buff or can you feed them etc. I definitely like pet mechanics in games. Everybody at Moon has a pet pretty much!
Are you going to introduce stealth mechanics for the assassin class?
Yes, already working on that. I’ve not really seen that done well in a Souls-like game or a game with Souls-like combat systems. Sidling plays into that whole stealth/sneaky gameplay!
Mounts? Horses?
No. Just no It’s not possible with our gameplay and level design. Verticality challenges… it’s just not feasible. Similarly, gliders and grapple hooks - most likely, no. We did not design our levels in that way to make it viable. It would be cool but it would require a LOT of re-design. Maybe someone could unofficial mod it!
More vanity items?
Yes, also funny items right? For example, I dont know why we dont have a frying pan in the game yet. Theres stuff coming, I dont want to spoil it. Horse on a stick has been shared before, thats coming!
Any misconceptions about the game that the community has that you’d like to address?
That’s a really interesting question. I don’t know. I mean, we are designing Wicked in a way that I dont think has necessarily been seen before, right? We have this luxury to design our dream game and not necessarily have to conform to making just X. The nice thing that we’ve seen is that well, that kind of worked out now, right? Like, people really enjoyed what we did with No Rest for the Wicked Together and where the game is right now. I think people have a much better idea now of like, where we’re heading with Wicked and how things work. I used to see a lot of like, especially when we launched into EA originally, some of the systems didnt work as tightly together yet. To be honest, my vision for the game has remained fairly consistent over all these years. We want to make Wicked a world that you can ‘live’ in. We are trying to find that perfect recipe, combining things we loved from games of our childhoods like Zelda, Diablo, the Souls series and so on.
Will there be any plans to be able to deflect projectiles like they can with Parry?
Yes, definitely.
Different type of build mode in the game that’s not player constrained? Right now you have to place a chest, orient your character to it instead of something like being able to place it with the mouse or place it with a free cam.
I would love something like that. I dont know if we will do that though. It’d be great for keyboard and mouse. But we’ll have to see. This is always difficult because we have to make it work for controllers as well.
I would love to see more QoL, for example, using a grid on the ground to place things. Or even something like when youre placing an item near the wall, it doesnt just go to into the wall, it just smushes towards the wall wherever you place it. So youre not alway fighting with a tiny little piece of the wall. Small QoL stuff like that.
Grab Runes?
Its very difficult to design this. Its easy if your game world is humanoid but we always have these issues with grab around bosses, wolves, what about an elite? And so on.
Ranked PvP + Invasions
Maybe, I dont know. We’ll have to see. First step is that we put the arena in and let people have fun with that. From a party game perspective, I think the PvP stuff will be insanely fun. I’m really looking forward to having our team retreat where we all just play PvP against one another in the arena. And then doing a tournament right there.
Can I play this game as a comfy game?
Not quite but there are elements like that. Farming, for example. I will say that if youre playing multiplayer, if one of your friends really likes farming, you can just be the farmer for your group forever.
Optimizations for Steam Deck?
Always. Like, we will never stop that. Yes.
What is the secret in Wicked that hasn’t been uncovered?
Guys, if I answered that, it wouldnt be a secret anymore So I’m not. Only me and Ron Gilbert know the secret.
What are some DLC ideas that you can share?
Well, I prototyped the survival mode last year. And thats not something we can necessarily put into Wicked, in the ARPG campaign as is, right? Because it drastically changes the ruleset. But that is something AFTER 1.0 that I would really like to see us handle.