After playing for 24hrs, and completing all that we can. First off some background, I am not a huge souls player, only played Elden Ring, one play through, and I enjoyed it. I played a few hundred hours of Diablo 3 and really enjoyed it. I played the story and Season 1 of D4 and while I enjoyed the story I didn’t like the end game whatsoever and haven’t played since. That is pretty much my only experiences with ARPGs, I mainly play MOBAs and MMOs. I am loving Wicked, I haven’t played a game, let alone a new game, this much this quickly in years. I love the art style, gameplay/combat and I think the story has very good potential. Keep up the good work over at Moon. I know most of these points you have said you have plans but I will add anyways to affirm your decisions. My main points of feedback are;
Inventory management:
- This is just not good. The main reasons I have stopped playing a session is how annoying it can be at times. I don’t mind having to manage your space but the amount of different items in this game there is no where near enough slots for them all. Increase the space, have gems, armor, and weapon upgrades as one tab, consumables, food ingredients, and upgrade material as separate tabs and up the single stack from 20 to 50 would be my suggestion. Also being able to craft from your chests is necessary in my opinion, it does not feel good running around trying to remember everything you need.
Gear:
- Compare gear to what you have on, self explanatory.
- Gear gets reorganized in your bag when you put stuff on and off, just have it go to the slot you are replacing it with or the last slot in the bag.
- Show weapon speeds
- Detail what the runes do, this isn’t huge as it is fun to discover what they all do on your own but after you do it would be nice to have a description.
Gameplay:
- I have played mostly on controller, but have a few hours on mouse and keyboard. Number one is key binds, of course this will happen but the main issue I have with m&k is sprinting, it is really awkward, and somewhat painful to sprint while moving and climbing, I think having an option to hold space to sprint would help a lot with this. On this note, I much prefer WASD than click to move in all games, but with wicked it feels a little strange. I think some thing that would help with is is if you allow an option to rotate the direction of your character with the mouse. Smite is a great example of what I am talking about here, not an isometric view but if you could have the controls feel similar to that it would be great and would make traversing and moving around feel much better, you currently don’t really do anything with the mouse other than click to attack. Also hide the mouse when you are not in your inventory or fighting and make a mouse art, having the standard mouse is not nice.
- Make the area with the training dummy; 1) targetable, with unlimited health. 2) Completely unrestricted, as in 100% stamina and focus, no stat or level requirements for gear and weapons so you can actually test out before committing to a build.
- Respec is necessary. I think for early access make it easy and unlimited but for the full release you can definitely gate it somehow, it will make committing to builds feel better, and if the above point is implemented it won’t be as scary.
- Fast travel to all whispers would be a nice addition, its not a huge issue now but if the new zones start getting farther away from sacrament I could see this being a real annoyance to deal with going to farm those places, one alternative if that is not some thing you would like to implement is to have one whisper you can choose for each different zone you enter, one for shallows, one for the glades, one for nameless pass ect… and all the new named zones and keep the current last whisper traveled system you have. I actually think this option would feel better than full on travel where ever you want because it allows you to engage with the environment more, but makes traveling feel less tedious.
- Dailies and weeklies are boring to be honest. This is the same in all games honestly, they just feel like chores. I personally thing the best thing to do is have a weekly quest, they are long have a story, they could still require blocking, digging, whatever… sure, but have it so it is for a reason, you can give the same rewards and exp when you completes steps throughout the week so you don’t have to finish it but you will still get rewarded for what you did complete. This weekly quest can culminate with killing a big bad like you have currently, have some dialog about why we are collecting these things. Its just a stale practice in games that I think you could really change for the better.
- The crucible, I enjoyed it, but it got kind of tedious after a few attempts. I am not exactly sure how to fix it but something does need to change, Having 10 floors for 1 attempt at the boss, which you most likely are going to die on a few times doesn’t really feel great.
- Fall damage, I think its fine after the nerf but I have often, accidentally jumped off of something not meaning too and died, not really that big of a deal other than when I was in the last room before the final boss of the crucible before I killed him… that was a little frustrating. I think that having even half a second of your character pulling back if they were to take fall damage or die die from the jump, where you could stop moving forward in time to not just immediately jump off when you slightly adjusted to the wrong angle would help.
That’s it from my perspective. You have a fantastic game here, I love the art, platforming, combat, and gearing. Keep going on strong with the story, it is so important for an RPG and I really like it already.