I have just unlocked the pestilence events on my first playthrough. I am thoroughly enamored by the game so far, thank you for all your hard work and creating this beautiful and challenging game! Here are a few things I have struggled with and feel could be improved.
-Attack/healing windows
I felt I was wasting a lot of healing items and spells based on the aggressiveness of attacks from enemies. If I disengage to heal it feels like I don’t have enough time to consume either food or spells before I am attacked again, resulting in losing the health regained immediately. This causes me to burn through my recipes quickly without feeling like I am actually benefiting from them. I believe that the time it takes to cast a heal or consume food could be sped up slightly, allowing me to have a combat heal more effectively. Right now it feels a bit more punishing to heal rather than using it as a strategy to keep in the fight. Some recovery windows from enemies I think could be a bit longer too. Especially from larger enemies where you have to have a lot of space from them to avoid attacks, then you don’t have enough time to run up to the enemy and attack before they attack again. So windows where I thought I could engage are so small that I would usually just run up to get hit again before having a chance to counter.
-Attack areas
Some enemy attacks have unclear areas of effects, making dodging frustrating. One that sticks out is the explosion attack during the Caretaker and Tusk fight. I was hit multiple times by it where it looked like I was out of its effective range but the actual attack was much bigger. Not sure if its the VFX indication before the initial attack but I found it was hard to judge. The flame attack from some enemies as well were hard to distinguish in the chaos of battle and it felt like I was often getting hit by attacks that I thought I was avoiding there as well.
-Enemy Tracking
The tracking by enemies in this game is extremely over tuned. In something like Elden Ring it felt like enemies attacks where a bit easier to learn and counter, and in NRFTW it often feels like more of coin flip whether or not I’m going to avoid them or not. This usually led me to just tanking hits because it didn’t feel like my dodges were actually dodging, more just moving my character and using stamina to still get hit. “last second” dodges don’t have the same thrill as ER, where it felt like I could pull off a high pressure last second dodge. I know the timing is up to the player to learn, but with the multiple staggered attack patterns from enemies it often feels like I’m spamming roll/dodge rather than timing it.
-Fast Travel
I enjoy the way fast travel works in this game. I don’t mind going through zones to reach places I’ve already been. But it can be frustrating when I make it to a boss fight whisper, then decide I need to farm some food/upgrades to prepare before the fight. This means I can jump back to Sacrament, and I can either roam for resources without using a whisper and die then have to trek all the way back from Sacrament, OR I can use a whisper but then trek all the way back to the boss fight. So it feels like my time is wasted either way. I think a good fix for this would be a craftable consumable that allows me to pick a whisper to travel to. I’m ok with these being extremely rare or having them take expensive resources, thus allowing me to decide when/where to use them.
“ok I have 3 fast travel potions, and I probably wont find any more till after this next boss. I can use one to travel to a zone where I can farm food/items and one to get back to the boss saving me some time.”
The tradeoff being that I can’t do that all the time so I really need to decide if its worth it to use those. Maybe you could give a soft limit? Like max you can carry is 5 or something. Going back through zones to find new enemies is great. But when I need a specific ingredient that only exists in a certain zone then it starts to feel a little tedious to speed run all the way back to an area just for a few items. So it seems like my time is being spent traveling for little reward.
Overall I think most of my feedback comes back to just fine tuning some of the existing systems so they work a bit more fluidly.
Those are the big things that I would think can be improved. Other than that I have been having a wonderful time with this game. I look forward to up coming job system rework, very curious to see the changes!
Thank you!