[Hot take] I don't think I want respecing (at least not as we know it)

Wicked Feedback
84

There are no classes so not having respec functionality is simply artificial difficulty.

For your argument, nothing changes with or without respec except player frustration. The game doesn’t become easier because people can just research meta and make a new character. Sure, it’s time-consuming and probably not fun because it’s so redundant, but it won’t change result except to be overly frustrating for no reason. They still have to add more content and balance the game either way because there are tons of players making videos that claim best this and best that and highest dps this and strongest and invincible that. Your point is invalid and short-sighted.

In a game where nobody really knows yet what they like/dislike, not having a respec system just means you get railroaded into a perception of what might be good and then when you realize it’s maybe not what you wanted, you end up weaker because you wasted attributes where you won’t use them.

This forces you to make another character if you want to optimize, but for many players, making a new character isn’t desirable. What’s the point of redoing all the experience grinding on another character (and the ichor farming) just to get back to where you already were?

Since every character is the same (no class system), it’s pointless to replay the game with another character and insulting to be asked to by the developers if they decide they don’t want to add a respec system.

If they made actual classes that had different abilities and maybe even different starting attributes, I would want to replay the game to try each out, but having a respec would still be necessary to avoid frustration. I wouldn’t want to make two casters with slightly different attributes, for example. I would want to play a warrior, a cleric, a mage, a ranger, and a thief, but not two of any of them. I would hate having no respec because one mistake would ruin the class and replaying the same class only to make one small change is unacceptable.

Not having a respec system makes the game unsuitable for a sort of ‘playing for fun and then optimizing after doing some research if you end up struggling more than you feel you should be’ style. Many players don’t like being told what’s best before they even try for themselves. Many of them will vehemently avoid watching guides or researching builds to prevent ruining their experience. At least for their first playthrough.

You shouldn’t have to feel like you will suck unless you do research before your first playthrough so you don’t struggle and get frustrated and burn out and quit.

So your claim that they need to “be careful when making the respecing system” argument is absolutely ridiculous. It hurts no one if there is a free system that can be changed in town as many times as you like. Why? Because you can only be one build at a time.

A character doesn’t need to be defined by attribute choices without even knowing what they will like.

A player doesn’t need to be punished by developers for not knowing the future.

The only result of no respec system will be a lot of underpowered players that made choices before realizing what was good that are too lazy to make another character to fix it dragging down multiplayer for potentially difficult content.

At least if they can respec, they may eventually realize what’s good and everyone will be on an even playing field.

There will always be a meta in an unbalanced game, but that lack of balance isn’t based on knowing what the meta is. It’s that there actually is a meta because the developers weren’t careful enough to actually balance all the viable options so there were multiple builds that were considered equally powerful.

It’s partially because it’s not easy to balance dissimilar things. It’s kind of like comparing apples and oranges. If it was just mathematical differences, that’s easy. It’s when you compare damage output over time with fast weapons and slow weapons since it’s harder to land slow weapon attacks comparatively.

It’s not about instant gratification or hand-holding. It’s about quality of life and actual gameplay enjoyment. Making a game that railroads you through a fog and you have to choose which track to take without knowing where it leads or being able to go back is simply aggravating and artificially punishing.

There is no “thrill of discovery” when you realize there’s a better build and you have to make another character and redo everything if you want to access it. This isn’t like Baldur’s Gate 3 where your choices change the game ending. This game is clearly based on defined progression. There are no choices that would warrant a second playthrough. It would just be doing the same playthrough with another character that has different attributes.

You’re projecting false perceptions and it’s offensive.

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85

I have made a ticket for that already. On top of that though: if I like the weapon after testing it, I would like to respec my current character to it (for free or for a reasonable cost), not have to play through the same campaign again only to enjoy that weapon 3 weeks later when I’ve finally reached lvl40.

By that time, I’ve probably churned and started playing another game. Because I think it’s fair to say that this game has a better story feeling but less story replayability than D2. That’s partially because with D2, you can choose to skip nothing/nearly everything depending on what you want to play exactly. It doesn’t seem like that will be possible in this game, due to no town portals.

This person speaks truth

86

This is indeed a hard problem to solve, give players more agency while keeping their impactful.

For one, the respec system solves post-problem, I think what causes all the fuss about respec is the fact, as player goes into the game, first time, they have no clue, what weapons exist, player can’t anticipate what attributes they should be leveling up. The game is not replayable right now, so softcore players have no reason to create new char, second playthrough would be no different to first one, and that puts respec system as a solution for softcore players to simply try out new things, without having to spend another 20h, to see if that shiny new weapon actually worth the grind.

I like approach that Fromsoftware took in elden ring, respec is locked behind the boss, and you need an item to respec, it grants a challenge for player and doesn’t make respec an easy decision, since there is like 3 or 4 tears around the whole map.

Something like that should make respec a viable option.

On the notion of not brining a respec system at all - there should be a way to try weapon with out meeting requiring stats, as many already suggested. This will give SC players a way to try things out, without compromising current vision. Because it frustrating to grind points only to find out that in the end it didn’t worth it. Gamers need to have respect for them self, and games should respect it players time. So introducing “try out weapon” system is no good, respec is still needed.

Now let’s turn to another system, have you seen a wonderful game - Monster Hunter World(MHW)? They take a very different approach to softclass system. The game managed to keep me for 120h fully invested.

System where you can try a weapon without having to grind it, makes sure that player will find what a style they want to play from the start, making investing points into a certain attributes more solid, than a guess. They allow player to see what is possible in the game, and each weapons takes time to learn to deal most damage possible. Through the game I played 4-5 different weapons and it kept me going.

The internet made exploring the game worse, game was 2 days out in EA and youtube already has tons of videos about best build, where to put your points, so much hand holding. Having no respec system will not solve meta-play problem, since it’s hardlock, railroading system like current one makes players want to have meta-build, so they can clear end-game and rush through the story.

Without game having a way to convey what player is capable of, they always will turn to external sources, I find this sad.

So, putting this into conclusion, I suggest:
Give a player training grounds, as location would perfectly fit into Sacra, as there are guards, and put all archetypes of weapons there, that you can’t bring out of training grounds. Weapons can be low level, though high level weapons would make distinction between them cleare. Allow player to use every one of them, so they have an expectation of how playing with that archetype feels like. Tell a player what requirements are for this playstyle. Soft lock leveling all attributes beside health, stamina and equip load, this way player won’t lose their points into random attribute, and after visiting training grounds unlock other attributes, since now player know what to expect from the game, though there should be an option to skip this part, in case player already has a vision of the build.

Add a boss to lock respec behind it, so player has a challenge to overcome, if they decide to change their build. Make respec pricy, so player should think before respecing to another stat.

2 Likes
87

Firstly: I pretty much love your entire comment.

On the quote above: I understand from other forum posts that this potentially actually isn’t possible, because apparently even within each weapon type there’s variations :sweat_smile:
Not sure if that’s true or whether the person was hallucinating (still being new to a game can do that)

88

I do agree that respec’ing is something the devs should take into consideration very carefully . While i don’t think it’d be gamebreaking to have it should be locked behind an item or something similar . Me personally , I just don’t spend my points until i feel I have to or find a weapon I want to use .

2 Likes
89

Thank you)

That could be the case, but I doubt that variations are that different in attacks patterns. In case they are, there should be a common point, sice it’s an immense task to create 100 unique weapons, if we speak of attack patterns.

So similarities should be present, therefore it might be done with weapons that has most common attacks within group. The whole idea of training ground is to give player general expression of play-styles.

90

Honestly, there’s too much thought against respec system.

It hurts no one.

Is everyone taking crazy pills or something?

I generally appreciate your suggestion in conclusion. It seems well-thought out.

One thing that feels relevant and missing is that attributes are single-purpose and that design is wasted opportunity.

Not only does it make attributes boring, but it doesn’t give any distinction to putting points into an attribute beyond weapon accessibility and scaling.

I feel attributes should have passive bonuses as they do in most games. For example, dexterity should increase critical hit chance/damage and/or attack/movement speed. Faith should increase healing issued/received. Intellect should increase rune damage/efficiency. Strength should increase equip load (and remove equip load as a discrete attribute). Health should be changed to Vitality and increase health pool as well as passive regeneration (which would be initially slow, but gradual for eventually topping off between encounters and more useful with higher attribute value).

It doesn’t have to be exactly like that, but the general idea would make attributes viable beyond simply deciding which weapons you can use.

Additionally, they should remove the attribute requirements for all weapons and simply level restrict them as they do armor. They can keep the scaling and nobody is hurt by this since the weapons are going to be weaker without the supporting attributes anyway.

So why restrict them in the first place?

Artificial difficulty, that’s why.

It’s bad. Stop it.

3 Likes
91

Good notice. Attributes do feel like purposeless beyond locking weapons behind stat requirements. There is other things in game that seems to be single-purpose system, as such ending up as a bit shallow systems.

If attributes had additional effects on gameplay, that definitely would have been an improvement.

2 Likes
93

theres no studio without their playerbase. Studio is a service, no rest for the wicked is a product, and we are customer. How naive to think that its about what studio wants. product exists to serve customers, not other way around. If product is good, people will buy it, if product is bad people will go look for other products. They have a good product and they should be proud of it. HBut in the end its a product. If they make is bad, people will leave. It was never about what studio wants, but people buying their product.

why? Why would I wanna make a new character because finally the last piece of gear I was farming for dropped, and its armor, and it has 1% less of weight reduction then my previous peice of gear, so I am now running a heavy instead of medium roll, and I cannot fix it because I run out of limited respecs points? Why would that gameplay be a good one? What do I gain by being forced to make a new character?

And note, if u dont wanna respecs, just do not respec. Let other people who actually prefer their time respec as much as they want.

A very shallow take. You can want your game to be played in any way you want. But guess what, your sales will reflect your design decisions as well. And the one you are wanting to be part of the game is not the one thats gonna earn them more money. Most peoples wanna play for the story and will play the game once. If they get restricted the way you want them to they will just refund the game. No sane studio would tank that money loss for such a design decision.

it does, tho, and if u r any good at the game you respec ur tree like 20-30 times a league. I went to play wicked this league, two of my few friends I play poe with grinded for mageblood this league easily. I made both of their skill trees and helped them respec multiple times this season.

95

Good to know. Have they changed it at some point? Plenty of people (that are good at the game) have said you can brick a character because there’s no respecs, and many more people have therefore not played it.

Would be a shame if that message goes out for NrftW as well, reducing the player count and revenue significantly because of people (that respect their own time) got the wrong message/impression due to early reviews

96

there has always been a respec, I have been playing the game for 10 years. Hoqever it was always done with point to point respec using regret orbs instead of full respecs, which they should be offering to everyone whos still in campaign.

97

Hi, yes, thank you. The post is good. I also do not advocate endless free respec. It’s just an opportunity, even if it’s hard to get, to somehow remake the build

1 Like
98

To me it looks like most of the points that are pro respecc are minor problems with the system that respecc doesnt fix itself, but rather is a bandaid for.

The strongest point imo so far is the weapon requirements, which needs to be addressed. of course i also would like to try out every single weapon that i find, like many others and i would want to do that without some kind of drawback. The weapon requirements in the first place are there not because this is a better Weapon in so far that it is a superior type of weapon to another one with lower attribute requirements, but only on a higher upgrade lvl. i think the intention of the developers is that the most basic weapon you can find can rival every weapon you can find in late game (similar to Souls-arpgs), you only need to properly invest in it. the requirements seem to mostly be there to keep weapons from late in the game with a high upgrade-lvl from underleveled characters, and i think reducing the stat requirements and adding a lvl requirement would solve that problem.

About optimizing your build and minmaxxing:
There are already options for optimization in the game. if for example, like a post pointed out. your stat profile leaves you just barely unable to put on the last bit of gear that fits your playstyle, you can either try to find that gear on a lighter armor type (e.g. enchanting leather gloves instead of mesh gloves), or even simpler use a feather ‘gem’ in the socket of your item to reduce its equip-load by a bit. And i certainly wouldnt mind but rather approve of a careful restricted way to reset some attribute points to finetune your character or fix some mistakes made along the way.
Lastly i think the arguments around minmaxing are weird in the context they are used in. There are some posts in here that argue about not wanting to create a new character after they made a mistake with their first one and ‘fix’ their character. I think the game will be perfectly beatable without perfectly aligning everything with your character, especially given how much raw power you get through upgrades, enchants and gems. minmaxxing to beat certain challenges (both game-content wise like (probably even harder) crucibles and user-based once like speedrunning/nohit-encounters) will of course be a thing, and should be encouraged, but only very passionate players who invest a lot of time into the game will try those and asking them to create a new character to minmax stats doesnt seem unreasonable to me. A statement like “i can’t minmax as a SC player if i dont have respec” confuses me, because as a casual player you shouldn’t even worry about minmaxxing in my opinion.

3 Likes
99

nop, it definitely fixes them and is not a bandaid for. Its the only actual fix for them. You cannot have an item that requires a random amount of weight, expect people to not minmax their equip load and provide no respects to do so. as in every other systems like arpg respect is a neccessity to spec out of a system and spec into a different system. Thats how that works.

100

Definitely on point towards findining a better solution, I’m tempted to mark this conclusion as a solution.

Just so the devs get something out of this post.

3 Likes
101

I see 2 flaws in that argument:

first, respec is absolutely not a necessity for arpg, I of course haven’t played every arpg out there but to name 3 games that i can think of from the top of my head, Dark Souls 1, Torchlight 2 and Titan Quest all offer no or very limited ability to respecc and they all were successful enough to have sequels. so thats not necessarily how that works.
And on top of that, NRFTW is supposed to challenge the status quo, so the argument 'but every other game does not do that" is basically complimenting them on achieving what they set out to do.

second: the equip weight is absolutely not random. There are 4 different equipment classes(cloth,leather,mesh and plate), each having a different level of weight on every slot, and the only major change to that equip load comes from rolling a decrease enchantment or socketing the feather.

2 Likes
103

Either way we can talk about different titles and what they brought about, which is, in it’s own right, a good formula to suggest what worked and what hasn’t.

But we’re talking about Moon Studios here and No Rest for the Wicked.
This is neither your classic arpg nor your average souls-like. So standard practices could elevate or impair the experience. Neither are superior.
The game is in development so it’s not a finished product, therefore we as community can pitch in and give our own thoughts to bring the game forward to make it it’s own thing.

Everyone should be heard, I see valid points and concerns being made across the board both in pro and contra.

104

Titan quest has heavily limited respecc since you can only respecc points put in spells and not points put into your mastery(or change your mastery) and you could not respecc points you put into attribute. It even is written right there in the page you posted!

Arguing that old games are not played much today seems odd. they are not getting updates every few month so of course the playerbase dwindles over time. I would guess (i have no data on this) that games like diablo 1 or the first super mario don’t have a huge playerbase today,. but noone would argue that those games weren’t huge successes.

I have never claimed to know all or that i am smarter than the developers, i just voice my opinion and try to argue what may or may not work to give the developers insight in what the community as a whole thinks. And if you read my comments carefully without thinking black/white only, you will realise that i tried to find a solution that works for both sides by looking at the given arguments and searching for an inbetween solution. i never argued againt any respecc, i only argued against ‘unlimited’ respeccs.

If you want to further explain to my what i don’t understand about ‘system like rpgs’ (what does the system even stand for? i only ever hear people talk about arpg, but that maybe because i havent played much of poe/LE) i suggest you do it in a private message, that way we wont clutter this thread.

105

I have played it long ago as well, but I did forget so I did google it.

107

I think first playthrough should always be prioritized over replayability in situations like these, and ending up not being able to use an armor or weapon or having 2 much points into equip load will end up hurting first playthrough much much more than replaybility of the game. Elden Ring has less replaybility than previous titles not because of respcs, but rather because of its vast open world. I will remind you, most people will play the game only once, and if their time wasnt good they will not replay the game in the first place. And most of them wont ever replay the game because they only play games once.

1 Like