I never thought I would like Hardcore

Wicked Feedback
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Some thoughts from a player who never expected to enjoy HC. These are based on Unspoken difficulty, though I think the conclusions apply broadly.

  1. HC is a missed sell. I spent hundreds of hours in Wicked without touching HC, and that’s a shame. It massively changed the game for me, for the better (… the rest of my thoughts below).

  2. HC is a Roguelite, not a Difficulty Mode. I didn’t understand this until I first reached Sacrament and realized I could build up the city, buy a house, and keep that progression across deaths. HC isn’t a no-death run — it’s a game where each character dies and resets, but your Realm … endures : ) And Realm strength really matters in HC: comfort buffs that are nice-to-have in normal mode become critical for every new level-1 character - Opulent buffs, for example, make it so that every run you’re actually really starting at like lvl 4-5, instead of lvl1. The balance shifts from character/build strength to Realm strength. Characters die; the Realm lives on. Over time, each new run starts with a warchest of gear, resources, and buffs left behind by predecessors — and you start making interesting decisions, like whether to risk your absolute best weapon on a run you’re not sure will last.

  3. HC exposes how shallow death is in normal Wicked. The only penalty in normal mode is durability loss and time. It feels like the outcome of an early design debate where character progression won out over realm progression — and the result is that death has almost no weight.

  4. In HC, the map is the star. Fall damage is a long-running joke for Wicked players, but HC forces you to take it seriously as strategy. Which approach do you take into an encounter? Can you clear the safe zones in a Crucible chamber before dealing with the ledge sections? HC puts the whole level design into sharper focus — the traps in corners, getting stuck between a chest and a mob. You remember those deaths. You obsess about making sure they don’t happen again.

  5. Realm milestones hit different. Playing HC coop, one of our biggest early-game accomplishments was when my partner’s character made it to the Crucible shop wealthy enough to buy the Whisper Stone for our house. That toon died shortly after — but they were the GOAT. The Whisper Stone changed everything: suddenly we had a real Roguelite base to invest in, and every future run had actual momentum behind it.

    Now multiply that feeling by every major economy/infra upgrade … getting tier 3 vendors and being able to start runs with Weapon X, which seemed impossibly difficult to reach organically in a HC run, is just another example of how it feels like every Realm progression system in Wicked becomes eveon stronger in HC.

Concrete Actionable Feedback

  1. Fix HC Coop Bug. This one just really sucks; the way I played HC Coop with another player after we discovered this bug was to actually just both agree to only use a character once until its death. Afterward, the character, the gear, etc. was lost and we would start over. This led to some pretty funny naming conventions for our toons YOLO.Zelda.Life13 (YOLO was our term for ‘unofficial coop hardcore’).

    My uneducated guess is that coop forces the death status of players in some edgecases to make the game behave more conservatively in considering a death a death in multiplayer; e.g. certain clipping falls or situations where lag may have positioned a player off the map. In normal coop it makes sense to be conservative when considering player death.

In HC coop mode, I would personally prefer it to be as stringent as possible, even if that means there are some “unfair” deaths. The HC status having integrity is more important - it’s what makes Runs real. You would never want to find out that you or someone else’s run wasn’t really “legit” … because the game saved a char from death when it shouldn’t have.

  1. “added by {CHARACTER}” display in menu for all housing items, maybe with a little memorial plaque in the chest/refinery/etc. menu for the fancy ones. I really want to remember HERO.NoFallDeaths8 for the epic crucible run that got us our Whisper Stone. He was a hero. Let’s remember the heroes that build our Realms.

  2. Re-evaluate the featherweight penalty for death in normal. I don’t know if it makes sense to change Wicked normal, but after playing HC I’d want to make sure there was a really healthy, intentional decision to make the penalty for death so light in Wicked and that some of the ways death could be made weightier were considered somewhat…

  • What if you lost all inventory on death, but could buy it back at the graveyard?

  • What if ichor upgrades could let you retain one of your item categories, so you can retain more @ death over time?

  • What if there was a ring that let you keep everything @ death?

    These are probably terrible ideas, but the space for ideas is there and I just want to make sure players get a chance to experience Wicked with weightier death : )

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I know a couple of guys in the discord who will love this post :raising_hands:.

Great write up Z4a!

Silas