Take of indeterminate temperature: The campaign is the best part of the game, I enjoyed the campaign far more than I’m enjoying the end game; I’d really like an opportunity to replay the campaign from the start, but this time facing off against level XX enemies, dropping level XX loot.
NewGame+ has been a staple since Chrono Trigger, and one of my favorite games ever, the Nioh series, elevated it to perfection. NRftW deserves its own version of NewGame+, and, dare I be greedy, NewGame++ if that’s possible.
I don’t know how progression is going to work in v1.0, or what end game is going to look like in the final version, but right now, at the current moment, I’m really jonesing to replay the campaign with all my toys intact. Not a new realm with level 1 enemies to start with, a proper NG+ with enemies that pose a real challenge.
I agree on the campaign being better than the (current) post-game. I’ve started fresh a few times to regain the sense of progression and challenge.
How would a map overhauled for NG+ look like? It’s costly to add more than number tweaks or letting the zones be in post-game difficulty from the start. Considering the eventual campaign length, NG+ development would benefit only a (small?) fraction of devoted players that stay beyond ~150 hours. Modding is a great solution, of course.
I am also unsure if smooth zone scaling is good. The current stepwise system feels fine: Zones do jump up, just not high enough for the player power cap.
Fixed enemy levels have the advantage that you can return to a difficult zone and feel that you have improved in power, that your advancement was worthwhile. Fixed-level zones eventually turn into a cakewalk, but then plot events change zones. The stepwise system feels like a compromise between advancement mattering and difficulty catching up, as you’re always against a static (fair?) benchmark.
Smoothly scaling enemy levels can lead to the feeling that enemy progression outstrips yours, as is currently sort of the case if you waste your attribute points and damage resistance decreases; or that the game moves the goalposts and your progression is irrelevant, that you’re just playing keep-up. This is always the case, but best hidden from players. (Compare Oblivion as a cautionary tale, where the optimal move is to sleep as little as possible lest bandits start wearing glass armour.)
There’s also the option of keeping the player power curves flat. The class system might do that, depending on the number of incremental bonuses. I haven’t read into it too much, so I am not sure if health and other characteristics will continue to scale. Less player scaling means finer control over the intended difficulty, but also less of a feeling of progression. I hope Wicked lands closer to Zelda or Sekiro in progression than to Diablo 3; more constrained and less exponential.
I really like ng+ in the games that I have played. That being said, those games only took 15-30 hours to complete, which is how things currently are with NRFW. However with 1.0, it’s supposed to take hundreds of hours (I think they said 270 hours average), in which case I’m not sure new game plus makes sense.