I’ve been playing NRFTW for about 120 hours now, mostly co-operative multiplayer. I’ve beaten the game twice, and have entered the end game on two separate servers.
At this point, my gameplay loop mainly involves completing Crucible runs and farming for cursed gear so that I can use Essence Embers to select and transfer the best enchantments to the cursed gear I need to complete my builds. Unfortunately, I’ve found this process to be a lot more tedious than it needs to be, because item drops have a lot of ambiguity in how they’re presented.
For example:
Cursed items appear almost identical to normal items in the pick-up menu – normal items have a black background and cursed items having a very dark magenta background. For some reason, these colors look nearly identical. I think the values need to be adjusted for better readability.
Pick-up icons sometimes won’t reveal their contents until you’ve been standing over the item for several seconds. If you compulsively pick up every drop you see as soon as you can, you’ll almost never now what you’re actually picking up.
Only the item’s menu icon and rarity is shown, but the stuff that really matters (gear level, stats, scaling attributes, enchantments) isn’t viewable until the item is in your equipment menu.
In my runs, I’ve seen both red and blue pick-up icons in the wild. Red pick-up icons seem to indicate that a set of rare items is contained within the pick-up, and are also (in my experience) only found at certain locations in the world. Enemies don’t spawn red pick-up icons on death, even if they’ve dropped Fallen Embers, cursed or legendary items.
The solution should be as follows, I think:
Cursed gear should have a brighter magenta background in the pick-up menu to better differentiate it from unenchanted gear.
Pick-up icons should have a radius (or a larger radius than they do currently) which shows the icons of what the drop contains without the player having to stand on top of the pick-up icon. This means the player will know the general contents of the pick-up icon while moving towards it instead of standing on top of it. The radius wouldn’t have to be that large – maybe one or two meters.
When close to a pick-up icon, we should have an option that allows us to view the contents of that icon in a sub-menu, kind of like a chest menu. In this menu, we could see more important characteristics of the loot contained in the pick-up icon without having to put everything in our inventory and sort through it later. When a pick-up icon has been searched through in this way, anything left over is assumed to be of little interest to the player, and so the icon becomes translucent/ghostly/grayscale post-search to indicate that the icon has already been investigated. For people that just want to pick up everything, they can pick up all the contents of the icon by simply pressing the associated button/key for the drop like they do now.
When an enemy is defeated and drops a pick-up icon, that icon should be red if it contains embers, cursed items, legendary items, or other items intended to be highly rare and valuable. This lets the player prioritize pick-up icons containing high-quality loot immediately without having to run to each individual pick-up icon and stand there to see if the icon contains items they’re interested in.
To add onto the red ember thing, boss corpses tend to occlude the pick-up icons which have fallen inside of their geometry. Adding a small light pillar to rare/red pick-up icons could really help players ensure that they always know when rare items have dropped from a large enemy.
Please consider making more changes to aid in accessibility and readability for gear farming. Right now, it’s really annoying to have to spend so much time parsing through my menu halfway through my Crucible runs, and I’m sure that other players have had similar experiences. Inventory management isn’t very fun, and it becomes more and more necessary the later in the game you get, when you’re parsing through literally hundreds of items in a day of grinding.