Multiplayer Needs More QoL

Wicked Feedback
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1

Friendly Fire

I like the idea of ​​friendly fire but I think it should be toned down a bit, especially in the early game.

In particular, being hit by your allies stuns you for a moment even if hit by a light attack and this often causes a bit too much trouble.

If every time an ally hits me I have to be stunned at least they shouldn’t do any damage to me, either both effects are reduced or one or the other should be removed.

Some weapons are extremely unusable in multiplayer, like scythes, the only way I see to fix this is to have separate small hit boxes for the friendly fire, but I understand that might be too much work.

Exchange the loot

Approaching allies and interacting is awkward, and it’s very strange that when a party member is in combat you can’t do it.

We should have the option to leave items temporarily on the floor.

There is a bug that sometimes prevents you from previewing items on the ground in multiplayer.

We should be able to interact with the same Chest & NPC at the same time.

When exploring, the game encourages everyone to be together, but we still can’t move the loot from a chest at the same time, and this is very annoying, especially due to the Loot Exchange problems I mentioned earlier.

When we return to the city, everyone has to do something different, otherwise we end up standing in line in front of an NPC or a chest. It’s quite frustrating.

Essentially these things should work just like it does in Minecraft, chests and NPCs interact at the same time, and drop the items out of the inventory to trade them, The multiplayer of this game is already very similar to that of Minecraft, so it is worth implementing the other things that work well in the multiplayer of that game.

Availability of the Loot

Tools (pickaxe, axe, shovel, fishing rod) should be easier to get in multiplayer.

In particular, I find very strange that the guaranteed tools are always only 1 of each type, maybe 2 if we count the ones sold by Filiamore.

Essentially if you are lucky and in sacrament both the blacksmith and the carpenter have all the tools if there are 4 players, someone will still be left without tools.

Farmable resources are the same quantity as the single player, although they are farmed more quickly as there are more people and there are not enough to satisfy everyone’s needs, This is also true for resources that are found randomly but since it is RNG it is difficult to quantify if we have been unlucky or if resources are missing.

I suggest introducing larger resource settlers for multiplayer, such as giant trees that have triple the health and offer triple the resources.

Given the amount of resources, only one player can effectively upgrade the gear, while the others make do with what they find.

Therefore, even in multiplayer, it is never a good idea to upgrade your gear, and it is always a good idea to use the already high-level loot found along the way.

Essentially all the problems I describe here: The Crafting Materials are an Unintuitive Mess are amplified.

Multiplayer in Duo

Reviving an ally when there are 2 players should be quicker &/Or less expensive since it’s much harder to do because there are no other players to distract the enemies.

The Crucible

The crucible is in a terrible situation because of how death works. It’s a terrible experience especially with friends of different skill levels.

I recommend doing as in Risk of Rain: Every time you advance the floor the allies respawn.

General polish of the Experience

Having the camera fixed on the point where you died waiting for the allies to save you is not nice we should have the ability to Spectate Allies.

It’s very strange that when a particular ally manages to separate an enemy from the group, to do a 1 vs 1 with him if he wants to take the XP of the other enemies (which technically helped us defeat by driving an enemy away from the group) he has to come where we are and we have to go where he defeated the enemy.

It’s not very intuitive and it often happens that because of this the levels are different even if we have never separated on purpose. It seems like you’re forced to follow the same steps as everyone else to get XP and this ruins the exploration a bit. I think it would be a good idea if we had Fully shared XP when you are in the same area.

Ally icons on the map are hard to see.

Every time we have to waste time trying to describe the loot because we can’t see it directly. We should be able to see allies’ weapons and armor inventory not just equipment.

Maybe in the future

Ability to host a server, I’m playing with my brother and we have between 65 ms and 150 ms, if I could host the server we would have a much better experience.

Local Coop, and in particular I would like to ask about the possibility of having two separate windows on the same device so that if someone has two screens they can have a better experience.

(Obviously I understand that these are not simple things to implement but I think it would be worth it)

Thank you for reading

2

ff is meant to encourage tactical play, weapons like scythe arent “unusable” you just get a different role and have to find different attack windows.

resources are intentionally the same as singleplayer because otherwise you’d progress faster. you’re supposed to share what’s there which is more than enough, especially if you play optimally and use focus healing or hp regen gems to pad food usage. you already get more loot than singleplayer equipment-wise by having more enemies that potentially drop things

i agree w potentially streamlining the sharing and npc interaction process, by adding item linking in chat or adding shop assistants, and making crucible require a team wipe rather than being individual.

3

I know in fact I didn’t ask to remove it, it should just be toned down a bit.

Forcing your allays to play a ranged just because you want to use a weapon that has a lot of AOE seems like a bit of a strong restriction, don’t you think? Freedom of expression is important in RPGs This is why it would be worth making these types of changes.

But there are also more things to upgrade, Iron/Wood is needed for all players to improve their Weapons, not just for one player.

If you notice the only real way to progress with gear is to find new gear that is already high level only 1 in 4 players can upgrade weapons and armor, others are forced to use what they find.

Of course the game still works even without upgrading the weapons, but this is an ARPG not a roguelike and the players should be able to upgrade the weapons and not just use the new ones they find.

Transferring items remotely via chat seems a bit much, in the group is almost always close, it would be enough to leave the items on the ground.

4

youre not forced to play ranged at all tho. you just dont do the aoe swing with your teammates around. yes if youre using a wep with an exclusively aoe moveset then this is a tighter window, but that’s why you have 3 main hand slots to freely swap between - theres so many weapon categories and moveset variations within the same weapon category and that’s what ff is meant to encourage you to explore. also tbh this shows you haven’t even played ranged since a big complaint is ff aoe on quivers and spells xd

linking items in chat is not some novel feature and is typical of any multiplayer game with itemization, including fellow arpgs like poe or diablo or literally any of them hehe. it doesnt instantly transfer items nor should it

5

Yes, if we have to see the game from a rationalist perspective, and try to do what is most effective, what you say is correct.

But if a player wants to do role play and the character he has imagined uses the scythe or any of the weapons with large weapons, (or maybe simply that is his favorite weapon is the scythe and he would like to use it) the player would like to continue using that weapon without swapping.

in ARPG “RP” stands for Role Play, I think it’s an important aspect of the game that’s worth making changes to improve on it.

I’m just saying that it would be a good idea to make it easier to avoid hitting attack allies with these weapons. I’m not saying that a scythe has to be as simple to use as a rapier or a bow, but I’d like it to at least be more user-friendly compared to now.

I know this, but quivers aren’t as strong as they seem, and my brother simply stopped using them after he found the elemental gem he was interested in.

I haven’t played them, maybe I didn’t fully understand how you want the feature to be implemented, but the no rest multiplayer is similar to that of Minecraft and dropping items on the ground works well on that game and weight would also work well on NRFTW, I’ve never wanted other methods of exchanging resources in Minecraft, so leaving items on the ground seemed sufficient to me.

I would like to point out that the multiplayer of this game is very nice, and the issues discussed fall into the QoL category because they would improve the experience, but even without these changes the game works well.

6

Agree with many of these points. Along the lines of interacting with chests and NPCs, we found out that bounties and challenge rewards are only given to the first person who goes to check them in for completion. Not only do other member who participated not get any loot, there is no indication for them to see that the quest was already completed when they separately check in with Captain Randolph afterward. Loot feels like it should be duplicate/personal or better communicated, transparent and frictionless to know who has what between your party in order to properly discuss trading gear that benefits your friends.

7

Can you please add the option to use same NPC by more than just one player at a time? It’s really taking time for no reason to wait in line until you friends decide what to buy or upgrade.
Can you add resurrection option in the Cerim Crucible ?
Another waste of time for players to wait for others to finish the dungeon once they died.
Great game btw !

8

I agree with most of the points.

When it comes to grinding for power progression; I think the dynamic of forcing the players to distribute the resources amongst them can be a nice collaborative experience. So I don’t mind it.

But if the resources are scarce to the point that it multiplies the grinding/farming times or it creates arguments for players that don’t like to share, then it can be rather bothersome.

9

We just got done with playing this for a bit because multiplayer is too frustrating. Feedback on QoL is as follows, and aligns a lot with what is mentioned in the original post.

Friendly Fire just sucks. It’s not good. It’s not balanced. It doesn’t “encourage cooperation”. It just sucks.

I’d like the friendly fire mechanic, if it didn’t just entirely cause more problems. We need to be able to toggle that off. Idk why I’m seeing so many people are opposed to having a toggle or setting for their own realm. Maybe it’s a weird toxic gatekeeping thing that they don’t want people to have their own difficulty settings? Either we toggle friendly fire off for our world, or co-op is out completely and this game becomes a solo one.

There’s not much room to maneuver and literally every one of the attacks have some kind of AOE. Anyone using a 2H weapon, well, you’re just going to have to not do that. Call outs will just break up the combat flow and make everything clunky. We’re not adding extra buttons for call-outs to attacks that already require timing.

We’re sitting here watching our friend go through the level and following behind rather than actually fighting because all his attacks are close quarters and all ours are AOE. Why should we even bother if we’re just going to kill our teammate in a few hits and he’s got it handled? We’ll just go elsewhere. The end result of friendly fire is that we play the same realm, but solo.

Pretty sure this isn’t the intended outcome of friendly fire, but that’s how everyone has been playing it.

Progression isn’t shared, on a shared “realm”.

Players need to be able to use things at the same time. Having to constantly split up to get resources or have a conversation is stupid. I thought this game was supposed to be cooperative? Why the heck do we have to run around and do things solo?

In addition to players just going off and doing their own thing due to combat design choices, co-op is discouraged again due to the fact that there is only enough for one person. This goes for loot, conversations, crafting, or anything you interact with in the game: it’s all shared and you’ll just have to wait in line. We’re not going to farm the same area 4 times each time we play; it drags down the flow and progression of the game.

We need a way to progress once “all players” have gotten to a quest progression point. Just some kind of check on dialogue options, or something. We’ve activated to much by accident, not knowing it’s about to be a cutscene or lore, and someone is always missing out on content, apart from the major scenes that force it. Character conversions need to be heard by all players that aren’t nearby, or at least provide an option to do so.

This is AMPLIFIED by the fact that we have to wait for others to use chests or talk to the NPCs. This is, without a doubt, one of the biggest turn-offs for co-op, in any game. We were literally just complaining about that in something else. I don’t mind sharing loot, usually we pick different roles anyway, but the fact that we must share and must wait for others to just look at something adds a level of frustration, not difficulty, that I don’t think was intended.

11

Based on the amount of related topics with thousands of views, it looks like there could be room for improvement.

Unfortunately, we stopped playing co-op for a lot of reasons mentioned above. My main issues being friendly fire, accidentally triggering cutscenes where players miss out on things and the shared/scarce looting mechanic.

RPGs used to be my favorite game category and this one actively discourages me from wanting to pick it back up again with friends, or recommending it to friends. This is unfortunate because the game is pretty good, just not well-executed (imo).

I’m sure the dev loves the title and we’re all here to have a good time. If this was a different kind of game, like a hack-and-slash, I’d be more open to the current co-op mechanics.

There are games that are meant to have difficulty and that’s okay. It’s okay to want the mechanics to be more tactical.

But, the way co-op and friendly fire is implemented with the combat structure, it makes “tactical fighting” feel like there’s only 1 way to approach fights or get punished …and that’s not tactical gameplay. That makes me feel forced to do it one way or no way. There isn’t room for imagination or strategy. It isn’t engaging.

It feels like this game was made for solo play, then they added more players. Everything builds around that one person and isn’t inclusive of others. It doesn’t feel like anything is scaled or designed with more than one person in mind.

I’d love to see more multiplayer QOL changes, then I’d give the game another shot.

12

I believe a solution to alleviate the problems of friendly fire is adding dedicated support classes (which I’m crossing my fingers in hopes that we’ll have some in the upcoming class system).

And I don’t mean simply because there should be one player dedicated to healing damage inflicted by allies to other allies (which is a realistic scenario too).

I’m mostly talking about the weight of the team composition choices of a party; if all members of the group are damage dealers then it’s no surprise that there’s gonna be a lot of friendly fire (especially considering the level design of this game). But if we had a balanced team then the struggle will be dramatically reduced.

Everyone want to use their skills or powers whenever they have the opportunity, and having support classes will give us the opportunity to shield, heal or buff our allies as opposed to throwing yet another arrow or fire ball in their direction because they’re standing next to an enemy.

We could even get offensive supports that focus on debuffing or CC-ing enemies. But if we only have the option of hacking and slashing then friendly fire is what we’re gonna get :man_shrugging:.