I just wanted to run through some of the things I’ve been doing in order to try and find fun in No Rest for the Wicked since the Breach patch.
First off – I can not overstate how much I love the art style in this game. I am going to say this every time I post feedback. I love the art style so much in this game. It’s like it just tickles something deep in my soul. I also love the level design in this world. (Encounter design, not so much – more on that later.) But I don’t want to just neg on this game, because there are somethings about this game that are just absolutely wonderful and I will not stop singing their praises no matter how much this game gets under my skin with some of the design choices on other systems in the game.
Okay now that that is out of the way - Let me describe my degeneracy.
The elephant in the room.
FOOD:
Please allow me to explain the lengths I will go through to save my food in this game.
- I will not use food in the overworld.
- This causes me to run around the overworld like a lemming. I would rather die 10 times than use a single morsel of my food on anything other than a boss fight.
- I ruined my weapon by putting Healing Aura on it, so that I can fight longer without dying in the overworld and that has ruined my character immersion because I don’t like using magic - Or the rune system at all if I’m being totally honest.
- We’re going to circle back to this because I have much beef with the Rune system.
- I used to Parry enemies and then pretend like I had a Riposte by using my Focus on an attack. Now I parry so that I can heal myself, and then a part of me dies inside when I can’t find the backstab angle on a stunned enemy – or take too long walking behind them… or get shafted because the enemy has their back to a wall.
- I avoid fights in the overworld unless they’re near resources I want because I do not want to accidentally use my precious food.. because I do not want to have to farm for herbs more than I already am.
- I hate this, because I want to fight absolutely everyone and everything in this game all of the time. I want to 1v1 everyone, and I want to parry or backstab them because it makes my pp tingle. Every enemy I see, I now hear the adult voice in my head going “Don’t fight that guy, he’s gonna hit you and you might use a food out of reflex which is then one less food you will have for a fight that actually matters.”
- Whenever I get to a boss fight, I will fight the boss 5-10 times without using any food just to try and learn the fight so that I don’t use all of my food before I get into a flow state. I then have to repair my gear, which interrupts my flow state.
- When I use all of my allotted food per attempt, and get boss down to 10% HP and die – it makes me want to take my controller and throw it out the window… because now instead of using 1 or 2 more food and being able to move on, I now have to make a whole extra attempt, potentially using 5 more food instead of 1 more food. This causes me overall to actually use more food because I am terrible at video games.
- While I am attempting to get gud, and enter the forbidden flow state required to smash a boss into dust, and I run out of food, it causes me to experience ADHD Rage. Because now I am being interrupted with a chore of farming more food – when I was in the middle of hyper fixating on sticking my sword stick in the bosses nono sheathe.
- My bags are full of everything I need to make food except the herb I need… which is adding strain on the limited amount of storage I have in my bank and on my character.
ALL of this stems entirely from the fact that I have to farm for my healing resource… and it is compounded by the fact that I am now capped on how many foods I can consume in a single bout of combat.
All of this degeneracy is solved by From Software’s solution of just giving me freakin’ Estus Flasks.
Now, it’s not my place to say if a vision is good or bad. All I can say is what I will do to problem solve working around this vision – while adhering to my own personal vision of how I choose to play the game, and if it leads to me having more fun in the game or not. Right now – This food system is just a massive point of contention for me, that is putting extra strain on the other systems in the game.
So – let’s recap with a quick Tl;DR for food.
To avoid farming for food I am currently:
- Avoiding combat (Which I do not want to do)
- Dying on purpose (Lemming mode baby)
- Using Healing Magic on a character I wanted to be a barbarian
- Permanently tainting my weapon with filthy healing magic runes.
- Parrying enemies and not getting my sweet sweet dopamine reward
- Being interrupted from enjoying my “Get Gud” phase during a boss fight to farm more food anyways (My flow state, ruined)
- My inventory situation is becoming dire because I lack herbs to turn these bits into noms.
I don’t imagine that is the “Vision” for either the intended gameplay or the intended experience. If it is – friend, please tell me cause I need to abandon ship now. So – you might be wondering – what is the intended gameplay experience… and I would argue that for me personally – it doesn’t matter what the vision is. I’m a stubborn man. I’m going to do everything in my power to avoid doing this chore of farming food… and the more you try to force this on me – the harder I am going to resist until I just stop playing the game. So that begs the question – is that worth it? Well – I might be an outlier on this – so that’s really on you guys to decide. But for me – this whole food system is a wrench in the cogs.
If i could make a compromising suggestion – it would be to make enemies drop the herbs needed to make food frequently. So that I don’t have to farm for it, or make leech and or life regen a common modifier on gear.
Alright – Let’s talk about the Runes.
Let’s start with the biggest problem. These Runes are PERMANENT. Which makes experimentation a risky endeavor, or a costly one. This is debilitating to anyone who wants to try things, do science, test builds, you name it.
Normally I’d try to convey some logic or reasoning as to why this is bad or convince you that I’m a smart boy and I have a good idea. I don’t think that is really necessary here. There are somethings that you either agree on or disagree on – and this one – there is no combination of words that would change my mind here. These are skills. I should be able to swap them out freely… in fact I don’t even think they should be tied to my weapons or gear at all.
This Rune system has potential. But it is sabotaged by inflexibility. If I have some precious weapon I’ve been investing all my resources into – do you really think that I’m going to taint it for science? You’re crazy. I would NEVER do that… it could ruin my item permanently. So I’m supposed to just farm up the resources to make another weapon to give a skill a proper try? Absolutely not. I don’t have a lot of self respect.. but I have more self respect than that.
If you want me to use Runes willingly, they need to not feel like precious consumables or a means to permanently mar my items.
Okay – Let’s talk Stats and weapons.
A frequent occurrence while I’m playing, is that I’ll see a weapon type that looks interesting, but it will require stats like Int or Faith or Dex when I’m on a STR character… but none of the low level int/faith/dex weapons even remotely resemble this weapon… so if I want to try this weapon out I have to make a new character and suffer using some silly weapon type I don’t like… just to try a completely different weapon type that I’ve never seen before. Example – I saw some super cool fist weapons with Faith scaling and I really wanted to play with them… but they require 22 faith. I haven’t seen any faith based fist weapons… so If I wanna try thouse out – I need to level a guy that uses hammers… but I don’t like the hammers. Do you see my dilemma?
Now this could be addressed with the ability to respec my stats. Sure. But – I would argue that it’s a better opportunity to re-think how Stats work in this game.
Right now, STR does nothing except improve STR scaling weapons. That is super boring. In fact – every stat works like this. This is extra silly in a game where you really have no guarantees that you’re even going to get a decent weapon for whatever stat you want to level.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting if each stat actually did something interesting? Like STR is more Melee Damage. INT is more Elemental Damage. Faith is more Light/Dark damage. Dex is more Crit/Attack Speed.
That way, I would have some incentive to level more than simply “VIT/STAM/WEAPON STAT X/EQUIP”
Personally – I love simple systems that somehow manage to find great depth of customization – but here there is so little room for science or build diversity. You just work out whatever ratio of health/stam/equip/focus/and damage stat you feel comfortable with and that’s it. You’ve solved every single build for you. It’s kinda lame if I’m being honest.
Imagine if INT increased your elemental damage and Focus.
If VIT Increased your Health, Stam and Equip Load.
If Faith increased your Dark/Light and Resistances.
If STR Increased Melee Damage + Equip Load
If Dex Increased Melee Damage w/ Light Weapons + Stam
Suddenly things get more interesting.. I gotta think a little more about how I wanna invest my points.. but it’s still pretty simple.. and if I wanna tunnel my points I still can. Now what if we spice things up a little – and make the Gem infusions more interesting.. what if the Infusions can change weapon damage types from Physical to Fire. Now my STR Greatsword can have some INT scaling… and I get to control that scaling with MY choices… instead of just hoping some STR INT weapon exists that drops sometime… and dealing with whatever happens to drop for me.
Then imagine if Runes are just skills that I can equip separate from my weapon… and if their scaling is 100% based on the type of damage they do… Now we’re really getting into RPG territory… The juices are flowing my brain is cooking… theorycrafting is happening… and suddenly the game is less of this crappy RNG fiesta of timewasting disrespect.
Now we scrap all these silly “Damage on Tuesday” item modifiers, and start adding some actually cool item mods like “Your Ignites do more damage.” or “You gain 5 HP when you shock an enemy.” or “Consecutive hits deal more stagger damage.”
Then we start adding in some unique items that make certain Rune skills start behaving differently.. and now we’ve got a real RPG on our hands with actual theorycrafting.
This is all just spitballing ideas – but it stems from a love of theorycrafting.
It seems to me, that the current goal in No Rest is to appeal to people who like Rogue Lites, ARPGs and Souls-like games. Love the idea.. but we gotta learn from the folks who have already failed in these genres.
We can’t be doing overly punishing gameplay (POE2 I’m looking at you.)+ maybe damage on tuesday modifiers(D4 I’m looking at you.) + boring stats, and chucking all into a slot machine. It’s a recipe for disaster. It’s an even bigger disaster with these negative affixes on gear. I love me some Souls-Like games, but I despise the infinte slot machine of RNGesus. I want to know which boss to smash to get some cool item. I wanna sit around staring at a wiki page and trying to come up with wacky combinations of skills/stats/items I can come up with to completely break the game.
The real shame here – is that some of the powers you can get in the Crucible would make for great modifiers on items… it’s like you guys have a lot of the pieces already.. they’re just not all on the same page. We’re baking like 3 different pies poorly instead of one mega pie inspired by 3 awesome pies.
I dunno – I’m writing a freakin’ novel over here. I want you guys to knock this game outta the park… but when I play it I feel like I’m being edged by edward scissor hands if he looked like Jessica Alba. I have the most confused bonnet of all times man. I need my RPG systems to make me theorycraft… and I need and I need my Souls Like combat to stop forgetting the fundamentals.. this food system is like a pre-wheeled technology wheel barrow… and for the love of all things holy I need an actual Riposte… and I need enemies to actually get staggered. I swear some of these crossbow guys are like John Wayne and the Doom guy had a baby when I go to punish them they swap from melee to ranged attacks like an animation canceling korean starcraft player… and these bigger mobs a have so much ghost range they could hit me in the afterlife… and we got the bosses doing front kicks that stun you so long they can crush you with a vertical attack sent via carrier pigeon from bum F* Egypt
And I can forgive a lot. I mean – you guys are tickling my artistic soul here in so many ways. But I got two souls, and if you replace the ‘r’ with a ‘u’ you’ll understand the second soul… and I need that tickled too in games nowadays… and I know you all can do it. I hope this made some of you laugh, and gave some food for thought. I’m rooting for you guys so freakin hard. I wanna love this game with 200% of my soul… but I’m worried that we’re just gonna end up with some super punishing game that caters to like 5 people on some discord or steam forum.. where fun goes out the window and everything is gated behind some terrible RNG pyramid… and there is no reason to theorycraft anything or room to experiment… because someone has this grandiose idea of making this infinitely replayable slot machine game that is less about what you want to build and more about what you happen to get on your run… with 1/2 inch deep theory crafting/synergy… which we don’t get to experience because we’re too busy looking for herbs.
Best of luck, love you guys.
