Hello No Rest for the Wicked team, here’s a little feedback of what I felt after playing a lot (40 hour and more) of your very interesting game.
Things I really enjoyed:
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Flow of combat, even if the encounters are pretty repetitive, the way the character moves and attacks is very satisfying (for certain weapons).
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Ambience and art direction, great job, everything looks majestic.
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Bossfights, even if they are just 4 of them, each one felt pretty good to fight (I still need to finish Echo Knight but it’s going well)
Things that I think need to change:
- Player Stat Management: from what I experienced levelling is pretty frustrating, as a lot of equipment has no reason to be this heavy, what is the point of having 6 weapon slots if with 29 in Weight i still can’t wield a single claymore without being on the verge of heavy weight. Some armors especially reach numbers like 75-100 weight.
With weight being such an important stat, I remained at 28 strenght for a while, and it’s pretty frustrating seeing every weapon that I dropped requiring 42 of any stat or 26/26 spreaded with others. If i obtained 12 weapons while attempting the crucible, i couldn’t use any of them.
I think that the weapon requirements are too high.
In the early game, having 10 or even 11 on every stat allowed me to use a lot of weapons dropped, knives, staves and swords. That was fun, I could simply change my way of playing by changing the weapon.
(In my opinion weapon stat requirements don’t really have a place in this game, in souls you have a lot of variety and high requirement weapons only appear after a certain point in the mid to late-game, here I think that just the character level can be a good weapon requirement, without having to invest in a stat, but this is probably too far away from your intended way of playing so I can understand)
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Allow players to reallocate their stats. (PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD)
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Allow players to test weapons that they can’t yet wield to try how they move and feel, simply make them deal no damage when they try to use them in combat. (I want to know if what I will invest my point for is actually good or not)
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Change how the game handles materials, right now gathering only 10 spruce, 5 iron and 5 clay is just boring, if different houses used other resources like granite, salt and coal it would be a bit less of a chore.
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Remove construction time by swapping it with quest/challenge completion.
To finish a construction you need to complete first 5 bounties or something like that. That way I feel engaged to play the game instead of leaving it on idle while doing other stuff. -
Remove the real-time saturday 8 - 12 window of a certain NPC shop by instead making him appear at certain in-game hours like 11pm to 1am in-game day/night cycle. (I was fuming with rage when I read that sign)
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Revamp the weapon upgrading, wolf claws are ok, but bear claws are the worst decision, I spent an entire session running around chests on the nameless pass and only got 1.
Most of my chests are filled with skulls and hearts that I still don’t have a use for.
And don’t just “increased the drop rate of a certain item”, that is not the right solution, I get that a lot of the game is based around RNG, but right now it feels like there’s too much stuff with too little use and everything else is a chore.
Maybe add (and here I get inspiration from souls likes) enemies that are certain to drop important upgrading materials like “bear paws” (why do I even need a bear paw for my greatsword is another question). -
Add signs that make us understand better what is the content of this Early Access and what’s not, there are a lot of gates in the city, bridges and ladders in the nameless pass that I spent hours trying to reach. A little sign that says WIP would have saved me from that frustration.
Combat suggestions:
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Change how player recieve posture damage after attacking and rolling, by appling it when a player rolls or attack when they run out of stamina, or they try to facetank an enemy without trying to roll out of their attacks. (Enemies and bosses don’t gain stagger when they attack so I don’t see why the player should.)
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Enemies with shields, these guys are incredible, they can attack and while they are recovering and giving you their back, if you try to attack them they can simply turn istantly by 180° and istantly block your attack. This is dumb.
Make so that the enemies have 2 stances they can swap to with their ai, not input reading.
I want to feel like I was the idiot who decided it was a good idea to attack a guarded enemy (and I would also recieve stagger damage for my error), not that the enemy istantly read my attack and made an istant block or parry. -
Enemy stagger, I’m not talking about their “posture bar” (sekiro way of speech), but some enemies literally don’t care if I attack them and will keep on going, without even flinching, while I, even in heavy armor, get completely interrupted for even being hit a little bit, and my ability that i just casted disappears.
Now, a little note on how I am feeling for this release.
Yesterday I said it out loud with my other friends who somewhat agree. It seems like the game got released in early access with the idea of using it as an Alpha where the testers have paid to play and give feedback.
I wouldn’t have said this if the game was in a better status, but right now I can’t even fathom who said “yeah, this is playable, let’s launch and wait for the reviews”, this was a very risky move which will make a lot of players feel betrayed.
The user interface is still pretty bad and I can’t control my character after closing the inventory or resting at a whisper. Even some things that I have talked about before still leave me speechless, who thought that those were a good idea.
What even is the brightness setting, why does it just make a grey box cover the entire game? Is that a place-holder?
I am a little hars, and I am sorry for it. But I really think that this game has a lot of potential, and I would hate for it to just become a grindy unfun rng gring.