Hi! First of all i wanna thank the developers for their work and for their wish to create something special and unique. As a big fan of your idea and the game concept i’d like to know more information and details about work in progress. It might be discord feedback, maybe YT videos, doesn’t actually matter just something.
This might give you guys feedback from players in real time and also might help with new ideas. I have 200+ hours in NRFTW and wanna share my opinion.
1.Story
It’s not bad. There is drama, i can feel the characters, their feelings and emotions. The art style and design create a beautiful world where you want to be. Have to say the sound is also great, i can feel the impact from my weapons. And thank you for a good physics, i can say for sure the game is made with soul. But unfortunately for now it’s still not enough.
2.Combat, Builds
The first thing i wanna talk about is rune descriptions. When i look at them i literally have no idea how they actually look like and work in action. I think i’d like to see some small window in descrition that contains a video that shows a rune in action (just so i can see animation, speed, how many hits etc. numbers would be great too).
The second thing is as a player i don’t understand the rules when i’m trying to make a build. I mean what things work together and what things don’t? How it’d work with a particular rune etc. you know things like that. Just more detailed information. So my suggestion is give me some sort of a training room where i have access to runes, items and can test my ideas before i’ll dive into many hours of farming for potentially some bad idea that simply doesn’t work. I’d be helpful to know that it won’t be a waste of time.
There are many effects for low health machanic, but i just don’t understand how should i survive? It’s like we don’t have another mechanic that works with it. There are energy shields in similar games, but i’m not sure if it fits this game. But we need something, maybe some amount of heath per hit not percantage.
3.Crucible
In my opinion your rework is great and looks awesome, i also saw the video with CohhCarnage, where he was talking to one of the devs not sure with whom exactly, but the dev said there are plans for crucible like potentially a boss rush mode and a survival mode. I like these ideas so much. I also know a good example of boss rush in Hollow Knight with pantheons.
But the problem is in the end the reward is not such a big deal. My suggestion is give players another way to spend echo like if you wanna boost your character you buy boost effects with your echo like it works now, but if you don’t you can keep echo then spend it in the end of the run and you can pick a specific effect or something for your gear from a chest or vendor. The point is to make craft more controlable but you have to complete a challenge for it.
4.Craft
Unfortunately i think we have a bad situation here. As i can see you’re trying to make people happy if they got a good gear. But with current balance if i need to enchant an item to got specific effects i need around 3000 tries (believe me i literally know what i’m talking about), of course exalting is a great adiition compared to what we had before. Just imagine that i need to carft a full set and it requires something that is hard to get. Which means i’m about to spend a lot of time, but again at the end i don’t even know if it works.
So my point is i’d like to see a version of crafting where i can re-roll 1-2 effecs (like Last Epoch for example). Things there have forging potential which gives you a certain amount of affix re-rolls and prefix re-rolls.
5.Open World
I know how you think about timers (Cohh’s video), but also i think it’d be more logical to set these timers to game time rather than real time. For now the game world seems much better to explore and farming, and i understand you’re trying to make it more playable just as you did with crucible. Maybe if we already have daily quests, we should change it a little bit from kill X monsters to solve a puzzle or find and defeat a Boss. Even some kind of challenges when you have to complete a quest without focus (something like that) but also with a greater reward.
How about some sort of a hidden dungeon that can apper in a random location then mix it with the puzzle part from before and we have a quest about how to find this dungeon. We also need some unique bosses for that or a hard platforming section (cause for now i don’t exactly understand why do we need the ring with endless climbing?)
So i think that’s it. At least for now these are the things that bother me the most. but it’s my humble opinion, so thank you if you read it.
Your fan Eugene