New Player Experience - General Feedback

Wicked Feedback
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Been on for about 3 hours so far and made it to Sacrament in the latest version of the game that came out July 25th. Figured I’d drop some feedback on the new player experience.

First of all, it’s probably worth noting that I’m on Linux (Ubuntu), playing through Proton on Steam. The game ran flawlessly right out of the box, although it does take some time to start up. I get high FPS, no stutters, my controller works great, and the game is highly responsive. I did have one issue where the game crashed when I tried to Fast Travel the first time from a whisper to Sacrament, but otherwise it’s been very stable.

The story and animations in the game are incredible, as expected from Moon Studios (although I still haven’t fully finished Ori). The facial animations in particular are, in my opinion, a technological marvel. I’m at the part in the story where the inquisition shows up at Sacrament and I like that I’m left wondering who the good guys and who the bad guys are in all of this. Not because of some moral ambiguity where everybody is a bad guy and I can’t relate to anyone and therefore don’t care about any of them, but because none of them have really done anything evil yet.

The voice acting is phenomenal.

Combat is fluid and fun, for the most part. Stamina felt a bit limiting but I understand that a) I can fix this by allocating points to it and b) using light weapons felt comfortable and heavy weapons felt… heavy. So I think that is intentional and working well. Some of the enemies in the starting area felt a bit too punishing (I’m looking at you, guy who throws fire bombs and follows up with triple attacks, and the clusters of 2-3 enemies packed together) for the part of the game where you’re still learning how to play, but I guess there’s no better teacher than failure. I tried both the controller and the keyboard/mouse and both felt good and intuitive.

Now things get a little more critical.

  1. Maybe I just got unlucky or didn’t look around enough, but the starting area only gave me two weapons all the way from washing up on the coast to Sacrament, save for the selection I could buy from the vendor. Those were a claymore and a fire staff. I would have liked to see more hard-coded weapons drop in the starting zone so that I could try them out and see which ones worked well for me and my playstyle. I thought it was weird that I got something like 6 claymores and yet not a single short sword or daggers or anything else. Yes, I can buy from the vendor, but it’s not like you have a ton of cash at that point in the game. These should really be hard-coded drops in my opinion.

  2. There seems to be a lack of playstyle customization. Being able to customize runes on weapons seems like a great start (I haven’t gotten there yet but I did read about it), but even so, it’s kind of off-putting that all abilities are tied to weapons and you don’t have any personally-learned abilities that you can mix and match with. The #1 thing about Elden Ring that had me coming back for more and more and more was the diversity of builds you could make in that game by combining different spells with different weapons and gear sets. If, for example, this game gave you a few points every level that you could spend on abilities that I could pull up with LT (with RT staying weapon abilities), I’d be in heaven. Again, only first 3 hours, so maybe there’s some endgame customization stuff that I’m missing, but so far it feels very flat.

  3. No “hide helmet” option? Finally a good ARPG that lets me customize my character and I can’t even see them? This is probably like less than a dozen lines of code to implement. I’m not sure why in 2024 there are still so many games that don’t offer this until the player base begs for it. Which we do. Every time.

  4. Wait times on construction projects is… not a good thing. It’s not the end of the world, since there’s plenty of other stuff to go do while you wait, but… why? Why make us wait an hour? It just seems unnecessarily frustrating.

  5. The text block tutorial pop-ups worked, but I always find it a bit jarring and unpleasant when, in my action games (which I don’t play many of), my game is getting constantly paused so that I can be accosted by text blocks. I think it’d be really cool if there was some voice-over explanations of mechanics while you’re on the boat with non-interrupting pop-ups showing which buttons to press. Overall though, very minor thing.

  6. Would love it if the training dummies in town were functional. This kinda goes back to #1 on this list, but finding and trying out new weapons is kind of annoying without a dummy or easy access to those weapons.

  7. I don’t usually have music turned on in games, but I did for this playthrough so far so that I could get the “full experience” before writing up my feedback. It was… okay. A lot of the game didn’t really even have music, I don’t think? I definitely felt this was something that could be improved upon.

  8. I don’t see any way to actually see what runes on a weapon do until I get to Eleanor. Given the high focus cost of executing the runes, this was very frustrating to trial and error my way through.

Overall, I’m really loving the game. I think this could become my go-to ARPG (which right now is Grim Dawn) if the playstyle customization was expanded on to increase replayability. If not, I imagine I’ll probably plug through the story and a few crucibles and then call it finished.

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Good to have you in the community and awesome feedback. I figured I’d give some responses as someone approaching 200 hours.

  1. The first day actually has a massive amount of chests spawn, more than normal. To the point where I often start new worlds just to farm the chest. If you check every nook and cranny, you will have enough money or loot to sell so you could buy a couple of starter weapons to try out.

  2. So there is a little bit of a limit in the current state of the game just because it’s early on, a lot of the runes feel the same but there’s basically standard, ice, fire, plague versions of each. That being said, you can have up to 6 weapons on you between the main hand and off hand slots. Each weapon could have up to 4 runes on them. Meaning you could have up to 24 abilities at any given point. Unlike Elden Ring, the weight of a weapon only applies if it’s in your hands so you don’t need to worry about carrying a small arsenal.

One thing that is pretty different between a Fromsoft title and NRftW is that most weapons tend to have their own movesets. Meaning not every axe, rapier, hammer, etc share the same moves. They might not be fully unique, like one rapier might have it’s second attack be the same as another’s fourth, but the overall moveset is a different mix. So there’s another reason to have multiple weapons, even of the same type because you might want to switch between one that swings around close quarters and one that thrusts across a long distance.

  1. True, I often take more damage by not wearing a helmet so I can see my character’s face/hair. I’d imagine this will get added by full release.

  2. I agree. If they cap this I can see it being a “engaging thing” as it takes time to smelt a bar or build an elevator. But if it gets to the point where like a tier v item takes 24 hours to make, I’d be annoyed. I don’t see the point in long build times unless they’re trying to make us pay to skip and I believe that’s not their intention, nor would I want it to be.

  3. Tutorials are hard. As an indie dev I also dislike text popups but when you don’t do them a lot of players just miss the thing you thought was obvious. It’s a tricky thing to balance. That being said, after your first character the rest you make can skip the tutorial so you don’t have to see them again.

  4. Agreed.

  5. I believe most areas have some music, but yeah it could use more work. I’m not a fan of the new tracks added to The Crucible. They sound way too similar to LoTR and could be more unique.

  6. Agreed. You almost need throw away weapons and extra copies of a rune just to test out what it does. This could be better.

Also agreed with the overall. This is my favorite ARPG to date and it’s still early on. I hope they can keep heading in a good direction and don’t do anything stupid like charge us to skip construction times :stuck_out_tongue:. Very good game.

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I kind of have to agree with point 2 about lack of diversity in builds. I’ve been through the released story content twice, once with a pure Strength build and once with a Dex/Faith hybrid, and they basically played the same way. The biggest difference is the Dex hybrid could use a bow and the pure strength character couldn’t.

Granted I was playing with a one-handed weapon and shield in both cases (I just don’t like how slow the 2 handed weapons are) but the differences in moveset feel more cosmetic than anything. Both builds have access to the same runes and such. No specific stuff for being really strong, no holy or divine magic for the faith build. There is healing magic, but literally anyone can use it.

The one real difference seems to be intelligence builds, where staves actually do play noticeably differently. Makes me think adding runes that specifically work with different stats might be a good way to go- big smashy attacks on strength runes, healing and protection on Faith ones, elemental damage on Intelligence ones, that kind of thing.

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If not a straight up requirement, it would be cool to see enhanced effects. Like maybe everyone could use a slam attack, but a 12 strength character would basically just be hitting where the weapon lands where as a 40 strength character would shatter the ground and hit everyone around them.

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That’s actually a pretty good idea- you could even have different effects from different stats on the same rune if you wanted.

E.g. an overhead slam attack rune where you get an AoE shockwave if your Strength is over 20, it swings faster if your Dex is over 20, it does fire damage with Int over 20, that kind of thing.

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