Player Power and Combat Concerns

Wicked Feedback
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Let me preface this by saying that both me and a friend of mine bought the game and tried it on EA launch in the first zone till we got to the city and we loved the experience. However, we told ourselves we will hold off on playing till we get co-op but also just the 1.0 release in general to experience the full game properly.

With that in mind, I have seen a couple of feedback videos for the game that mention some combat related stuff as well. Notably some people complaining about stuff in the lines of wanting to become “overpowered”, “feel like a God” and stuff like that.

I Urge you not to give in to this kind of feedback. Please, for the love of God, don’t do this.

As someone that had really high hopes for Path of Exile 2 to finally have a good combat experience (as they originally stated themselves) while still retain the cool character building aspects… I was wholeheartedly disappointed in how trivial and unengaging the combat was in that game, and became worse and worse with every patch even though they did have potential to make it good. Bosses die in that game in under 3 seconds and everything is just colors and explosions everywhere. A complete mockery of videogaming and a joke if you ask us.

Now, I wouldn’t have made the effort to post here if it was just some youtuber providing bad feedback, there are some concerns I have based on some things you guys mentioned you want to do and some you’ve already did currently that I’ve seen that youtuber present.

One of the things I’m concerned about is ranged weapons. It tends to be a huge problem in these games to properly balance the two… and based on what I’ve seen presented by that youtuber…. bow style gameplay seems overpowered at the moment

Another one I’m concerned about is something related to the future class system you guys mentioned you want to implement… more specifically one of the classes.. Necromancer I believe. I would highly advise against implementing such a class at all. At the very least, I hope you will be very careful how you implement such a thing because it can easily trivialize everything if done poorly. Summoned units, even temporary ones, give you the unique advantage of not attacking yourself and diverting from attacks with said unit, both very powerful advantages that can take you into overpowered territory with ease.

I really hope we won’t regret our decision to wait for full release.

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For a necromancer class, maybe you have to actually kill the enemy first, and then have a vulnerable state where you resurrect them to fight for you? An animation where their limbs and guts slide back to the main body before they get up and fight for you.

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I like souls like, and I quite agree that essentially the game should be balanced in such a way that even when you have a very strong build the game uses its dynamic difficulty system to always give a balanced experience, I’m not interested in “power fantasy” trivializing the combat makes the game boring very fast.

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Rest assured, we feel the same way. Wicked will always be about skill first and foremost and the whole reason why we built Wicked the way we did was to not have it become another zoomer ARPG where you’re just mindlessly exploding the screen.

Path of Exile 2 tried to mimic deliberate combat systems, but they thought they could get away with still using all the path of Exile 1 tech and just do that with stats. But that obviously didn’t work out. In order to have deliberate, precision combat, you need an animation-driven combat system like Wicked does, like Souls does, like Monster Hunter does. If it’s not driven by animations, you’ll always fall back to giving players more power through stats and stats alone.

I’m pretty sure animation-driven combat systems will become the norm for all ARPGs in the future, even the Diablo’s and Path of Exile’s. But we’re a generation ahead of those and it’s doubtful that they’d even be able to pull this off since their animation quality is just really sub-par compared to what we’re doing at Moon.

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I really hope you can balance the game in the combat update because at the moment it is easy to break the game and become op (it only requires time and RNG), There are several balancing issues.

And I want to tell you that making things Op rare is not a nice way to balance the game, It’s like the RNG is balancing the game not the developers (which is what’s happening in beta, I guess/hope that wasn’t your intention).

Really nice of you, reading the forum during the holidays.

Happy Holidays!

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Thank you so much for taking the time to reply to our concerns! I very much agree with you. The animation quality in Wicked is far superior, not to mention that the game oozes style and creativity and is artistically unique from most other games I’ve seen.

We’re really looking forward to experience the story side of it too.

As for Path of Exile, I think their situation was and is very complicated. I looked at some of their earlier statements from years ago and it seemed like they had some plans and ideas that went in the right direction but they‘ve completely abandoned those. I think part of it had to do with the big backlash they got in terms of feedback 3-4 years ago, long before early access even started, when they invited popular streamers/youtubers to play an early demo. I think that was probably one of their biggest mistakes. I’ve seen since then what looked like almost organized campaigns to discredit PoE2 before it even came out just because of their stated intentions from back then.

While player feedback is a powerful tool, it can also be very destructive sometimes… in more then one way.

I don’t think they would be able to change gears (hah) at this point even if they really wanted to, but who knows.. maybe I’m wrong. At any rate, I’m not holding my breath for that.. but I definitely am hopeful for Wicked!

We thank you again and we wish Happy Holidays to all of you at Moon Studios! (and to everyone else that reads this)

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Youtubers and streamers are some of, if not the number 1 worst thing, to happen to game development. They are the perfect example of the loud minority when it comes to opinions. Regardless of how many views they have, the people watching may not represent actual players. Thousands could be just people browsing YouTube, or waiting on updates, or just exploring the genre.

Perfect example of a game ruined by streamers is Tarkov. The game started dying years ago when they almost exclusively listened to streamers. When you look at quality of games before streaming and YouTube took part in development versus after you see a big difference. I think open forums like this where you can talk with a developer and staff is good. But I also think this should be the primary community aspect of the development, not youtube or twitch.

For example if they have a lot to say about the game development but they only say it on twitch or YouTube and never pop in the forums and engage with the community, then what they say should hold as much water as a collander.

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I just looked a bit at this video (and others) and…. it looks rather concerning..

Wicked Fencer Lightning Rapier Endgame Build Guide… No Parry Needed! Clear ALL Content With Ease! - YouTube

I’m sadly getting the same feeling as I was getting just before PoE 2 release in EA when GGG was saying it will do all kinds of things it didn’t end up doing … and I really want to be wrong… I guess we’ll have to see what your response to this will be.

Killing the hardest bosses in a few swings is… pretty much the same thing that happens in PoE 2.

While I do think this might be solvable just by number tuning here unlike in PoE 2 which is fundamentally broken systemically…. NRFTW will suffer a systemic change with the class introduction as well…

Worth a mention, but, I remember there was a recent interview with Aaron, and he was pushing quite a bit for permanent minion armies…. which aren’t exactly a hallmark of animation driven combat

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Agree, everything I said in the previous message (n5) is still true, on the opposite with the new gems and facets the situation is even more out of control.

They did nothing to keep these builds under control, and I’m afraid that even if things improve with the class system, op builds will remain easy to conceive.

The devs tried to make them difficult to obtain with RNG in the beta, which was exactly my concern, then they took a step back with the embers.

The problem remains that if these builds are theoretically possible, it’s a problem. Using RNG to make them rarer makes it more difficult to build any build, not just op ones, and as a result, players can’t afford to make a weak build and opt for the op ones.

In Elden Ring at least you he to use buffs to obtain similar results, and if you make a good build that makes sense in Elden ring you get a strong build but not an op, to get an op you have to use all the buffs and find specific synergies.

And you’re free to do whatever you want.

In NRFTW If you try to optimize any build, it becomes op even without buffs. If you use the Ring of Determination, you can make a mediocre build op.

And you risk doing it even by mistake, despite the fact that to make a build in NRFTW you are limited by embers, and the crafting system.

It’s not just a late game problem, if you get good RNG you risk trivializing the game.

My brother found a ring that synergizes with his build and a couple of decent armors and trivialized his first experience with the game, because of all these percentage effects and the fact that it is the RNG that distributes the items.

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This is something that really worries me. In the late game, the game turns into a hack-and-slash even when I’m playing on the hardest difficulty, some builds end up being way too strong, and I can kill bosses in under 5 seconds.

I think the game has too many ways to empower the player: Facets, socketing Jewels, Enchantments (up to 4 per piece of gear), Exalting gear, upgrading equipment up to +16. I think this is mainly a damage and resistance issue you end up strong enough to delete enemies in seconds, even though they can still kill you in 1 second as well. Player damage feels way too high, and incoming damage is too high too. It really starts to feel like PoE2 when you become overly powerful.

I believe there are too many systems that allow you to become overpowered, but not enough equivalent content yet. On top of that, being a glass cannon in the late game is frustrating. All of this makes me sad, but at least it’s a shared concern, because it can be balanced fairly easily.

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This vid just popped on my feed Echo Knight with 0 Attacks [No Rest for the Wicked] - YouTube … thought I would share this one too because it heavily reminds me of the “0 button” build types from PoE. Not exactly stoked about that.

I was curious about one thing however… apparently he is using thorns as far as I could understand from the comments… thorns is one of those things that tends to promote passive play by design…. and it’s just completely out of sync with the core combat design.

I’m curious to ask those that have played from the start of EA… was this a thing from the beginning? Not that it matters in particular if it was or not, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s, in my opinion, not the right thing to exist in the game… but I’m rather curious if it got added later on.

Thorns is one of those things where numbers don’t really matter, it more so just doesn’t fit as a core idea of the intended combat.

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Correct, I think the devs added it to give something interesting to tank builds, without realizing what they are doing from a geme design end philosophy point of view.

Obviously rewarding the player for getting hit doesn’t lead to the controlled and thoughtful combat of Souls.