I am not a great gamer. I have played a lot (and I mean a lot) of games over the years, including most ARPGs, MMOs, etc, but I am not someone who is going to jump into a game that requires careful observation and reactions, and immediately do well.
I like that Wicked is hard. I like that I have to learn to play well. I even like the concept of durability loss.
Where I am struggling is having my gear completely break in the opening hours of the game because it’s taking me a while to get a feel for the game. When durability hits 0, I lose the ability to learn to parry and block. This is not good. I’ve visited the blacksmith, and appreciate that the repair cost was 0 (not sure how long that lasts), but now the penalty for repeated deaths isn’t just backtracking from the last save point, but also all the way back to the blacksmith (I don’t have many hours played yet, so if this changes later, I apologize for my ignorance).
What I’d like to see is a set of starting weapons (they can still be randomly discoverable) that don’t take durability damage. Let me cut my teeth on learning the game’s systems without worry that I’ll completely lose access to the weapon I am trying to learn.
After the first part of the game (wherever it makes sense), introduce weapons that take durability loss and then start penalizing me for failure to correctly engage with the combat systems. But that first set of weapons (maybe just to level 10) shouldn’t break on me while I am learning to use the most basic and weak versions of them.
I think this is a good way to teach the game without introducing something like a training arena or target dummy. This means I can learn while progressing naturally. Knowing gamers, someone will probably come up with a way to exploit these and come up with some uber end-game build that uses indestructible level 1 weapons to zerg a boss - but that’s what Early Access is for.
Great game so far! I love the art style, the classless approach, and the challenging combat. I’m sad that my male character seems to have skipped leg day, but I can look past that.