The game has turned into a button masher if you’re using one handed swords and clubs because you can microstagger all small to medium mobs to death without needing to respect their moveset. The bosses have also been toned down to the point where they have become insignificant save for the Echo Knight.
DS1 and 2 wouldn’t even let you respec. DS3, Lies of P, Elden Ring and literally every Soulslike game, which on the Store page, NRFTW is clearly advertised as, ALL of them require you to perform certain tasks and acquire certain items to respec. This game asks you clear 5 rooms. If you can’t do it, then figure out why you can’t do it and fix it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
Also let’s be clear, this person went through entire game with their build and only hit a wall with the Crucible, an optional content in an EA game.
The game could benefit from a tutorial, sure, but this specific “problem” won’t be solved with a tutorial. It requires a band aid solution for a specific strata of the player base. A solution which more than likely further dumb down the game for the sake of people who won’t be investing any real time into it.
And it’s true, the game, when the character is solid, offers no real challenge beyond spamming the current rune or the attack button (with some dodging in between). That’s its current state. And you’re right, D1 and D2 don’t have respecs, but they do have something very simple that NRFTW doesn’t: character creation that shows the player possible archetypes before diving into the world.
Something as simple as that puts the player in the right mindset and gets them thinking about what combat style they’d like to play from the available options. And once they decide, it gives them the most basic gear aligned with their choice and a weapon that scales with the right stat. That’s how the Souls games guide new players from the very beginning, with that simplicity. Your first experience in a Souls game, when you didn’t yet understand their now-familiar attribute system, was like that. And without realizing it, it helped ensure your first character wasn’t a total mess in terms of stats.
That’s a simple and much smarter solution than lowering the difficulty just so the test characters we see here can beat the game. Another option, if that one doesn’t appeal, is to make respecs more accessible rather than hiding the mechanic without warning in a “secondary minigame”
Edit: @BlackWaterPirate I forgot to reply to you directly. Editing so you get the notification.
I would advise beginners, based on their own experience in the game at the initial levels, to distribute characteristic points primarily in health and endurance in order to be able to gain more experience in a fight to the death, and then add points to control characteristics, concentration and carrying capacity. When you have already decided how you want to play.I would also advise the developers to add a potion to the game to reset the characteristics at the initial levels, say up to level 10 inclusive.This would help new players with adaptation to the game. Based on my own experience, at the beginning of the game you can very easily ruin a character by investing character points in the wrong place, and in order to reach Limus and open the opportunity to fix this, you need to spend a lot of time and effort, especially with such a character. Therefore, at the beginning of the game it is easier to create a new character.This can discourage players from further play, because they have already played this character for several hours and not everyone will want to go through everything all over again.