I’ve been thinking about the replayability of NRFTW and wanted to share a scenario.
Let’s say you’re playing on a realm with a group of four. Everyone levels their character and experiments with different builds—switching from a samurai to a mage to an archer, and so on. As I understand it, you can level individual weapons or playstyles (similar to something like Final Fantasy Tactics), right?
This essentially means you have one main character, and eventually you reach the endgame—after that, you mostly stay in endgame content. As a result, the full story and world from beginning to end aren’t really revisited after the first playthrough. That feels a bit unfortunate, considering how much effort clearly went into crafting them.
Right now, there’s no traditional New Game Plus. If I want to experience the story again, I’d need to create a completely new character on a new realm. In Diablo II, for example, there were Nightmare and Hell difficulties—basically a form of NG+ where you could replay the campaign with increased challenge. Is something like that planned for NRFTW? Maybe a system that unlocks after reaching the endgame, allowing players to replay bosses or the campaign?
Another question: Can I join another realm with my endgame character (e.g. switching realms to my friends and vice versa?) or is this character locked to this realm?
If it is locked, how can I level up to endgame when my friend already beat the campaign. can I get there then or is this realm done already for new players?
YES. I can see for the health of the game why this is a good addition and reuses beautiful assets. I’d support this and would guess that lift isn’t as big as producing new endgame content seasonally.
(And I say this from the standpoint of someone who doesn’t enjoy the NG+ mechanic)
Correction: you only need to create a new realm if you want to experience the story again.
Even if your character is at max level you can still experience the story again on a new realm with that same character, it will not reset your characters level or gear but it wont have access to the same key items like you have on your old realm.
Most of us who have repeatedly started over also create a new character.
Sometimes I’ve leveled a character from lvl 20 and up in my main realm since the content is more doable then, but in general it’s fastest to level a new character by starting a new realm, and coincidentally if you want to experience the story over a new character is also the best course of action.
Yeah, some kind of “rebirth” system (or call it NG+ with benefits), would definitely help staying longer because I think people would use it. Also because there are 19 classes to master.
What Claude answered fits kinda, and I don’t have a better idea right now:
The Jobs System kills the classic reroll incentive. In D2/PoE, replaying the campaign = new class = new experience. In Wicked, one character can become every class. So alt characters are redundant by design — which means campaign replayability has to be built into the main character’s loop or it doesn’t exist.
The realm is Wicked’s natural NG+ unit, not the character. Characters already travel between realms with their gear. So nobody needs a “character reset” debate at all — the clean solution is a realm difficulty tier: create a new realm at “Nightmare” scaling (D2-style), bring your character, face a scaled world with an upgraded loot table. Character progress untouched, world reset, challenge restored. This directly fixes the problem lvl 30 character that one-shots beginner zones.
The Jobs System is itself the replay fuel. Mastering 19 classes on one character is a huge grind. If class/trait XP scales with realm difficulty, replaying the campaign on a Nightmare realm becomes the efficient way to master new jobs — replayability emerges from progression instead of being a bolted-on punishing mode. That’s the FFT loop: you replay content to level jobs.
Fair answer.
Realm difficulty is also one main problem I see in the future. also for playing together.
Because of the scaling system. When one player does not play for a week and another one plays every day - the difficulty spike for player one will be out of the sudden too high.
I mean, Diablo II LoD Normal / Nightmare / Hell just works.
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