Hey there! I got Wicked over the weekend, and I’ve been having a blast playing it! I had three days with it, and I’ve already got 20 hours clocked, which speaks wonders about the amazing work you guys are doing.
I wanted to give feedback about the one thing that’s been bugging me a bit, and that’s how the game seems to have two personalities that clash with each other. I’m talking about it’s souls-like mechanics, and it’s survival mechanics.
In a souls-like game, your goal is to get to the next campfire. Simple. It’s a test to your skill, endurance and resource management. If you can get to it with all your XP, you get a big level up reward. If you die, you drop your XP, but you can still recover it if you get it back before dying again (easier said than done). If you get far enough, you can also make your next run easier by opening misterious doors that only open on one side, and conveniently skip part of the map. There’s a clear risk/reward gameplay.
In a survival game (subnautica, enshrouded, etc) you venture into unexplored lands to farm resources for the next tier of technologies, hopefully with enough food and water to make it back. It’s a test to preparation and planning. You need to farm a lot, but you also need to make sure you can bring it all back. If you die, you drop the stuff you farmed, but you can get it back from your corpse, usually. You can also build a base or an outpost to make future farming runs easier. Hard work pays off, and every tier of technologies provides significant upgrades to your survivability.
In Wicked, there is no punishment to dying. Enemies don’t respawn, you don’t drop anything, and you can continue right where you left off, expect for maybe once every fifteen deaths, that you need to go back and spend ~40cp to fix your armor (a laughable amount that makes the trip more of a waste of time than a punishment). The rewards are equally lackluster. Unlocking shortcuts does nothing for me, if I still need to scourge the whole map finding every last tree to upgrade buildings in Sacrament, and even then, those buildings don’t increase my survivability in any significant way (expect maybe the food recipes). Reaching the blue thingies is not exciting since it doesn’t heal and it’s not a permanent teleport, and I even get slightly punished for beating the area boss, because now I’ll get harder enemies, so you can see how the gameplay loop doesn’t feel super satisfying right now.
The crafting/looting system also has a similar issue, but that would require it’s own separate post.
Everything else I’ve seen in this game, looks absolutely amazing. The artwork, the combat, the voice acting, the story, the animations, everything is stunning. It just feels that the gameplay is trying to do too much at the same time, and the mechanics don’t work well together.
That’s all I had. I can’t wait for the next update!