After 1 year, this game is at a crossroads. The parry button, negative status gear, bomb and potion crafting, merchant upgrades. So far, No Rest has a danced a delicate line between extreme difficulty, and mobs of swarming enemies and broken builds farmed w passion. After the Breach, we have come to a point of a decision:
WILL THIS GAME BE A TOP-DOWN SOULS LIKE, or A DIFFICULT ARPG?
I favor the later, as souls elements of dodge parry, weapon coating, and overly punishing, give and take long form combat encounters, require a certain camera and map level design, to be fully implemented. Imagine an arena sniping pvp, without first person perspective to allow for precise acurate head shots? imagine a boxing game where jabs parries and dodges were as critical as power punches, but the third person viewpoint was from the seat in the audience? it would fail.
a dark souls game requires a dark souls camera perspective, and precision balancing to achieve a reward for both skill expression and raw quick twitch talent. this is just not possible for No rest for the Wicked, unless it fully abandons the very thing that attracted a mix of sous fans and diablo-Ish arpg fans looking for the marriage of 2 loved genres to perfection: the trash mob.
As a day one player who stuck round for a long time through the chaos of the early access, i have always felt from reading these forums, the souls like loud and vocal minority have had way too much sway in these forums on the direction of the game, thus leading to the state of where we are today. the majority of casual players who play this game love no rest for its artistic beauty and hand-crafted odd enemy’s movements and graphics. count me as one of those majority of casuals. and what i loved about the cartoonish difficulty of no rest, was that in return i could cartoonishly put together a absolutely silly bow and halberd torch and shield build and clear the map.
BUILDS, BUILDS AND MORE BUILDS, is the heart of arpg. I am asking as a fan for a sound decision, a shift and return back to the broken and overpowered, because souls fans can always UNDER LEVEL UNDER GEAR and under prepare to increase difficulty. but the casual fan can never over prepare for the most difficult content, because we are causal, and we will quit, and give up. please make a return to form and balance that allows all fans to enjoy no rest for the wicked and return to the fun: huge op weapon and element combinations. supremely weak weapons turned into boss cannons with a little coating of grease. random npcs and weak mobs dropping the best weapon in the game. this was no rest for the wicked at its best, and the only avenue to any potential pvp.
i am not in favor of abandoning all souls like aspects. but rather softening those elements of souls like tremendously. eliminate the parry button from the control scheme entirely. there are not enough buttons on a controller for a dodge, a second weapon, a block and a parry. instead fuse a parry mechanic into the move sets of the weapons that are parry dominate: swords; in the same way the shields don’t have a block button, and bows don’t have a reload button, but rather have these things built intuitively into their movesets… smooth the mechanic by making parry an action button tied to the weapon. these will be the “parry weapons”. and by doing so you please both fanbases while staying true to the heart of the marriage of genres.
i kept my parry button on a xbox layout on rt, and never touched it; i already had an offhand shield that stagged on block, why do i need an entire button dedicated to another form of negating damage? make parry a form of action related to the highly recognized parry weapons of most video games (hammer yes, club no, spear yes, scythe no, sword yes, claymore maybe). and for the other types of weapons, add a mechanic that induces stagger if swinging an attack at the right time in enemies attack motion. this will balance the game and give souls minority of hardcore players the red meat they want, without punishing those of us who do not parry at all, but shield and block, or use magic, or stay ranged.
to compensate for the power shift in only certain weapons having a parry mechanic, lower the attack level of those weapon types to encourage a more one on one - tit for tat - slow fighting style, while offering more runes and infusions and passive buffs that reward that play style with high damage and focus (dmg increases by 5% for each successive parry within combat until damaged received).
these are just my thoughts. i want this game to become a franchise, but the first step is to make a decision on the biggest question: Souls like or arpg. i promise you can never make any one of them happy, but no rest found a niche that allows the marriage of two genres and the potential to create an all-new one, in the same way that Clair Obscur is now its OWN genre. A decision for the ages, is due, and once you do this, never look back…