After playing No Rest for the Wicked myself and together with my friends, I noticed several issues with the combat system that significantly hurt our overall experience.
The first thing I would like to talk about is how unpleasant it feels to play with slow weapons. The problem is that a player can begin an attack before the enemy has started theirs, but because enemy attacks are often faster than the player’s attack animation, the enemy can still begin attacking afterward and land the first hit. This happens especially often when fighting multiple enemies at once. Heavy weapons force the player, especially in the early game, to use more food, rely more often on healing runes, and sometimes even lead to situations where death feels unavoidable because the player loses control of the fight. Heavy weapon gameplay also requires gear with high stability, which means investing many points into equip load. I and all of my friends immediately disliked heavy and slow weapons, which in my opinion creates a major balance problem. Fast light weapons, such as dual blades, allow the player to get hit less often, invest fewer stat points into equip load, have more openings to attack, apply status effects more quickly, and land more hits overall, which also means more frequent critical strikes.
The next problem I ran into was enemy groups. The game mixes different enemy types together, so they do not attack in sync. If the player cannot kill enemies very quickly or deal damage from range, the game quickly becomes frustrating. When trying to close the distance for melee combat, enemies begin hitting the player with unsynchronized attack chains, which often makes dodging impossible, or leaves the player with no option except dodging over and over while barely attacking at all. If I were to compare this to one of the game’s inspirations, the closest example here would be Dark Souls 2, where there were often huge groups of enemies and ordinary melee players did not always have the tools to deal with them properly. As a result, the game starts to feel like an endless circle around the area, hoping that one enemy falls behind the main group so you can fight them one by one. Even that only works when the terrain allows it, and when the player has enough damage to kill isolated targets quickly. If the player prefers tankier builds with lower damage, these “circles” take even longer and become even more frustrating.
I got a lot of enjoyment out of exploring locations and fighting enemies there, but the Crucible was extremely frustrating to me and made it feel very clear that this is not an area where player skill matters most, but rather character progression and the use of tools that leave enemies with almost no chance to respond.
And now I want to talk a little about those tools: bows and magic. From the very first hours of the game, after trying different weapons, I noticed that ranged weapons do not really fall far behind melee weapons in terms of damage per second. They are roughly on the same level. Magic and arrows with elemental damage ignored shielded enemies, while keeping distance between the player and the enemy allowed most enemy attacks to be avoided entirely. The player only really needed to dodge jumps or ranged attacks. Ranged weapons offer nearly the same damage as melee weapons, but they let the player deal that damage both up close and from a safe distance, which means they are often much easier and more comfortable to use than melee weapons.
While playing with a bow, I noticed that it was sometimes even dealing more damage than my dual blades because I was using an explosive arrow quiver, without sacrificing the bow’s own damage the way melee weapons do when they come with innate elemental damage. Most enemies simply have no real answer to a player who keeps their distance. The player only needs to learn one or two potentially dangerous attacks.
Sometimes enemies did not seem to understand what to do against a bow user because they could not reach the player due to the terrain, or because the player was too far away and outside their effective detection range. Enemies in the open world also cannot move too far from their spawn location. They run into invisible walls, after which the player can simply shoot them down. All of this creates even more imbalance, because a ranged player can kill enemies with little to no risk, while melee characters may have to make an enormous effort to win the same fight.
For reasons I do not fully understand, ranged weapons also turned out to be very effective at building up the concentration bar, which I actively used in the early game to charge healing runes. The fact that a player can safely gain concentration from a distance without risking their health, and then use that concentration to heal or unleash powerful attacks that quickly destroy enemies, once again makes ranged weapons feel too strong and too unbalanced.
If we talk about possible solutions to these problems, I would suggest the following:
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Allow attack animations to be canceled with a dodge roll.
This would let players use reaction time and knowledge of enemy attacks to avoid damage when they commit to a weapon animation that is too long. It may also be worth speeding up some of the existing weapons in the game. Yes, I know this can partly be improved through enchantments, and some weapons can roll the Fast property that gives 10% attack speed, but in the early game this is not realistically accessible. Building a proper setup takes a lot of time, and until then the player is forced either to suffer through it or simply use whatever weapon is strongest without investment. -
Enemies should not cluster together so aggressively.
They should try to keep more distance from one another, and they should also avoid attacking in ways that create unavoidable layered pressure. -
Ranged weapons should deal less damage than melee weapons.
The player should have to choose between dealing damage safely from a distance and dealing a higher amount of damage in close combat. -
Ranged weapons should generate less concentration, or possibly none at all.
If the developers do not want players to rely on just one weapon type and instead want them to combine tools, this would be a good way to encourage that. -
Enemy AI should be improved.
This could be approached in different ways. For example, if an enemy cannot reach the player and the player is effectively inaccessible, enemies could dodge incoming arrows, or retreat from the player so that arrows either cannot reach them or deal much less damage.
