We know you guys want to create something different, but in my opinion good innovation is about solving problems, not innovation for innovation’s sake.
After 30 hours of play, I have a few feedbacks and suggestions for the game’s core gameplay loop.
- Teleportation:
The game limits the player to two-way teleportation between a whisper in the wild and the main city, much like the teleportation scrolls of the Diablo-like games.
This not only ensures that the teleportation will not be abused, but also protects the value of the shortcut map design. which is good design.
However, there are reward missions and resource collection needs in the game.The player may want to take a break in the middle of exploring a new area of the new map and go to other areas to do other activities, but due to the limitations of Teleportation, the player has to walk to get there.
If the Revival point（whisper） is not replaced, the risk of death becomes significant. If the Revival point is changed, then the previous Teleport path will be banned, which is very frustrating and annoying.
So I suggest that the Main City Whisper should record more outfield teleportation paths (3 May be enough), and this feature can be used as an upgrade to unlock gradually during the game.
In this way, the player still has teleportation restrictions and can’t just move to every whisper of the map, the player still needs to plan their own path through shortcuts, still needs to choose the record teleportation path according to their needs, but it is more flexible.
In addition, the main City Whisper should display the location information of the transport path for the wild Whisper.
- Food-cooking:
Unlike Soul-like games, enemies in this game are not refreshed in the short term due to the player’s death respawn, so when the player dies, you don’t give the player a new recovery item, which is reasonable.
However , the problem is that the available ingredients in the map are no longer refreshed anytime soon, which means that there is a fixed limit to the amount of resources a player can obtain in a map area, and these resources will eventually be used to challenge the BOSS.
This is essentially the same as the Estus Flask design of the soul-likes, but every time the soul-like game’s player dies, it is a resource cycle, and this game’s resource cycle will wait until the map is refreshed. This is more like the Monster Hunter, a hunting mission will give the player a fixed number of recovery items and various resources, death respawn will not refresh the resources, if the resources run out and challenge failed, the paleyr can only be restarted once.
So, the correct game loop of No Rest For The Wicked is like this:
Enter a new map area → Push along, collect resources → Make food → Challenge the BOSS-> If resources run out, wait for the map to refresh and challenge again.
Therefore, the game needs a more convenient map refresh mechanism (which will be discussed in detail in point 3).
From the above analysis, we can see that the addition of food cooking systems does not fundamentally change the level’s resource cycle, but just makes the process of obtaining resources tedious and boring. The chef NPC sells both the ingredients and the finished product, making the gathering meaningless, so it’s a worthless system that doesn’t solve the problem, it just wastes the player’s time.
The fault-tolerance item（flask） of a level should be as straightforward as possible to the player, for example, the Chef should provide a certain amount of food for free after the map refresh every day.by completing the chef’s task (which may be to collect specific ingredients) to upgrade the quality of the ingredients.
Additional activities, such as gathering and cooking, should give the level variety and strategy, such as food to increase combat buffs, projectiles to aid combat, items that strengthen enemies to increase experience gain, or items that reduce experience gain to weaken enemies and so on
- Refresh the map
Enemies and resources in the game will naturally refresh as time progresses, but the game does not provide rapid time advancement.
I guess the main reason behind this is to protect the Homebuilding system, because homebuilding (materials processing, hotel rest) takes time (real time), and if the player can push the time quickly, then the system loses its meaning. But that Puts The Cart Before The Horse.
The time-consuming design of home construction, just a tedious wait, does not provide any game fun, it is not like those real industrial planning games, through time to guide the player to design production processes, manage resource input and output.
It’s more like one of those unscrupulous placement games that hook players with poor fishhook skills, which should never happen in such a good stand-alone game.
My advice is that you can keep the time-consuming design of home building, but change it to in-game time, which will increase immersion.
But at the same time, hotel sleep should be designed as a quick time advancement mechanism, spend a certain amount of money, sleep, advance time, refresh the map. (Get a debuff, short term, can’t sleep again).
While it is currently possible to spend unlimited resources through kingdom backups and create a new kingdom, this is not a modern, immersive, intuitive way to play.
- Character-buiding
The introduction of equipment affix and Mosaic system inevitably encounters the contradiction between numerical system and action system. In the current version of the game, there are a number of dangerous affixes that can cause excessive expansion of combat resources and values, resulting in combat logic and enemy AI being disabled.
Each weapon in the game has a different attack module, a variety of different rune skills, enemy movements with pattern characteristics and AI, so equipment affixes should not be able to strengthen the player by allowing combat resources to regenerate each other, but should still be built with the action module as the core BD.
For example, affixes around dodging action (light load), affixes around blocking action (middle load), affixes around shoulder bump action (heavy load), around chop action, spike action, drop action, jump attack, back stabbing, armor breaking, front kick, throwing, shooting and so on
For some Character-buiding, I suggest you learn from Path of Exile 2, because they are also doing a similar blend of Diablo-like and soul-like.
Finally the combat system and map design are really good, and we encourage innovation, but again:
Good innovation is about solving problems, not innovation for innovation’s sake