So recently someone posted in reddit about Thomas Mahler’s message on how he is confused on why some other games which are less refined are actually selling more than No Rest for the Wicked (NRFW). So i’m here to write down my feedback as honest as possible in the hope that he can see the issues and find the solutions to make it a great game.
Now I’ll start with the disclaimer that all opinions are subjective, but subjective doesn’t mean there isn’t any standards at all or that there is no truth in it. And I’ll apologize in advance if I sound harsh, rude and vulgar, none of it is directed to hurt anyone intentionally, but in order to say it as honest as I can, I cannot mince my words, and perhaps unfortunately lack the better vocabulary that I should use. It’s all for the betterment of the game.
Now with that said, let’s start, there is a lot to unpack.
Firstly, I want to ask the devs, or better yet ask the devs to ask themselves, what is the goal of this “ARPG”? Are you trying to create a 1 time linear arpg adventure like Dark Souls, or are you hoping to create an arpg more similar towards games like Diablo/PoE that has an addictive loop that players can come back and play again & again?
From the dailies, I have to presume it’s the latter, something with an addictive loop, but a more involved combat that requires some skills.
But either way, I have to tell it straight to you then, from both perspectives, NRFW is just bad, and more inferior that what’s on the market now.
If you are going towards the linear souls adventure, you are worse than souls, you might have cool cutscenes and story, but at least in souls the player has more agency to choose which direction to go or ally to help. You also lack the 3rd person perspective to create the sense of awe and wonder that most souls games have.
But if you are going to the PoE route, then you are also a far inferior product with way less options. And your world is certainly not build to accommodate that too.
Now that I told you that you have a bad direction either way, let me dissect to you clearly why.
COMBAT:
Your combat sucks, its dogshit, period. Your entire combat system design is predicated on one word, “INCONVENIENCE”. And every level up, every build, it’s all to reduce that huge inconvenience you have since the start. First, the default walk speed is atrocious, I dunno who think its fun to walk like a turtle. It is entirely redundant and annoying, even souls don’t move this slow. As a confession, I cannot stand it and use trainer to make my default move speed my run speed. If you want players to move slowly through obstacles, you already have a “toggle walk” button for that, there is no need to make the default movement speed that slow.
Even in combat, the default movement is all but useless. Every enemies fat or thin can far dodge out of your way, and have a movement or skill that can jump or close the gap from more than half the screen, meanwhile you are made to chase them whenever they dodge away, and you can’t chase with the walk speed. Rather than making more creative enemies, enemies are design around to take advantage of the inconvenience of your turtle speed. Bosses and elites are even worse, highlighting this problem even bigger. You design dogshit bosses which is why all your bosses are designed in “giant” sized, and all of them will have a movement that can close half a screen away, and have attacks that can hit another half screen away, which means all bosses can cover whole screen immediately and dodge far away, meanwhile you are made to chase them around again. Block and dodge a few attacks, using stamina, then chase the boss, using stamina, now with whatever stamina you have left, you have to make 1 hit, because if you make 2, you ran out of stamina to dodge/defend yourself. Then you slowly use your walk speed to walk around to recover those stamina and repeat the process, what an absolutely dogshit combat, made inconvenient with both speed and stamina.
You keep on doing this until you probably reach level 20 because you circumvent those “fake inconvenience” by pure stats. You said you want levelling up to be exciting, but it’s NEVER exciting, it’s just adding more stats so that you don’t have asthma with every few moves, so that you don’t run out of mana/focus with just 1 spell. It’s a fake difficulty made by poor design. Ask yourself honestly, like really really honestly, does this levelling up really feels exciting to you, addictive? Really??!
And as for the next inconvenience? Artificial potion limitation.
Hey you know how to make combat even harder? Just limit players to drink 1 potion. Wow! Look at me, aren’t I a genius??
You are so fixated on making everything difficult because you think players “love” difficulty, that you design all these stupid artificial limitations to inconvenience the player. You know what happens when a player get a plagued status? They die. Because they cannot cure it any other way other than heal, and when they cannot heal, they just die, what an incredibly stupid design. Please don’t come and tell me on how I should make a build with life regeneration, leech etc, then that would make those stats mandatory, because there is no other way to stop the health loss. Even with souls, healing is not limited to estus, you can carry as many rotten meat(heals but poisons you) as you can and poison bolus(heal poison) as you can outside drinking estus potions. In short, souls players can get creative, souls players can BRUTE FORCE combat with items or stats, but you can’t do it here. Because another stupid lvl 30 cap of course, another forced inconvenience. And you know what’s cooler in souls? You don’t have to farm your potions. What’s the point of farming 100 different kinds of healing but only limit it to 10?
The idea of following souls combat is already stupid in the first place. No one is addicted to souls because of it’s addictive combat, it’s the sheer wonder and mystery and adventure that makes that game charming, not it’s combat. If you look at the mods for it, there are TONS of combat mods that make the combat more robust, precisely because souls combat is as basic as it gets, but NRFW is even worse.
In souls, I can wield magic and cast spells/arts a few times and drink mana potions, in NRFW, I start with mostly 1 time cast per rune attack, before I have to regain it by some other way, or eat up my healing items for some rune refill. Or like I said, circumvent the force inconvenience by levelling up to 20+ and filling your stats. Rune attacks are also made rather boring.
Unique weapons are slightly better, in that they have some variety of Rune attacks that has slightly different functions, but none of them synergize and cannot be chained combo-ed with one another. Normal weapons are worse, you are stuck with that 1 Rune attack all the way, because there is no other interesting combat Runes that can be slotted to create interesting combos (except fists, but none of them can combo too). So you have the most boring and brain dead idea of getting stuck with 1 special attack once you found a weapon with the decent stats that you want.
Every other Souls-like in fact try to spice up and improve on the basic souls formula, Code Vein allows you to equip 8 skills, Nioh 2 allows you to wield 20+ and all of them chainable, which is why people can play that game for the combat alone for THOUSANDS of hours for its sheer depths. And NRFW went for the shittiest the most basic 1 Rune attacks…. truly moronic.
The previous concept of pure stat based weapons are also moronic as hell, instead of encouraging players to try many weapons and find a good combination, it pigeonholed players to get stuck with 1 build 1 style for the rest of the game. I won’t comment much on it anymore since you’ve decided to remove the stats requirements and scaling and I don’t know what is in store, but please don’t repeat the same mistake by pigeonholing players to stick to 1 weapon/skills/builds just because they have invested to this 1 stat.
Backstab is absolutely retarded, just remove it altogether. 99% of the time you will never carry out a successful backstab because of turtle speed, and 99% of the time even a sneak backstab will fail. A useless move, a useless stat.
Parry…. Is really stupid, maybe isometric games are not suitable to carry out perfect parries. Parry is either pointless or the most powerful thing in the game. I’d say, change the way parry works altogether. Make the hit box larger, maybe 220 degrees in front and to the side, everything except the very back can be parried. Make parries more akin to parry games like Wo Long, like a generous 18frames±, parrying chips stamina away but also lets you gain Focus, and make it less critical to the enemies. That way you can chain parry enemies to make a more focused constant combat, yet you can’t just parry all the time., and enemies are also not stopped after 1 parry. Currently the parry sequence is boring, the enemy is immediately staggered, you gain some Focus, do 1-2 attacks and 1 Rune attack, then regain stamina, repeat. It’s pace breaking and boring. Yet the enemy has to be staggered because the current parry system is so risky and unreliable. Making it less critical means the enemy is not immediately staggered with 1 parry but with many parries that build their stagger meter. With more generous and less critical parries, even magic or light armoured builds have incentive to learn and participate in the parry system rather than weighing the risk of missing a parry and losing tons of health.
In short, the suggestion for combat is, make it faster, reduce the “forced inconvenience” by a whole lot, more stamina so less asthma, way more rune so less asthma, make interesting skills & magic that can be slotted to normal weapons and make the abilities “chainable” by perhaps making it be able to be chain-cancelled or cast back to back immediately.
Make levelling up stats more fun by making all stats somewhat useful, eg. every Dex will give you 1% more speed. Remove useless stat like encumbrance, and put it into Str benefit, same with Focus paired with Int.
Stop the fixation on “difficulty”, but make it more “FUN”. Difficulty can be adjusted later. Make parries easier & less critical to enemies so that it can fit to any builds.
BUILDS, UPGRADES, ITEMS:
Again, everything is dogshit boring.
As I’ve mentioned before, NRFW entire design is predicated on adding INCONVENIENCE to create artificial difficulty, and it’s the same here.
Black Ichor, the upgrades actually gave you +5 items slot? After beating a boss I get to upgrade +5 items slots???! This is one of the lamest stupidest upgrade i’ve ever seen in any game.
Another upgrade actually gave me another slot to carry another weapon??! How Innovative!.. Another stupid dogshit meaningless upgrade, even souls game know not to do this kind of stupid upgrades. Other than the extra healing slot and ring upgrades, everything is useless and stupid as hell.
Remember the 1 rule to upgrade: ALL upgrades must increase player’s POWER, everything else is stupid.
If your upgrade pertains to QoL, you’re already wrong. Carrying additional and switching weapons is QoL. Some souls game in the past have gated basic skills like “immediately wake up after getting beaten down” as upgrade, and such upgrades has always been complained by the players.
You want meaningful upgrades? Maybe skill points like PoE, or maybe something like “timely dodge now regain 3% health” and the like, hell you can even add 4th ring and it’s still a better upgrade than what you have now. You can even create more choices so that players cannot choose them all in a single game, eg, everytime you parry a critical hit, choose 1 of the 4 resistances to be raised by additional 10% for 8 secs, and you only allow 2 of such upgrades.
Next is item upgrades, the mods are utterly boring. Durability stats are basically a deadweight, you need at least 2 of them to be barely useful because they are capped at low percentage. Irreparable is also a dud, because there is no good accompanying mods with it. I’m not sure how to improve on this department. You removed exaltation feature, which was pretty exciting, and now there’s nothing else but smithing your gears to next level for the sake of numbers go up.
BUILDS
… when it comes to builds, its also super boring. Either you build into something that can generate tons of focus and spam Rune spells/attacks, or you stack stat to make big dps hits. Regen health, regen focus, its a given, get health after a kill…. These are not builds. When a player look for a fun build, they are thinking about shooting a single fire ball, and perhaps with some tinkering, not they can shoot 2 fireballs, and after more upgrades, now the 2 fireballs split into 4 smaller fireballs after hitting their first target. That’s is what an interesting build is about. People in arpg try different ways to stack up attack speed so that they can finally dish out 8 attacks in 1 second, it may not be easy, but it’s exciting, you really feel the change, feel the power up. These are what makes arpg players who play games like PoE come back again and again.
You can implement this by allowing players to slot “special gems” into their gears, and also create a rare drop that allows them to add a 2nd gem slot for even more upgrades/customization. And if you want some balance, you can still put some penalties into the gems itself, eg. “Projectiles return after you fire them, but it can hurt you too” “You fire additional projectiles, but each projectile does reduced 30% dmg”
When I can get such build combinations, i feel the power up, i feel the effort, i change my playstyle, which spices up gameplay & combat.
Dodges can leave behind thunderstrikes/after-effects , melee attacks can release small aoe waves etc, or even “melee attack now does no damage, but leave behind a 100hp 2m ice wall”, and let players find some interesting 2nd weapon skill that can be used to create crazy usage for that skill.
Without interesting mods that can encourage theorycrafting, NRFW will never be the addictive arpg you imagined it to be.
MECHANICS
When i say mechanics, i mean something like the Breach mechanics that you’ve implemented. Though, to be honest, I haven’t played that far to experience it, but if I’m understanding it correctly from the trailer, the breach can happen organically anywhere when you travel, and this is a good thing.
First and foremost, mechanics should be a very very important part of your gameplay. NRFW world is static, and almost dead, because there is also 0 rpg interactions that you could make or make any difference, so your world has almost 0 randomization, which is important when it comes to making addictive arpg gameplay, and sorry, your dailies system is dogshit, boring, a chore, uncreative.
You want to learn what are great mechanics, look to the best in the market right now, PoE, usually called League Mechanics.
In general, mechanics that can happen organically are good, and these are mechanics like Breach(poe), Delirium, Syndicate and Abyss. These encounters make the map encounters more fresh and interesting.
Some require more preparation but can also be great, like Blight (tower defense system). These are the stuffs that will make every Cerim’s journey different, and encountering 2 or more league mechanics together can make a dull journey into a dangerous and exciting one. Ideally, every mechanic will culminate into a special boss fight that will yield special items or special mods. This will encourage players to chase them to craft special items/runes/power to fuel their theory crafting. People would not engage with league mechanics if it doesn’t have the chance to yield interesting rewards.
Edits: One of the best league mechanics you can learn from is their latest Settlers of Kalguur mechanic. Settlers mechanic basically functions like a town builder, that can do automated tasks and give rewards… as long as you can constantly provide it with currency upkeep. And because you also have some light survival mechanics, you can essentially make additional resources be fuel/currency for Settlers mechanic. Really, try and look into it.
CRUCIBLE
Now you can pat yourself in the back, but only a little, because when it comes to roguelike, you are not the only bad players in town. Every single arpg in existence that has implemented roguelike mechanics has implemented them wrong/badly, period (yes even poe).
Why bother implementing it if you are going to do half assed work?
Every arpg out there, when they implement roguelike, what they meant was, adding mods to enemies like “enemies does 20% more damage”, and adding mods to players like “players does 20% more damage”, these are the most basic retarded mods that does nothing to enhance the gameplay. A good roguelike always allows the players to create bonkers builds that alter and provide variety to the gameplay itself. Every single good roguelike in the market does that, just look at Hades, Warm Snow, Soulstone etc. What is exciting about Hades? Additional 20% damage? NO. It’s when I get mods that turn my gun into rocket missiles and get another mod that makes it homing. What makes Warm Snow fun? Additional 10% crit chance? NO. It’s when I stack tons of speed, get mods that make my dash damage enemies, and turn into a dashing lightning throughout the maps. These elements are always present in the good roguelikes and never present in arpg roguelike modes.
Yes you have some fun mods like faster speed, but that’s also only because your default gamespeed is already atrocious. What people want is getting mods that allow them to eventually build into crazy attack speed, shooting more than reasonable projectiles, get 3x additional dash and dash like a madman. Don’t worry about your balance first since it is restricted to Crucible mode, concern yourself with making it FUN first. Make people ADDICTED to Crucible mode because they want to know how lucky they can get with the mods. Then you can later add crazy mods to the enemies side too, like “final boss gets a clone”, “final boss continually summon minions every 15 secs” etc. If a roguelike mode makes me fight like normal in every other fight, then that’s a total failure of a roguelike.
Again have the reward giving players special items/mods, so that people have a purpose to chase power there. The previous one has an exaltation mechanic, I don’t know why it was removed, but I hope you can replace it with something else.
BOSSES:
Not every boss have to be giant despite what you think of visible animations or not. And not every boss or elite should be able to cross entire screen in a single move. You forgot the benefit of isometric view, is that bosses can have attacks that carry positioning mechanics. Which are attacks that covers the environment in a certain pattern, that require the player to move out of the way. And yes, all the good action isometric roguelikes does this, Hades, Warm Snow, The Breaking Show etc…. And even PoE & PoE 2….., except NRFW, because NRFW is brain stuck in the souls like combat. If you have ever played any arpgs, PoE series hands down has the best bosses bar none. Their bosses have clear mechanics that require players to handle or solve them, not just simple various attacks that are all solved with rolling away (because of turtle speed). If you have fought Maven in PoE, you have to move around rotating beams, and also handle exploding certain projectiles because they can leave permanent ground effects. They never had to make all their bosses giant, because they did the only smart thing ever done in arpgs, they use voices to indicate their special attacks. You can have your movement animations, but you can also use voices to indicate special attack mechanics.
In PoE2, bosses like Jamanrath is pretty excellent, in it’s 1st phase it does your typical souls melee if you are near, and javelin throw if you are far, with a mix of aoe blast and chasing lighting rods. Then in Phase 2, it does space control by having portal that constantly shoot knives to block certain paths, and forces you into ever closer and smaller space and it does its melee slashes there. The mechanics are varied, interesting, and clear.
Meanwhile all your bosses are almost the same, big swing, big jump, big charge. Echo Knight is just made purposefully confusing by having erratic animations and do ridiculous distance closing attacks. So players just end up memorising the attack timing because the animations are so unreadable due to erratic animation, made artificially difficult by having tons of damage in a single attack. The boss isn’t hard, it doesn’t have any interesting mechanics to handle, it’s just boring and annoying. Same with the werebeast. Hades have positioning mechanics, Warm Snow has positioning mechanics, so if you want to make your bosses cool and interesting, you better think of designing them for bosses too.
Co-op
Focus less on the coop but polish the combat and gameplay first. Most players are still single players.
Internet Rants
While it’s good that as a developers you dont make crazy statements, in reality nobody cares. If your game is excellent, people will still buy and play it. Don’t ever get the notion that it was some of your crazy internet statements that stopped people from buying your game, it’s always about your game itself. Cue Factorio, Hogwarts Legacy etc.
THOUGHTS:
I spent many hours across a few days taking notes and typing all these out. And as I’ve said in the beginning “all opinions are subjective, but subjective doesn’t mean there isn’t any standards at all or that there is no truth in it”.
For context, I’ve played most huge arpgs like D4(sucks lol), Last Epoch(meh), Grim Dawn, PoE, and PoE 2, with over a thousand hours in PoE. Played most Souls games and it’s souls-likes too, Dark Souls 1&3, Elden Ring & DLC, Sekiro, Nioh 2, Lies of P, Stranger of Paradise, Thymesia, Khazan, Code Vein, Wo Long, and also hundreds of hours in the roguelikes mentioned above. And yes I finished them, not just casually touched them, I cleared Nioh 2 all to Depths 30 in highest difficulty.
So why does it matter? It’s to show that I’m familiar with those genres, I have extensive time spent on those games, that difficulty doesn’t quite matter, that I am the target audience. And I’m here to tell you in as detailed as possible why your game sucks.
I’m telling you how and why it suck not because I want you to fail, but because I want you to succeed, to carve out a space of your own but also understanding why those game succeed at what they do, why some things are addictive and why others don’t.
When you deliver a great game, I win, and hopefully you win too by way of sales.
I am not sure what you will learn & change from this feedback, but i seriously hope you do learn something and change many things. You asked why your game is not doing as well as a less polished game, and here are your detailed answers from a big gamer.
All the best in delivering even better arpgs, because the industry certainly need more of it.
(Oh right, please add transmog damn it!)
Edit: made some grammar correction and additional suggestion which are marked by quote box.
