First off I would like to say that I love playing this game and can’t wait for more zones and quests to be added. That said, there is an annoyance with the time gated content: building contruction, daily/weekly quests, smelting/tanning/weaving, and Finley’s appearance.
First off, when you start to interact with the building upgrade system, it isn’t too bad. The issue comes from when you try to reach level 3 of a certain building and it takes 4 real life hours to complete. I don’t mind time gating building contruction, but nothing in this game should take more than 1 hour to complete. Even 1 hour is kind of pushing on the annoyance button slightly. I would like to recommend level 2 construction to be 15 minutes and level 3 construction to be 30 mins. Reason being is I think there is probably more construction levels than what we have so far so this gives some room to grow. Only adding an extra 15 mins to each building upgrade would help alleviate a lot of the annoyance with the system.
Second, daily and weekly quests in the Bounties and Challenges menus need to be changed. Daily quests should really just be repeatable quests that cycle out once completed or if there were no quests that were accepted within 1 hour real time. Weekly quests should be changed to Daily quests and reset/cycle once a day. There should also be an option to reroll the Daily quests that appear once per day if the quests that appear are not desirable to do. This would provide incentive to engage with the system more often. If I am not doing the Cerim Crucible and I just want to wander around the zones collecting materials, I would much rather have a daily or weekly quest in my log to do in addition to just pure farming.
Third, the processing timers on some of the higher quality wood, ore, leather, and thread are a bit too extreme. I mean how does Pine Wood take so little time to cut into planks and Birch wood takes like 40 some minutes to process 1 piece? I get adding real time to crafting gives a sense of realism to the game but that big a difference doesn’t feel realistic. Cutting any quality of wood should not take any more than 5 mins tops. Turning metal into bars is also off. Realistically it would take probably 30 mins to an hour for a bar depending on melting point and cooling time. For in game purposes however, that time should be sped up some. Copper processing is fine. Iron should probably only be a couple mins slower to process than Copper. Silver shouldn’t take more than 10 mins to process. Tanning realistically would take days but ingame time it shouldn’t take more than 15 mins at the current highest tier material. Same with weaving cloth. No more than 15 mins at the highest tier to process. By speeding up the material processing now, it allows for room for higher grade materials to be processed under than annoyance threshhold (1 hour) later on.
Finally, there is the appearance of Finley only happening on Saturday’s. Finley’s wares are not impressive enough to justify him only appearing on Saturday. Also the guards in Sacrament are super lazy as he just sets up shop behind one of them so that also makes his timer not make sense. The General goods vendor is rotating his stock every hour or so. We can run probably 300 Crucible runs in a week and gather thousands of pieces of armor and weapons. Where as Finley not only brings us a normal haul of a Crucible run worth of gear, it is pretty underwhelming at that. PLEASE upgrade his inventory and timer. Finley should show up at least 3 times a week and have Blue and Purple gear only with 1 of those pieces being a random Unique item. This would at least get me interested in seeing what he has to offer. Maybe he could even rarely have Ichor in his inventory for sale.
These are just my suggestions on how to lower some of the pain points of the time gated content and to make it more fun and enjoyable to interact with.
I personally don’t understand why they use real time ingame. I can understand if the game is based on mtx with online heavy focus. But NRFTW is neither of that.
First, real time progress gate just screams mobile game to me. My first instinct was “there will be items to skip this timer and it would be available with real money”. In mtx heavy games, the timer creates anxiety to players so they have the urges to skip it and progress faster. But in this game, I’ve yet to find the purpose of it.
Not that I’m opposed to timer in general, I just find it weird why it has to be real world. Even Finley’s shop. My suggestion would be to change the timer to be based on ingame timer. We know that the game have a time system albeit we still don’t know whether it has a day system or not. For example, the daily bounty/challenge could be changed to 7 ingame days while the weekly ones become 30 ingame days.
This way, players don’t feel “forced” to play the game just to finish the bounties/challenges. They can play the game with their own pace whenever they have the time (very helpful for people like me with family and job).
I personally have no opinion on the length of crafting timer. I understand that the exponential processing length doesn’t really make sense, but I also understand that the progressive nature of the game requires things to be more difficult. The middle ground could be having a constant time for every refining process, but with varied processing cost. The cost gets more expensive the rarer the material is. Having your own refinery would negates that cost. I think that’s a decent incentive for building refinery, although I think building/buying one should be a bit more expensive than current cost then.
I think the idea of using the ingame timer would make things happen more frequently but at the same time it seems weird when applied to the daily and weekly quests. If it were applied to them, players would need a third party website to track the next reset on them as opposed to just knowing they will reset on a set specific time.
The reason I also suggested changing daily/weekly challenges and bounties to what I suggested is because of the reward. I think grinders will find the current reward a bonus for just playing the game and people that have families won’t be missing out if they skip them entirely for a week. I would not suggest making those quest rewards any better or fear of missing out would set in for people that do have families. Honestly the quest rewards are just barely adequate and honestly you can get way better gear just doing 2 rooms of the Cerim Crucible versus any of those quest rewards.
players would need a third party website to track the next reset on them
Not really. The game just need to have a clearer time indicator (for example, Sunday, 17:00) rather than current hour:minute only indicator. The bounty/challenges then need to have deadline like “3 days remaining to complete this mission” with the time of when that request was posted. While I do like that bounty is more narrative based than ingame UI based (without marker, arrow, etc), I do think it needs improvement.
I do agree that the rewards are underwhelming (12 silver for 3 ichors??). But I doubt things are gonna stay like that. Bounties and challenge have massive potential. For example challenges that improve relationship with the vendors, unlocking hidden perks. Connected bounties, like several low-reward bounties that if all completed, would unlock hidden bounty with better reward. The possibilities are endless. Having the timer tied to ingame time is just better overall, imho.
I am probably going to say something controversial but I don’t think bounties and challenges that you accepted should expire at all. Rather every other bounty and challenge that you don’t accept should rotate at a set time. This gives players an unlimited amount of time to do those quests and get those rewards and eliminates the fear of missing out entirely.
There are some good quests though such as slaying the uber elites that drop ichor. While the quest turn in reward isn’t worth much, the fact the quest allows you to spawn in a monster that has ichor to drop as a reward is super good. Those are the only quests I really look forward to doing. That and the easy ones like 5 wood/ore are nice give me free loot quests that are not too encumbersome. The weird ones where you need to kill enemies with fists or a bow or block x attacks. Those quests are ok if you plan to do that anyway but are annoying otherwise to keep on the list. That is why I wish they would swap out more frequently.
As far as the potential of Bounties and Challenges, I think it would be cool to earn some reputation with vendors to unlock discounted prices or their secret exclusive VIP only merchandise they normally don’t show the public. That sort of thing I can definitely get behind. Connected bounties sounds just like a side quest. You find animal tracks that lead to a bear cave but the bear is a mutant so after killing it you need to track down the contamination source and it is a torn boss of some kind. Yeah those chain side quests could be introduced into the bounty board I guess, but it would be better and more meaningful if you found a citizen of the city that is always there to give you that quest after asking them what is wrong versus hoping the quest spawns in the bounty board. The bounty board could do chain errand side quests but npc character development side quests shouldn’t be on the bounty board. They should be available at the specific NPC.
That’s a perpective I haven’t really think about. I still don’t really know what the purpose of these things from devs’ vision. Is it just to give people something to do, something to gain, or other purposes. But your suggestion could work, especially in multiplayer settings where you find time to play together with your friends to finish that bounty that’s been sitting for too long but with good reward that you can’t abandon.
This is just my perception on the bounty and challenge system, but I think the devs intent is just to give the players some direction on what to do while they are logged into the game.
Some players need to have their hand held the entire way. Some just need a little guiding and are fine. Others like myself will just explore everything and do everything, figuring out what do do along the way.
I can see without this system in place, a lot of players would log in and be like “ok what do I do? Crucible? Anything else?”
the crafting and vendors are not tied to your main game proggression so i dont mind if there is timegated stuff and Thomas already told that the developers are not going to add MTX to boost timers on the game if it get released in other platforms (phone, playstation, nintendo).