I love the concept of this game, but as a new player, I find it too exhausting to immerse myself in the world and fully enjoy the experience. I believe this overwhelming feeling is a major reason why the recent Steam review score is only 35% positive.
Two major issues stood out to me in Act 1, and they were so frustrating that I stopped playing. These problems feel like unnecessary barriers that stall progression and pull players away from the core enjoyment—combat and story. I’m not sure if these issues are resolved in the later acts, but I believe it’s crucial to eliminate them early on for the sake of new players. Many new players won’t push through the exhaustion just to reach the point where these problems might no longer exist. The early game experience should encourage players to stay invested—not wear them down.
Restoring Health
The character can only heal through skills, food, or sleeping in a bed. However, gathering materials for food becomes an unnecessary chore that distracts from combat and story progression. The bed is also located far from the town center, where the NPCs and checkpoint are. It feels like these design choices create artificial difficulty that punishes the player instead of enriching the gameplay.
Fast Travel
The fast travel system only allows teleporting to the most recent checkpoint, not to any discovered checkpoint. This makes exploration and backtracking frustrating. It also turns retrying bosses into a tedious chore due to long runbacks, which saps the excitement from the game.
I genuinely hope your team can overcome the challenge of combining ARPG and Souls-like elements—both are among my favorite genres. There’s another game, Path of Exile 2, whose developers are attempting something similar, but they also stumbled in their latest update due to design choices that created similar issues. That said, I’ll definitely come back to give this game another try in a future patch.
No offense, but you sound like you need a different game. The restoration of health and fast travel are things that some of us are drawn to (like Outward). The combat is the issue at the moment because they scaled back most of the power we originally had and made us work harder for it with less rewards. With that restored you wouldn’t feel so overwhelmed by the other mechanics (I think).
I do belive this game has this mechanic issues. the game has design choices that pull you away from the challenging combat, exploration and looting wich I believe are the core of the game.
If the game is forcing you not to play it, then there must be something wrong.
I think that the healing thing could be resolved with:
easier to aquire food ingredients (right now i’m going through the quarry and the black someting, and there aren’t any ingredients to create food, so I have to exit the zone i’m exploring to go to town or repeate the beach zone to get ingrdients, depending if the chef has ingredeints or not)
You should be able to craft food anywhere, having to look for a bonefire pulls you out of the battlefield, and there is no fast travel, so it takes a lot of time that I could be using exploring or trying to klills stuff
I’ve never found food hard to find. So it’s not inconvenient to me. Then again I grab everything and max out my material space with Ichor first.
I’ve never found chest storage useful unless I’m building special armor so it’s hardly inconvenient since I already need to be at a house or a blacksmith.
There is a fire at the chef, a stove, once you’ve upgraded him once, and if he’s not upgraded you have to walk a full five feet down the stairs to get to the fireplace.
There is fast travel limited. And if you feel like getting back to sacrament you can use a rune of return. And if you fast traveled everywhere, you would miss out on the opportunity to loot and stock up for your next adventure along the way.
The core problem is not that combat is not fun, but that it takes too long to get your fit together. What moon needs to reconsider is how to get new folks invested without making it a chore to them. Once I got my enchantments on I rocked the house. But before that it was like driving my dads dying truck uphill at 15 miles an hour. I do think some element of convenience can be found here. I just feel like this post is concerned about the wrong things. I like exploring so of course I don’t mind traveling. I like gathering, so of course I gather my stuff along the way. I like being prepared so of course I’m thinking about how I would travel so as to maximize my gains and my loot. The game makes you prepare, makes you think. It just needs to make that preparation a bit easier at the start of the game since unlike Elden ring you cannot go elsewhere to git gud.
Pretty much exactly my thoughts. On the topic of fast travel I always read these comments with wonder because It’s never been an issue to me and rather - as you said - an opportunity to gather more stuff on my way. Additionaly not being able to fast travel everywhere forces you to actually think and plan ahead. Really cool experience making you feel like an actual adventurer that needs to prepare before going out and I really don’t want this rare experience to be ruined. Inconvenience isn’t inherently bad game design and more people should learn that.
(Edit) It’s suppoused to be a reply to @Irbanthony don’t know if it worked cause it doesn’t look like it on my screen xd
This is another good take! maybe the problems aren’t the systems, it’s just that the quality of life things are behind player progression, which to my eyes is a bit of a flaw because as a new player you don’t know if is a system that will be available after X hours of play.
The first time I played I felt that the food system was off, because I felt like there wasn’t enough resources to enter the “Explore, Die, Get Better, Repeat” loop. But in the breach update I believe they updated the drop rates, and made it easier, but many herbs, or maybe recepies that use more advanced herbs are missing in the more challenging areas, threrefore you could enter the downward spiral that I mentioned earlier.
So, maybe is not a thing of systems but a thing of QoL fixes.
It’s hard to farm when the game upscales zones to your supposed same level danger level and it turns out that means the mobs now are way too tanky, and hit you for 1/3 your health.
My Everfrost staff fully upgraded until the Torn item steps, which I cannot get until much later, is taking about 11 hits to down a single mob at Danger lv25, and it’s fully gemmed and I’ve got the Intellect investment.
I think most people not having issues are playing run of the mill leather/mesh armor builds with melee weapons and not mage builds.
The change to focus has made building focus while being assailed by 3 constantly attacking mobs a horrid experience.
I’m farming the echo knight, and it doesn’t mean much, because echo powers make every build broken in the crucible if you’re smart about what echoes to pick up and the RNG gods bless you with good echo powers and rooms that give a lot of traces.
But yeah, once you get the 3 good rings and upgrade armor and weapons, mage builds do well after the hotfix nerfing mob and boss damage to not 2-shot you anymore.
Not unique to mages. Monk builds are doing 1.1k damage shockwaves and some 2H builds are using shockwave for 5k damage hits that 3 shot the echo knight with little to no focus cost and all the safety of higher armor and better melee damage.
There’s quite some imbalance in skill and armor classes. For mages, frost and fire dwarf all other elemental builds, and melee can run Plague Splatter and 1-shot bosses in full mesh armor while having the benefit of casting.
Early on the food system might feel limiting if you’re playing the game like a souls like with infinite replenishing flasks. Because when you think like that it makes you want to win by repeatedly playing against bosses or high level areas by just getting good. But Wicked has limits like durability on gear and food resources to keep you from doing that over and over again. I think that’s a good thing in itself, but one that players with other mindsets might find annoying. In my early leveling I did all the side quests I could find after first reaching Sacrament and farmed all the resources I could on the way there. By the time I reached Nameless Pass I was on the right level and right amount of healing and never struggled to get healing, not even bothered with the healing runes.
I think the biggest fear I have about the crucible is getting one punched off a ledge on hardcore mode. I am more tense about that than finishing the rest of the game on hardcore. The ledges are so narrow in some of the arenas.
This is not a p2w gacha game or timegated Boss events with p2w walls.
You have hard time with boss, learn it, get some proper upgrades, rest, come next day, defeat it and feel much better!
So I’ll agree with you regarding a git gud approach. What I’ll say here is that the rewards for gitting gud are lackluster and unpredictable. It’s a git gud game with casino style rewards. Sure, there’s no real cash for it, but it feels like it may as well be.
And the level limitations are the biggest issue with this problem. If I could equip an item at any level that wasn’t upgraded, I could upgrade, it same as I could in Elden Ring. If I needed more carry weight, I could upgrade that. The point is if I wanted to use an item there was a path to do so, and not a barrier to level.
Oh, and you failed to address the Crucible pits. Hades I and 2. Do either of these have giant pits you can fall into and die in an instant from being body slammed by an opponent and thrown across the map? No. Is being body slammed, okay? Sure! Learn from that. But falling into pits in a crucible isn’t very logical when it’s a rogue like. I can accept that I fall to my death in Marin woods and have to start again. I guess it’s just a red line for me in a crucible.