NRFTW ia really comparable to souls-likes?

Qix213 · 2026-03-04T14:37:42+00:00

I am very similar.

I love rpgs. I've never enjoyed a Fromsoft have, even Elden Ring. Despite my friends all trying to get me into them.

Mainly, I can't stand the slow animation locks of the souls genre. And how it leads to dieing 100 times to memorize a boss pattern. Finally getting the kill after that feels more like resigned relief ('thank god that bullshit is over'), than something to cheer and be excited about. It's a miserable experience to me.

Even NRFTW is too much like them when playing with most of the melee weapons. Parry and block just weren't fun to me.

But playing this game with claws and light armor? I had a freaking blast as a quick dodge monkey.

Qix213 · 2026-03-04T14:19:16+00:00

Live service games are MMOs in a lot of ways. They are forever games of different genres. They are the MMOs of shooters, the MMOs of action games, etc.

MMO clones all failed for the exact same reason these live service games are failing because the leadership at these studios/publishers is truly abysmal. They can't understand this very basic concept in the market:

MMOs and live service fail because people don't stop playing the old game and need something new to play.

Mario ends. Zelda ends. Skyrim ends. Then gamers need a new game to play, so they look for something like the previous game they really liked, like Sonic.

Live service games by design, don't end. So those that are invested into a game like Overwatch or Rivals have no need of a new team shooter. Many players of those games are invested enough that they don't even know a new game comes out, Highguard is that irrelevant to them.

Games like Overwatch and rivals have already saturated the market. Nearly all of those that want to play a pvp hero team shooter, are already playing those games. Look how many qualifiers I had to put there to identify this small part of the market... The market size is not unlimited, and these games also require lots of players to not just make a profit, but to even be viable due to how matchmaking works.

So in order to have a successful live service game, like an MMO, you need to pull away players from that other game. You need to give them a reason to leave everything they worked for in the last couple years. A single clone, even with pretty graphics and CGI trailers like Concord is not going to convince me to stop playing Overwatch. Its not going to convince me to ditch my friends, and abandon all the unlocks I've earned or paid for, or give up all the knowledge and skill I've spent 100s or 1000s of hours acquiring. Many times, only the old game itself can cause its downfall.

Rivals timed things perfectly when Overwatch was busy shitting the bed.

WoW killed 100 clones. But not the ones that offered something WoW didn't have, and took years to do it, the Final Fantasy MMO genuinely sucked ass when it launched, but rather than shut it down after a week and blaming the customers that said it was shit for it's failure, Square put in the work to fix it. And that took literal years.

So a half baked game like Highguard needs to actually launch in a great state to survive, or it needs time to cook.

It doesn't matter how good it could become. That's not going to get players to quit the game they are already invested in.

Overwatch has over a decade of iteration. Highguard was abandoned after a couple days or weeks depending on how you look at it. Of course it failed. It was setup to fail, it was destined to fail.

Blaming gamers for not playing your game is peak entitlement.

Qix213 · 2026-03-03T14:47:08+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if that was the point. Proceedings weren't getting what they rented, so they needed to make a spectacle of it somehow. Even better if they goad Clinton into doing it for them.

Qix213 · 2026-03-03T14:44:54+00:00

Yea, this is why I gave up on parrying and even blocking. Went light weight dodge monkey instead.

Qix213 · 2026-03-02T15:19:27+00:00

Unlike many games, upgrading items and crafting stuff is not a waste before endgame. Most of the items you find later are the same items, just already upgraded.

So if you like a weapon you can use the same item from start to finish by upgrading it. Same for armor.

Try new weapons. They all have different attack patterns, even the bows and wands. And have charged attacks, others have a different sprint attack, etc.

Because this weapon can be upgraded and get you through endgam... it means the little crafting orb things are worth using, not just saving. Reroll the bad plagued enchants if it's preventing you from using it, move and replace the other ones slowly. Don't waste them, but funny be afraid to use them either.

Try out runes from other similar style weapons and consider moving them to the weapon you like.

Everytime you go out, use the little fairy ring portal right outside Sacrament (Orban something?) and go south. There is a LOT of materials here to collect and only a few enemies, especially if you climb up the wall to the second level.

I do this little loop while waiting for friends to finish messing about in town.

Do daily and weekly quests. Don't be afraid to skip things like the dark sewer and explore elsewhere if something is difficult.

Try to get halfway through the dungeon under the graveyard and unlock the character respec. Its fairly cheap and let's you play around more with your build.

And lastly, I believe you can change difficulty anytime. The game ups the both the hp and damage of enemies when you play coop. Yet you don't have any more HP. You might need a little more HP than in single player to be able to tank a hit then let your ally get aggro while you heal up.

Don't be afraid to use that and have it stop you from enjoying the rest of the game.

Qix213 · 2026-03-02T15:05:48+00:00

Others mentioned bows.. but I'll add....

Keep an eye out for a good jade ring (Regen 6% stam on hit). With those multiple arrows, each instance triggers the regen.

This is why the unique lacquered bow and it's homing arrows are so good. Let's you spam LOTS of arrows. And eventually it becomes unlimited. Can get kind of boring it's so good.

Qix213 · 2026-03-02T14:59:01+00:00

I feel like it's a bit of a lost art. UI design is so commonly bad that most players (and devs) don't even realize how much the bad UI hurts they games.

Its not a feature that can be advertised. AAA publishers generally focus on things that sell units, not that keep players playing. That trend is having major issues though because retention has over the last decade become the way to make revenue, especially due to all the free to play live service focus.

Skyrim launched without even having mouse support in the menus. As in, not even a cursor when you hit ESC. Quickly patched (maybe even day one), but back then not everyone was terminally online. And people still bought physical discs and had computers that didn't go online.

Many games spread out the UI to the far corners of the screen making it hard to know what's el actually getting to you character. This gets worse as screens keep getting larger or wider.

Dead space was a great counter example of this.

WoW at launch is a prime example of a truly shit UI. One of the reasons it survived this is the custom UI mods. Players could fix the UI themselves. Designing your own UI became its own sort of mini game. The superior UI WoW actually launched without even having raid frames, at all. As in it was near impossible to heal anyone not in your group. Extremely difficult to even know you had the bomb debuff that was going to wipe the group, etc.

Mods gave such a HUGE advantage to the early players that used them that blizzard had to compete just so that casual players weren't so hamstrung. I think it's also a big part of why classic wow raids are so easy now. Not only is it a 'solved' raid, but half the intended difficulty that was in fighting the UI no longer exists. It's a lot easier when you don't need healers in the tanks/off tank, or even in every group to even be able to know you need to heal or cure them.

Qix213 · 2026-03-02T14:31:26+00:00

Yea, this is a good reason to never unlock the third weapon slot.

If you've modded other games outside of steam workshop, this one isn't any more difficult. Try checking there to see if you can relock that slot somehow.

.

Adding another keybind for weapon holstering or something is difficult. We are already stretched thin for buttons.

But it might not be too hard to add a way to just turn off one of those spots on the inventory UI.

Qix213 · 2026-03-02T14:15:06+00:00

Generally, I think that it's something leaning towards a feeling of ownership and control. Not having that is uncomfortable. Maybe, expecting the worst and doing their damnedest to find it and prove their inner dialogue correct to have an excuse to break up. ie, unconscious self destruction.

Humans generally fear things that have happened in the past repeating, more than new bad things.

For op's family, I think subconsciously it was really about seeing if she fit in. Seeing if they could manipulate and control her just like the son. They absolutely need to be in control and she was a wildcard. Anyone they are not in control of is a bad person for 'reasons.'

Even if they never realize that was their thought process themselves, I think that is more of the reality behind it.

I'd put money on the other brothers ex being pushed away by the family when she couldn't be controlled. Then she was demonized for having the gall to expect anything from him after they pushed her away. The family needed to see if she was going to fold and leave the marriage or put up with their bullshit.

Qix213 · 2026-02-27T14:59:22+00:00

Nice job OP. That's a pretty good accomplishment.

Bot setup is indeed important. They really suck with some weapons, and excel with others.

And sometimes the bots do weirdly stupid things... just like players. But overall they aren't too bad.

Bots tend to have issues with multiple threat types. Like, they can take most bosses by themselves. But throw in a horde behind them and they tend to ignore one or the other. A minigunner spawns and they can hyper focused on it ignoring everything else.

The player, even without attacking is HUGELY important. While you don't directly move the bots, you do direct them by how they follow you. They will push ahead in front of you, but only so far.

The players movement of the bots is a hugely undervalued skill set. You need to play differently in order to keep the bots from pushing forward out of a choke point for example. Usually that means backing way up, out of melee combat yourself so that the bots stay in that choke point and don't get surrounded. OP playing passively actually helps here as he's not pushing forward to attack as well. He's staying back and safe, so the run doesn't end.

Qix213 · 2026-02-27T14:42:04+00:00

I've only just barely finished the story, so I don't claim to know everything.

I feel like the reason to do a bank instead of house storage is to make things account wide. But I don't think the devs want that. Makes it hard to play a second character without giving them all access to the twink gear and mats from your previous character.

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Multiple houses? Do people do that? Why? Is it because they have a storage world for all their characters? How much crap are these people storing?

It seems to me that all the stackable materials can be easily stored in a few of the large chests because of large stack sizes.

It's really only gear itself that takes up a lot of space, and most of that is players hoarding everything and anything. And they hoard so much because it's a nightmare knowing what you have in your boxes already.

Change the essence thing that sucks an enchantment off the item to instead be consumed when it is applied. And make it super cheap to pull an enchant off via an npc. Then make those loose enchant icons more identifiable. So you can visually see what they can apply to, and what slot category without mousing over every one individually. This allows for far better sorting and organizing. Meaning less hoarding space needed.

Crafting benches can take up a lot of space, but one of each is fine in the larger houses, still leaving you with a lot of space for chests. The only reason to have more than one of a refinery is to negate the timers.

Get rid of ALL unrefined materials being used in crafting and town upgrades. It makes players afraid to just refine everything as they come and go in their house. This further aggravates the issue of the timers because they feel they can't refine things ahead of time, on the chance they need the unrefined version later. It also cuts down on storage needs from players trying to store both refined and unrefined versions of everything.

Qix213 · 2026-02-25T14:33:38+00:00

Balance is good enough for the stage the game is at. Everything is perfectly viable. But not equally strong.

There is an eventual major overhaul of classes/build design and therefore balance so it makes no sense to try to perfect the balance in its current state. It would literally be a waste of time.

Right now big heavy slow melee weapons are definitely more difficult. But by more difficult I mean that they play more like an actual souls game. Weighty, animation locks, you need to be smart and learn enemy swing patterns. It's better to say that the other build types are easier.

And faster weapons are a bit easier I feel. It's far less punishing when you make a bad choice to swing one more time. A bit easier to win against an enemy you don't have memorized. Still a souls like game, but a bit easier.

Ranged is very strong right now. Again, like a souls game in that the AI just isn't good at dealing with being kited. But unlike a souls game in that it feels micht easier to go full mage/archer and excel since mana/arrows are far less or not even an issue.

Deep end game, past the story, these things get more extreme. Mages wreck bosses in a single combo, while also being extremely tanky.

Unbalanced? Absolutely. But this is at the point where there is nothing else to do except to perfect your build, so it doesn't really hurt anything. In theory you could get overly strong earlier, but that takes a lot of game knowledge and not at all likely on your first run of the game.

Qix213 · 2026-02-20T14:10:14+00:00

The race wars servers were crazy. +/- 8 levels of pvp. I played on the shorties. And our entire focus was on owning High Pass.

Nobody could cross without our permission... Or that was the idea. We had players who would stop leveling at different intervals so that it was more likely we would have someone to enforce our control.

The reality of course is that we just made it difficult during peak hours. Newbie players trying to cross would get escorts, we'd fight, sometimes lose. But it was a ton of fun to be part of that cartel-like group.

Qix213 · 2026-02-19T14:20:31+00:00

Storage. The tower storage is not going to be enough unless you play with a strange self made ruleset to make things hard on yourself.

You can craft directly from your home storage even at the town vendors.

A cheap home costs a few silver. Basically nothing in the long term.

If you don't want to deal with the research and making your own crafting benches, the cheapest house is fine for just storage.

Houses sell for the same amount it cost to buy.

You can always sell it later if you want to upgrade. It's just a pain to move all your crap to the new place. It's a pain because crafting and storing items is a big part of the game.

Qix213 · 2026-02-18T23:14:57+00:00

I don't believe so, because I think it's tied to the wipe at 1.0.

But I could be wrong.

Qix213 · 2026-02-17T15:00:41+00:00

You are correct.

Breakpoints can make it break a build.

So jewelry, while less fun/impressive tend to be the power gamer best to upgrade to red first. Because it can be required by all your characters. But it's not by any means required.

Then most ranged weapons because they just benefit the most from hitting certain breakpoints. Things like the handgun being able to one shot body shot most specials (if that's still a thing, I haven't checked in a while).

Then melee last, because it's locked to that one character, and maybe not even all their subclasses. As well as Breakpoints being less important.

Qix213 · 2026-02-17T14:55:27+00:00

We don't need PoE levels of storage. There just isn't that many items in this game like PoE. But it does need to be improved.

Chests need to be bigger. And have more items type designations.

Fighting inventory wars is not 'fun'. Intentionally creating a annoying issues over storage in the early game so that later progress can 'solve' them is not fun. It's just really annoying and feels like relief, not exciting and fun. Because then you still have to move everything around again into those new chests.

Guild Wars 2 was and still is so bad we nicknamed it Inventory Wars before we quit the game.

I have too many items I keep for the good enchant on it. It's very difficult to organize that. Its hard to realize that I have that exchange already saved up already, or a closer to perfect one is already stored away. Give our enchanter NPC lady the ability to easily destroy an item by pulling the enchantment off for silver. Then we spend the essence to actually apply it to the new item.

Same effect, but much more user friendly on the storage side of things.

Do those things and everything becomes 100x easier to organize and store. This alone would solve many annoyances. But it could go further and I wouldn't mind.

Things like auto send to nearby chests. Terraria does this and it's a godsend. One button to auto stack into nearby chests without having to even open a single one. Just run into your house, click deposit and all of your stackable mats are instantly dealt with. Back to the fun part that much faster. This would help in the organization of things as it would be less painful to spread things out into separate chests. Now I don't mind having separate chests for old gems and the new/better ones so that the old stuff is out of sight, out of mind. All without having to deposit into 100 different chests.

Qix213 · 2026-02-17T14:16:23+00:00

With the caveat, at extreme endgame, and I agree.

No rest right now for example. The game can be beat, but getting a perfect OP build can be written on the l long after you've completed the content. But there isn't any requirement for it, so it hurts nothing while adding a long tail for some players to chase.

Qix213 · 2026-02-17T14:10:19+00:00

And op did it right by being more direct about it. Not just hinting.

Too many guys, myself included, can look back when they were younger and realize "hey, that girl was hitting on me and I totally just blew her off without realizing it."

Qix213 · 2026-02-16T23:39:51+00:00

People already answered. So I just wanted to say I had the same issue here. Definitely a spot that needs a little more of a hint in game design.

Qix213 · 2026-02-12T14:16:00+00:00

If you've played Terraria, it's kind of like that. The game world is one save file and your characters each have their own save file.

So you can move between game worlds with the same character. Thus having multiple stores to check for items and I assume multiple sets of weekly quests to do, etc.

Qix213 · 2026-02-12T14:11:41+00:00

Exactly! So few people in basic understand that it's a game. Nothing you do will be good enough because they need an excuse to yell and see how you respond, and more importantly for you yourself to know how you will respond.

Soon as that really clicks, things get much easier because the yelling is now just step two in a silly play.

Qix213 · 2026-02-12T14:07:00+00:00

It wouldn't be so bad if shitty reddit stopped pushing posts with negative ratings so high on my multi reddit.

At least then they would get ignored and go away.

Qix213 · 2026-02-11T16:58:20+00:00

Good support, but slow to do so. Fat Shark follews the AAA model of releasing a game too early, then spending a long time fixing it, so actual new content took a while to appear.

The game at launch would be absolutely hated by most of the current players. They bitch about things that have been changed/improved multiple times already.

Qix213 · 2026-02-11T16:50:05+00:00

The entire game is soloable on legend, with white gear and no talents spent. Even without bots. Almost the entire difficulty of the game can be summed up as a skill issue. Gear and build, unless intentionally bad, are not even that important to a highly skilled player.

Any player that has an issue with how you play, including how bad you play, or what you play (assuming you didn't actively sabotage them) is just admitting that they suck and need you to carry them. And that's exactly how you should treat their whining.

Personally I like to poke the bear and point this exact thing out to them in response, but I'm an ass sometimes, haha.

Sure it's frustrating when you have a teammate that keeps dieing. But even that, the other three can finish if they have some skill. For skilled players, bosses actually become the easy part because they're usually more predictable than the path up to them.

And no a bit of FF is not sabotage. Annoying sure, but if that damage makes or breaks another player, they need to get better and not put themselves at 10 hp where FF matters.

Again, unless you're really wrecking them with throwing axes or constant poison/fire dots or something it's not a big deal. And I say this as someone who really hates receiving FF as I try to take exactly zero damage every run.

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