The game suffers from "Death Spiral"

[Twotricks]

What is death spiral in short : It is gameplay mechanic where upon losing/dying you suffer damage to your equipment that can only be repaired with in game resource. There is a threshold called "Death Spiral" were your equipment is broken, but you can not gather resource to fix it because you have no equipment.

It is basically game over by wonky design.

Lets take a example of Dark Souls. If you die you lose all souls you gathered. But if you keep dying you have no souls, therefore you lose no souls. So the game never falls into death spiral. And even a bad player can keep playing.

NRFTW however has a pretty broken mechanic. When you die your equipment is damaged. Repairing equipment is very expensive ( once you reach Sacrament ). And on top of that the game shifts gear and becomes harder.

So what happens is that your equipment gets broken ( you are literally naked and weaponless ) , but you need to gather up to 2+ silver to repair it ( which is though ask even with complete equipment )

I am now at point of the game where I have no equipment and no gold, and can basically do nothing but restart the game from zero.

This is very broken design and honestly I don't know how this went trough QA.

[Beethy]

Terrible game design, I agree. IMO they need to delete all the gathering and repair mechanics entirely. It's not fun or satisfying. Just totally tedious.

[Samseng Yik]

"Unstable Equilibrium"
Playing well will make your future game easier.
Where play badly, will make your future game worse.
You are right, this is something need to taken care for, come back Mechanic like DOTA

Example in FTL
1) not taking much damage in early game mean you spend your scrap into upgrading your ship.
By upgrading your ship more, you deal more damage and much harder to take damage AKA preventive cost

2) In contrast, if your early game sux, have to spend scrap just to repair your ship.
Then your ship missed the upgrade due to you used the resource for repair, thus your ship weaker.
Since your ship weaker, it is now much easier to take damage and lose in future combat.

[Raikira]

Originally posted by Twotricks:

I am now at point of the game where I have no equipment and no gold, and can basically do nothing but restart the game from zero.

Is this not part of the game design? If you fail you have to start over again, and each time you will get further.

I'm not saying you are wrong, and I also think it is wrong to punish people who struggle by making it harder and harder each time they fail. It is backwards, if you fail, the game should nudge you along instead of punish you further.

[Don Dimon]

I really hope the devs will read this post...

[Krainz337]

Originally posted by Raikira:

Originally posted by Twotricks:

I am now at point of the game where I have no equipment and no gold, and can basically do nothing but restart the game from zero.

Is this not part of the game design? If you fail you have to start over again, and each time you will get further.

I'm not saying you are wrong, and I also think it is wrong to punish people who struggle by making it harder and harder each time they fail. It is backwards, if you fail, the game should nudge you along instead of punish you further.

This is not a roguelike where you die and have to start from the start. This is just a terrible design and the devs havent thought it trough. Game basicaly softlocks you from progression if all your gear breaks and you have no money and materials to repair it. So you get punished hard for dying

[Samseng Yik]

At the moment, you still can salvage by teleporting to earlier area.
Where enemy is easier, collect some early game lowly scrap to sell for the repair.

This is the point of EA. Voice out and let developer aware

[Naison]

I would like to know what the thought behind the item durability was, in a hard game like this. Sadly i have the same problem. Dying after reaching Sacrament over and over and having no money to repair. you can argue i should be getting gud, but it takes the fun out of the game for me if i have to start over at any point if i cant get money to repair.

[Aya x Kru]

All I see is how you guys suck. Get better, cry less honestly. I have money, gear, food and a woman. Learn to appreciate what was given and adapt to it.

[John Hayabusa]

Originally posted by Aya x Kru:

All I see is how you guys suck. Get better, cry less honestly. I have money, gear, food and a woman. Learn to appreciate what was given and adapt to it.

You sound like you adapted to your mom.

[Sotho]

Fully agree, besides performance this is my only complain. But its a massive one.

[The_Mess]

Yeap, stuck on the stupid axemen myself, and they're a royal pain in the rear to fight, so they're blocking my ability to get to chests.

[Frantz Ziger Van Forsberg]

So many threads where OPs write a wall of text and how much of general skill issue they have.
You are lacking one, mate.

[The_Mess]

Originally posted by Frantz Ziger Van Forsberg:

So many threads where OPs write a wall of text and how much of general skill issue they have.
You are lacking one, mate.

Except this game doesn't explain things fully, so it's hard to people to learn how not to die, which is what's driving me in to grumpiness over the 2nd tier axemen who don't give me anyspace to breath and hit the fat f*cks.

[KyrenCross]

Originally posted by Aya x Kru:

All I see is how you guys suck. Get better, cry less honestly. I have money, gear, food and a woman. Learn to appreciate what was given and adapt to it.

I think it is a from soft syndrome. If From soft implemented this mechanic in any of their future games, people will gobble it up and will be very afraid to voice their opinion as they will just get clowned and be told to git gud by the hardcore fans. So people will naturally adapt.

But I guess to any other game, without exploring more of the games mechanic and style. People won't tolerate it and any major deviation from any from soft mechanic will criticized to the ground.

I guess the idea is that you have to prepare for every journey and periodically need to go back to town to upgrade, sell, cook stuff, repair gear. Then go back out in the wilds for more punishment.

But yeah, I hate the durability mechanic as well. lol.

[Frantz Ziger Van Forsberg]

Originally posted by The_Mess:

Originally posted by Frantz Ziger Van Forsberg:

So many threads where OPs write a wall of text and how much of general skill issue they have.
You are lacking one, mate.

Except this game doesn't explain things fully, so it's hard to people to learn how not to die, which is what's driving me in to grumpiness over the 2nd tier axemen who don't give me anyspace to breath and hit the fat f*cks.

Game tells you everything you need in the tutorial.
Seriously, is that hard to read?

Rest is common sense and if you are willing to explore for yourself and try things, game gives you tools to play around after all.