Questions about the game and DLC

[jasta85]

Hello, saw some videos of this game and will most likely be picking it up during the summer sale, a few quick questions though.

1. How long is the game length if you actually make it successfully through? The videos I saw of this were basically the guy dying multiple times and restarting with slightly higher stats each time so I'm curious how long an actual successful run would take.

2. How viable are different builds? It seemed (at least in the videos that I saw) that defensive builds seem best in terms of just being able to survive enemy attacks since it seems very hard to recover from injuries and such in the middle of a fight. Do two handed weapons or ranged attacks work well?

3. The No Heroes DLC seems to be a standalone campaign that you can do as an alternative to the base game one (correct me if I'm wrong there). Does it provide anything that improves your experience if you are just playing the main campaign or would it be safe to just put off buying it until I beat the main game?

Thanks ahead of time for any answers.

[death and rebirth]

Originally posted by jasta85:

Hello, saw some videos of this game and will most likely be picking it up during the summer sale, a few quick questions though.

1. How long is the game length if you actually make it successfully through? The videos I saw of this were basically the guy dying multiple times and restarting with slightly higher stats each time so I'm curious how long an actual successful run would take.

2. How viable are different builds? It seemed (at least in the videos that I saw) that defensive builds seem best in terms of just being able to survive enemy attacks since it seems very hard to recover from injuries and such in the middle of a fight. Do two handed weapons or ranged attacks work well?

3. The No Heroes DLC seems to be a standalone campaign that you can do as an alternative to the base game one (correct me if I'm wrong there). Does it provide anything that improves your experience if you are just playing the main campaign or would it be safe to just put off buying it until I beat the main game?

Thanks ahead of time for any answers.

Hey. The questions you ask seem to be more directed towards other players rather than developer but I can also give you my two cents since there are no answers so far.

1. The amount of time required to beat the game would seriously depend on how thorough you are in completing various optional tasks, missions and events of which there are a lot of. There're also several mutually exclusive story paths that would require you to play the campaign several times in order to see all of the available main story content.

The game has a dedicated "Story Mode" difficulty that trivializes the combat and is aimed at people who are only interested in the story and not battles and survival. On this difficulty the campaign can be completed in about 6 hours (one of the story branches). On higher difficulties that number is going to be way higher as the combat and survival become a serious challenge. And, obviously, there's also the roguelike permadeath mode that implies that you will die and restart the campaign multiple times, considerably prolonging the playtime.

2. In my personal experience and judging from the players' feedback - there's a significant number of viable builds and subbuilds. Two handed weapon builds can work pretty well but they do require you to have some kind of answer to enemies' attacks (it can be done through armor, stats, trinkets, cautious playstyle etc.).
Ranged weapons are very powerful but have a number of intentional downsides to them that have to be worked around or metigated through something.
Generally speaking the HWR's combat is designed to be a puzzle with no easy solution but with a lot of possible ones.

I would say that currently the overall balance is a bit skewed towards maxing certain parameters. However, firstly, it would take a novice player quite some time to figure it all out. And secondly, the situation is going to be addressed in the next major patch that would bring a serious rework to parameters and several aspects of the combat system.

3. Not a Hero DLC includes two new story branches that can be accessed at about the midpoint of campaign. Thus it would require you to beat the first half of the campaign in order to get to the DLC content.

I personally would say that it's probably better to first play the original story paths and then see the DLC content. The reason for that is the fact that both of the DLC's new story branches would work better in contrast to what you've seen in the original English story branch as the DLC puts you on the other sides of the same conflict.

Gameplay-wise the DLC does indeed attempt to do something new by introducing several chapters that revolve around your character's attempt to lead a civil life and somehow integrate back into society after spending a considerable time as a soldier.
Other than that the DLC is primarily interested in storytelling and developing various characters rather than somehow remixing the gameplay formula.

Hope this helps!

[jasta85]

Thanks for the detailed answer, I've just picked up the game.