No Rest For The Wicked Is Getting A Major Gameplay Change

Just after passing its first year in early access, action-RPG No Rest For The Wicked is making a major change by scrapping its entire attribute system. Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler said that players just weren't getting the current system, and that it was time to replace it with something new entirely.

"One thing that's become abundantly clear to us is that the attribute system has to die," Mahler said in an extensive X post about the upcoming changes. "We've always been a bit wary of using this system, but we wanted to go ahead with it anyway, since it's a system that other big games in the genre use and we thought that because of that, people would get it. After having analyzed the data, people clearly don't get it."

The post goes into detail on what Moon Studios has analyzed from No Rest For The Wicked's first year in early access, with Mahler saying that many players ended up "having insanely underpowered builds without understanding why."

"If you never put any points into the attributes that the weapon of your choice scales with, your level-20 character will be just as strong as a level 1 character because we gave the player the choice, but the player made the wrong choices and then blames the game instead of themselves," Mahler said, adding that even internal developers were messing up their builds, leading the studio to realize that some pretty drastic changes would have to be made.

The good news is that whatever will replace the current attribute system is already in motion, and the developers seem to have put a lot of thought into it--though it still needs plenty of testing and fine-tuning before it's ready to be implemented in the live game.

"We will ensure that leveling up feels insanely addictive and that each level up allows the player to only make good choices while still allowing for a wide variety of builds to be made, including insane builds that make no sense, but still work out anyway," Mahler said of the new system, adding that they took inspiration from Final Fantasy Tactics director Yasumi Matsuno's work.

No Rest For The Wicked released for Steam Early Access in April last year, and clearly still has some work to be done before its full release. Moon Studios also plans to release the game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S once it's in its finished state.