Count me in the group of people sad to see it go because it made it very easy to get articles onto my Kobo e-reader. There are other ways, but they’re all too labour intensive to be practical. Probably should have seen the writing on the wall, though.
I honestly don’t see much comparison at all, to be honest. This doesn’t have a web of skills to unlock nor does it have the rapid-fire pace of a Diablo game. I guess a vaguely isometric 3rd person action game is automatically Diablo?
It’s 1,000% in the Soulsborne category, but with select systems from ARPGs mixed in, and the pains of figuring out how to adapt them are showing, but the potential is huge.
And maybe that’s the thing; coming at this from “I want an alternative to a Souls game” and it lands great. If I picked this up expecting Diablo or Torchlight (ha! I’m old!) or something, I’d be WTF-ing within 8 second of the game starting.
Personally, I picked up NRFTW after the first hotfix for The Breach and I haven’t run into pretty much anything most of the negative reviews are complaining about. There were 100% tuning issues with the original Breach update and they got pummelled for it in the reviews, but in less than a week they fixed 90% of the problems.
It’s an early access game, so no, of course it’s not perfect yet, but it’s a really solid product with a ton of potential that’s fun to play right now.
The problem is that reviews are rarely updated, so right now there’s a ton of reviews that capture a tiny snapshot of the game’s life that don’t reflect where the game is merely a couple weeks after they were left. I’m sure there was a bunch riding on this…they’d been locked up in legal proceedings getting the rights to the game and getting out from under a publisher, and I’m sure part of the hype train around The Breach was to spur a renewed round of funding.
As someone newer to its community, I’m really surprised at how much complaining there is about end game longevity and a bunch of other things that make me want to ask, “You…you know the game isn’t done yet, right?”
Moon Studios took a risk going independent which means two things: (a) they have strong faith that their project can stand on its own, and (b) they are far more sensitive to cash flow now than they were under a publisher. One thing I think they’ll need to work on is their community relations, and it’s a shame because it almost always means we hear less direct communication and more stuff filtered through PR people.
I’ll leave a positive review b/c I’ve played about 10 hours and I’m really enjoying the game in front of me and look forward to the updates coming through the rest of 2025.
I’ll have to see if I want to go to the rigamarole of setting up Wallabag on my home server or if I just fall back to using GoodLinks on iOS exclusively and forgo articles on my e-reader.