„I See a Lot of Open World Fatigue.” No Rest for the Wicked Devs Embrace Complexity with Extended Gameplay and Roadmap
Promo materials for No Rest for the Wicked have poured over industry sites, and the game's director, Thomas Mahler, revealed on social media the philosophy behind his and his team's open-world design for the upcoming action RPG.
Due to the fast approaching debut of No Rest for the Wicked in early access, more and more materials promoting the game are being released online. Eurogamer recently released almost 90 minutes of gameplay (below), and the game's director, Thomas Mahler, started a thread on X, in which he revealed what guided Moon Studios when creating the world in No Rest for the Wicked.
"We don't need 10.000 planets or a quintillion areas"
Mahler started his argument by observing that players are tired of the way other devs approach designing open worlds. In his opinion, this boredom results from the open world design scheme used by many developers. Because of the procedurally generated content, they are frequently empty and consequently dull, partially resembling gameplay in walking simulators.
I generally see a lot of 'open world fatigue' in gamers at the moment. The problem here is this:
Procedural Generation Tech of today is just still not good enough to actually create good level design. Most developers who make open worlds do it because it's fairly easy to just create a large terrain and then use some perlin noise [an algorithm used in computer graphics] heightmap to create valleys and hills and et voila, here's your game world. Cheap and easy, but you [as a developer] also kinda get what you paid for [...].
Mahler wrote that the principle of "less is sometimes more" was followed with No Rest for the Wicked. The devs of Moon Studios chose to manually create a smaller area instead of a massive world, so that players wouldn't have to walk in a straight line for a long time to get from point A to point B without paying attention to the surroundings.
Instead of just procedurally generating a huge world that then suffers from vast swaths of emptiness, we instead hand craft everything inch by inch [...].
The goal in our level design department was that there would never be moments where in order to go from point A to point B, you'd simply hold the analog stick forward for 2 minutes. We don't think that's fun, that's just turning your game into a walking simulator at times.
According to the developer, it's precisely the disproportion between the scale of open worlds and their content that is the cause of the increasingly common boredom with them.
I think most gamers agree that we don't need 10.000 planets or a quintillion areas in our games. We just need one big, intricately designed space that actual designers put their blood, sweat and tears into creating!
In subsequent tweets, Mahler continued the thread, meticulously analyzing what he believes should be the basis for developing levels in games. He even mentioned specific examples from No Rest for the Wicked. If you are interested, I recommend checking out his profile on X - you'll find many interesting things there.
No Rest for the Wicked development and endgame
The intense marketing of No Rest for the Wicked also gave us insights into Moon Studios' early access plans and post-story game content.
During last week's Wicked Inside presentation, the development team revealed the roadmap (below) of No Rest for the Wicked. We found out then that the first update will bring a multiplayer mode to the game, more story chapters, and new areas will be added to it as it develops.
Picture source: Moon Studios.
Later, we learned some more details. It turns out that at the beginning of early access, the players will get access to the following locations:
- The Shallows;
- Orban Glades;
- Sacrament;
- Nameless Pass;
- The Black Trench.
As part of the first story update The Breach, the game will feature the following locations:
- Marin Woods;
- Lowland Meadows;
- Hunter's Vale.
Endgame will take many forms and will be inspired by Diablo 1
In an interview for GameInformer, the devs from Moon Studios also said something about the content that will be available after completing the story. Ultimately, No Rest for the Wicked will include activities related to the endgame, and they will be added with subsequent updates.
- The Cerim's Crucible will be the first one, a special dungeon drawing from the roguelike formula.
- Within it, the players will have to complete 10 consecutive areas, with the difficulty level increasing as they progress.
- The game's creative director noted that the creation of this challenge was heavily inspired by the first Diablo.
- Completing the described activity will provide us with great items and crafting components.
No Rest for the Wicked will be released in early access on Steam on April 18. At a later date, the title will also be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
