I got a lot of questions on my previous post because people don't quite understand what the technical difference between what I call old-school ARPGs and No Rest for the Wicked are. So... here goes: Most ARPGs today, even the big names like Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2, are still built on ideas from the 90s. At their core, they're still point and click games. You press a button or click on something, and your character performs an action for you. You’re not really doing the action. You’re telling the game what you’d like to do, and it handles the rest. That worked back then because it had to. We didn’t have the hardware, input devices or engines to support anything more responsive or expressive. It was enough that you could equip cool gear and press buttons to watch the screen light up. My point was that I don't think that's good enough anymore. It’s 2026. Players expect to actually be in control and for their games to have proper combat systems. There are inherent limitations in building your game on a point and click foundation that cannot be overcome. In Diablo 4 and PoE 2, when you attack, you're not committing to a movement. You’re triggering a calculation. It doesn’t really matter where your character is standing, what direction they’re facing, or what your weapon’s physical properties are. Whether you're holding a sword, a hammer or a spear, it all animates basically the same way. What matters most is what modifiers you’ve stacked and whether you’ve optimized your passive tree or skill nodes. That’s why the combat in those games still feels off, even when it looks flashy. There’s no friction. No weight. You’re not asked to make decisions in the moment, because everything’s been decided by your build ahead of time. Now compare that to something like a fighting game, a Souls-like, or Monster Hunter, games where the weapon you use completely changes how you move, how you space yourself, and how you think. Those games are all built on animation-driven combat systems. That means when you swing a sword, your character physically moves through that motion. You're locked into it, even if it’s risky. You commit to your actions. You learn timing. You feel the difference between fast and slow weapons, heavy and light attacks, deliberate strikes and desperate dodges. That’s the foundation of No Rest for the Wicked. We didn’t try to retrofit direct control into an old engine. We built from the ground up for full physicality, precision, and mastery. In Wicked, when you swing a weapon, you're actually the one performing the swing. You’re responsible for your positioning. You have to pay attention to where enemies are, how fast they move, and what they're about to do. You don’t win just because your stats are higher. You win because you timed your parry. You dodged correctly. You found the opening and punished it. And because of that, every fight matters. Even trash mobs can be threatening if you get sloppy. And when you do get stronger, it actually feels earned, because you obtained actual skill. You’re not just watching the same actions with bigger numbers, you're actually playing and controlling your character. This is also why every weapon in Wicked feels unique. Because it is. Not just in damage values or affixes, but in how it moves, how long it takes to recover, how it chains into other attacks. Every weapon has its own language and mastering it is part of the fun. So yes, ARPGs like Diablo 4 and PoE 2 can still be fun. But my point was that they’re not evolving. They’re scaling sideways: More modifiers, more loot filters, more ways to explode the screen with one button. But it’s all built on the same basic idea: Press a button, watch stuff die. And they literally can't do anything else than that (even though they're trying real hard) cause they weren't engineered that way from the ground up. When we started on Wicked, coming from Ori, obviously I wanted to really tune the feel of combat in the same way I tuned the feel of platforming in Ori. The whole idea was that combat shouldn't be designed on a spreadsheet, but be designed around actual feel. ...