I'm not sure why but I'm finding it extremely difficult compared to the first one, even on normal mode. Maybe my age is getting to me.
I think in general it’s a bit harder because they have honed the combat to be more challenging.
As an example, nearly every bandit camp you come to after early game has enemies that cannot be one shotted to the head with a precision bow and if you are using a hunter bow you can hit them repeatedly in the head once you have destroyed their armour and just get ‘weak spot’ notifications which is a bit silly. Enemies also seem to be able to one shot you really easily.
Powerful arrows use a lot more resources to craft and you get fewer of them as standard. Then to do any real damage you need advanced ammo which again costs a ton of resources.
Upgrading ammo pouches is a real chore because there’s now half a million different creatures you need to farm to do any real upgrades. Even after fully upgrading the various skill trees, crafting arrows still takes far too many resources in my view. Some of the advanced stuff takes like 4 different resources to craft and they also share resources with other weapons and ammo. Machine flesh being a massive one for me.
I’m pushing through this but I’m not really enjoying the combat at all. It’s far too tedious. There’s definitely a ton of RNG shenanigans too particularly using sharpshot bow and concentration. Seems clear to me that enemy movements in many instances are tracking what I’m doing and moving at the last instant before I fire. With humans it’s annoying dodge rolling just as I line up the headshot. Feels very obvious to me, kind of like bow combat in Elden Ring.
Overall my motivation and interest in this instalment is reduced. But maybe I’m just suffering a bit of “open world” game burnout after ~170hrs on Elden Ring. I’m not sure but I do know HFW is feeling like a real chore to play.
