This is somewhat a continuation of the original topic
Out with upgrades, in with initial custom characters? Read that thread if you want to see where my head was at a week ago; but thanks largely to the feedback in that thread, I'm in a totally other place in my thinking on the subject now. So let's have a new thread (this one) to discuss how we can improve things like upgrade stones and the choose-new-character experience.
Things I Know For Sure
---------------------------1. Players -- as a group -- like having the randomized names presented to them at first, and also really want the ability to rename them.
2. A re-roll option on the character select screen is all but required, because otherwise people will just suicide their characters until they get one that they like.
3. Upgrade stones as they currently are prove to be tedious at first, and then ultimately inconsequential once you have a jillion of the things.
4. Nevertheless, players want increasing numbers of ways to customize their characters; in a variety of forms and fashions.
5. Many players also want more penalties for dying, but at the same time that is at odds with the carefree nature of many other parts of the game (where you are free to experiment and do as you please with low risk).
Things I Think I Know
----------------------------A. Attachment to specific characters is low partly because character mortality rates are so high. The more of an "event" death is, and the rarer that event is, the more the impact will be.
B. Given #5 above, I'm not sure what we can really do about penalties for dying. There's also risk of players griefing in multiplayer by dying a lot if the penalties are too stiff. So let's take the penalties thing off the table for now and just ignore that -- we need to focus on customization and randomization of characters first, and once that has stabilized then we can look at death systems that give satisfying penalties. Potentially the death system stuff would even be based around strategic difficulty, but again that's a completely different topic and please don't drag this particular thread off-topic on that just yet. We'll get there, but that's two steps down the line rather than one!
C. I think that having players have to design a lot of stats for their characters is not really great. The upgrade stones are kind of a mixed success -- if they were truly related just to the character, then you'd lose on those on death. But then players would feel compelled to grind those as soon as they come back to life. Not Fun. On the other hand, if we had some elaborate new character-creation screen when players died, they'd just recreate what they had last time and death then becomes pretty meaningless.
D. Enchants are proving to be a lot more interesting of a way to buff your character compared to upgrade stones, in the main. Not that there aren't things to improve there as well, of course -- again, don't drag this thread off topic on that please. But enchants are more flexible and allow you to adapt to changing circumstances. The upgrade stones are really inflexible and people wind up coming up with combinations of stats that they don't like. Or they wind up having to maintain a stable of characters with varying stats, and then they wind up having to travel back to town to swap them out. Sometimes an annoyance, sometimes an impossibility (if they are in a mission).
What I Think Ought To Be Done
--------------------------------------------------------P1: Upgrade Stones Out, Three New Enchant Slots In-----------------
I. Remove upgrade stones, completely and irrevocably. Wherever you previously found upgrade stones, you'd instead find consciousness shards at something like a 4:1 ratio (and your old inventory would be upgraded accordingly as well).
II. Three new enchant slots would be created. One would be the Mana slot, one would be the Health slot, and one would be the Attack slot.
III. Each of these new enchant slots would have one of a few broad categories of enchants in them:
- Increase the stat in question by some largeish amount, and reduce one of the other stats by X% of that amount (75%?).
- Increase all three stats kind of a smallish to moderate amount.
- Decrease the stat in question by some largeish amount, and increase one or both of the other stats by X% of that amount (75%?).
IV. Obviously the above needs to be tuned for balance, but the idea is that this would mean that you could do the equivalent of the various build-outs that you were already doing with the upgrade stones. Put another way: it takes the upgrade stones and just turns them into enchants. This also makes these things permanently a part of your glyph (and something you can change around at will). So that's then something that you never have to repetitively grind, and it's also something that you never have to mess with when your character dies. It also cuts down our number of customization systems from two to one (although the one remaining one is much larger, of course).
----------------P2: No More Glyph Transplant Scrolls, But Adding Retirement Scrolls-----------------
V. Glyph transplant scrolls would go away, for a variety of reasons. First of all, if we're trying to build attachment to your characters, then just being able to swap out them with another character isn't the best thing. Also, using them is fiddly at the moment and it's just another element to confuse new player. If players can customize their actual main character at will (via the expanded enchants), then there's no reason to maintain a stable of NPCs to swap out with in the first place -- your one character can switch between glass cannon and tank and so forth at will.
VI. As a lower priority for later, we would add in relatively rare "Retirement" scrolls. This would let you make your current character simply retire to the settlement and live a long and happy life there as a non-glyphbearer. They wouldn't have a useful profession, just "Former Glyphbearer." This way if you get attached to a character and they have done some major good deeds, then you can reward them with no longer having to flirt with death. Perhaps any character who is present at the death of an overlord gets a retirement scroll, for instance.
----------------P3: Alterations To Choosing A New Character-----------------
VII. Right now it's really annoying having to scroll through a ton of characters to find the ones that you want, I think. The scrolling mechanism is inherently a bit awkward. So what I propose is simply having 3-5 characters presented to you at random (but no duplicate picture types), and you get a re-roll option.
VIII. Potentially if you would like to specify what time period you want your characters to be from, that might work even better. So there is a dropdown that says Time Period, and it defaults to Any. But you can specify the time period of your choosing and then just get a more limited selection of characters every time you re-roll.
IX. As part of this, we'd continue to build out unique attributes for each time period, so that you'd get more attached to specific character types for these reasons as opposed to their base attack/health/mana/etc.
X. Also, something that is coming today is going to be a shift in how much health characters have in general -- the floor and ceiling both need to be raised up a bit. Right now it's possible to play with glass cannons that are simply too glassy, and that leads to too many glyphbearer deaths and thus a cycle where death penalty systems that we might come up with in the future are varying too widely by player skill and character stats for us to be able to put in any penalty at all.
XI. ALSO, something needed is to expand the character's unique stats beyond the three basics. Right now they vary based on mana, attack, and health. And of course whatever their time period's extra attributes are. That's not enough, but I'm not interested in adding stats like DEX or similar. Instead, what I think should happen is that each character gets two completely-randomly-rolled minor enchant effects that are permanently a part of them.
- So any character, regardless of time period, might have a small bonus to green attack power or incoming damage reduction or detectability or attack shot speed or jump height or whatever else. This again plays back into the enchants system, but these works as very minor built-in effects that nonetheless make the characters individually vastly more unique than they currently are. And as more enchant effects are added, characters will get even more unique.
- To me, when you have characters that are more unique like this, the penalty for losing them is sort of built-in. The odds of rolling a character with their exact stats ever again is infinitesimally low. Even just getting the same two minor enchant effects on them is extremely low. So there's a feeling that you've lost something irreplaceable when a character dies, even though it's not an enormous setback since most of your stats are coming from your remaining-with-glyph enchants.
XII. Clicking on a character portrait once will highlight it. Clicking on the rename button while that character is highlighted will allow you to rename them, but if you click on them again, you just start playing with them. And make it so that it's not a nickname, it's literally changing their first and last names. That will take some internal changes on our part, but I think it's a good idea. For instance, the name of robots right now uses the first and last name components but that would switch to just using their full name as their first-name only. Details, details.
----------------TLDR: The End Goals-----------------
Basically the above system is designed to do a few things:
1. Maintain the randomized element of character selection. That's always been a part of the game and enough people like it quite a lot that I don't think that we can ever change that. Not a smart move on our part to do that sort of thing at this point.
2. Expand the amount of customization you can do, but lower the penalty for mistakes. Accidentally putting the upgrade stones into the wrong slot and realizing your build is suboptimal really stinks. Enchants in general beat the pants off that system because they are so flexible. Not just in terms of making mistakes with initial selection, but also with not having to maintain multiple characters to have different roles for yourself.
3. Increase your attachment to each character through a few means. First by making them more unique and irreplaceable; second by giving you more time with them by making the time between deaths greater than it currently is; third by giving you that all-important rename option right from the start.
Thoughts?
