Will there be classes?

[Teal_Blue]

Will you be using 'Classes'?  Or something more player defined, I guess what i mean is the player makes his character a certain way?

I promise not to say anything about classes.

-Teal

[x4000]

Sort of.  At the moment we plan to have Weaponsmith, Armorsmith, Trapper, Pharmacist, and Enchanter as the "classes."  However, this just controls what kind of things the character (NPC or player-controlled) is able to craft, if any.  We'll also have some characters without a crafting class, I think.  That stuff is still a bit tentative in some ways, because partly it depends on testing results.

But in terms of traditional JRPG classes, no.  There aren't mages that are the only ones able to cast spells, or warriors that are the best at weapons, etc.  The individual characters have some stats, but most stats (including levels) belong to you the player, not any character you control.  Thus if one character dies and you get another character, you don't lose your levels, etc.

In terms of customization, that largely depends on what you find as you explore, and what you choose to craft out of the things that you find.  Though, as you are playing you are also heavily customizing the world itself around you as you do various deeds and explore various places and thus alter the world map by setting up settlments, wind shelters, and so forth.  As the title suggests, "wind" is a big deal in this game.

[snrub_guy]

In your blog post you mentioned the persistence in levels between characters after death. You also mentioned something about item persistence. Can you say how that works? Will the items be on a persistent corpse? Or in some kind of inter-dimensional lost-and-found? Or maybe each character is the last one's progeny and they got it all in a will?

Obviously if it's something you want to keep close to your chest for a while I understand.

[x4000]

In the case of items you were carrying, they get dropped where you die in a magic bag. That bag never disappears or goes away. You can go and retrieve it immediately, or just ignore it if you don't care. A preview coming up soon goes into this in some more depth, but that's the main gist of it.

[snrub_guy]

Good stuff! That's what I'd been hoping. Another question comes to mind, though once again, feel no pressure to tell me. But where will your new character spawn? Back at the beginning? Where you died? The nearest "save point"?

[x4000]

There's actually no way to directly save/load in this game. Like minecraft, it's more of a persistent world that autosaves in parts as you go, and which you can enter and exit at any time. Partly this is due to the way data will be saved, but also it's from our desire to have this feel like a place you go, rather than a game you try to metagame too much (ideally never trying to savescum or encourage that, etc).

So, all that said, the next character usually won't spawn. Rather you get to choose from amongst some of the npcs you have interacted with in some ways, and you get to choose between them. You then take them over whereever they are at the time got other character died (more often than not, they would be in one of your settlements).

If you are out of characters (ouch), then you'll get one spawned at random somewhere. Haven't decided exactly how that will work, but most likely it will be in some quasi-safe place. In terms of getting back to where you were when you died, the overworld travel system would generally make that pretty straightforward if you were strategic with where you place god settlements and wind shelters. If you're more on the bleeding edge of your known area when you die, or explore waaaay out into the unknown on a long trek, then that's going to be reflected by nature in how long it takes to get back there.

Clever players will store many of their items in their settlements, rather than carrying the world with them at any given time (though inventory will be either massive or unlimited -- the rationale being that already ourr encourage to leave stuff behind because of the death mechanic, and the last thing we want to encourage is returning to a settlement just because your stupid inventory is full. And yes I'm aware of the torchlight dog method, but that seems a bit too easy in some respects. This is a bit more inspired by demon's souls of all things).

Anyway, since you can shape and settle the world to some extent, there's no reason you ever have to be super far away from places you can fast travel to. If you don't take the time to put down wind shelters when you go to a new place, then that will make travel more difficult, but that's your choice to be overly bold, rather than the base way the game works. More on a lot of that soon.

[getter77]

In the case of items you were carrying, they get dropped where you die in a magic bag. That bag never disappears or goes away. You can go and retrieve it immediately, or just ignore it if you don't care. A preview coming up soon goes into this in some more depth, but that's the main gist of it.

Tangent:   Reckoning on keeping to landmasses/solids as opposed to any aerial or any bodies of water, especially the latter, then?   Though I guess a magic bag should be enough of a MacGuffin to float and such upon the occasion...

[x4000]

There will be water and similar.  When that sort of thing happens, the bag will just be NEAR where you fell.

[tigersfan]

Like your wife, I'm also the type of gamer to get really frustrated at some the death mechanic in some (alot of?) games. I like the idea behind this one, and hope you can implement it as well as you are describing it. But, the descriptions lead me to another question. If I'm putting lots and lots of items in wind shelters and the like all over the map, will there be some mechanic for letting me know which items are in which shelters?

I'm imagining that I'm playing this game for hours and hours on end, and simply littering the map with dozens, or even hundreds of these shelters and other "safe" points, and I get to a point where I need a certain rare or rare-ish item. I think to my self "I found one of those a while back, I put it in a shelter for safe keeping... now where was it?" Personally, my memory is bad, and I'd NEVER remember that, so will there be an easy way to find it w/o having to go search all my shelters?

This may be further along in the design process than you guys are now, so if you just wanna table this, that's fine. But, IMO, something like this should be in there by the time you go gold.

[x4000]

Yeah, I suspect we'll need some sort of inventory tracking system to keep track of stuff globally. That's a problem for much later, though. You wot be storing items at wind shelters, only at settlements. And settlements are a lot rarer than wind shelters. Even after hundreds of hours of play, you might only have 4-6 settlements.

That's you option, of course -- you could have dozens and dozens. But I figure that most people will choose to build up a few settlements into something impressive rather than just having a huge number of low-level settlements.

Where is see more of a problem is in remembering where old loot bags are if you died and dropped one and you don't go back for it immediately. So that's certainly something we'll keep track of, I think. It's a consideration for much further along, though!

[tigersfan]

Yeah, I agree that it's not an immediate concern... which is why I mentioned going gold rather than for the alpha release. ;-)

[x4000]

Oh, I know -- I understood that, didn't mean to imply otherwise.

[snrub_guy]

Cool, thanks for the replies. For someone who doesn't want to let on too much at the moment, you are remarkably forthcoming about these details. All sounds good! Can't wait to give it a go. Oh, is there a way of increasing population in an area?  Will larger settlements attract more people?

[x4000]

My pleasure!

In terms of the settlement mechanics, that is one area I don't want to get too much into.  But suffice it to say, when you establish a settlement it's generally early, and then you convince survivors you meet to go take up residence there largely individually.  There may be some unattended growth, too -- thing will definitely change in your absence, anyway -- but the core mechanic is that as a result of your exploration you're able to build up these places.  The NPCs do most of the heavy lifting of setting up shop, choosing their living spaces, etc, all without you needing to micromanage that aspect, though.

[Panopticon]

Will the player have much if any influence over the way settlements develop? Will it be possible to set one up as a Fort, training survivors into a militia or army? Or a settlement devoted to crafting goods? Will the player be able to set goals for individuals or groups? Like, say that the player finds a large chasm full of kobolds, can he lead a group of NPC militia from the Fort settlement to help clear out the threat?

I know I'm just blurting out a lot of questions here. I'm trying to show some restraint actually :p. I understand if it's too early to get into these kinds of topics.