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Unique Spells & Abilities Via Exploration
ArchivedUser
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Everyone’s main driving force for playing games is progression, and everything else that accompanies it is to make the journey fun and fresh, hence story lines, immersive zones with lore to explore and other activities to grant players experience, to make them stronger.
- Unlock the secondary class specializations via challenging quest lines
- Learn new and unique abilities from the world
- Provides a MASSIVE incentive for exploring the world and tie into the node system.
- Makes players feel unique and more desirable, optimize builds more to the players desire.
- Help tie content creation, lore of areas, classes and abilities to character progression.
Progression
Progression is games are, progressing, getting better and providing players with enough build diversity to play how they want to play. It’s always been my personal philosophy to let players play how they want to play, and the developers should provide them the tools to do so.
Exploration
I think the late Everquest Next hit a lot of points on the head, one of them was their idea of having 40 classes in the game, but players only being able to select from a couple at launch and having to “unlock” by some means via gameplay.
Classes
Encountering a Druidic faction, doing certain quests for them that will earn you reputation and help advance ongoing storylines in the world, helping their side of an ongoing event. Potentially earning the right to become a Druid, and thus giving you access to spells and abilities.
Endgame
The same could be done for all of the secondary class decisions in the game. Playing a Cultist, a Necromancer, a Battlemage or any advanced class is much more enjoyable because you’ve worked hard to obtain it, and makes you that much more desired or unique to other players around you. It also makes collecting all of the secondary classes a long and arduous journey to completing your character.
Spells & Abilities
The other thread got me going on this, and using it as an example, for the summoner base class, a couple people were in agreement that exploring the world and somehow learning new summons by some mean would be an interesting and fun addition to any Summoners progression.
Forms
My last point before I end this, but you can also add ways to obtain new forms in this game. Becoming a Lich, becoming a vampire, wearwolf, or obtaining some other form that could alter your characters stats and abilities or enhance and weaken certain areas of your gameplay. Just think Skyrim with more forms.
I’m sure everyone thinking “Oh ma gurd, this is too much for da developers...” and it could be. I’m just throwing his out. If the developers have a world 40x the size of Skyrim and have enough unique zones and enough lore then there should be plenty of exploration in the world and ways to incorporate these into the mix. Just heavily relies on the world building.
Comments
Nothing anyone else would like to add, or specific parts they’d like to see to fruition out of any of these points?
perhaps other ideas of implementation or possible build characteristics or things players could earn?
One is vertical progression that leads to an ever greater power gap and building an ever thicker wall between players. So that they cant play together which defeats the object of a community experience.
One is horizontal progression.
Those are ideas that make character progression much deeper in tying character progression to actual gameplay.
The challenge isn’t in deciding whether vertical or horizontal progression is right because that’s a whole other story of game design, completely different games and for the sake of Ashes, will incorporate both which is personally what I prefer.
The challenge is in designing the game in such a way that a barrier doesn’t exist between one character and another. One good game design choice is no leveled zones, any area can have level 5-10 creatures, with higher level creatures just beyond the trees.
plus, discovering new abilities and skills doesn’t have to mean they’re stronger, you could be a level 30 and discover a level 10 spell. The idea is that it’s different, you learned it from the world, maybe its a different kind of gameplay style, but hopefully there are those stronger abilities reserved for later game content.
So I'll give you that one
But what is vertical progression in reality ? You gain XP for doing stuff....progressing.
Most of the time that means levelling up for gear or weapon access that are useless without the skill to use them.
So in that context levelling should be the act of training on usage or learning.
There is nothing stopping you having that individual vertical progression of training within a horizontal framework of accumulating new skills.
And as such amassing XP only really serves the purpose of bragging about how long you have been amassing skills and isnt really necessary.
vis-a-vis levelling really isnt necessary other then on a skill by skill basis.
Requiring adventuring to unlock those skills for players to choose from just ties everything together and attribute are necessary to let player fine tune their build.
I coined a design concept for another MMO which I called 'paths of destiny'.
You took a land area and drew a random path through it calling it 1 man.
Then you added another path calling it 4 man.
Then you added 12 man that went straight though the middle for the in your face mode going above and below ground.
This left island off the beaten track that could get more and more dangerous the closer to the middle of the islands you got.
It was a way to enable all playstyles to have purpose and meaning withing a map with their own quest lines without stamping on each other feet.
So I have no problem with Intrepids concept of the worst monsters being far from the beaten track.
The need for 'levels' instead of 'groups' in their design I dont think is necessary TBH.
@Rainer You make no sense but in a different way
I don’t know what the process for secondary classes is defaulted to, since I know you can change your secondary class but not your primary class, but I’m assuming they’re going to make it a “paid” change, as in ingame currency that could potentially be supplemented by cash shop secondary class change.
When they could make it a much more rewarding system and make the secondary classes rarer. The only downside I see to this system is that not all of the classes would be available to every player and thus the developers would feel as though they’ve created all these classes just for no one to play them for a while. Receiving feedback from the community is also a very harsh process because not a lot of players will be able to play the classes and see how balanced they are for themselves, and if a class is too strong it could go by unnoticed.
Aside from that, I still stand by the idea of there being skills and abilities that can be learned via a number of ways throughout the world, for every class and there being deeper customization options for people to progress their characters the way they want to, and having to “earn” their classes, rather than just learn a completely new play style just because you hit an xp marker.
@RiverBird
Thats the general idea. In the artisan system. You have to unlock skills as you go. You get a choice what you wish to unlock and delve into. Broad and shallow for generic abilities or narrow and deep for greater abilities. Its a trade off. We dont know how combat progress is going to work.
There will be attribute points to stick into str, dex, int, wis, etc. These points you will also pick up as you progress and they must change your build. But they dont have to make you more powerful as in...
str 16, dex 10, wis 4 = level 30 vs str 8, dex 5, wis 2 = level 15
they could equally work as a fine tuning distribution system...
str 54% dex 33% wis 13% = level 30 & level 15
Its the attributes distribution that would define your uniqueness.
Not that this is what intrepid will do, just that classes were originally defined by attribute points (offering some presets to save you the bother) and they can be used in a vertical or horizontal way.
At 10 collected points each would be worth 10% granularity
At 100 collected points each would be worth 1% granularity
At 1000 collected points each would be worth 0.1% granularity
Its diminishing returns by default and self balanced by default, but still honing your build...eternally.
I do agree it would have been nice to enhance a class skill by skill rather than a whole secondary playstyle. The attribute allocation stated above would have allowed the 'tuning' of skills to 'match' attribute allocation. The closer the match the greater efficiency with the skill.
At the moment I cant see the point of attributes with preset classes.
The principle is still the same, earn experience, use skill points on abilities/unlock automatically, same thing. That’s about as much character creation as elder scrolls online but I see more customization options available here which is good.
Im talking about. Explore the world and unlock shit you wouldn’t have gotten had you not earned it. If you don’t do this specific raid or dungeon, or quest line, or earn enough favor with said faction, your character will never know it exists, and won’t even have the option to spend the upgrade point on it. You are exploring, discovering, and becoming more powerful.
Also, I hope what you said about the stats isn’t the case. That sounds ****. I hope there’s D&D stats like you said, and that players “build” the characters they want and that it “works” like normal D&D.
And stay on topic. Twice now you’ve drifted, into attribute points and progression in general or questioning the reality of vertical progression like you’re a pholilosopher.
Horizontal progression is variety.
Learn the difference.
You started a thread about progression.
I gave my thoughts.
Your response and logic are flawed.
after a while hidden class unlocked by special quest its pretty stupid.
And I still think gain your second class by going around wiped what's 30x bigger than Skyrim its bad idea. Because you have to run like stupid and wait ppl to upload information about skills what you couldn't find