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Absurd amount of character costumization
arsnn
Member, Intrepid Pack, Alpha One
Now this is not gonna be a popular topic or a something that can spark a discussion, but i nevertheless want to shine some light on this.
I have the concern with the sheer amount of layers of costumization for the character, the experience of building your character may end up beeing a convoluted mess.
I had a look at what is currently communicated to be planned for building and progressing your character.
Here are the layers:
-64 classes - The combination of the base archetypes and augments
-4 Schools of augments + racial + guild + node + social org. augments
-8 Armor pieces
-5 Jewelry slots
-Armor types - Heavy, medium, light
-A lot of weapons ~around 18 for now - With different attack speed and range
-The ability to wield any weapon with any class
-Passives that can heavily change the armors/weapons power and synergies
-Gear and weapon enchanting
-Over enchanting
-Crafter influence on the stats of the gear
-Racial stats (+maybe hitbox differences)
-Ability system tree that provides a lot of abilities, with a limited pool to chose from
-Passive tree for weapons
-A combat system that has to work in the context of small scale, medium scale and laaaaaaarge scale for both PvP and PvE
...and this all wrapped into a system that has to work out for both tab target and action combat.
The amount of combinations and permutations are simply unparalled. Where most mmos struggle to find any a decent equilibrium for balance with around 4-5 layers of costumization, Intrepid seems to attempt to make everything subject to player choice and currently has ammassed systems that outshine everything in terms of depth per system and also in overall quantity of systems by orders of a magnitude, that give me headaches.
They combine systems where the players can adapt to bad choices relatively quickly, like the selection of abilities and respecing, with layers that have a lot of fricition like:
Crafter influence (where the crafter is soft locked into his choices and adaptation is locked behind long term progression), shared progression (guild+ node augments, where your influence might be rather limited),
permanent choices (like racial influence).
Personally i dont see how the current scope can be managed in terms of balance and yield a satifisfactory and meaningfull system, where choices seem impactfull, diverse in character builds and not over complex. With all those layers, individual choices may end up not feeling like having any impact at all, while the over all path of costumization is so important and far reaching that players feel forced to go certain directions.
I could easily see how a group of players with decent choices and 10 levels ahead, walkd around verra like untouchable dietys and in turn may monopolize some of those choices eternally.
Does anyone share my concern or am i too overdramatic?
Is there anything you would cut of the system?
I have the concern with the sheer amount of layers of costumization for the character, the experience of building your character may end up beeing a convoluted mess.
I had a look at what is currently communicated to be planned for building and progressing your character.
Here are the layers:
-64 classes - The combination of the base archetypes and augments
-4 Schools of augments + racial + guild + node + social org. augments
-8 Armor pieces
-5 Jewelry slots
-Armor types - Heavy, medium, light
-A lot of weapons ~around 18 for now - With different attack speed and range
-The ability to wield any weapon with any class
-Passives that can heavily change the armors/weapons power and synergies
-Gear and weapon enchanting
-Over enchanting
-Crafter influence on the stats of the gear
-Racial stats (+maybe hitbox differences)
-Ability system tree that provides a lot of abilities, with a limited pool to chose from
-Passive tree for weapons
-A combat system that has to work in the context of small scale, medium scale and laaaaaaarge scale for both PvP and PvE
...and this all wrapped into a system that has to work out for both tab target and action combat.
The amount of combinations and permutations are simply unparalled. Where most mmos struggle to find any a decent equilibrium for balance with around 4-5 layers of costumization, Intrepid seems to attempt to make everything subject to player choice and currently has ammassed systems that outshine everything in terms of depth per system and also in overall quantity of systems by orders of a magnitude, that give me headaches.
They combine systems where the players can adapt to bad choices relatively quickly, like the selection of abilities and respecing, with layers that have a lot of fricition like:
Crafter influence (where the crafter is soft locked into his choices and adaptation is locked behind long term progression), shared progression (guild+ node augments, where your influence might be rather limited),
permanent choices (like racial influence).
Personally i dont see how the current scope can be managed in terms of balance and yield a satifisfactory and meaningfull system, where choices seem impactfull, diverse in character builds and not over complex. With all those layers, individual choices may end up not feeling like having any impact at all, while the over all path of costumization is so important and far reaching that players feel forced to go certain directions.
I could easily see how a group of players with decent choices and 10 levels ahead, walkd around verra like untouchable dietys and in turn may monopolize some of those choices eternally.
Does anyone share my concern or am i too overdramatic?
Is there anything you would cut of the system?
0
Comments
If no, then we may need to produce strength buffing rings too.
Good for bussiness
Not every choice is going to be dumped on us right away either, keep in mind our in game time will directly corelate to what is available and most of it you will be able to change after selected. I am not worried, but testing is what will tell us for sure.
What needs to be balance (and so "not any bad choice" is the 8 primary archetype, and each weapon/armor type. To avoid the "no one uses sword" and "you play summoner ? sad for you"
Those element will be the real base of builds imo : with all augment out of secundary archetype we could even imagine viable build with augment from other sources, and so... build viable with any of the 8 secundary archetype avaible... (because it could end have no impact in the end)
For stuff aside armortype/weapon type, this will be stats... Considering the game is well designed, some build will favor a kind of stat instead of another. Speed build, critical build, avoidance build, pary build, etc.
And when you see all part you can easy change on build (augment, and stuff) you realise that there are not so much risk that bad choices leads to un-enjoyable game... just try to find out what are your bad choices, and adjust the combination
The problem is where the "bad choices" are on spot you can't change. or only hardly. the fact we can, thru a quest, change secundary archetype limit even this potential "bad choice"
Race and class are a matter of preference (except for minmaxers obviously). Gear will be dictated by your passives and those passives would probably come from preference too, so half of your build builds itself.
We don't know whether enchanting is limited by gear type, nor do we know the extent of all the non-class augments. Both of those might be quite limited or just give small bonuses that add up at the end, but can still be just picked on preference w/o completely fucking up your character (they're also changeable iirc). And OE is just vertical boost, so not really a separate branch of customization.
And as for balancing, they already said that classes will be rps and the bigger scale will be balanced around parties and ideally "one of each archetype" composition. As for massive pvp, it's more about player tactics and strategies than pure gameplay balance. As long as the party balance works out, the massive pvp will follow suit.
All in all, I think the game will satisfy all the minmaxers with its variety, while most casuals will either don't care about it or just look up a guide (of which there'll be a ton, I'm sure). Also, don't forget about the possibility that the choices themselves might be really limited due to the difficulty of the required content or pvp around that content. So while the potential minmaxer from a strong guild will have a shitton of things to tinker with, a casual with a few hours a week of gameplay might only have the basic gear and barely any non-class augments because he didn't have the time to acquire them. And the class itself will take them a ton of time to fully augment, so there's that too.
Obviously all of this will have to be properly tested, but right now I don't quite share your concerns.
The big quest is will all these classes be viable? How many viable tanks, healers, dps, support classes will there be out of the 64? How many meme classes are there?
I see the vast amount of customization as a way to make every class viable, making it more of a boon than a bane.
It's still early, we really don't know what combat really looks like, skills/abilities, even progression.