- Jul 27, 2019
- 255
- 281
IMO an elegant way of raising arcane and physique would be to simply add them to the perk tree nodes in addition to their normal effects. Like maybe +5 physique per combat node, +5 arcane per spellcasting node. Though I do realize the current perk tree is a very crude placeholder, so those normal effects are in dire need of a revision too. Hell, basically every balance-related number in the game is just very roughly eyeballed, so what I'm driving at here is just a general principle along the lines of "automatically increase core stats as the player levels".*snip*
You're almost certainly right that content is going to be moved out of Dominion and dispersed around the larger world as the game grows. I'm in two minds about it. Not doing it will make the later game boring; doing it will make the early game boring. I like LT a lot precisely because it's very 'dense'; the entire progression from start to endgame is compressed into what you correctly identify as a tutorial. I'm not sure I'm going to like it as much when it's spread out across a sprawling open-world RPG; I have a sinking feeling it's going to end up feeling diluted.
From a purely technical point of view, you're right. The easiest way to balance the game would be through a 'vertical slice'; make some early-game enemies and weapons and perks and balance them, make some late-game enemies and weapons and perks and balance them, and then fill in the middle using this progression framework as a guide. As you do so, you can move the late-game items out of the older zones and into the newly implemented ones. That's the rational way to approach this.*snip*
The problem with that is that it's not going to feel good to us irrational meatbags. Why would the people supporting this game get excited about updates if every new thing in them was guaranteed to be worse than what they already have from previous versions? Every single online game understands this, that's why power creep exists. If your players have played previous versions of your game, you can't add new items (exclusively) into the middle of progression, you have to tack (at least some of) them onto the end and extend that progression so that the older players who have already reached that end have somewhere further to go. But as you noted and as we know from existing games that do this, that creates its own set of problems. Like every other dev who releases their game piecemeal, Inno's between a rock and a hard place.
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