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December 28th, 2013

December 28th, 2013 published on

Even a week out it’s hard to digest the new version. Most of the week was spent stabilizing it (which we’re getting pretty close to now), which makes it somewhat difficulty to form a cognate impression of it when most of the time was spent replaying the first third of the game again and again. The other thing that throws it off is simply that the numerical balance of a lot of things is still all kinds of off. But what’s clear is that pacing is going to need a lot of work to cope with the changes- getting to about the halfway point took an hour for 3 players. Not entirely surprising since a lot of the new map stuff adds thought overhead to the game (among other things). The first move to fix it will probably be cutting it down to 6 difficulty ranges instead of 9. I could even see dropping it all the way down to 3 if necessary.

As predicted, the new combat system seems to be extremely effective at making player vs player far more interesting. It has even made 2v1 matches more balanced than before which is a somewhat unexpected side effect. Having rewards tied to location combined with many areas having low-risk actions for players to earn from has also created an effect where it’s relatively easy for players behind the level curve to catch up to everyone else.

Presently the biggest question of where to go with this thing is how to deal with enemies in the new battle system. Right now when they have static patterns there’s a big advantage to players who have fought the same enemy in previous games. There’s two ways to fix this: either let players know about the enemy’s next move, or partially randomize monster patterns each session. The latter is the far more likely solution to go with- trying to predict a pattern and then exploiting it has proved far more enjoyable than I expected. Lots of exciting player gambling. The biggest win, though, is that randomizing the patterns means players have reason to pay attention to other player’s turns to learn about enemies ahead of time (along with having a minor element of memorization to keep players focused on the game).

So really the big question is where to go from here. At this point the work branches off in several directions: enormous amounts of content needs to be planned and implemented, additional interface functionality needs to get added (and then the interface presentation needs to be overhauled entirely), optimization and clean up desperately need to be applied in a few areas where all the radical changes left scars, fundamental basic features are still missing, support for expected configuration options needs to be added, and plenty more! Right now my priority is still to get this second draft stabilized, balanced, and paced correctly so I can start evaluating feedback, but after that a whole lot of big picture planning is going to have to get done for the next year. Right now I’m not sure if I want to dabble in each, or focus down on one category at a time. As I said before, there’s a ton to do but I’m no longer worried about it.