This week was pretty much all about the slow climb of designing all the new stuff for co-op (classes, monsters, quests, etc), and building the new systems they depend on (scaling encounters to party size, adding spawn/transform battle actions for more gimmick heavy battles that co-op is better suited for, etc).

When I actually sat down to design new classes for co-op I finally had to admit an uncomfortable truth to myself: this game is just not that well suited to heavy character customization. On a mechanical level you need a certain level of fluidity to make the kind of customization I was pushing for work. But the game isn’t that fluid, it’s more rigid. So when I kept trying to inject such heavy customization into it, players were just ending up with generic characters built to compensate for each subclass’s shortcomings so they could do anything, rather than classes that pushed them into interesting advantages and disadvantages that require using different strategies to compensate. It wasn’t especially obvious in PVP, but it’s blindingly obvious in co-op where you’re trying to build very specific roles for each character.

I spent a lot of time trying to think of another class system that still offered limited customization. Nothing really seemed right. So I just went in the complete opposite direction: players pick one class, that class has a completely static progression. If this works well, I might go back and inject some mild customization into it. Or I might just leave it alone.

I’m still in the process of designing these classes. I did most of the necessary programming additions while deciding on what route to go with classes, so next week will primarily be focusing on design stuff. It’s a little harrowing. This is probably the third time I’ve built sample player abilities, and the fifth time I’ve had to redesign or heavily alter the monster encounters. It’s starting to feel like I’ve been remaking the same game over and over. Here’s to this hopefully being the last time, even though it’s probably not.