Posts made by KairosVal

This is an idea I had a while back over at Feature Spotlight #1: Three Races, Three Gameplays, but I thought I'd mention it again here to see what people think.

Firstly to get this out of the way: This would not be in the game at launch, and maybe shouldn't be in the game at all. It would probably require quite a bit of work to implement, it would only impact evil aligned players who choose to opt-in to the concept, and arguably we could sort of do this using out-of-game resources like discord to organize things. So it might be that the development time could be better spent on features that would benefit the whole playerbase.

But disclaimer aside: I think it would be kind of fun to have a Babilis worshiping human running around Syndesia that has an ability that lets them summon a demon from Tartaros. Which is to say, summon in an actual player character demon, controlled by that player and counting as a summon in the summoner's creature cap.

I'm planning on playing a hellfire demon, and I think that this could be really neat. It would take some work, obviously. But so many of the pieces of the puzzle for that kind of gameplay are just sort of sitting there in the game design, waiting to be implemented. It sort of jumps out at you as obvious once you've seen it - or, at least, it does to me.

So just some rough back-of-the-envelope thoughts from my original comment:

For example, an evil human can cast a summoning spell that will teleport in a PC demon. A demon can be mentioned by name, or can be left unnamed and mentioned only by race. The PC can opt in or out. Unnamed will jump around online demon players until someone decides to opt in.

The demon comes in and can fight for or trade with the summoner. If the demon does something illegal while under the 'control' of the human, the human carries all the legal penalties for the action as per normal Sundesian law.

The demon can opt to teleport back to Tartaros whenever they feel like it.

The human has a banish ability to try and force the demon back to Tartaros whenever the human likes it, but the demon has a chance to resist banishment based on stats and abilities.

The summoning ability has a duration, at the end of which the banish effect will automatically trigger. The human has the option to trigger the banish effect early if desired.

So long as the human doesn't banish the demon and the demon stays within proximity of the summoner, the demon gets to remain in Syndesia without the normal penalties. But once banishment happens the summoning effect ends, and if the demon resists then they begin to suffer the normal penalties.

Prometheus has already commented on it here:

@prometheus said in Feature Spotlight #1: Three Races, Three Gameplays:

@KairosVal that's a nice original idea, but it would take a considerable amount of work to implement it - so, as you've said, it's unlikely we'll consider such mechanics early on. For sure there's no limit to how deep and creative we can go when it comes to racial mechanics though, so never say never!

So I'm not really expecting anything any time soon. But I think it's a nifty concept that I'd really enjoy.

Thoughts?

@fibs said in Will there be a way to change your Attributes?:

The philosophy you just gave us is directly contradicted by every single element of the game that is not the raw character attributes as well as by common sense. Do your Talents not matter because you can respec them easily? Does your gear not matter because you can change your clothes? Does the planet you're on not matter because you can go to another planet more-or-less freely depending on your race and alignment?
Of course that isn't how it works, and it doesn't apply to character attributes either.

Turns out we actually agree about quite a lot, we're just using different words to do it.

Decisions are only interesting if they have consequences. A decision's consequences only apply until such a time as you can unmake that decision. So the impact of each decision is tied to the duration between making and unmaking each decision. The longer the duration, the greater the consequence, and the more interesting and important the decision becomes.

1. So your hotbar selections do matter. But only until your next rest.

2. Your gear selections do matter. But only until you lose, break, swap, or replace them.

3. Your planet selection does matter. But only until you move to a different one.

4. Your attribute selection matters. I believe current design is that a one-off respec ability will be offered early in a character's progression, after which it is permanent.

5. Your talent progression matters. It is permanent.

6. Your race selection matters always, it is permanent.

Listed in this way, we have a gradual rise from short-term to long-term durations for the decisions we will be making in the game. I don't think that this means the game design is contradicting itself. I think this is a way to have different mechanics that complement each other to lead to an interesting and compelling whole.

But perhaps the most key thing you've said is this part here:

And just like Talents have a limitation on how quick you can learn them, when you can respec, and when you can swap hotbar slots, stats should also have a limitation on when and how they can change so that players aren't ever-shifting slime-demon Mary Sues.

Exactly!

So it seems that this is where we agree: Decisions should have meaningful consequences. The faster a decision can be unmade, the less significant it's consequences. So there needs to be a duration between making a decision and unmaking a decision if that decision is going to be meaningful. We agree that such durations should be nonzero, and that some decisions should have longer or shorter durations than others.

What we disagree about is where that duration should max out. I prefer more permanence than you, because I am trying to maximize how meaningful the decisions are, and to create a sense of consistent identity for the character into which I will be dumping many hours of play time so that I can get invested in a sense of ownership over my character. You prefer the middle ground of not-trivially-changeable-but-also-not-permanent because that'll give you more flexibility to enjoy different playstyles down the track as your tastes and as the game itself gradually evolves.

I think that this is a reasonable disagreement, made in good faith, based on our different subjective preferences regarding what we both hope to enjoy from the game over our time playing it.

And I don't think that either side of our disagreement here is "completely stupid and bluntly contrary to every other aspect of not only this game's explicit design but good game design in general". I get that this is an internet forum and hyperbole is just par for the course. But even so, that's a little strong, don't you think?

The romantic concept of "yours tailored to you" is defined by adjustment over time.

So this brings us around to where I think there might be room for some compromise.

What I want to avoid is trivially rebuilding your entire character once an hour, or once a day, or once a week, or even once a month. I prefer permanence, and in response you've brought up adjustment over time.

Adjustment over time is not the same as a respec. And that's... Actually pretty interesting as a concept.

It reminds me of a MUD I used to play ages ago. Your attribute selection on character creation was essentially permanent. You couldn't even boost your attributes with gear: Gear could boost secondary statistics like skills or attack chance or damage or health. But not the underlying attributes that set everything up.

It was a humorous, satirical fantasy setting. One of the NPC merchants was a retrophrenologist. Phrenology in real life was a quack pesudoscience that suggested you could infer information about someone's personality from the lumps and depressions in someone's head and skull. So in the fantasy setting, the retrophrenologist's job was to change the shape of your skull to bring about a desired change in your character's attributes. With a hammer.

So you'd go in, pay a large sum of in-game currency, the NPC would wallop you with the hammer, dealing massive damage and applying a status debuff for a few hours. In exchange, you would transfer one point from a stat you no longer wanted, into a stat that you wanted to increase. And there was a time limit, something like only one retrophrenologist visit per day, or per week. Something like that.

Obviously, that specific implementation of this kind of mechanic would not fit the style and tone of Fractured.

However, this is what a gradual adjustment over time would look like. Not a full respec once a week, but a gradual shifting of points between abilities. Something like that would actually be fairly reasonable to me. I'd be happiest with something very slow - one point moved per real-time week - but that might be way too slow for you.

But regardless of where you or I would want to set the dial for rate-of-change-throttle, I think that something along these lines would be a little bit more interesting than just having a full attribute respec a week/month/year/whatever.

Thoughts?

@jetah said in Will there be a way to change your Attributes?:

@kairosval said in Will there be a way to change your Attributes?:

I'd get bored somewhere around Act III and stop playing.

If anything I'd like the campfire system to be more restrictive than is currently planned... But I can acknowledge that I'm probably on the extreme end of the playerbase in terms of preferring permanence in all aspects of character progression, so I don't expect the devs to change their designs out just for little old me.

vanilla act 3 was where it got really hard!

you can be as restrictive as you want with regards to the camp fire. You can ironman it as hard or easy as you want

Yeah, I suspect I'll be pretty close to ironmanning it anyway. ^_^

I have a fairly restrictive min/max build in mind that'll make me really good at a small number of things. It'll be interesting to see how flexible I can be within that stat distribution within the release version of the ability system.

One question though.

It seems weird that the cost of attribute increase for 7 and 8 are both 3, but that the cost of attribute increase for 10-15 is 2 per level. Then the cost per attribute goes back to 3 for 16 and 17, then up to 4 for 18 to 21.

Having 7 and 8 cost three seems like a weird deviation from the rest of the pattern.

I'm not complaining about it. Just curious as to the reasoning.

What's the deal with 7 and 8 costing three points?

So if I've done my math right, I should be able to set up my Hellfire demon with the following. Cost in brackets.

STR: 21 (27)
DEX: 10 (10)
INT: 15 (20)
CON: 21 (42)
PER: 6 (0)
CHA: 6 (0)

That's a total cost of 99. I can live with one point of wastage.

I'll have to keep paying attention to make sure that this will give me the kind of playstyle I want, and to check that I'm comfortable what the penalties of taking both PER and CHA as dump stats.

But being super-tanky and hitting really hard while throwing a lot of fire around sounds super fun. Looking forward to it.

@benseine said in Question towards the devs;:

I would really suggest to do a justice system spotlight next

I think I remember reading something about a planned spotlight on this already coming down the pipeline. Can't find it right now though.

@finland said in Clarification on the target audience:

Yeah that's what everyone hope! About the "you just had to pay attention", well mostly of the time I get back to home so tired that I prefer easy peasy things

That's fair: EVE isn't the game for you. And that's okay.

@finland said in Clarification on the target audience:

@kairosval said in Clarification on the target audience:

I used to play as a carebear miner in EVE Online, but even there the potential to get ganked in highsec meant that I had to stay alert and actually pay attention, and that made things more interesting. I think that mostly-carebear-with-some-spice is a good thing, and that if you give carebears the ability to opt out of the spice altogether then enough will do that such that opting for the spice becomes a disadvantage and no-one will pick it.

You have just summoned the worst game ever with the worst cancer community/player base ;). I'm wondering why none of the PvP players I met in this forum so far has never mentioned once to go kill players around Tartaros XD

I know EVE gets a bad rap, but I didn't and still don't see it. It's really not that hard to avoid the gankers in EVE if you just stay alert and keep an eye on local comms. And the gankers are actually pretty useful for taking out bots and discouraging inattentive and over-cautious miners from risky systems, freeing up those systems for players like me.

I think I got ganked once when I was just starting out because I undocked from a trade hub in a mining barge without checking local or mail to discover my guild had been wardec'd. This made it entirely my own fault. But I just scraped off the salt and learned how to not make that kind of mistake again. So I didn't. And I never lost another ship to player activity again.

So the ganking thing was never really a problem for me, you just had to pay attention to what you were doing. I've never really understood what people were complaining about. I always just figured it was themepark-MMO players complaining about EVE failing to be a themepark-MMO... But that's like criticizing a dog for failing to be a cat. It's technically accurate, but somewhat misses the point of having a dog in the first place.

I don't think that Fractured is setting out to be another themepark-MMO either, particularly given the forced-player-interaction-economy thing. That's a good move in my view because the themepark-MMO market is extremely saturated, and I think what the Fractured devs have in mind here is meaningfully distinctive in the MMO marketplace. Really looking forward to it.

Salut @YacineBrutal!

@miffi said in Economy and PvE:

The devs have stated in some posts that the best gear will be crafted but that items can still be found on mobs, they just wont be as good. Certain materials can only be found on different planets so it seems like each will have its own economy but going on the demon planet comes with the risk of losing it all very easily but thats why anyone would play that race in the first place right?

Not at all, human. Come to Tartaros. Trade with us. There are riches to be had from trade.

You can trust us to keep you safe.

I think it's probably best solved by balancing the penalties for being there.

A demon in Arboreus will receive significant penalties while there - even more than when visiting Syndesia when there's no eclipse. We'll be significantly weaker.

If there's too much ganking going on, the devs can balance that with harsher penalties. Harsher penalties on all individuals, or maybe increase the penalties on each individual demon based on the number of demons nearby to to make zerging inefficient.

I plan to play a demon character, and my expectation is that I'll hang out on Tartaros to build up my resources and join up with a guild, then once I can afford to lose a set of gear we can go raiding in Syndesia on a regular basis. Then once I start getting good at that and I want the next level of challenge, I'll be up for a suicidal raid on Arboreus.

But I fully expect to die in Arboreus >90% of the time I go there. The penalties should be steep because I grok the need for a mostly safe PvE setting... And also, that's what makes it a challenge in the first place.

If the devs do change it around so that demons can't do PvP on Arboreus at all to make it fully safe, then I do feel like that would take something valuable away in terms of the lore and the setting. I think the distinction between mostly splitting the playerbase and fully splitting the playerbase is a meaningful one with negatives on both sides that go beyond the interests of just carebears and PvPers.

I used to play as a carebear miner in EVE Online, but even there the potential to get ganked in highsec meant that I had to stay alert and actually pay attention, and that made things more interesting. I think that mostly-carebear-with-some-spice is a good thing, and that if you give carebears the ability to opt out of the spice altogether then enough will do that such that opting for the spice becomes a disadvantage and no-one will pick it.

But even if the devs went with a full split, I'd live with it. There'll still be lots of hairless monkeys to hunt in Syndesia. I'd still disagree, but its no biggie.

The A compilation of everything we know about Fractured thread links through to this:

@prometheus said in The knowledge system and cookie cutter builds.:

@Kris you'll likely get a few free stat respecs too, yes, but it's hard to tell right now exactly how many and when.

From memory (can't find the quote) I think it's been discussed that the devs don't want your attribute pick on character creation to be completely set in stone, to allow for a situation where a player learns more about how the game works and comes to regret their initial pick. The idea is to not force that player to throw their character away and have to start over to get a different attribute distribution.

However, the overall point of attribute distributions is that they're supposed to be permanent to make your character your character. The attribute distribution should be a decision that has consequences - because in the absence of consequences, the decision is kind of meaningless.

One of the reasons that I found Diablo III to be so boring was that it was way too easy to swap around a character build. In Diablo II my character was my character, and the decisions I made during progression had long term consequences. In Diablo III I could just exit combat, click a few buttons, swap out some gear, and presto-chango I had an entirely different character build. So my character was completely indistinguishable from the same character type played by any other player, so I wasn't invested in the character, so I wasn't invested in the game, and I'd get bored somewhere around Act III and stop playing.

So I like the idea that race, attributes and background will permanent* and impactful. If it's too easy to swap them out then the decisions aren't meaningful.

If anything I'd like the campfire system to be more restrictive than is currently planned... But I can acknowledge that I'm probably on the extreme end of the playerbase in terms of preferring permanence in all aspects of character progression, so I don't expect the devs to change their designs out just for little old me.

So is it spam if someone just posts in this thread to get in their forum message for the day?

I'm a fan of all of this. Death should cost you something, preparing for the environment should be meaningful, and the tradeoffs between equipment should involve something more than just having bigger numbers.

Hidey ho!

@vengu said in ABILITY LEARNING:

I am pretty certain that eventually fansites will spoil exactly how every ability is earned. It's not something that can easily be avoided. Randomization won't help because it takes away the flavor of every ability. It would be weird if the raise undead spell is learned by picking a bunch of flowers. If you don't like being spoiled, the best way to avoid it is by simply avoiding those fansites.

Pseudo-randomization done right can be amazing for reducing or eliminating the way fan sites can ruin discovery in games.

But you're exactly right that, regarding the knowledge system, it would be very difficult to do this effectively in something like fractured without losing the flavor of the system.

It's a shame. I've seen pseudo-randomization done once that was amazing for a potion/poison crafting system on a MUD. But it's just so difficult to apply that kind of thinking outside of that kind of that specific example. It's a damn shame.

Good news everybody!

I remembered to get my daily message in today.

Mechanically? None of them.

In my experience, mechanics that work well in a pen-and-paper setting don't always translate well to a videogame setting. The medium is different, and that shapes how the mechanics play out... And for some reason it just does't feel right.

From the look of things you have a martial arts body of knowledge, which arguably could be read as being monk-like in nature. And the Devs might even decide to have a 'stunning fist' or a 'quivering-palm' ability in that tree.

But it still wouldn't be a D&D monk, because the overall mechanics and world are too different.

Thematically? I'm pretty sure we'll be able to at least approximate standard D&D classes and tropes, so I guess something like a monk or a warlock would be fun to play with. But not at the expense of changing the artistic style and direction of Fractured itself.