Making the imbue system more accessible
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Fractured has the best enchanting/imbuing system that I have met in my gaming experience. It is simply fantastic and one of the greatest perks it has over other games. The item/drop system that it generates is brilliant... and yet I'm sure that 99,5% of the players of this test never got to experience it.
That's because in the last test, the enchanting system was changed to the imbuing system, which uses gems to carry the enchanting effects. Good, no issues with that, it was a fine solution that also allowed to trade the enchants.
The problem is that now such a fanstatic system is gated behind a gem and gold cost. This can be good for advanced tier enchants, tier 2 and 3. You are chasing something advanced, so it is correctly gated behind a cost/effort.
Tier 1 enchants though should be very accessible. They provide that first important step of personalizing your equipment and give meaning to 90% of the items dropped by mobs. You can't gate this behind a gem and 500 gold.
Now, the gem is needed due the imbuing system. That's fine. But chipped gems must become very common. One in 10 goblins/bandits should drop one. And the cost must be a lot lower, like 50 gold. Enchanting your equip in tier 1 enchants should be something you do by default.
Looking around for the right properties, learning the correct combinations to make YOUR gear adds so much to the game, and makes for such a rich gaming experience that at least the basic level of it must be very accessible.
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I would suggest turning this into a tutorial and make a new tier 1 (so pushing everything else up a tier) that is much more basic and cheap, so that its easy to experiment with and provides a little benefit so that you can then understand what is needed for higher tier ones. That way it becomes an onboarding process and allows new players to have a goal for their tier 2 while also making it cheap enough that they can experiment and mess around with different ingredients to see what they want. Then when they see "oh I need a gem for tier 2" that gives them a goal.
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Have un-imbued gems give some basic mild bonus?
I did not test imbuing this alpha weekend as I usually rely on my guild to collect the mats as byproducts of hunting trips. I dont remember it costing 500 for a chipped tier 1 imbue, if that is true then it is too much. 100 at most. Giving players one as part of the tutorial should not even be a big deal as their first weapon / gear will be replaced within 24 hours once they kill some animals with better skins (dire wolf / warg).I dont think that the gems need to be more common, I got plenty from just mining ore. If I had wanted more I would have put up a buy order for them at 5-10 gold each (chipped) and would expect it to be filled by people who get them and would rather have the gold.
The problem would be locking players out of the starting town imbuing table after the tutorial is over... and making sure they can only use it for one enchantment... Tricky...
