A few spoilers
-
So, I have promised on discord to make a post with a few spoilers on what you may find in the next version of the game, and that I will do.
Please note that I have only a partial knowledge of what is to come. I simply had a way to take a look at the version under test, and it wasn't even the most recent version.
With that said, I guess that if we are talking about news, I really have to open with this:
There's a lot to unravel in this image.
First of all, there is now a thing called "Rank". This is a value tied to your character which increases as you increase your knowledge points.
Based on your rank you will have a certain amount of talents and a maximum proficiency level in schools (more on this later).
That's right, talents are no longer unlocked with KPs. Instead, you simply get more of them by increasing your knowledge points.
This by the way is true also for skills. You no longer spend KP to unlock them. You discovered a skill? Well you can use it! No more unlocking required, it's yours from the get go.
What this means is that you no longer have the risk of not getting to unlock talents because your spent too much on skills. KPs are simply no longer spent. This by the way also comes with a drawback. You can no longer focus early on the talents to unlock all of them as soon as possible.
The ranks are harder to get the more you have. This means that getting your first talents will be quite fast, but getting to 60 talents will take a while. To give some numbers to this "while", at 80k you already have 30 talents. How much for 60 talents? You are looking at more than 400k.
This brings the game back to the original idea that characters should be ready to join the fight very fast, but that the game should offer the possibility for dedicated players to push their limits to get an edge. Previously if you min maxed correctly, after you hit 200k KP you no longer had a reason to do any other activity. Now if you want every last talent point (and school proficiency) you will need to gather every last point of knowledge.
I believe that the game will benefit quite a lot from this system. Especially new players will be a lot less prone to false starts.
Moving on to the next big topic... school proficiencies!
So what are those? Well to know what they are I first have to show you how the tooltip of a skill looks like now, and what better skill to spoil than the good old fireball?
This graphic which I took from the new wiki (yes, there is a new wiki coming) reconstructs quite well what you will find in game, thanks to the marvelous work of our Wiki Guardian GorTavaro.
This often mistreated skill has received quite the buff in the new version! But what is that huge number we read there? That's a 50! Does it really mean that a fireball can inflict 50x INT damage? Well... yes and no. Depends on your proficiency in the pyromancy school. You see that there are 2 numbers there. 25 to 50. Those with a proficiency level of 0 will cast it with a (very respectable) 25XInt damage, those with the maximum proficiency (level 10) will cast a quite scary 50xInt spell. Any other proficiency level scales linearly, so for example at proficiency 4 you will cast at 35 X Int.
All skills have effects which scale with proficiency, but they don't all scale in the same way. Here, get a few more examples so that you get an idea:
Now, as you can imagine this new system required a redesign of all skills. And redesigned they were. You will find all of them here on the old wiki https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spells_%26_Abilities?so=search
They have some minor mistakes and they don't look as well as they do on the new wiki, but in the mean time it should sate your hunger.Key takeaways from the redesign:
-
Almost all spells are now castable in medium armor. Only the assassination skills are still forcing you to wear the light armors. But sweet heavens are those assassination skills powerful...
-
The schools have changed, and all the skills were sorted into their new schools. In particular, the offensive melee skills have been sorted into schools specialised in one type of weapon. Those skills are usable only with weapons of that type!
-
A lot of skills were added. Especially non magical ones.
Now I know that many of you by this point have a burning question: How do you increase your proficiency level?
The answer is orbs.
Remember well this icon here. You are looking at potentially the most sought after and frequently traded item in the future of Fractured!
Now, what I say here is hearsay, the version which I played didn't have them yet. That icon was obtained with... unconventional means
(kids at home, don't do this).There's supposed to be a different orb for each of the schools, and when consumed it increases your knowledge of that school. These orbs are obtained from "Elite" mobs. What are those? No idea either, sorry
. Apparently, they are supposed to be about as rare as recipes.And you won't need a single one. Each proficiency level you get requires progressively more orbs to unlock. Similarly to talents, unlocking the first ranks of proficiency in a school will be easy, unlocking the last ones will not. Consider also that there is a minimum rank required to gain a certain level of proficiency.
Same concept repeated. Easy gains of power until you reach a good level, then the path to power gets rougher the further in you go.
"Completing" a character is now a feat. And a very long term one.
Oh by the way, the monster too have heard of this concept and wanted in. The higher the difficulty (challenge rating) of a mob and the higher will be its proficiencies. You don't understand what "A world of pain" means until you meet the new dragons. Remember that cute bone wall that the skeletal dragon throws at you? Well that's inflicting 80 bleeding stacks now. And let's not talk about what his breath has become!
Well that's it!
Hope that these spoilers will keep you company while we wait for Fractured to be available to play again!
-
-
thank you so much for this little sneak peak
-
finally we got some old fractured back, its great and amazing.
hope to see it soon.
thanks @Prometheus !!!!!
-
Even more great reasons to group up.
I am a bit worried about solo players or those who play in low population time windows.
-
@OlivePit said in A few spoilers:
Even more great reasons to group up.
I am a bit worried about solo players or those who play in low population time windows.This, at least they can be traded. If solo aspect of pvp is the same, then it will be worse than it was previously.
-
@OlivePit when i play must of the time im alone, its hard to play alone, but this changes will make it easer, i think, since now i can still work to be better.
and not just stuck in front of a wall like last time.
-
Man. I can't say I'm as hyped about this game as I once was, but I do actually feel optimistic for the first time in a while. Keep it up guys!
-
sighs
With each update they divert more and more from the original pitch.
Instead of an exploration and achievement rewarding ability leveling, you now have a hamster wheel grind system. Instead of having a choice and the possibility to play smart, you are now forced to grind longer to be the same as everybody else.Thanks for the spoilers though, I'm going to play and test, but I wish Fractured would head less towards the dime a dozen MMORPG.
-
@Logain said in A few spoilers:
sighs
With each update they divert more and more from the original pitch.
Instead of an exploration and achievement rewarding ability leveling, you now have a hamster wheel grind system. Instead of having a choice and the possibility to play smart, you are now forced to grind longer to be the same as everybody else.Thanks for the spoilers though, I'm going to play and test, but I wish Fractured would head less towards the dime a dozen MMORPG.
I have to admit that my first reaction was the same. I thought that it was a compromise compared to the initial idea of the game. But then after giving some thought I grew to like these changes.
I will try to explain why.The game went through many phases regarding the concept of "Progress", especially related to the talents.
The initial idea, the one found in the design diaries, was to have the characters start already battle ready. They would have no talents, but talents were meant as a "Plus" for completionists which should have given them an edge but not one so great that a non "complete" char couldn't fight them.
Then it came the actual implementation of the talents, and they were STRONG. A character without talents had no chances against one with them.
Around an year ago, it came the nerf to talents. Pretty much all the damage talents were removed, with the only notable bandit left being cantrip mastery. This meant that finally a new character would inflict almost the same damage as an old one. The talents though still offered a lot, especially in terms of resilience, accuracy, mana regen and critical chances. Most importantly, they contained some linchpin effects which defined builds, like encumbrance reduction, super dodge, poison mastery and so on. This meant that some builds were simply not working before they got 15 or even 30 talents.
This led to the second change. The first talents points were greatly decreased in cost, at the expenses of the last talents which instead were increased. This meant that it was easier for a character to gather the first necessary talent points for his build. The characters with 60 talent points though, were still quite advantaged, so you were pushed to reach 60 talent points as soon as possible. While improved, it was still a system which rewarded min maxing. If you wanted to explore, learn skills, fight new mobs and similar, the system was actively penalizing you, because you were "wasting" knowledge points on skills instead of putting them in talents. To be "optimal" you had to know exactly how many skills you needed for your build, get only those and fight only those mobs which gave you enough KP to achieve 60 talents and that didn't require you to learn new skills to fight them. This isn't what a player expects from Fractured.
This new system fixes that. It gives the players to freedom to explore and go wherever they want. You no longer have to chase talents. Go around, explore, play the game and they will come on their own. Your character will grow in options simply because he is exploring new areas and learning new skills. I really like this a lot! This iteration is the closest one to the original vision out of all the ones we saw during alpha and beta! It is a compromise? Yes it is. It clearly is, a new character just created has no chances against a fully fledged one. But it can still pull his weight in a party.
Now, I get that your real issue isn't with the new skill and talent system. Your issue is with the proficiency system. In the original ideas, skill levelling was meant to be a quest system based on exploration, while now it is a loot hunt. While I may agree on this point, I would argue that we have very limited info in that area. We don't know where those "Elite monsters" are supposed to be. The journey system could reward some orbs for particular exploration feats. There's many avenues for the devs to tie exploration and proficiencies. You know that when I don't like some aspect of the game I don't hold back, but before I start doing that I want to see the actual implementation.
-
@Logain your right its not fully back to what was promised, but its a step in the right direction, we needed this progression, that was promised from day 1...
for getting the exploration we need to see how they going to implement the orb idea, if they going to limit the orb to 1 for any kind of creature, this will force you to explore in order to be stronger.
-
Sounds great
-
@spoletta said in A few spoilers:
(...)I thought that it was a compromise compared to the initial idea of the game(...)
My perception is different. The more time passed, the more the actual release date diverted from the initially planned Q3 2021, the more 'short cuts' had to be used in development, since money is starting to be more and more of an issue. I don't blame Dynamight Studios for that, it's normal and happens frequently. That said, I don't have to like it.
The 'original pitch' used to be horizontal instead of the standard vertical progression, gaining more versatility in combat instead of more raw power. That requires a lot of work, abilities and creatures have to be balanced and placed carefully.
As far as I recall, talents were planned initially, but you're right, they were/are far too strong in every implementation.As for the new system 'fixing' the issue of beginners spending their KP 'wrong', yes, that's correct. But at the same time, it does remove the possibility of meaningful decisions as well. Now everybody is simply the same (and has to grind far, far more, because you require double the KP to reach the same stage as before). I strongly disagree that this is the closest to a horizontal system that adds versatility instead of power. The original pitch always included spending your KP, having choice, not being 'just all the same' and grind day out day in.
As for the orbs, sure, I'm going to withhold my final judgement until I see the implementation. What I predict is one of two possibilities, either Legendaries are going to drop them (the very simple solution), or each type of creature is getting a new version (e.g. Elder Mountain Troll could be reused) with slightly adjusted values, that either has a fixed spawn or that is random part of chest events (like it was done with crystals).
I hope they prove me wrong, but I won't bet on that.
-
New and revamped starter classes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses:
Three new legends have awakened from their eternal slumber:
The point of interest system has received an update, now you not only see where a point of interest is, but the difficulty is color coded and after uncovering you are described the exact CR that can be found in that area:
The journal system awaits you, as a guide and entry aid, or to remind you what else you could kill, you are free to mark a quest from the journal on the quest tracker:
No pictures, only text:
Aerhen, Terra and Tutorial Island got map revisions, new pois, regions were revised, new enemies and challenges.
Have fun discovering yourself.
That's all for now, enjoy the information and expect new updates soon.
Your Fürst Axolotl.
-
Cool
-
@grofire If the orbs drop only from Elites, like Ogres, that's going to be a big problem (most players are only a few moments in a real group to take those down), let's hope thats not the case.
-
-
@Junkie Did you mean to do this?
-
@GorTavaro said in A few spoilers:
@Junkie Did you mean to do this(...)
Oh lord, I for the sake of my eyes and my sanity I wish the forum wouldn't allow direct embeds!
-
This post is deleted!
-
@DraxOakstaff said in A few spoilers:
@grofire If the orbs drop only from Elites, like Ogres, that's going to be a big problem (most players are only a few moments in a real group to take those down), let's hope thats not the case.
Friends is the answer you are looking for
