Hello devs. I just had my first session in alpha and I am loving what I see so far. The game feels smooth and crafting is enjoyable. I like the informative tooltips and hope all aspects of the stats get more love. One thing I love about Torchlight is the tooltips show exactly what affects the skill and the final number given all the stats.

One thing I hope changes though are the arbitrary skill restrictions. By this I mean each skill can be locked away just because of armor type. I get some attacks should require a certain weapon, but even those should be as free as possible.

As it stands now, it feels like there are essential three classes in a class-less system; light armor, medium armor, and heavy armor. This makes me feel like I can't really make unique characters. I get a choice of one of the three armor classes, and then have to pick synergies from a restricted list.

What I would like to see are trade-offs for using skills that are currently locked by armor. Such as stealth skill requires light armor. If I put one heavy armor piece on, like a helm, bam no more stealth. Instead, what about modifying your stealth stat based on armor. If I have 100 stealth, putting on a helm could reduce it to 95. Putting on fullplate chest would reduce it to 50. This would make it much easier for me to be spotted, but it would be my choice.

For casting spells, instead of saying no, there could be other trade-offs. Casting a spell in full heavy armor could increase the mana cost and/or increase the cooldown.

Again, I love what I am seeing so far. I just hope we get more freedom with skills in the future.

I was just thinking, trade-offs I listed are penalties. Instead, what about bonuses for different armor types to add flare instead of negatives. This could be based on the skill and not just in general.

Example:
Magic Missile
Heavy Armor - Chance to finish spell even if interrupted.
Medium Armor - Higher chance to crit
Light Armor - Channel speed increased

Stealth
Heavy Armor - Cannot be crit while stealthed
Medium - Perception is higher while stealth (stealth hunters)
Light Armor - Increased movement while stealthed

A choice presents itself to you. You have no information for either direction. As an adventurer, which way do you choose to go?

There are many reasons to keep hunger going at a normal pace no matter what.

• It is one less thing to code
• Towns will be sieged and food usage could matter
• Not all towns will have easy access to food, and as such will be encouraged to trade with a farming town
• If you want to semi afk chat with your friends, do so in a tavern/bar and make an evening of it, eating and drinking in game too
• Resource sinks can be very healthy for the game
• It is currently very easy to stockpile food, and if you are in town, you won't be far from a chest full of it
  • If food spoils in future iterations of the game, then it could be more bothersome, but probably wouldn't be that bad
• If you are afk, you won't be needing to move around and can quickly eat something to jump into any random pvp
• It is one less thing to code, break, and be exploited

As you round the corner, your footing falters as you slip on the wet sloped stone. It is just enough slope that you slide for a while before catching on a loose brick on the wall. Righting yourself on the edge that is dry, you are able to make your way down the rest of the slope at your own pace. It leads past a door, but abruptly ends at a wall that looks like an afterthought. Your attention turns to the door, it is locked. The lock appears rusted on the outside, which can be expected for an old place this humid.

You could turn back, but reckon it would be easier to find a way through the door than fight your way back up the slope. What do you choose to do?

Grind is very subjective. I define it as doing something many times you don't want to do to achieve something unrelated to the task.

Grind Example: Kill 1000 orcs to level up to get the next armor crafting tier. The journey didn't drop crafting materials, and you don't care about killing orcs.

Maybe not Grind: Kill 1000 orcs to raise your faction with these NPCs that hate orcs. You wrote your backstory that you hate orcs and you really want the highest ranking with this faction.

There is a fine line to walk between offering reward for time spent to make the achievement worth it and arbitrarily inflating the requirements to the point of not being fun. Everyone draws this line in a different spot.

If you want to understand the wolf, you must study it. If it has an ability you want to learn, you must interact with it, and possibly kill it in multiple ways. The reward is you get the skill at the end. The fighting rewards the skill. The journey makes sense. This should help reduce the feeling of the grind as the journey matches the reward.

It is also said that you will only need to do a fraction of the progress to unlock the skills the creature has. At that point the skill is competitive if you want to use the skill. To level it up past tier 1 requires more investment, but the bonuses will be minor improvements.

Just have area loot. Clicking on any corpse brings them all up in a reasonable radius. Then outline the things in red and slightly visual border (for a11y) for things that would be negative karma. Confirmation dialogue configurable before commiting the negative karma.

Really not that complicated. I would be surprised if they haven't already planned this out. Single click top layer detection is quick to code, relatively. Next step will just take a little bit more to code. I just hope area loot has a few setting for those of us that want to pre-filter negative karma items.

It would raise the barrier of entry. If newbies can't ask for help, they will just leave and never come back. If they don't leave, then they leave the game world to look online for the info. The hardcore players will then have an advantage since they live in discord already.

On a flipside, you should get knowledge points for adding information to an in-game wiki, so players don't ever have to leave the game. Information should flow more easily, not other way around. Anything to keep people in the game and immersed.

Then, players could add info signs that link directly to the in-game wiki page that would help players the most.

With taxes added and armor and weapons being locked to poor in newbie cities, can we also make the enchanting tables work up to the first step for enchanting? Right now the tables are there and just don't allow clicking on them.

@Logain said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:

@Brueson said in Cities feel too much like grid paper:

(...)No changes needed to the coding(...)

You mean other than having to check and ensure that there's always a viable path from any entrance to every exit (a non trivial task). And other than having to reevaluate and communicate building privileges, since you need to know who is allowed to place something at that position (or destroy/use...). And other than having to reevaluate space per city, since you can 'mess up' or 'optimize' more with such a solution.

There's more, but I guess you can see that this is not a trivial click of a button implementation as you might be thinking.

No coding changes to the assets. Meaning no logic needed to merge them if they are touching. Same assets placement.

As for pathing, maybe non-trivial, but it has been done thousands of times now and pathing has to already exist for mobs to get around those buildings. One extra algorithm to check if building would end up with no valid paths to the front doors.

I'm confused why players expect the world from developers, but also defend them with weak tech excuses. They are professional developers making games for a living. Many probably have done some of this from scratch multiple times.

The only RNG I like is when the game world is randomly generated. Why? Because I want to go somewhere and see something no one else has seen. When it comes to PvP, I prefer to be able to out think my opponent, Chess. Recently a really fun variant is Chess 5D on steam... time travel and multiverse... god it is a amazing.

There are grids out there that don't feel like paper. Just change the build area to the entire city instead of a plot. Then instead of having a buffer of 1 to 2 blocks, buildings can be right up against each other. No changes needed to the coding and merging of the assets.

Don't use tech talk as an excuse to not do something as your first reaction. As for the 10-20 years, voxel games do way more than what I am asking for already. Just see Dual Universe. https://www.dualuniverse.game

There are other games where the individual pieces snap to each other and people do amazing things with. Also, City of Heroes, R.I.P., had some amazing player bases designed with some pretty limited building blocks. And CoH is closing on 2 decades old.

When building a city, the builds and plots are all disconnected. It feels like you are walking through a concept art test world where everything is evenly spaced to look at the models. They don't feel connected enough.

I think the cities need to be able to have the buildings jammed together. Instead of plots, you should get a building deed right and be able to place it anywhere within the city. With the only limitation is you can't build it to completely close off the entrance of another build. Think maze tower D rules, you can't block the flow.

If we can do this, then we can create more vibrant feeling cities that feel more alive. We can make alleys that people shouldn't go down. A maze of merchant and crafting buildings. A place where houses a jammed together along a path there resembles an actual town's housing district.

RNG is not fun and always counts as a negative for any game I play. There is always a better way if one is adventurous enough keep trying.

There have been too many personal stories where it takes me 10 times more tries to get something than any other person I've talked to. I think a named mob that is known to have a thing, should always have that thing. The influx of that thing controlled by how often it spawns.

For crafting, I will go above and beyond to get skills to give me 100% chance to make something. Like in Eve Echoes, I maxed out ORE invention so there is no way I can fail at making a blueprint with rare materials. I am the person that always fails with a 98% success rate. I am the 2%.

I for one am always for player choice. Some like RNG, I suspect many more hate it, but live with it. Humans can get use to some terrible things. I get the thrill of combining something and getting the best result on the first combine, I have never experienced it. I would think there is a way to offer the players a choice though and allow the RNG to be offset by putting more effort in a different space. The system could stay like it currently is but adding to it could help a lot.

I think the worst part of RNG crafting is gathering really really rare materials, combining them, and losing them completely. Not getting the best combine is essentially losing the materials even if a lesser product is made. Instead if there was a rare drop that could be traded that would close the RNG gap, it would accomplish the same thing. Only difference is, you have no failure change when you go to do the final combine. You still have to get lucky to get that drop, and would be a sought after item.

Another way to do it is to have an extra step to sort through the regular mats to find the high quality ones from the bunch. Essentially the second button in the original post, except it would create a secondary market of extra refining.

Yet another way would be to have certain areas excel in producing higher quality versions of the materials. This would be region specific and only that region would produce this higher quality version. This would encourage more cross region trade. Since no two regions would have the same high quality versions, if the crafters want the best chances, they have to potentially gather 2 to 3 high quality materials from as many different regions.

Player choice is king. Some LOVE RNG. Some HATE RNG. Most don't mind putting a little more effort into making things. Those that love RNG don't mind farming 10 times more materials to get what they want. Those that hate RNG probably don't mind spending a little bit more time on the gathering side to make sure they get the thing they want in one combine. It shouldn't be easy, but it doesn't need to be random.

I don't like locking guilds to a race. Locking guild to an alignment is fine. But if I bring my demon up in karma to be good, I should be allowed to join a good guild if they will have me.

Need more votes on the child threads for the story to continue. Votes are low and results are tied.

I've always want games to directly interface with discord and use it for all chats and easy one off group voice chats. It is cumbersome for a casual wander to join a discord channel for maybe an hour and then never join it again. Why reinvent the wheel?

I can dream right?

It would raise the barrier of entry. If newbies can't ask for help, they will just leave and never come back. If they don't leave, then they leave the game world to look online for the info. The hardcore players will then have an advantage since they live in discord already.

On a flipside, you should get knowledge points for adding information to an in-game wiki, so players don't ever have to leave the game. Information should flow more easily, not other way around. Anything to keep people in the game and immersed.

Then, players could add info signs that link directly to the in-game wiki page that would help players the most.