variety in-combat

[Jack Dandy]

Any devs around? The Gamescom interview was nice, but I'd love to hear what you have in plan for the combat portion.

In the first game I had a great time with the base mechanics, but battle became repetitive due to little variety in enemies and player skills.

Got any plans to treat that problem?

 

[Avonaeon]

As Bubbles reported, there's no longer a class system per se, the player chooses their skills freely, spending xp in the process. This directly transfers to the enemies as well, meaning the enemies can have the same variety as the player. As is also mentioned, we can sort of tell which "archetype/class" you're playing based off your skill selection. We have a system for setting up the enemies where we can set an enemy to have an archetype and they'll then randomly select skills that fit that archetype, so there'll be more varation, but not so much as you'll get enemies selecting skills that don't make any sense (Like a sword-wielding bandit, having aim high and aim low, but never use a bow, for example).

On top of this, gear now also plays a much bigger part, as they have different stats, whereas in Conquistador armour was just a number between 0-40 iirc.

Hope this answers your question

 

[Jack Dandy]

A bit - but that much was already stated in the interview.
I guess I'll ask this more directly : are there more active battle skills this time around? This is what I'd love to hear about!

 

[Avonaeon]

Oh, yeah there are gonna be a lot more abilities this time. Most of the ones from Conquistador is in there in some form, plus most weapon skills (Sword, Spear, Axe, Knife, Shield, Unarmed, Bow so far) have 3 abilities each. Some of the Conquistador abilities didn't make sense this time for any one particular weapon or they were general enough that they didn't need to be weapon-specific, so they're now their own standalone abilities (Like Taunt, Charge, off the top of my head).

 

[Jack Dandy]

That's what I wanted to hear! :D

 

[Niektory]

Is there any chance you'll ditch cooldowns on abilities?

 

[Avonaeon]

Right now, we still have cooldown on abilities. They're there to help balance the abilities against each other, to prevent spamming of powerful abilities, like stun. If you have an idea for how they could be balanced differently, let me know.

 

[Jack Dandy]

Spoiler

There's nothing wrong with cooldowns

 

[vivec]

Right now, we still have a cooldown on abilities. They're there to help balance the abilities against each other, to prevent spamming of powerful abilities, like stun. If you have an idea for how they could be balanced differently, let me know.

That was a question which took me some time to answer. While there is *something* wrong with cooldowns I can totally imagine them as being *unbalanced* from a game perspective. One way to deal with that is to make the powerful abilities resource dependent, i.e. they cost stamina, rare reagents more time (i.e. if it's a grainy action point system then it costs proportionate action points compared to weaker abilities or if it is a phase based i.e in this context movement/attack phase based system then cost them more than one full round to execute). This can safely counteract the effect of the cooldowns without feeling artificial.

 

[Avonaeon]

We do have full turn actions, like Aimed Shot, where you can't move if you want to use that ability. It's not something we do that often, so I'm willing to see if not a few more abilities can use a full turn instead of a cooldown. I'm not a fan of having actions take more than one turn however, as I feel that would limit your ability to out-manuveur the enemy. It would also turn followers into obstacles for the next round, which I think would just get annoying. On the other hand, we could maybe have some abilities take up 1½ turn (Halving your moves on the next turn), but that would still require something like a cooldown to prevent spamming the same ability (If the enemies lined up just right).
Thanks for your input. I'll defenitely give it some more thought.