At first I thought it could maybe work. But more and more I'm thinking.. it's not.
I think 4 active abilities is GOOD. I think 4 to CHOOSE from is bad. There should be something where you have like say, 8-10 to pick from in the skill trees, but you can only choose 4 of them and after you pick the 4 you can't unpick them and can't pick any new active skills. They just go on your bar. Even only having a choice of 6 would be good. But I don't like the choice of only 4 actives.
I imgine it could work something like this:
I thought MAYBE the active skills could have trees that drastically change how they work.. but eh no not really, still too limiting.
Also, Active skills should have a circle icon like they currently do. The other skills should have a box or hexagon or something so you can differentiate them at a glance.
There are only 4 skill slots. By NOT having skill lockouts, you limit each demigod to 4 active skills. Having the choice between more than 4 active skills means there's more possible combinations.
That is factually incorrect. You have a limited number of points, and there are more options that you can have points. You cannot "have any combination you like". That is a fact.
Also, you completely ignored parts of my post - what about changing demigods midgame? what about changing sides in an RTS midgame? How come you can't revoke your class choice in DnD mid-game?
As for RPG's that have skill lockouts - How about playing a Sorceror (or variant thereof) in DnD? You have to choose which spells you want to have, from a very large list. You can only have a very small amount, which cannot be changed (with a caveat that's a concession to the permanent nature of DnD characters). I can list more.
A player should always have to think carefully about his choices and make sacrifices when these choices are made if the game is to be fun. I think we should stop comparing this game so much to mmorpg, and more to RTS. If you can just pick Hammer Smash, and then unpick it whenever you like, then did the player even have to think about his choice of picking hammer smash? or just midlessely pick it, knowing that he would not have to sacrfice anything when he did pick it up and could simply unpick it whenver he wanted.
And there lots of RPG's with skill lockouts....lots. Basically every RPG infact. When you play WoW and you choose a Dwarf (or whatever the characters are..i never really played it), then you have just locked out all the skills from the other classes. In Guild Wars if you pick a Warrior/Necro, you now have all the skills from an elementalist, ranger, paragon etc. locked out. in POKEMON (yes im using pokemon as an example), when you level your little guys up and they learn new moves, you are forced to lockout one of your other moves for the new one....and who can honestly say they never enjoyed pokemon ?
true that true that. Thats what I'm saying and it really doesn't have to be a ton of skills u can't get or something. I think once u get something u get it and u shouldn't be able to get all the skills fully leveled up but u should be able to get all skills partially upped.
To the opnening poster: YES 4 abillitys to "choose" from are too little.
Especially for Assasins.
For Generals 4 active skills could be enough.
I hope character deepness/variousity will be in the focus after Beta 2 release
Simple, clear, useful =>
Agreed aswell
I did address them. You can't because balancing 2-4 sides or 8 Demigods is easier than balancing 100 skills. This makes your choice of side or class infinitely less likely to be a game-breaking error. Additionally, in Supreme Commander and D&D, there ARE some ways in which you can change, you can dual-class under certain conditions, capture or trade engineers. Additionally, in D&D or SupCom, picking your class is something you do in advance and generally speaking, it's the same every time. This isn't true of skills for your Demigod.
How is locking out skills, going to increase the number you can have? I'm arguing that there should be a skill slot for every active ability so that you can choose to have some of everything if you want. Your side is that there should be fewer so that you can't. Do you actually know what you're arguing for? What you said completely doesn't make sense.
You're just pissing on semantics and totally ignoring my point. I'm not arguing for infinite skill points to buy everything, I'm arguing that if you have a skill point, you should be able to put it in whatever the hell you like. In WoW, if you have satisfied the pre-req talents, you can place your talent wherever you want, regardless of what your other talents are. I've even put italics on the relevant point, just so that you don't miss it and pick some other entirely irrelevant fact of their system.
As for your caveat mentioned, I'm guessing that you mean that you can infact change them. Even if you can't, then that's still a minimum, compared to every other class. If you're a Fighter, you can pick whatever new weapon specialities you like, regardless of what the old ones were. With mages, you can memorize any new spells within your slots, regardless of before. Etc. You've got one poor example, against how many I have. Try more.
Your examples are not changes, they're additions - you can't change your side in SupCom, you can only add another one, through play. Ditto for multiclassing.
You are still wrong - you cannot place your talent wherever you want regardless of what your other talents are - you don't have enough points for every possibility. I italized the important part of your statement.
So first you want an example, and when provided it's not enough? How many do you want? Here's another one: the Sacred RPG series has your character gaining the option to get new skills as you rise in levels - there are more skills than skill slots. How about the majority of Korean MMORPGs (played by millions)? Almost all of them use a branching class system - choosing one sub-class, locks you out of the abilities and everything else that goes with the other sub-class.
Uh, I specifically said, if you have a skill point. The idea of "skill points" as a limiting factor is totally irrelevant and present in Demigod either way, so I still don't know what you're doing or what point you're trying to get at, because this is not new, or debated on either side. If I'm a Mage and I take a bunch of Frost talents and then level up and get a talent point, I can still start spending in the Frost or Arcane trees. This behaviour is what is stopped by locking out things because you have other things, even if they're only to a lesser extent.
By adding another one, what you really mean is that it's perfectly possible to play exclusively as your "added" side or class, especially noted in DnD. Nor did you counter my point about the relative number and ease of both balancing and making sure you pick your desired. I'm going to add that when you make a mistake with any of these, it's much easier to start over. Also, I'm not sure what you're on about, because you only ever add skills, not change them, so I'm seriously not seeing your argument here. I just think you should be free to add whichever ones you like with your points.
Given that I have a lot MORE examples (I'm going to add Deus Ex and Jedi Knight II to my list, by the way), and they qualify for the entire game, whereas yours is a subset of one game where I have an example for my side anyway and the vast majority of the game takes my side. Firstly, subclasses doesn't count for the same reasons as classes (which we are arguing on a separate point). Secondly, majority of korean mmorpgs.. hardly a specific example I can relate to or research, is it? Thirdly, your millions pale in comparison to World of Warcraft, let alone all the rest, especially given that the Korean market is a pretty small sector of global, unless you're Starcraft or a Korean MMO.
Doing a little research, what you didn't mention is that you can get your skills combined into a combo, and also, after more reading, the item-based skill system looks like it doesn't even remotely compare to Demigod (adding in that you can trade them, so you could trade an unusable rune for an upgrade one).
Then I'm gonna add Deus Ex 2 to the games that do lock out skills - by providing several options per biomod limb, where you can only choose one. Also, all the other Jedi Knight games except JK2 - you lock out light side/dark side by spending points in the other respectively. We can play this game forever.
I think this is a good idea as well. If you've ever played Guild Wars that game was built entirely around this idea. If this gets implemented then I think it is a MUST to allow me to drag and drop my skills to different hotkeys(like what you do in MMOs).
innociv,
I think you bring up a valid point and I really like your suggestions.
Admittedly, having to think carefully about character design and making decisions is - for me - one of the things that makes a lot of games fun. Particularly strategy and RPG games. However, clearly, what makes a game fun varies greatly from person to person.
It goes without saying that the developer would be wise to both cater to the majority of their target customer base (fans of realtime strategy and multiplayer RPGs) and aim to please as many gamers as possible within given budget and time constraints. One way to do this is to offer the players choices as to how they want to play the game. Hence the Generals / Assassins choice. Perhaps the Assassin type players should be given additional ability choices (like innociv suggests), while the Generals can keep their extremely limited choices as it is?
Personally, having very few options to choose from feels incredibly restraining to me. With some games it can feel like there's almost no real choices to make, (particularly if the game is unbalanced and there are only a few choices that offer distict advantages over all others).
Myself, I prefer more options and choices. If it's up to me, I choose this... every time.
What's wrong with being like a MMORPG or even an RPG? I thought that was the whole point of having the General vs the Assassin types? If you prefer to play Demigods as a strategy game, then play as a General. For those of us who like the idea of playing like an RPG, there's the Assassin type. Actually, I like both genres and I would probably try Demigods both ways. But when push comes to shove I prefer the RPG style as it seems more 'realistic' to me.
First of all, that's not entirely true. That's a pretty broad generalization. I've played a LOT of RPGs over the years, but not all of them have skill lockouts. (I'm an "old skool" RPG gamer.) And most RPGs I've played have significantly more choices to choose from than merely 4 abilities! Nearly every one I've played, actually.
Beta 2 is great. Better than I could have imagined but there are still to few skills and passive abilities. The skill tree needs to be doubled at the very least. Perhaps the typical level 15 "cap" abilities could be expanded to instead inlcude a choice of 2 or 3? Being able to have 90% of the skills at 25 shows that there really aren't enough.
Have the Dev's said anything about expanding the current skill trees furthur? 4 Active skills would have been fine if there were many demigods, but since there are a few (which isn't a problem) it'd be great to see huge skill trees that have a ton of different options and builds, currently the 2-3 cookie cutter builds per demigod (some which play similiarly) is fun for now, but will not keep people entertained for long once they've tried them out. It'd be great to incorperate a few ideas that are in this forum. Would be great if the devs could keep us up to date on what still needs to happen in the overall game.
I wouldn't except extraordinary amounts of Dev feedback right now - it's the holidays.
I think it should be most compared to guildwars, magic: the gathering, and dota. Those are the 3 closest relevancies.
I edited my main post with how I should think it should work. I do not think you should be able to simply change what skills you're using mid-game. Once you pick your 4 when the game starts, you should get locked ot them. I basically do agree with Dalzk's points. While I think this game needs a few more actives to pick from, so you can more build your Demigod, I don't think you should be able to flip-flop around. =]
more moves are badly needed imo, so hopefully gpg/stardock realize
I think there are enough items. It's just that 30% of the items need to be completely redone, and 30% are too bad. Only like 40% of them are useful.
well items, to me, suck because you usually get same ones, even demigod to demigod i get similar 3 and maybe two that vary a bit
You do realise this thread and things posted here are over 3 months old ?
It's still completely relevant
Especially sice we never got seperate icon borders for active and passives. That would of been a nice and simple feature!
2 Reasons why not:
1. You could throw balancing into the toilet. Compare a MMORPG to Dota or DG right now. It's nearly impossible to get all builds of 16 Demigods on the same level. Some builds will always dominate other on a DG. The versatilty will improve far less then the complexity of the balancing issues. But with 4 it should be np. Think about it, 4 Active doesnt mean you have alot less builds. Passives are also full fletched skills and very important. Often some Auras and passives are far better than some actives.
Dota has only mere 4 skills - passives and actives - and still has enough replay value for alot players, which play the game since 4-5 years. As a mere mod. Since DG's got 8-9 skills to choose from there is alot more depth to builds, but it needs more tweaking. The fun thing of these games - right now only dota - are also the change of metagame after updates, and how to adapt to changes and/or to new DG's.
2. As i said already. There is always "The build" for a DG. Most likely because random Pro will use random DG with build X and 99% will follow this build. Or random Pro writes a guide about Demigod X - 99% will follow it.
Its nearly impossible to bring more than 2 builds on a same level. This is because you can't just do the maths of your own skills. You always have to bring them into the context of the most used builds on other DG's. Since you mostly try to counter already effective builds which are in use. This means, having more skills doesn't mean a proportional increase in fun, but definitly in more work for the designers.
Yeah I mean.. GW is so imba with it's 1400 skills. Sure about half of them are pretty useless, but nothing is really overpowered
Hehehehe GW +1K skills are some of the most balanced I have ever seen. Those are updated almost constantly as people report.
I also do not think that 4 Active ability is enough because it always seem like you need a whole team to take down 1 Demigod. Altough there is variety in the builds it is just not enough. Each Demigod has like 4 ways to play them and not more. But Guild Wars for example has like +20 ways to play one type of class with the secondary one ofcourse.
Yeah. And in december and january they did an update that completely redid how more skills behave (completely new behavior, not just messing with numbers) than demigod even has.
It shouldn't be hard to add new skills. Just making new effects. Balancing them, sure. But adding new skills will mess up balance anyways so best to just guess what'll work and hope for the best. Better balance can be added later, as long as things are very overpowered. Best to jsut start em with what would be underpowered.
I'm not syaing there needs to be 20+ ways to play each class like GW(er there is more than that ), but 3 or 4 basic builds where you'll have variations of based on how the game is playing would be nice.
Personally I like it as is. Id rather them keep the focus tighter and more balanced adn instead of expanding too many abilities to the DG's just release new DG's. Then you get different builds to mess with on a different character altogether.
As it is when I play some of the characters I do vary my builds enough as it is. I dont really care to have that many more choices. Of course thats just me and you have your opinion as well for sure.
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