The next fest provided an absolutely enormous amount of feedback. As we've sorted through it all, one thing we noticed over and over again was that people just do not like wall-running. The most common complaints were that it's unreliable, unintuitive, and not used frequently enough to justify it's existence. And, after taking a closer look at wall-running, we completely agree.
In fact, we realized that the situation was worse than that- there are only 3 or 4 locations in the entire game that properly support wall-running. The team was unanimous: wall-running just isn't a good fit for SOAR. It's too specific, too linear- our lead designer described it as 'perpendicular' to SOAR's design ethos- not to mention, very time consuming to implement properly.
Now, nobody's shedding any tears over losing wall-running, but, it still held an important place in SOAR's design. We built it originally to add variety and interest to the human form, and even though it failed in that goal, that doesn't mean we should give up on achieving it. So we had a brainstorming session, and we decided to cook up something new. These are the ideas that we've settled on:
- Air dash
- Wall jump
- Superjump
- Vertical wall run
- Breath of the Wild-style glide
We'll spend the next couple of days prototyping these, then play through them as a team and see what feels right. Which ones are intuitive? How difficult will they be polish? How many new bugs might they introduce? What kind of new avenues for play do they open up? And most of all, which ones are the most fun?
We'll be sharing these playable snippets exclusively on our Discord in the next couple of days, so if you're interested in helping to guide SOAR's development, come on by and say hello!