In today’s Dev Diary, we are looking into the combat system in Worship. Since Worship’s gameplay includes a lot of novelty in its mechanics, a little of context is needed to properly understand combat in the game.
Quick overview on Worship terminology: when we talk about a Cultist, it defines the playable character. When we talk about Followers, we talk about the cute little mascot looking fellas following the Cultist. As a Cultist, you can bleed yourself to draw symbols on the ground to cast rituals. The most important ritual to a cultist arsenal is the conversion rituals, which will convert followers to your cult. As a Cultist, you can order your Followers to do different tasks, including fist fighting enemies.
While in combat, you will have access to three types of actions to defeat your enemies: Followers, Rituals and Follower Throw. Each of those actions have a different purpose in combat.
Followers are a multipurpose resource in Worship. During exploration, they will carry stuff, help you solve puzzle and interact with the world. They can even be used as a blood source to heal your Cultist.
During combat, their main purpose is to grab the enemies’ attention and buy you time. Even with their small size, followers are now surprisingly tanky. Send them to attack your enemies to take some hits for you.
After a few hits, followers will be knocked down and vulnerable. Once they’re down, they are not quite dead yet, but they are most likely to die in a hit or two. If they survive, they will eventually get back up and automatically regenerate their missing health. They will also regenerate their hidden health bar out of combat. That, way, they’ll be fresh and ready to take more hits for your next bloodshed!
To prevent losing followers, you can still recall your followers to dodge powerful attacks while they are standing. Be wary, if they get knocked down, you will not be able to recall them back until they get back up by themselves.
Followers are able to damage enemies when they’re fighting, but it is not the most effective way to defeat enemies. Unless you have an overwhelmingly amount of them, obviously.
Although followers are used to grab enemies’s attention during combat, this does not mean that the Cultist will never be in danger. Enemies have attacks in their move sets specifically aimed for the Cultist. Be wary of the Inquisitor quick dash, it will catch you off-guard.
It can be counter intuitive, especially for new players, to use your own resources (either your health or the life of a follower) to draw blood symbols while you have a bunch of enemies trying to kill you. But even then, rituals are the most powerful actions a player can use to defeat enemies. You cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, as the saying goes…
Your Followers will buy you time, enough for you to draw these bloody shapes on the ground and activating them. Rituals are the key for you to win fights quickly while preventing too many casualties on your side.
There are two types of offensive rituals: instant cast and active effects rituals.
Instant rituals, such as Impale, is a ritual who’s going to have its effect go out immediately once you activate it.
Active effects rituals will give you charges of a spell to use whenever you see fit.
In terms of size, obviously, the bigger the drawing is, the bigger the amount of blood spent. Players will be rewarded by having certain aspects of the rituals scaling depending on the size of a shape. Obviously, for any area of effects, it’s easy to imagine why you would draw a bigger shape. For active effects rituals, we can scale it in different ways. For exemple, for the Ghastly Claw ritual, a bigger size will give a higher number of charges.
Finally, these adorable followers are multipurpose. They’re also throwable!
Other than being really funny, throwing a follower will slightly damage the enemies, but it can also interrupt some attacks. Some abilities will grey out the health bar of the enemies and display a variable number of shields over it while they charge up the attack. During that time, enemies don’t take any damage but, by throwing followers to the enemies while they’re charging, you can destroy their shields. If you manage to destroy all the shields before the attack releases, you’ll cancel it and slightly stun your target.
Some rituals will also be effective to destroy shields.
Cultist has a way to directly damage enemies without the use of followers or rituals. With a simple input, you can cast a small damaging spell to attack your enemies.
You will have to be careful with this attack, since every eldritch power has a price. Using this attack will cost you blood. It is meant to be an emergency tool if combat goes dire.
Each god will have a different basic attacks for its cultists to add more variety in your play sessions depending on which deity you choose to worship.
To summarize, the “rules” of design we establish are the following: use followers to crowd control, use rituals to damage enemies and throw your followers to interrupt attacks.
But as we all know, rules are meant to be broken, and that’s where the upgrades take place.
During your run, you will stumble upon worm-filled crystals called Catalysts. They can be used to spawn buildings granting you upgrades for your cult. By unlocking new powers, you will eventually unlock abilities which will let you break those rules. A pretty straight forward example would be an upgrade to your follower damage, but it can take various forms too.
An upgrade we currently have is the Follower Piercing upgrade, which let followers pass through enemies when you throw them, making it a lot more efficient to damage multiple enemies during combat.
We are eager to see what kind of builds and upgrades combinations players will create to surprise us.
That’s it for today! This should cover a bit of everything regarding combat. Hoping this update makes you even more excited to try out different strategies and offensive rituals while playing Worship!
Next Diary entry will be all about highlighting our game’s unique mechanic: blood drawings.
See you next time!
- The Chasing Rats Team
