Welcome to Death Must Die dev log #2! Since last week was more technical, this time we want to switch it up and talk about game design.
Releasing into early access has been great for collecting player feedback and identifying common problems with the game. We identified a cluster of problems around the main attack. Namely:
- Attack movement penalty - this is probably the single biggest complaint about the game
- Attacks feel underwhelming
- Melee heroes are too similar in their attacks
- Attack-based builds are consistently inferior to spell-based builds
We’ll talk about how we solved #4 in depth next week, as it involves a bigger discussion around build-making and the changes we’re making to improve that aspect. So let’s focus on 1, 2 and 3 for now.
The attack movement penalty was meant to be a tactical consideration. Making a trade-off between dealing more damage vs better mobility. In practice, however, this has been widely described as clunky and slowing the game down. This is particularly bad for players who want to play with autoattack on. Also, since you’re constantly facing off hordes of enemies, the decision of attacking vs not-attacking barely comes into play.
So we’ve been testing the game internally without the movement penalty… and we really like it! It makes the game more dynamic and the combat more satisfying. And as a bonus, we’re also improving the auto-attack - now your hero will attack only if there is an enemy in attack range.
However, during our testing, the attacks still felt a bit underwhelming. Attacking is one of the main actions you can do, so we knew we needed to spice them up. So we turned this:
Into this:
Now each character has multiple attack animations! And while the knight’s swings are pretty similar, we can actually vary the parameters of each sub-attack. Things like speed, area, attack point, etc. For example, Skadi starts with a regular swing, which is then followed by a bigger jump-cleave:
This not only makes the attacks more satisfying, but also reclaims that tactical aspect of the previous attack slow.
In addition, it serves to differentiate the attack patterns of the heroes, helping with issue #3.
So this is how we’ve tackled the design problems around the attacks in Death Must Die. We'll be shipping these changes as part of our Act 2 update in April.
Next week we plan to do another design discussion, on how we’re improving build variety and making attack builds more viable. Stay tuned and let us know what you think!