Hey all! This week is a follow-up to last week's introduction of Master Skills, going over some details I feel I missed or didn't explain enough. I'll also provide some insight into the concepting and creation of Master Skills.
The first thing I'll touch on is the Mastery gauge, the HUD element used to represent a unit's current Mastery resource. While it was visible in last week's clips, I didn't bring any attention to it, so I wanted to explain what the additional bar on the Unit Info Panel was and clear up an error I left in the clip (in the Seraphim clip where it appeared empty for a bit).
Once we figure out exactly how we want to lay it out, we'll likely add a numerical value like the other resource bars and breaks every 20%, to maintain parity with the Focus (FP) bar due to their interconnectivity. While we like the current design for the gauge, we might make further adjustments, as it was the final thing added before capturing the gameplay footage.
Now, where did the ideas for Master Skills come from, and why were they only revealed recently? Originally, many of our classes capped off their rank progression with a cool, powerful skill at Rank 10. Things like Knight's Heavensfall and Lumimancer's Radiant Ray; awesome skills to reward the player for sticking with a class all the way to the end, with great power and great resource costs as well. While these 'capstone' skills were cool in theory, in practice they interrupted the flow of gaining and spending FP too much, and weren't really satisfying to use.
That's not even mentioning the cost of remaining on a class already at max rank. We've made reclassing as simple and painless as possible to encourage players to build out a diverse array of options, and choosing to stay on a rank 10 class means not gaining rank EXP on another class, which might slow down acquisition of advanced classes (as a refresher, some classes require the unit have other classes at a certain rank or above in order to access).
So, we had all these amazing ideas for big, flashy skills, but they didn't fit into the gameplay loop cleanly on both a macro and micro level. That meant going back to the drawing board, figuring out if we could salvage these skills or if we would have to change them drastically. It was by looking at the core issue with FP that we began to iterate on our current solution; incorporate the skills into the core gameplay loop of building and spending FP.
Taking skills we previously intended to be powerful, end-of-progression things and making them available at rank 1 did require some changes to be made. In order to maintain the idea of providing a cool reward to the player for hitting max rank, the solution we came to was to have the skill increase in power at rank 10, meaning some skills were stripped back a bit at rank 1 before being upgraded back into their original concept at max rank. We also added an upgrade point at rank 5, both because rank 5 is a pretty important rank (for reasons which I'll discuss in a future update, maybe?) and so we could scale the skill up a bit more smoothly over all 10 ranks.
That's all I've got for now, though! I'm always happy to talk through some of our design intentions and processes (maybe a bit too happy, this was meant to be a short update). Closed beta test is still on the way, although I still can't give a definitive date. Development has been a lot more challenging than any of us expected, but we're as committed as ever, and I'll share any news I can when I can! Thanks for tuning in!