Hey everyone, I've just made some significant changes to aspects of the game's economy and itemization today. This set of changes is focused around improving the shop experience, balancing some aspects around economy focused builds, and some other new changes!
What Isn't Changing
In a previous news post I had mentioned that vendor inventories were going to change. I explored some ways to improve it and did a few rounds of playtesting with the changes, and players felt that it reduced some of the surprise in shops.
Therefore, in this patch today I've focused on improving the town / shop experience with some of the other changes and left the specific inventory changes to a future patch to give it some more time to bake with playtesting. Don't worry though, the other changes in combination with each other are a significant improvement in the experience.
Shops and Towns
Towns have been reduced in size variance, limiting the number of rooms generated significantly. This will reduce the pressure players feel to check out every vendor before making a purchase or choosing to spend money on the forge. There's still some variance in room selection between single and multi vendor layouts, but this keeps the concentration of options closer together for less travel time. I'll still be exploring some new layouts with a room update in the future, to make this aspect of the change even better as it evolves further.
Shops specifically have received a couple specific buffs:
Common and Rare items in shop have a quality (star level) bonus when appearing, making them more exciting to find and helping bridge the gap for builds focused on forging vs high rarity item hunting
Prices have moved a little closer together to compensate for this change, now the choice between a shiny legendary or a 3 star Rare item is much more difficult to make. Do you choose immediate power in the high level Rare, or do you invest in the future at the cost of short term gain?
Perk boxes in shops have been fixed so their prices reflect similar effects as the item costs, making re-rolling for legendary perks a valid late game econ payoff
Foiled Items
Foil items have received a bit more love in this patch. Foil items represent an increase in maximum item quality at the cost of additional gold (or forge resources). A Foiled Common Pistol for example receives double the effects of all augments rolled on the item. Theoretically a 5 star version of this item would behave like a 10 star one (in actuality it's a little less, but still close to double).
The issue with foiled items previously was that their cost was too high for this utility, making it optimal to just pass on them or sell them to use the money + interest for better effects later. To fix this, the cost for foiled items (and their forge costs) have been reduced to make them more enticing and exciting to find.
Additionally, the effect on the cards was a bit too subtle to see and there weren't many places where the game would draw your attention to the fact the item was foiled to begin with. I've increased the contrast on the effect, brought a little bit of HDR in to the shine, improved the animation, and added a text hint when inspecting foiled items. This should help them stand out more and be exciting to stumble upon.
Items and General Econ
A small gold boost has been added to the option to skip a perk during selection. The original value was initially too low, making it almost certainly always optimal to take a perk instead of passing on them. With a bit of an increase to this value, the choice is now much harder. Especially early in the game with a class that has a low starting gold count (looking at you, Mutant) skipping an early perk might help get your econ back on track. The new values have scored much better in playtesting as an option that players are taking more often.
Since towns now have less vendors, I've also reduced forge cost slightly to compensate. It was probably too accessible previously any way, so the change is subtle to hopefully meet in the middle a little. It's not possible to forge as much as you could before, but also hasn't been reduced too far in effectiveness. I'll keep an eye on it going forward, but in high level test runs it's still possible to optimize your econ for a heavy forge build and still generate very significant power.
Thanks again everyone for playing, happy Steam Summer Sale Shopping to all! If you have any feedback or just want to chat about the game, feel free to hit up any of the social channels.