Hey there folks!
Our designer Mat wanted this week’s blog post to feature some of the design stuff going on in the workshed, and who am I to deny him that?
Here’s what Mat wrote.
I’ve been meaning to discuss some of the reviews and feedback that we got so far, and the blogpost channel feels like a good place to start, so let me tell you guys some of our plans.
First of all, gotta say, I’m very pleased by how descriptive and (often) polite our feedback has been. Players have been pointing out some flaws in our design, and after parsing through some of them, we identified 4 major points.
- Characters are not unique enough. Hey, I get that. Having a different biography and starting skill doesn’t really do it - you want each unlock to really mean something. While we want to keep characters of the same class having access to the same pool of skills, we could offer other ways for them to be different. Our Plan: We have discussed a few ideas, and we are now looking towards Passive Status Effects for each character, that reinforce specific gameplay styles and provide another piece in your loadout. One tank might reset cooldowns as he loses health, a ranger could behave better when away from allies… Things of that nature. We have a few tentative designs and should be ready to implement that this week. More on that at the bottom.
- Warriors are being punished too harshly. Melee characters have the short stick! Many of your foes punish being too close to them, like Redcap’s Corrupt or Thorntoad’s Bristleback, and those that don’t, are a pain to pursue. That, coupled with lacking base attributes, makes Warrior characters less desirable! Our Plan: This is going to be big! The introduction of a new abomination in the “medium” category (with Thorntoad and Cockatrice) that rewards melee strikes will help, but not just that - the entire roster of abilities needs a bit of a tune-up. We are in the middle of the second pass for that, but the Warrior will gain more ways to set up combos, regain AP and reset Cooldowns, and gain more survivability. While these bigger changes will take some time to get right, we can start by fixing a few issues and giving them some attribute boosts, which you’ll see added pretty soon.
- Some abilities, plainly, suck. Hey, I get that. The data is pretty clear, and some abilities or upgrades are just not interesting enough! A great example of something that didn’t work well is Raise cover. On top of it being the least picked Mystic ability, its upgrade, Raise Covers, has never been picked by a run that ended up killing the final boss (!!!). Our Plan: That’s our current effort. We are giving another hard look at the abilities in the game and trying to compare them as a player would. We give a bit more buffing love to those that are the least picked, but try our best to not nerf the ones that are fun to use (Parry and Volley are in my chopping block, though. No promises!). This has led the direction of the game towards a bit more about chaining and stacking effects, the two spheres of gameplay that seem to be having the most traction. We got something solid for the Mystic, and we’ll be looking at the Ranger next. This will take a while since we have to implement them all together, but you should expect to see a major update next month. An example of what we’re doing: we’re removing upgrades that change the feeling of the abilities, such as Concoction -> Noxious Concoction. These will be turned into their own abilities!
- Metaprogression is a bit lackluster. No rewards at the end of the run, “boring” prowess unlocks, and lack of a meta-game for the most dedicated and successful players has been on the forums for a while. Our Plan: This is one of the great things about EA: now that we know more about what our players want, we can start planning for it. We’re still in the early design stages, but we want to offer a more complex and engaging meta progression aspect to the gameplay. One poster, Belgium, mentioned the idea of “Merlin gold” as a currency to spend on persistent buffs to characters. That’s sort of the direction we’re aiming for, lacing that with Hard Mode for you Veterans out there, and more. I’ll have something to show about that real soon, but the other fixes take precedence!
There are other noteworthy things, of course. We’ll be balancing rewards, guardian encounters, enemy attributes, gear upgrades, and all that good stuff that really makes the game as engaging as it can be, but the above ones are going to be our focus. Because these are all so interconnected, we gotta play our hand carefully. We’ll do a lot of internal testing, multiple design passes, and stream these updates for you guys to check out as well, hoping that The Hand of Merlin can be as good as it can.
But even this data collection could not be done without your support, so, from the bottom of my heart, Thank you!
I think the whole team would like to thank our community for the support and feedback. We really couldn’t do balancing without people playing the game and sharing their thoughts and experiences, so really, thanks!
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MarkoP
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