Hello everyone!
Today, we'll be covering our plans for the monsters! We'll be focusing on the monsters themselves, as well as their new sub-classes, which are tentatively called monster variants.
The short and simple version is that monsters have their base class (Vangal, for example) and then can equip up to 2 variants. They'll get access to the ability set of the variant, as well as their passives, on top of their base monster class. We're still tuning, but the current idea is that each variant has 2 active abilities, 2 passives and 1 counter. One of the goals is to give them something different than humans in the form of more equipped passives, while expanding their base abilities without crowding them too much.
We're focusing on the monsters today, but the systems in Missions and Monsters are all intricately tied together, so many of the features tied to monsters and variants will be obtained through special missions and new classes. We'll have updates about those later!
Monsters Specifics:
Missions and Monsters will be making monsters recruitable, so they can now join your Arbiter forces. You'll have to recruit them in a different manner than regular units, though. Monsters will join the player as rewards from special Missions or from being tamed during combat by the new Wrangler class (which we'll cover in a later update). Each monster base class (such as Vangal, Ercinee, etc.) will have its own skill tree, with their upgraded tiers (eg. Vangal -> Komainu -> Gyaum) being a node on their tree they can spend AP on to learn. There will be a tutorial on the process added early in the game to make sure things are well explained!
The monster variants can be seen as classes that the monsters can learn, and they function in a similar fashion to the human classes. A monster cannot change its base class , but they can equip up to 2 variant classes and 1 counter. A monster unit will be able to set its 2 variants and its counter from the UI, which means that all its passives come directly from its base class and 2 variants. They get 6 passives in total, but they have a little less flexibility than humans in selecting them.
The variant classes will have their own skill tree and AP pool and will unlock their abilities and passives in the usual way. New variants will be unlocked in a variety of ways, including having a high enough level in other variants, mission rewards, and special monster badges.
On the visual side of things, each variant will have its own unique sprite representation (like human classes have their hats) so it'll be obvious at a glance which variants a monster is sporting. Since each monster can have up to 2 variants equipped, they could be showing 2 different sprites at once.
Here, a Thorned Vangal uses Thornstrike on a Venomous Skeletal Daodrenner.
Here, we can see a Blardger showing many of its possible variants, although only 1 at a time (there could be up to 2 shown at once).
Closing Words:
One of the reasons we didn't have recruitable monsters in Fell Seal before now is that we wanted to make sure they would be interesting and customizable enough compared to human classes. We feel that too many games in the genre have recruitable monsters tossed in, but never bother to make them as attractive when compared to human classes, which tend to be more feature-rich. With our system, we're aiming to change that and make monsters both viable and interesting. They'll have different pros and cons than humans, but ultimately should balance out well when compared. It'll be up to player preference at that point!
Thanks to everyone for the continued support!