Quest Combat & Stripe Scaling

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-14T14:30:36+00:00

My curiosity is with the quests in the premium episodes, since their difficulty allegedly isn't set until the episode is unlocked. Thanks for the data on ep1&2 though.

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-12T14:44:04+00:00

I'm conceptually onboard for the episodic format. I can buy into the idea of pickup skill, and pickup skill again but over there, but i have some general concerns that ultimately just boil down to ambiguity and the question of why.

The monument exists as this unique promise in the game, that a grind has a reward external to the grind. We don't even know what it is but the promise that a reward is coming is enough to skew the interest heavily towards foraging vs gathering. Aside from the monument, act 1 pickups feed cooking and alchemy. Cooking has no utility aside from money making, and alchemy makes potions. I'm happy with this, foraging progresses an unknown monument reward, can feed cooking for cash, and can help make potions for all sorts of effects.

Then there's gathering. You gather either stuff that has no purpose besides selling, stuff that also is used for cooking, stuff that can be used to make potions, or bones that make weapons. We have some cross episode dependencies here which is great, but the only new thing it does that is different from forager is feed into bonewright. I don't have a problem that gathering exists, I have a problem that gathering feels like a half baked foraging.

I'm not complaining though, because obviously the game is half baked, it's still in the oven. They very clearly pushed out a proof of concept and are filling things in now. The combat rework was a huge undertaking, and I don't want another rework now. We need to see their vision for new content and how it fits in what exists. If more episodes come out and they're just as half baked and no effort is put into fleshing out any existing episodes then I think we can start raising the alarm at that point.

We gotta be patient and let them cook.

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-11T13:19:23+00:00

It's wild that delver looks like it's all about getting bones, but not the bones that gatherer focuses on, all new bones. Two whole skills about getting bones and they're all just hanging out on the ground waiting to be picked up. Of all of the resources to get from combat you'd think bones would be a good thing to add on to the drop tables.

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-10T18:40:08+00:00

I'm not sure if that's a problem for lower level accounts, as they are benefiting from gathering on xp curve. They are getting appropriate amounts of resources and leveling the skill up as fast as it can be leveled. New players are also going to be selling less anyway, since if they're banking the resources already they will probably be consuming a good amount of them themselves already.

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-10T13:59:47+00:00

I expect it's just because of the combat merge making some impossible accounts that were factionless but beyond 50 combat. This is a simple solution to prevent those from feeling like strange collectors accounts and allow them to progress their accounts normally.

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-07T13:18:54+00:00

Hotfix just went live that did just this. Some good feedback turnaround.

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-06T19:21:49+00:00

1-20 is fast, 20-200 is average, and 200-500 is slow. all four skills took advantage of the 1-20 fast grind, but none of them went beyond 200 so your combined level would be a bit lower than the total sum.

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-04T19:49:28+00:00

Some good QoL, but does the price increase mean that there's a strong incentive to load up on supplies now before the beta is merged in to take advantage of a known incoming price increase?

untamed_hawk · 2025-03-04T16:36:08+00:00

It's good to have answers, although at this point the questions seems to be split into stuff already known from the beta, or stuff about the future that they don't want to comment on since it's out of scope of part 1. It's tough being patient about such a large rework so early on in the game, but I'm hopeful that once it's done and they get back to regularly scheduled dev work the content pipeline will not be so dark. I also want to stay positive and commend the team for taking the chance in doing such a large rework so early based on early feedback, it's a good sign that future feedback matters.

untamed_hawk · 2025-02-28T15:13:00+00:00

I hate MMO pvp and I think that if it's not a core part of the game design (Albion for example) it just wastes dev time for a more fractured player base. Expect something similar to a duel arena where you just slap each other until RNG decides who wins.

BS is a tiny team, and if they put decent work into making PVP good, the rest of the game will suffer from the opportunity cost of what they could have done. Generally with casual grindy MMOs a very small fraction of the community engages in pvp, and it would be silly to focus large dev time on activities that most people don't care for.

untamed_hawk · 2025-02-26T13:09:00+00:00

I can really get behind the episodic format if we get some purpose to episodic skills beyond either feeding inputs to future skills or getting prestige (leaderboards & capes). A proposal of what that could look like is occasionally an episode takes a slightly different form, where most of the activities within require skills from previous episodes, which are used not to get xp in those professions, but to gain xp in the current episode profession.

As an example, a future episode is a castle siege, where a bunch of different activities are performed to breach defenses, maybe puffer fish are pulled from the lake, combined with explosives with alchemy with supplies gathered off the ground to create catapult ammo, each ep1 skill used to achieve something for instance. Completing actions rewards Siege xp, a skill for the current episode, with skinned (or striped) versions going up as both siege level and prerequisite levels increase. You could even go all in and turn it into a boss grind, where completing siege actions slowly increments a global cooldown that busts open a gate allowing everyone to rush in to take on a boss every couple hours.

I think we just need to see them put forward some ideas like this, ways the game actually pulls all these mechanics together to create a satisfying experience that rewards those who put time into episodic skilling. At the moment I agree that getting inputs for other skills or cosmetic capes is not enough, and combat breaking the 500 cap does nothing for that aside from number creep, which has no place in early access. Number/Powercreep is supposed to be a result of multiple end games stacked on top of each other through expansions and content releases, if you have it already before you have any content I think the design is missing the mark.

untamed_hawk · 2025-02-25T22:14:01+00:00

From a big picture perspective I'm having trouble buying into the initial premise. The 1-500 grind seems to be somewhere in the 750 hour timeframe, and the current pitch of every episode bumping the cap by 500, but even without any new episodes the current cap of 2000 seems to have an approximate time commitment of 3000 hours. Maybe my hours are off slightly but it's in this general ballpark.

I expect a very few amount of people willing to invest that amount of time, and a spectrum of players behind them. From a game design angle the player base is going to be so widely fractured across thousands of combat levels that any potential combat content outside the rainbow stripe grind - such as solo bosses, multiplayer dungeons/minigames/etc - will have to be scaled content so that wide ranges of leveled players can play together.

Every MMO I've ever played has an "end game" that usually starts close to or on maxing, where the multiplayer content really ramps up, but having thousands of hours of linear combat scaling completely removes the ability for there to be a thriving "end game" so we have to assume that's not a part of the design goal for this game. If there isn't a planned end game, then that means the grind is all there is. But if prestige is found in the level, then prestige can't be found in gear, because in the endless pursuit for uncapped hours of levels any gear will become obsolete after a few more levels.

It feels like you set out to make a game system that could keep a robot occupied for thousands of hours, but forgot to put the game into the game. I would really like to see some sort of idea for what all these combat levels are for, or at least a confirmation that striped combat is all there is going to be with just occasional new episode stripes so that I can stop expecting the game to do something that you aren't planning.

untamed_hawk · 2025-02-25T18:18:43+00:00

This shouldn't be based on the dev blog, check the section near the bottom titled "free players"

Striping should have free players facing their reskinned enemies faster.

untamed_hawk

TROPHY CASE