ladubois

Yes, I realized a bit too late that where I left that point probably made it seem that I was planning to just have quick battles. Quite the opposite, or else there'd be no point in having a talent tree. This game will be focused on two things: exploration, and dungeons. The world will be large and expansive, and filled with relatively weak enemies. Challenging enough at the early levels when you won't have many abilities to strategize around, yet, but trivial at higher levels. Aside from some pocket change and nominal XP, their primary purpose will be to simply fill out the world and keep it from feeling empty. The real challenge lies in the dungeons, of which there will be many, and which will easily take an hour or more to get through, even if they only have 6 or 7 battles (they will vary in length - this is just the minimum). But this is all tangential to the topic. P.S. It's going to be CTB - the potential for tactical variety of ATB, but with the ability to give players a moment to think and actually capitalize on that potential of traditional turn-based. I honestly don't know why more (professional) games don't use this system. FF10 and the DS Digimon games are the only ones I know of.

Well you touch on a few other design elements I've worked through. First off, I should point out that the vast majority of my talents will be passive effects. For the style of play I'm going for, characters' core abilities need to be more-or-less guaranteed, and I don't see much use to cluttering things up with a dozen variations of "deal X damage of type Y" and the like. I'm planning for each class will have about a dozen abilities or so. Half will be common across all sepcs of a class, and only about half (independent from that first half) will be the abilities you regularly use. In my experience, that's usually about all anyone but the absolute most hardcore players uses anyway, regardless of what type of game is being played or how many abilities are available. Aside from a capstone, virtually all talents will simply modify your existing abilities or grant passive bonuses. Additionally, because of my distaste for "feat taxes", the power curve of individual talents will be slight to nonexistent. Your very first talents will be just as useful as your highest level ones. They'll probably tend toward the more "boring but practical", so that higher-level talents will be more exciting to get, but a humble 1% increase to all fire damage still benefits you at level 50, just as much as it did when you first got it, even if that new talent that grants your Fiery Wrath spell a 20% chance to deal extra damage is more fun to have. This approach also helps make mixed builds just as viable as focused ones, since you aren't giving up more powerful abilities to go halfway up two branches as opposed to all the way up one. Remember that since you always have your lower-level talents, simply getting another makes your character more powerful overall, even if that new talent isn't, on its own, more powerful than all your previous ones. Also, I'm probably going to give the talent trees some spider-webbing, granting multiple paths to the same talent. This will probably take the form of each talent taken granting access to all adjacent talents. Sort of like the system in FF12. Second, concerning the length of battles. Consider the alternative where every time you run into a random encounter you have a lengthy fifteen-turn battle to fight. Simply getting to Veridian City from Pallet could easily take an hour or two. I've got a couple of ideas for how to solve this particular predicament, but it'll take some testing to figure out which solution and how much of it works best. The main ideas that I have in mind are wandering monsters so that players looking to avoid encounters can do so, and exponential character growth that allows minimal grinding to let players smash through lower-level trash mobs with ease while still being properly challenged by at-level ones. Anyway, I'm using my phone to post this so that's all I say for now.

So I really like the concept and feel of talent trees like were once found in WoW and SWTOR, but I do recognize that they have flaws. The two most prominent being the difficulty they create for maintaining class balance, and the road block they create for creating class/spec identity. The first is fairly obvious - more "moving parts" increases the likelihood that something is going to break. Also, I've uet to see any game that manages to have talent trees that don't end up having "road maps" for a decisively superior build than all other options (which is really just a specific manifestation of the aforementioned breakage). Choices should allow for increased variety in playstyle, not a test to see if someone's looked up a guide or not. As for the second, this is basically what motivated Blizzard's scrapping of talent trees in WoW (which, much as I like talent trees, I do feel was for the better in this case). The WoW/SWTOR-style talent trees basically illustrate a dichotomy where if you allow players to pick talents from any spec, your core class abilities have to support all builds - meaning that, for example, all druid are still going to get Regrowth, Swipe, and Starfall, even though no one can effectively use all of those with the same build. This causes a similar problem to the previously mentioned one where the player has way more choices than they need that they then have to sort through. And while in this example, it's pretty easy to figure out which you should put on your hotbar, given how different the three specs are, classes without different roles for each spec can be much trickier. Additionally, abilities that are central but unique to a given spec require spending precious talent points to get to, basically like 3e D&D's infamous feat taxes. Even setting all that clutter and tedium aside, I like specializations each having their own clear identity. Anyway, I think I've come up with a solution for how to design my talent trees that allows them to cut down on clutter, maintain distinct identities, and also allow for multiple distinct playstyles even for characters with the same spec. To illustrate this, let me introduce you to one of my classes, the Animist. The animist is a lightly-armoured caster class that controls the elemental forces of the world. The specializations open to the Animist are Fire (a DPS spec that focuses on DoTs and burst damage), Earth (tank spec that uses armor buffs and self-heals), and Water (healing spec that focuses on steady group heals, and can essentially average out the party's hp to make its healing more efficient). Now, here's what I'm thinking for the talent trees: Your specialization is a discrete choice that grants you access to spec-specific abilities while leveling up, as well as that spec's talent tree. Each spec's tree being made of the typical four columns, with the middle two making up what is essentially a main "branch", and then two side branches which each essentially overlap with the other two specs. These overlapping beanches are identical to each spec that has it. An Earth Animist would, for example, have access to an Earth branch that focuses on improving their damage mitigation abilities, a Magma branch (overlapping with Fire) that improves their AoE damage spells, and a Life beanch (overlapping with Water) that improves their self-heals. There will be sufficient talent points and talents for a fully leveled Animist to take all the talents in their main branch, and a few in one or both (undecided - will require some playtesting) of their side branches, or all of one side branch, and about half of their main branch. The end result is that, while having roughly the same strategy, a Magma-leaning Earth Animist and a Life-leaning one would be quite distinct, with the former having greater DPS, but would be more taxing on a healer than the latter would be. However, thanks to the variety of class types and specs, neither of these builds is definitively better than the other - a Water Animist would probably love to have a Life-leaning Earth Animist tank, sonce their self-heals reduce the need for targeted healing, and allow them to focus on their strength with group heals, while a primarily single-target healer may rather have a Magma-leaning Earth Animist whose AoEs will keep the attention of stray mobs away from squishier allies, so they can just be sure they're keeping the tank alive.

I'd like a plugin that modifies the way saves work in the following ways: 1) After selecting a new game from the title screen, you are instead taken to the save screen to select a save file. 2) When saving the game, this save file is automatically used, overwriting the previous saved game (probably should include a confirmation that declares this, just in case). Basically, while you can have multiple simultaneous playthroughs saved, you can't save multiple versions of the same playthrough. Essentially like how Legend of Zelda games work. Ideal features that I would like, but can live without include: 1) Save file using the player's name (which is set pretty much first thing in-game, before the player is actually granted control to so much as open the menu). 2) Auto-saving. Ideally more or less persistently if possible, though I rather doubt that's possible, even without including this during battle and other inherently unsaveable times.

Bump? Also, minor update: I've decided not to bother with the TP thing, so for now, i'ts just the map.