Skills, skills skills, more skills

[Galaad]

I like what I see. Though an idea in my opinion would be to put a soft cap on certain things...Learning skills through use is something I like, but its risky in a way.

What I mean by that is that if your character can become a master of every craft/combat/magic etc that are out there. You kill a great part of the replay value, players may chose to play again to do other "choices" in game, but the gameplay will be the same pretty much. If the player cannot "master" everything, then in the next game he may want to try playing a completly different style of character.

There are many ways to go about this depending on how players learn skills (Is it through leveling, through a trainer or through use? or a mix?)

One way to try and lessen that problem would be to make the player chose a few skills on which he'll focus and the training for those skills will follow a regular curve and won't have a specific cap. While other skills that aren't the focus will still be useable/trainable, but with a much steeper learning curve and maybe be capped to a certain amount. Although in such a case you could instead put in a "soft cap" by making secondary skills simply be even slower to learn past a certain point rather than cap them completly.

If it is through leveling where you get some points to spend (Like seems to be the case in this screenshot)...There are many options you can use but it also depends on the game world. Is there a level cap? Is there respawning? Could a player just farm some mobs to grind their level and get enough learning points to train just about everything?

You could impose limits on this by putting level caps or making the amount of point given to the player per level pretty low. But that seems to me like it makes leveling your character up far less exciting and kills the fun a bit for many players.

Therefore I think, if you decide to use learning points, that a good idea would be to first put in skill trainers. Making the cost of training higher as skills get higher is an option, but what I prefer is if you simply make it that above certain tresholds increasing a skill costs more points... (Like 2 above 50, 3 above 75 and 4 above 90 etc)...

Now though, a risk if use learning points is that the players wont care about training x skills above a certain level....and some skills may get neglected in favor of others since they don't have as big an impact on the game. Because, lets face it, in most games who would max camping? Why max lockpicking if there's a spell to open locks that anyone at a low level can train?

So I think a good way to counter this is to create incentives for the players to train all the skills...Obviously since the playercan't train them all, he'll have to replay if he wants to try it all.

What I mean by that (and my idea is partly taken from cromcom's post) is to have certain really special quests or event accessible to those who have skill x above 90 for example. A quest to catch a special monster of legend that of course only a legendary hunter could catch .... It doesn't all have to be quest since that may not apply well to all skills. For others it could be creating or repairing an item of legend etc.

The idea is to create at least one or two strong incentives for the player to want to eventually try out all the skills. Its better if they don't break the balance of the game, but its also better if they have a visible impact in the game. Be it through the way people now speak to your character, through nice visuals/graphics, something that allows the player to see what he did was pretty damn big. Otherwise, it kinda makes it pretty bleh....ok caught the legendary monster and then we go on to kill 10 orcs quest as if nothing had happened at all...

If possible having such an incentive/quest at each "threshold" level of a skill (50/75/90 etc) that lead to one another. Like for the hunter can now catch a bear at 50 and when you sell the pelt or return to your training you hear about a nest of blablah.... Repairing a wandering Knight's armor, if he likes your work (50+) he puts in a good word for you to someone who opens up the next event.


Well, I'll stop for now because this is already lengthy enough and not very concise... I still have a ton of ideas running through my head though.

I wouldn't make a good dev. because I never get these ideas myself and need the help of someone else to get my imagination running...But once someone puts out
an idea, it usually inspires me and then the flow of words and idea doesn't stop .