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Game Design Blog - January 2022



Welcome to our first-ever Game Design Blog! Over the past year, we’ve heard from the community that they want to hear more about what we’re doing, upcoming features, along with providing an inside look at what we’re doing within the Game Design Department. With these posts, we’ll be able to update the public as needed when it comes to future updates, design changes, & so much more.

So without further ado, let’s talk about what’s been going on over the past few months!



GAUNTLETS

Gauntlets began development in early August, with the development coming along extremely quickly. For our first Gauntlet, as previously announced we’ll be allowing players to return to the depths of the ruined Dark Follower Base and fight Zirxas the Necromancer, in our new Revenant Gauntlet. We’re putting the final touches on this now, and you should see it in the game real soon.
In order to explain Gauntlets and Dungeons, and the differences between them, we’ll have to start with what exactly they are. Gauntlets & Dungeons are instance-based battles that you’ll queue up for just like you would a minigame, except this time you’ll have access to all of your spells and items. You and up to four friends (5 total people) can join a single Gauntlet or Dungeon, and battle their way through it. We have unique respawn mechanics that will only exist within the instance that will allow you to do things like reviving teammates, should they be defeated.

To give you a sneak peek into this, you can take a look below to see how the sidebar will look while within the Gauntlet/Dungeon.


Now, onto the differences. Gauntlets will be for max-level players only and be mostly PVE focused, with battle after battle and a horde of mobs for you to fight against, along with extremely powerful bosses. These will be a challenge to defeat, but also have awesome rewards, including brand new gear pieces that will only drop from the specific Gauntlet.

Dungeons, on the other hand, will be more puzzle and story-focused, with a variety of level ranges. These will include cutscenes, along with other cool multiplayer puzzles that will be an entirely different experience. You can still expect some fighting within the Dungeon, but it will not be to the same level that Gauntlets will be.

Why are we doing this?
Dungeons and Gauntlets have been one of our most-requested features of all time, and we’re finally able to deliver it to the players. This will allow a new repeatable challenge for graduates to experience, with more on the way. With our first Gauntlet, Revenant, we wanted to bring back an old favorite, update it to new standards, but it also allowed us to design and build it much quicker, which will result in a faster turnaround than if we started from scratch. Think of it like a staging ground where we could easily iterate on design features we wanted to test out. With that being said, however, there is a second Gauntlet already in the works that will be released after the Revenant Gauntlet.

So, just to reiterate:
Gauntlets: PVE focused, max-level players only, rewards will be gear-based. Extremely powerful bosses.
Dungeons: PVE, but also story-focused, with cutscenes and an emphasis on multiplayer puzzles.


REPUTATIONS

As you may have noticed recently, the Unspeakable Team has been fairly quiet. That is because we’ve been hard at work preparing our newest project: Reputations.

Reputations is a new kind of repeatable content that will allow players to “rank up” in specific towns and unlock awesome rewards for that specific town. These tasks will also reward XP, which will allow newer players to level up easier than ever before.
We want to make it clear that these tasks are NOT full world quests and will be fairly consistent across the board in terms of the content that they will include. You will be able to play through a variety of subject-based tasks, such as herbology, cooking, transfiguration, and more. Keep an eye out for more world quests in the future, however.

Why are we doing this?
We’ve heard one of the largest complaints has been that there isn’t enough to do to level up. With Reputation, you’ll almost always have something to do. Although the tasks themselves are simple, they’re repeatable and will give out XP to help players level up faster, while also allowing more choices for how a player levels. You won’t have to do every single task and can skip towns entirely if you don’t need or want to do them. We want to provide players with more choices to create their own paths. On the other hand, we understand that players want and expect more story-based content out of us in terms of quests, and I can promise that we’re working on that too. In this case, however, the project spawned from a gameplay necessity to be able to give players activities to do in our world to help make the leveling process easier. Even if you don’t need XP, however, you’re still encouraged to do Reputation Tasks to gain renown in that specific town to earn awesome rewards.


FUTURE GOALS - 2022

Lessons Learned:
Throughout 2021, we’ve experimented with various types of gameplay and new ways for unique interactions within our system. We’ve seen the introduction of cutscenes, choose your own adventure-like quests, and larger quest storylines, along with other features, like fast travel quests, and soon Reputations and Gauntlets. Some were well received, others not so much. We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear.

What Now?
Moving into 2022, we want to recommit to quality. This includes but is not limited to:
  • New Questlines, spanning multiple regions, like Relics of the Past.
  • New forms of engaging gameplay, like the morality score in the Walden Dilemma questline.
  • Cutscenes and other elements to engage players with the story more directly, like those in recent event quests.
  • Worldbuilding elements, including adding bits of lore in-game to each location, along with explaining and expanding the lore behind several existing towns
  • Redesign First Year quests entirely. We want to put our best foot forward for when new players join the server, which means reworking our entire First Year quests into a First-Year Experience, which will act as a tutorial for the players, and will guide them more directly to get to Year 2.
  • Continue adding Gauntlets & Dungeons, following the release of Revenant Gauntlet.
  • Greater transparency and communication with the community in the form of Daily Diviner Articles, Q&As, as well as these GD Blog posts.




TALENTS VS. SPELL TREES

A while back we sent out a Discord poll on what everyone thought of our current spell tree system. The results were nearly 2 to 1 against spell trees in favor of our old talent system.


With the outcome of the poll, we wanted to take a second look at what worked well with the talent system and spell trees and what didn't work so well with them.

SPELL​

TREES​

TALENTS​

SYSTEM​

PROS

CONS

PROS

CONS

- Adds the ability to choose specific spells that you enjoyed using and specialize in them.​
- Allowed for pinpoint "powering up" of the spells the player liked using.​

- Hard to understand tooltips for how spell points affected the spells as you invested points into them.​
- Not ALL skills were on the spell tree leaving people with spells that you could never "power-up".​

- Talents affected spells on a wide-scale level. This was easier to understand and most spells would be affected by talent one way or the other.​
- Easier to understand the investment of Talent Points. Points were more meaningful because you could only invest 1 point in each talent.​

- Harder to balance since each talent affected a wider variety of spells tweaking had to be really finessed as "too big" a number would yield bad results and "too small" a number would yield bad results, so the variation was sometimes hard to achieve.​
- The "ultimates" and the variation of talent builds were limited. Once a "meta" was found, it was what the majority of players ran.​



Lessons Learned:
  • We learned that the community prefers easier-to-understand tooltips and less number-oriented progression. (+25 percent radius range is easier to understand than 0.25 damage per tick).
  • It's easier to understand when a Skill/Talent increases the power of several spells than just focusing on one spell at a time. (All buffs last 5 seconds longer versus only Fortificus lasts 5 seconds longer).
  • The simplicity of 1 skill point investment versus 3 per Talent/Skill is preferable as it's easier to understand and balance.

What Now?
With the voice of the community and our own learned lessons, we have decided that we would like to ultimately bring back a version of the Talent Trees. Why a version? Because there were certain elements like ultimate spells and other spells that we have now removed we would need to adjust and rebalance the spell trees to account for this.

We want to also revisit the original idea of "healer, combat, and tank" in the talents system and change the focus of each tree a bit as we don't feel that "tank" really suits the types of builds we were designing for PvE and PVP combat.

So that plan would be to phase out spell trees and replace them with new talent trees (with the aforementioned adjustments). We want to focus on easier-to-understand talents and bonuses that aren't number-centric.

We hope you enjoyed our first-ever Game Design Blog! We'll be sending these out in the future whenever we have more news to share, so keep your eyes peeled!
 

Comments

NSgaming

Magician
Staff
Minecraft IGN: NSgaming
Auralock Dark Follower Staff Griffin Phoenix Werewolf Lore Keeper Lead Game Designer Lead
#4
Is this meant as text based lore or build based lore ?
I can't share more details at this time, but the specific project this is referencing will add lore to existing locations through text, although storytelling through build is something we're always working towards with new locations. Hope that answers your question!
 

Ivan_

Professor
Minecraft IGN: _Navyy
Auralock Griffin Phoenix Vampire Werewolf
#5
Can't wait to see those live. I still hope you do something about Azkaban as well because that is the original "gauntlet" we had. And about talents/spell trees, you didn't mention the biggest pros of talents is that you're not limited on the spells you used SPs on, you can use many different spells with the same talent setup, which wasn't possible with spell trees as using spells which you didn't spent points on wasn't effective.
 

TallBlondeDude

Librarian
Minecraft IGN: TallBlondeDude
Auralock Dark Follower Phoenix Serpent Vampire Werewolf
#7
I want to preface this by saying this is something I’ve been asking for from the dev team for what feels likes years now. There was only one thing missing where qb and maybe guilds. Overall, I look forward to future clarity and updates, as it really helps.

7/10
Too much water
 

Steaphan9

Magician
Minecraft IGN: steaphan9
Honeybadger Auralock
#8
I like the idea of making the skill system centered around tank/healer/dps, however I would like for those in charge of the changes to consider adding "utility". I'm sure I'm not the only one who doesn't like PvE or PvP. I tend to use odd spells for combat like the AoE spells (because I have trouble hitting everything I aim at). I would prefer reduced cooldowns on non-combat spells, like the spells that are needed for exploring or travel. I know its probably not a popular opinion but I feel it at least needs to be hear.