As mentioned in many other news, Crystal Hunt is going to be the long-awaited "Progression Mode" for Blade & Sorcery, and a big component of that progression is the development of the player character via their skills.
Let's get into it!
When we say "skills", we mean legit unlocking some new feature. We were very dead set against following the common game design cliché of a skill tree where you unlock a new skill and get "+5 damage" or things like that.
On our skill tree each unlock is unlocking something new to mix up how you can play, whether it be a new spell, an augmentation for a spell to change how it works, or even something that pertains to swordfighting or archery.
That includes unarmed too!
We were really, really adamant that we didn't wanna do a gamey skill tree that was nothing but boring number crunch, so this was non-negotiable for Warpfrog.
On this note, we currently have 78 skills.
Yes, it is indeed madness and it keeps me awake at night, lol. When Lyneca told me we were cramming this much new content into the Skill Tree I was gripped with terror because I am calling it now that our QA time for this many skills is going to surely be hell, but at least since this is 1.0 and "the big one" it will be cool to go out with a bang. ːpraisesunː
Some of these skills are stuff you already know but broken off into their own unlockable, for example the regular fireball, or the regular lightning, etc. But the vast majority is new stuff.
In the beginning of the game, the player character is completely skill-less. That means all the spells and OP stuff you know from the years of Early Access Sandbox game are stripped from the player and the player is literally just a sword or archery warrior.
As player completes dungeon runs in Crystal Hunt, you will begin to unlock things on the Skill Tree and develop your character in any of the five Skill Paths - Fire, Lightning, Gravity, Body and Mind.
While Fire, Lightning and Gravity are obvious enough, the Body Path pertains to physical prowess and swordfighting skills, while Mind refers to things like focus (slow motion, base telekinesis upgrades, etc).
Each path has three tiers and generally speaking the T1 unlocks tend to be the skills that you will be most familiar with from Early Access, T2 skills tend to be something new, and T3 tend to be the big merge skills.
There are also a few multipath skills, such as having a certain tier of Fire and a certain tier of Gravity will unlock some new special combination skill.
Particularly with these cross-elemental skills they can be the most devastating late game spells, and although they are composed of familiar elements, generally they are something completely new altogether.
Some of the skills will be augmentations for other skills you have already unlocked.
This is where it can get really, really whacky; a big component of the skill tree is about synergy, which is to say, how different skills play off each other. You will find that skill effects will compound and stack, and because of the physics simulation factor you may find they stack and can be utilized in cool or novel ways if you are creative!
With so many new skills and effects in the game, if you were to unlock them all at the same time you might hardly recognize the EA game because there is just so much going on, lol. But for this reason we tried our absolute best to make it so no new skill changes how the game plays on a fundamental level.
We tried our best on the controls side to keep everything either naturally intuitive or familiar to how the EA base game operated.
To give an example, we all know the regular fireball, but if one was to use the new skill "Remote Detonation", this allows player to explode the fireball mid air, so the controls are simply casting the fireball as usual and then the new part is pulling the trigger to make it explode.
So as you can see, it adds a little layer on top of the familiar controls without doing anything too radically unfamiliar, like suddenly needing gestures or new button combos to operate.
Nonetheless, if you were to have every single skill unlocked all at the same time, it could be quite overwhelming once things start stacking!
However, it is unlikely to be the case that a player would have everything unlocked all at the same time; it is not fully balanced right now, but the idea is that by the time an average player gets to the end of Crystal Hunt, they will more than likely have unlocked something like two full Skill Paths, plus some change.
The idea is that the game encourages the player to go down particular Paths and specialize, so by the end of the Crystal Hunt the player should have some type of character that is excellent at something, such as being able to say "I am a Gravity Mage" with a few extra random skills too.
This will hopefully encourage the player to replay the game again later and try some new type of character playthrough style.
Of course if you kept doing dungeon runs in Crystal Hunt you could theoretically max out every Skill Path and become a master at everything. Surely some madlads will certainly do this, but the average player is unlikely to.
When it comes to Sandbox mode however, in the dev menu we will add individual toggles to unlock anything from the start so that in Sandbox you can pick and choose precisely what you want to play with. Maybe you will wanna go crazy and unlock everything all at once, or maybe you will only want the familiar EA skills loadout but perhaps with one or two augmentations, etc.
We are adding this unrestricted approach to sandbox because if someone wants to have everything from the start to mess around with, that is their business; we don't believe in telling players how they should be having fun.
Now let's go a layer deeper!
Another mechanic that has been added to the game is the inclusion of "status effects".
If you recall the old lightning, when you zapped an enemy with lightning they were stunned for a moment; this is essentially an expansion of that. Enemy can now suffer status effects for all elements, such as being set on fire or made weightless.
There are also some status effects for the Body Path skills, but we will leave that for you to discover yourself later.
If the above flamethrower gif was making you wonder how staffs are going to work in conjunction with the Skill Tree, staffs will still get their usual imbue slam abilities for free, but you will be able to unlock powerful new skills for the staff too.
My wish was fulfilled that I can now play as Saruman. ːwftogrinː
Last little note, these skill trees are modder friendly!
We designed it in such a way that modders should be able to add their own entirely new skill trees into Crystal Hunt so that players could unlock modder skills in a progression mode fashion. This should prove to be cool if any modder was to add a thematic skill tree pack because it should slot into the vanilla game really nicely to compliment Crystal Hunt mode. ːsteamdanceː
That about does it for the Skills I think! There is much to discover and more detail to go into but I don't want to spoil too much.
As you all know, this content will be in the 1.0 release and for those wondering about when the 1.0 release is, the answer is we are not sure. We are still praying for a Q1 2024 release but there is a massive chance of that not becoming reality; our goal was to be feature complete by December and then use Q1 to polish and bugfix over a lengthy QA period, but it is end of December now and I can confirm we have lots of (in some cases worryingly large) features incomplete.
This means the extra dev time required to finish features is gonna ripple into our bugfixing time and that means everything is gonna get pushed back as a result. Compound that with the massive amount of new content that is gonna need robust QA testing and you can see why I say it doesn't seem unlikely that development could push into Q2. For this reason it is best for us to continue our policy of not committing to any specific release date, because we just don't know for sure!
That is it for the end of the year news, guys! From everyone at Warpfrog, thank you for the continued support and we hope you guys all have a wonderful holidays and New Year! ːlunar2019piginablanketː
Cheers!
