Elder Game: More Stuff Happening

This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on February 21, 2013.

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Fire Magic Spells!

It turns out that almost all the spells in the Fire Magic school were broken in pre-alpha 2. (For instance, the spell that makes monsters take extra fire damage didn’t.) To make matters worse, it was really hard to get started with learning Fire Magic, so almost nobody tried it out. So I’ve revamped the spells and added lots more of them… over a hundred more!

These spells come in all sorts of varieties. A ton of different fireballs: long-range, short-range, damage-over-time, damage-multiplying, sparkly, extra-small, made of frost instead of fire… plus there’s lots of other fire spells, for everything from explosive bursts to creating pet “living flames”. But no matter how many spells you research, you only have six slots for Fire Magic spells, so you have to pick and choose what you use.

The idea is that each person does this Fire Magic Research thing where they randomly discover different spells. At first you’ll just keep Researching until you learn them all, because it costs very little to do the early research. But after level 10, it gets more expensive to research the higher-level spells… and soon, there are so many spells to learn, and it costs so much, that you’ll out-level the spell range before you can easily afford all the spells.

This is intentional — it’s so you have a more personalized Fire Magic experience. The equipment you find is also random, so that will play into your choices a lot.

For instance, the “puttering fireball” spells are kind of crappy fireballs that don’t go very far. You’re unlikely to want to use them… but there are magic items that specifically make Puttering fireballs much more effective in lots of ways.

Or maybe you have some of the “sparkly fireball” spells, which just look different from regular fireballs. Those aren’t bad fireballs, but they’re nothing special… unless you’ve found a staff that specifically boosts sparkly fireballs.

Like I said, I dunno how well it will work in practice, because I don’t have a lot of test data. But it’s kinda fun to me, so I’ll just see how you like it.

(At max level, you’ll eventually be able to get all the spells, of course. At that point there’ll probably be a lot fewer distinctive builds. But there should still be some big choices to make depending on what epic equipment you happen to have found.)

Item Nerf Incoming

I’m not yet sure how well the pre-alpha 2 characters will make it over to pre-alpha 3. They’ll definitely retain their skill levels, and maybe their quests. Other stuff… not sure yet. I’ll have to see how hard it’s going to be to convert people.

One thing that definitely will happen is that lots of characters’ items will get nerfed.

In pre-alpha 2, any treasure-effect could end up on any piece of equipment, and they all stacked. Which meant it was very easy to create insanely broken builds.

As an example, there’s a treasure-effect that adds +20 damage when you use a certain Sword ability against Goblins. That’s a lot of damage, but it’s very specialized, so it’s not insanely broken. However, when you have six pieces of equipment with that on it, you do +120 damage, and you can insta-kill any goblin currently in the game! That effect is only supposed to show up on chest armor, not on any other slots.

So what I’ll be doing is stripping these powers off of items that shouldn’t be able to have them. In the example above, any non-chest-armor with that power will lose it.

Which sucks, and I apologize for it, but the game’s not even in alpha yet. I’m sure there’ll be other painful partial-wipes down the road. Hopefully you can push past the pain and keep play-testing!

Wallpaper

Will’s created a pretty cool wallpaper here:

Gorgon: Destriel's Army

This was originally the model for Destriel, one of the bosses of the game. But this ended up being one of his soldiers instead.

Lots of art coming soon! I’m hoping all the art integration comes together in the next two weeks and I can get the servers back up so you can try it out!