Citan's Potion Belt
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This Blog Post was part of the Gorgon Website blog. It was posted by Citan in early 2016 (Before April)
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- Thanks for the suggestions, this is something I'm still mulling over. Giving out infinite sidebar slots will be insanely overpowered (in the final game), so that won't happen. But the current sidebar system is a little too constraining, which leads to things like drinking potions out of your backpack. So a more nuanced solution will be needed.
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- Side-topic: before I talk about the possibilities, let me talk a bit more about WHY it would be overpowered to give you infinite sidebar slots, because this isn't necessarily obvious in the current game.
- In the final game I estimate there will be more than 100 side-bar-able abilities (not including different versions of the same ability). Most skill lines will have combat unlockables. Haberdashers throwing hats? Sure, why not? Blacksmiths with special hammer techniques? Good stuff. These are fun rewards to unlock. Some are attacks, some are restoratives, some do other things. If you could use all of them at once, your damage and survivability would go way up.
- Even raising the sidebar size to, say, 12 sidebar slots presents problems because it gives too much advantage to players with very broad skill range, and it encourages too much junk-carrying.
- Let me give an example: Fish Gut is a typical sidebar ability. Unlocked by leveling a non-combat skill, it does good damage but it has an item requirement (fish scales). In the final game there will be many, many abilities in this vein, along with dozens of abilities that restore power or health (with long reset timers), and lots of other stuff. If you could use dozens of these at once, and were willing to carry the ingredients for all of them, you would be significantly more powerful than somebody who didn't do this.
- "If they want to carry all that crap, and manage all those ability bars at once, let them!" I hear somebody say. No. That would be bad for the game. Because when players see Joe Catass with every possible ability perform some feat that's way above what should be possible for a single player, then everybody else suddenly feels that they are underpowered. And the only way to get up to speed would be to unlock all those abilities (which could take literal years!) and carry all those items, which is ugh. And many of them are too expensive for newbies, which further pushes new players away from feeling optimal.
- So in terms of being able to balance the game, I need all players with max-skills and max-gear to be in the same ballpark. Too many sidebar abilities will ruin that.
- To state it in terms of the game philosophy, this is a game where you can learn everything, but it is not a game where you can do everything at once.
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- So if we leave aside the answer of "give infinite sidebar slots", what other options are there? (Let me summarize some of the suggestions in this thread.) I agree that it sucks to have to open your inventory to drink a potion. I don't think just adding one or two more sidebar slots would help at all, because no matter how many sidebar slots you have, I doubt you'd make room for potions on there. There will be too many abilities you want to use instead.
- So a "potion bar" might be the best answer here. I might be able to refactor health kits to be usable as items, so then they could go on that bar as well. An "item bar" basically.
- Another option is a non-combat sidebar. Things like Resurrect could go on it. If the abilities could only be used out of combat, that wouldn't be overpowered. (You can always drag-and-drop abilities out of combat anyway... it's just annoying to have to do so.) But as was mentioned, many abilities are in a gray area where they're "mostly" used out of combat, but not always. Those really do need to count as in-combat abilities. Otherwise you could have too many.
- Looking beyond this specific problem, there are some other GUI features that may also help out here. We'll eventually add the ability to load and save "loadouts" of gear and abilities, so that you can quickly switch between them when out of combat. That may make a lot of other problems less of a big deal. But it's hard to say.
- Anyway, your suggestions are very welcome! But understand that this is something that will take a while before it's addressed, because first we need to finish the new GUI, and then we need to debug the new GUI, and then there are a bunch of new features already on the GUI waiting list. But in time things will get less annoying here.
- Oh, and you can always put potions on your two main ability bars. If you only use a couple of abilities from your secondary skill, that might be an option. (But I hope that you are actually using all 12 of those ability slots routinely.)
