Design Dev Journal
The Gargantuan Stats Ovverhaul
didn’t want to say anything until I was absolutely sure about this. The stats for all the races and classes of City of Steam have been completely redone from the ground up. Actually, all weapons, armors, items and calculations are likewise completely from scratch. And yes, thank you for asking, I really did go through hell and back to revamp the CoS core! Of course it’s for the better.(Race and Class pages updated! Woot!)
We thought… umm, I mean… I thought some of my old terminology was a bit nebulous, hard to understand. So, I decided to only use flavorsome words outside of game statistics. I drew a line that separated fiction from stats, and reduced the amount of bleed over into each. This way the mechanics for CoS are solid and independent, so they can be updated and changes without disrupting the fictional space.
The relationships between the stats now are easy to understand, easy to tweak, but hard to master. Intricacies of balance and character build will reveal themselves over time as player perception hones to the feedback of combat.
While I love talking about game stats… I still haven’t met anyone who loves it quite so much. So I’m just going to use plain English and tell you about the differences.
Vitals: A character has seven vitals. These are the base stats from which everything else is derived. Each vital affects several passives, some more than others.
- Physical Agility Quickness, dexterity, speed.
- Physical Strength Might, strength, muscle.
- Physical Endurance Toughness, fortitude, healthiness.
- Luck Fortune, fate, knack, prosperity.
- Mental Agility Intelligence, logic, mathematics.
- Mental Strength Charisma, charm, personality.
- Mental Endurance Tolerance, patience, concentration.
Passive Stats: A character has seven “passives”. These are used in combat calculations character inventory management and movement.
How Attacks Work: Attacks can do any of the following things. Please bear in mind that the % amounts can be changed at any time to adjust balance:
Attacks & Abilities: Sometimes, an ability requires you to have a target. Sometimes, it requires you to choose an area of effect. After a lot of talking and testing, we decided to completely disable friendly fire. It’s not because we are reducing realism, it’s because of the limitations of the camera view and the pace of combat –it’s just too easy to hurt your buddies when you’re out adventuring together. We chose to make the number 1 on the keyboard always do the default attack, if you don’t like clicking the mouse all the time. It also attacks without moving, so is useful when you have a ranged weapon and don’t want to get up close.
Stances: A character has three unique stances: Weapon & shield stance; dual weapon stance; two-handed stance. Each of these is good for different things, and adds a whole layer of coolness to combat. Switching stances is cool in itself just for the animation and sounds of the weapons. But later on, we will tweak this to give you an edge over certain bosses and enemies. Against a charging orog, you’ll want to have that shield ready. Against the fast skirmishing ratlings, dual weapons will carve them up faster. Against armored bosses and tanks, two handed weapons are the way to go. Later, when we have tested and tweaked for long enough, we’ll release a guide as to what character stat changes that happen on switching stances.
Weapon & Ability Relationship: Each weapon is attuned to a specific vital. For example, a hammer is a Physical Endurance weapon, whereas a sword is a Physical Strength weapon. Most firearms are Luck weapons –in the early days of gunpowder, misfires and lead gunshot deformation meant there was a very high element of change with each squeeze of the trigger.
Each ability also has its own special preferences, but unlike weapon vitals we don’t list them. You can work these out easily by just thinking to yourself. Obviously, a big overhead slam is going to work better with a hammer, not a dagger. Conversely, a dagger will be much better than the hammer for rapid stabbing attacks. This is a subtle effect, but makes character choices much more interesting.
Basically, the things you like to do will be partially affected by the abilities and weapons you pair together. THAT’s why we put such an emphasis on switching weapons. It’s totally to your advantage.
How Armor Works: Armor reduces a percentage of damage you take. But it also reduces your speed and reflexes. Each armor type has advantages and disadvantages, against physical damage, elemental damage (fire, ice, electric, sonic, acid) and aetheric damage (dark, light, healing, necrotic, poison).
You can wear up to 6 pieces of armor. Later in the full version, you’ll get special additional bonuses for wearing 4, 5, or 6 pieces of the same armor set. This makes suits like steam-powered armor really good when you have all pieces, but kinda slow and clumsy when you only have a few bits –because each piece is codependent on the steam-power.
Damage Types and Resistances: There are eleven types of damage possible in CoS. Each character has resistances and bonuses to each type. So do the monsters. Basically, don’t use necrotic damage on skeletons cause it will heal them, and don’t use ice attacks on an ice golem. This was something we wanted to do for a long time, but never got around to.
I hope that everyone who gets to play our Sneak Peek preview will give us some feedback on these things. What you like, what you don’t like, suggestions, etc. The system is all there, but the population and tweaking of stats is almost never-ending. It’s much faster with more opinions and feedback.
Without further ado, I give you what this all looks like in the new GUI:
Thanks again guys. I’m off to design the mythspikes now. Can’t have those levels empty on the 28th!
Dave
For more on how we changed the GUI and what tools we used (created) check out this week’s Art Dev Journal.
