Several Interrelated Issues

(1) Something I love from Final Fantasy Tactics is the way it encourages you to train a job you might not use otherwise, in order to get a specific skill synergy with the job you know you're headed for. It feels like charting out your own education or personal growth, making sacrifices to complete it deliberately over time, and in the end you've built something specialized out of your own creativity and willpower. This is something I felt was seriously lacking from the Foreverlands version of Tenderfoot's evolution system. (2) I also felt that classes in Tenderfoot were a bit too tightly designed, and wanted to leave room for players to build something we didn't expect. (3) Finally, we got some helpful feedback from the prologue that it felt bad to evolve a goblin and have them completely reset their progress. This makes a lot of sense! In an RPG, you want to feel character continuity and growth, and the full-reset evolution system spoiled that.

Introducing: The Genetic Memory Slot

As a resolution to the above, we've added to all units a single skill slot which lets you load any known skill from any class. It costs no points to use and is free to swap out any time (out of combat only, of course). We're calling it, for now, a 'genetic memory' slot.
(ignore the clumsy temporary UI while we polish up our new look!) It's an important balance that goblins do become somewhat weaker when you switch them into a level 1 evolution. It forces you to not become too reliant on over-leveled units, foregrounding whichever goblin hasn't evolved yet as the most powerful in your party. With the new system we get a little bit of both - you lose all but one of your old skills, forcing you to treat the newly evolved goblin as a weaker unit in the next fight, but in choosing your favorite/most-used skill as a memory, you end up preserving some of that unit's character and bringing it into its new shape. We also already are seeing some really interesting incidental builds. Archers that round out their effective range with Shortbow. Knights with Song or Grenade. Wizards with Frag Lance. The most exciting thing about this is that it's naturally multiplicative. There are about 150 planned unique skills in the game, and about 30 evolutions, putting the potential combinations of (memory skill x evolution) in the thousands.
We might not yet be exactly where we'll end up, and certainly aren't promising we'll ship this system in this precise state, but some lightweight multiclassing like this feels like the right direction to be heading to take the promise of the prologue and turn it into something richer and fuller.

[ 2019-11-12 22:22:52 CET ] [ Original post ]