So one of my favorite games has to be Diablo II. Yes, it’s basically click all the things. Yes, there are too many ways to fail in the skill tree. Yes, I always defend this game because I played the hell out of it. How many characters did I roll? How many mules did I have that were full of Stone of Jordans? My Hammerdin was awesome. My Bowazon destroyed everything. If I put points into the wrong skill, I just transferred my items with the help of friends and power-leveled my new character and kept trading for crazy items. Don’t even get me started with items… that was what put the frosting on the cake.
Why did this entertain me? It’s because I’m a min/maxer. I enjoy putting points into skills. I enjoy dealing with scammers to get the item with the best possible stats even if it’s just 3-5 more damage more. That probably also means I enjoy screwing up, restarting, and then to get it right. Masochistic? Sure, why not. However, this trend is quickly dying out. Even the the epitome of min/maxing extremes, the Diablo franchise, isn’t going to have that in the latest release. I was surprised to find out that Blizzard decided to axe skill points and just unlock skills as you level up and limit the number of skills you can use at any given time without rebinding (we’re doing something similar to I’m glad to see some of the big-wigs doing it too, at least the skill binding provides at least some min/maxing).
So without a high-chance-of-failure-masochistic-system, what will us min/maxers ever do? Will Guns of Icarus Online be any fun? Well, min/maxers of the world, do not worry. There is one role that appeals to our penchant for perfection: the engineer. How, what? Fans of the original Guns of Icarus will have an idea of what this was like but now we’ve made that game deeper instead of “fix the thing that’s on fire.” I won’t go into a lot of detail here but what we’ve done is taken the interspersed and long-term punishing action of allocating skill points (because if you screw up at level 35 that means you’ll need to spend another 3 hours grinding) and put the decision making process up front so that it occurs on a second-to-second basis. Furthermore, it’s no where near as punishing as wrongly allocating 2-3 skill points–you can recoup from a mishap that will inevitably occur every now and then–but will still demand a degree of understanding of the system in order to navigate it. Otherwise, mistakes will start to compound on themselves after a certain point.
Following the trends of casual gaming and inspired by the genre of time-management, we have something that is both highly active and set in a more hardcore setting. Hopefully those who enjoy precision, making tough decisions and compromises, and trying to squeeze out the most efficiency out of a system of numbers will enjoy what we’ve cooked up.
In the near future, we’ll have a overall gameplay video that will take a first glance at the mechanics I’ve described as well as the others that we have in store. Stay tuned.