Reply To: More important anything else, to me

#2969
Avatar photoGOD
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I’m with GoD on this. Without a doubt. The equipment is far more influential at the very start than it is at the very end. If you make the charactes in a generator you will be attacherd to them more than for their fairly weak starting members perk. I can even imgaine how many people will reroll the game just cuz they lost one of their custumized starters who they had big plans with. And this will happen at any part of the game. You are playing not as one (tho you definetely can RP that) but as a whole group of mercenaries who didn’t become this way because they like it, but had to. Just by reading the backstories it is quite obvious that most of them aren’t the mercenary material. This game is not about heroes, it is about mercenaries. The expendable kind. Death and gold are your companions, you are no heroes, you do all the stuff for money, even when it does not seem like that. This is not the MLP land, this is the harsh and bloody dark ages.

The mercenary life IS your LAST resolve, if this will not work out you can just go and die, nothing else is there in the world for you. That is the reason your people gather up, be whoever they were before. Ultimately it does not matter. What only matter is who you become if you survive and prosper. Tbh i’d even bound some of the backgrounds to a minimum party level so you can not recruit the combat experienced people too soon. As the player you would have a lot of time to get used to dying sellswords, lack of resources, fearsome enemies. The moment my group leveled up to lvl 8ish it was not so much fun anymore, there were rare encounters that could make me rotate someone to the back of injuries, and even less when I did lose someone. At that point it all became an OP group of dudes. Ofc that was only because the state of the game at this point. Besides had no time for games this weekend.

PS. That comment about strict parents and no fun made me rotfl. Why do I have the feeling that you will be the first to cry when your beloved custom character bites the dust? And… Just for lolz, what do parents have to do with a game preference and fun? Wouldn’t it be exactly the opposite when you break out of that stricnes every possible way and always have fun?

Pretty much. Customised character creation would a very misleading way of starting the game and encourage the idea that your first three are some sort of main characters, like in most RPGs. That’s why I’d much prefer to see something like that as a mod, so that you can play it as an alternative playstyle.

I think that the difficulty also changes the cost of items overall throughout the game, but I’m not certain about that. Difficulty right now only really affects the early game, since after a few large battles you get to a point where the starting conditions become irrelevant. There’s not really enough content and focus to the game at this point to know how hard it will end up being, so discussions about difficulty balancing are probably premature.
I do think that having a little more choice about starting conditions would help quell some of the dissatisfaction people have with a random start, without hurting the game’s theme too much. I do agree that it’s probably ultimately unnecessary though; more a concession to modern expectations about game design than a required feature.

I don’t think it does, but I haven’t checked. Maybe adding something like an additional difficulty level is an idea. A difficulty level for starting gold, like we have now. And a difficulty level for the minimum starting value of your team (gear, traits and backgrounds). It would still be random, but you would have a bit more control over how good your starting team is.
You could divide it into random, easy and hard. Easy raising the minimum value of your team that you’ll get. Hard lowering the maximum value of the team you can get. And random changing nothing.

Plenty of people have addressed your points. I’m not one because I’m not interested in convincing a fellow player of anything with walls of text. One of the devs mentioned that they’re thinking of having a character customizer for the founding members using a crown system. Pro traits/backgrounds cost crown, negative give crowns I’m guessing. Something like that is a familiar system. I think we’ll see that in the final game. Makes total sense for a roleplaying game, aside from your desire to make it arcade-y.

Not sure who you’re talking about, because the arguments I’ve seen in favour of customisation have been about convenience and the personalizing starting characters. No actual replies addressing my arguments regarding design.
They’re discussing customised creation, but handpicking traits and such is something Psen at least wanted to absolutely avoid. The crown thing was about buying mercs from a randomised list, which I have less of a problem with than with customised creation.