Design Basics
Not really any posts yet on ‘what the hell is this game, anyway?’ so it’s probably high time to do one.
Originally, Liber Juratus was just going to be a Diablo clone. We figured the way to approach it would be to use a really unusual setting for the game, since Diablo has been done to death so many times even zombies are jealous of it. So we bullshat liberally until we came up with the idea of setting it on the lost colony of Roanoke in the late 1500s, at which point the design quickly began switching from a generic Diablo rehash to something more resembling Deus Ex — only since almost everyone on the team is a World of Warcrack addict, we decided to go with a third person view, because we think WoW’s control setup is dreamy.
The theme obviously influences both art design and game design, but I’ll let ConceptGuy talk about how it affects art since he’s the expert there. As for the game design — we both loved Deus Ex, obviously, but it’s clear that the point-based skill advancement that was attached to DX’s character development system is a bit klunky and inaccessible compared to more recent games. That said, we still want each Hero to comform (to a large degree) to the player’s preferred playstyle.
What we’ve come up with in preliminary stages is a skill system where each skill has five levels of expertise, and where each level opens up more (and more powerful) play options and abilities. Accessing each new skill level requires the player to spend an Advancement Token or something to that effect, something we imagine players will collect by surviving encounters, discovering lore and so forth. There will be a limited number of these Tokens available throughout the game, so the player will have to choose what their Hero is good at, and what they can scrape by without. So, kind of a bastard child of Deus Ex and, say, Titan Quest.
There are three types of skills available to the Hero: Expertise, Professional, and Occult. Expertise skills define the ‘classes’ of the game (not that there are explicit classes, but your increasing prowess with Expertise skills will give you access to similarly themed abilities that feel a bit class-ish), and at the moment there are five of them: Marksmanship, Swordsmanship, Stealth, Survival and Perception. Professional skills define the extra bits the Hero is capable of; players can only select one for their hero, unlike Expertise skills, and while we don’t have a complete list of these yet, they’ll be things like blacksmith (for armor repair, tool fabrication, that sort of thing), gunsmith (shot-making, gun repair and refinement), and so forth. Nothing game-breaking, but definitely more than just flavor.
And Occult skills, of course. More on them later, I promise; for now, just understand that there will be lots and lots of opportunities to work the dark magic from the pages of the Liber Juratus. Whether it’s a good idea or not will no doubt be the subject of a later post, but you can be certain there will be… consequences.
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