Morning all, Question time then! @Deadpan, treasure is rewarded at the end of dungeons. So no item swaps during dungeons. Currently the "stash" is limitless, we may cap it to 999 items if memory gets to be an issue. Also, items work quite differently in this game. We don't have consumables. So if you get a "health potion" it might be one that gives you 5HP and can be used 5 times per dungeon. Or it might be one that gives you 50HP and can be used once per dungeon. Once you've used them however, they will still be there for your next adventure. There's no stacking on gameplay slots, as we found it detracts from the decision making at the start of a dungeon. @Sloany, yep, plenty of armour options. @Nullzone, probably a good place to mention that skills and spells are items that you assign to gameplay slots. They are treated very much like weapons in our game. You can buy them in shops, you can assign them to Warriors, and take them off just as easily. Makes for a more versatile system. When your Warrior levels up, they gain either a gameplay slot or a stat increase... or sometimes both. At current time of writing, that's randomly chosen. We may swap over to a more fixed system though. We're taking quite a different approach to items and gear, but once you play the game, you'll get a good feel for it.
@Benjamin: That approach to skills is really good, chafing at the bit to try it So, if I understand it right, there isn't (a need for) a skilltree; with the possible exception of special skills granted by class-specific equipment like the pistols you mentioned? For what it's worth, my vote goes to a fixed system for levelups. Imagine the worst case: Player A gets really lucky and gets 10 slots & stat increases over 10 levels, Player B draws the short stick and only gets 10 meager stat increases. Player B now is seriously limited compared to A, due to some unlucky dicerolls. If WHQ2 only hits the same mark as 1, folks will spend hundreds of hours playing it (I know I did ) . For such long games, random levelup rewards are bad game design in my book, and fixed ones are good. If it helps convincing you, I can do a long rant detailed analysis how much reloading occured here, to get skill/stat combos on levelups that weren't terrible (e.g. getting 1HP vs. getting 5 plus a good skill) and how horribly broken that system was in WHQ1 EDIT: if you already have a random system finished, keep it in and offer both random and fixed modes. Call them "Roguelike/old-school" and "regular" or something like that.
The more I read about this gameplay slot mechanic, the more I'm intrigued. Can't wait to experience it directly. How many slots do you start with, let's say, the captain?
I too would prefer a set system for character development I hate games that rely on rng and if you end up with something terrible you just want to start all over again or just give up because you can't be bothered. In the past I've rolled charachters over and over again just to get a decent start which I don't find fun. Surely having all heroes start the same and then the players choices to make them unique to their play style is enough? Along with set progression rather than rng
I agree that rng stats are a terrible decision for a long rpg campaign. Enough bad rolls and I simply give up on a game that uses that system.
Thanks for the comments on rng skill systems. We'll see what we can do. @Nullzone, correct, yes. There is no skill tree in this game. We have weapons, outfits (armour), items, skills and spells. All of these can be looted in dungeons, and bought in shops. Then you just put it into your gameplay slot for the Warrior who wants to use it. No level limits, no skill trees, no fuss. Last night I tried out a new Empire Captain combo. Potion of Ogre Strength, Ring of Strength and The Kings Armour. If you go into a dungeon with no weapons, you can still punch things. It was like "Berserk" mode in Doom! Also like the idea of having different game modes. As I mention, we'll be updating this post-launch, so I'm sure we can do those! @Pitta, starting count is 4 at the moment. Playtesting is ongoing though, so that may change over the next few weeks.
@Benjamin: Thanks for the update, really appreciate that you are communicating so much! And your approach to skills and such is fantastic. If that turns out as great as it sounds, you folks will be my new benchmark for how to do this right (hint: that's the highest praise I can give ) And I assume that's still internal playtesting only at the moment?
Benjamin, just throwing in my opinion that the rng on level up was the one thing in WQ1 I didn't like, the amount of times I just re-rolled was unbelievable. Fixed increases would be preferred ## Talking about weapons, are flails in the game? Or throwing weapons (such as knives/axes)? What about crossbows or dart guns? If ranged weapons are used in the gameplay slots, such as crossbows/bows/dartguns/pistols, does their ammo also take up a slot? Can you run out of ammo? And is there special ammo types (poison arrows/darts, fire arrows, silver bullets vs. Exploding bullets)? If a warrior takes in say a sword and shield in 2 slots could he also take a double handed maul as well and swap between them during the dungeon run? Will the map be bigger this time? Do you plan on adding more areas post launch? Will there be special missions where you can take larger parties into the dungeon? Like super dungeons or even narrative dungeons during the story (I.e. Last mission is a massive fight?), on that note are there dungeons where you take less than 4? Like stealthy type missions (get in, get the loot/hostage and get out)? Do you plan on adding in dungeons post launch that aren't actually dungeons but in say forests or cities? Sooooo looking forward to this....
Just wanted to say I'm happy with random skill points/ability slots. It adds to the replayability of the game imo and makes it more challenging when you choose to play with a character who's had a succession of bad roles. It can also prompt you to try out strategies you might never have thought of otherwise. Keep the info coming Ben, my excitement for this just keeps on growing!
Yeah, I actually prefer random stat gains. My favourite version is something like Fallout or Elder Scrolls where the stat gains are dependent on what type of activity you perform most. For example, if you fight with a heavy hammer, then your strength goes up. If you cast a lot of spells, your mental powers increase but not your stamina. However, that's a hard thing to design for in all games. Overall, though, I had no issue with the random stats system in the first Warhammer Quest. However, I'm the kind of person that isn't fussed about optimizing stats or building the best possible character and just prefer to play the game. For me the tactical aspect is more compelling than the character build / optimization. Different strokes for different blokes, as they say.
One more vote for set stat gains here. Rolling and rerolling stats on the Infinity Engine games back in the day and savescumming every level up took serious fun out of them until i downloaded the cheat engines and could enjoy the game. Also in my tabletop RPG group because of the difficult campaigns we keep the stat rolls but the RNG to the acceptable limit, ie. if we have to roll 1-10 for hp, and we roll <5, we reroll until we get >5. This way, the caharacter are powerful but the threats they face -and the campaign interest- can be scaled to greater heights. It's one thing to have a gimp group in a "kill all goblins" campaing and different to have a powered group infiltrating a dragon worshiping cult with a suitable end-boss. Which would you rather play in?
Speaking about fixed or rng progression, I personally don't mind, I'm fine with either. Never had a problem with WHQ. Sure some hardcore runs were harder than others, especially if the gray wizard didn't get certain spells, but I dare say I actually enjoyed more those runs because they forced me to think harder to escape alive some black dungeons. Actually I never max out characters and I prefer equipping my chars with things that I like and look good instead of equipping them with the most powerful things I got...but probably it's just me. What I didn't like (but it's more a problem of a not curated rng than the rng per se) was Deathwatch card system for characters (fine for loot). I'm still missin my Heroic Lone Wold after hundreds of hours and having beaten the game several times on hardcore. As long I can choose freely my character and equipment...I'm cool with a char that has less slot in a run than in another one (and as far as we know stat increase could be a huge thing too, even if obviously more slots seems more versatile). The real problem is more for the devs than the players imho....because in my experience getting the right difficulty balance in WAY more difficult in a game with rng progression than a fixed progression one, for obvious reasons. Most players (surely not this thread participants) will play just once the campaign so maybe they will never realize progression is random. All that said,..I really liking how this new gameplay slot mechanic is shaping up....feels more like a real miniature game than a RPG (limited 'slots' versus big inventory)....and I like this a lot.
@Benjamin Just wanted to say how excited I am to see you guys do a sequel for this. As a huge fan of the original board game, I sunk dozens and dozens of hours into the first release of WQ on IOS, and it's still one of my favorite dungeon crawls to pick up and play. Thanks so much for all your work on that release and for what you guys are doing for WQ2, I can't wait! I have one question for the new game as it was something I was hoping for in the original. Any chance to have an optional dice roll mechanic for us old school board game lovers? Keep up the good work, it's so cool to see you answering so many questions on here. EDIT: One more thing! Did I notice different selectable color sets for our heroes???
Oooooh! I SOOO second the dice roll mechanic! Even if its mainly just an aesthetic/add to the feel of the game kinda thing.
Hello everyone. Time for the morning questions then... @Tychaeus and @JonnyNoc, there are no dice rolls in there at the moment. It's an option we can look at adding post-launch though. Yes, there are 8 different colour choices for each of your Warriors. @Pitta, yes, we're really running with "choice is a good thing" in this game. No hiding Warriors behind random card draws. Rest assured we're listening to you lot with the rng stat gain stuff. We're coming up with a slightly less random way to level up, that also allows a bit of luck. @Sloany, you've managed to pick all the weapons there that didn't make the cut for release! At launch we'll have 20 "regular" weapons including pistols, hammers, axes, knuckle dusters, knives, torches, and loads others. We'll be looking to add to that list in future updates. We also have character specific "hero" weapons. Repeater pistols, elven swords, dark energy staffs. All in all, there are around 200 items to play with right now. We played around with ammo, and it turned out to be too fiddly. Instead we now have weapons that fire in a particular way. The Explosive Pistol for example. Heck yeah to swapping weapons during a dungeon run. Sword and board Empire Captain plus an additional Warhammer is a favourite loadout of mine. It's also going to be necessary, as weapons deal one of three types of damage. Slashing, Piercing or Crushing. Enemies will be resistant to certain types of damage, so you'll need to figure out the best weapons for certain situations. Swapping weapons doesn't cost any action points, however, swapping armour costs 1AP in a dungeon. The map is pretty huge. You'll be playing in Middenland in the core game, with Reikland being available as dlc at launch. We're aiming to release new regions every few months. Don't want to spoil any surprises, but yes there are dungeons where you take fewer Warriors in. We'll just have to see about any future dungeon sets. Any preferences? Hope everyone's having a cracking Thursday!
Swapping weapons and ammo gave me a thought about potential game modes bar the usual explore the dungeons if you wanted to try and have a few different types of missions to keep the game fresh One is in general you could have missions where you have to hunt/kill a particular monster or group of monsters that are only significantly damaged by a certain type of weapon but the weapon is so large and heavy that its brought on a pack horse and its not that effective against other enemies, and when a hero carries it they have to swap all their weapons to the pack horse to pick up the weapon think this would add an extra layer of having to protect the pack horse but also have oh sh*t moments where you discover one of the monsters and have to quickly retreat to get the weapon I was also thinking that you could have a protect the base kind of map along a similar line to the Zombie mode in Call of Duty for example, a cave where the heroes have to put up and maintain barriers at several points where enemies can get in for a set number of turns combine that with the idea above as well and I think it would be quite fun as you would have to switch strategies/weapons to adapt to the enemies that are attacking
Future areas/dungeons? My personal favorite would be Nehekhara , Egyptian theme is always great. Sylvania (I think it is), where that cute cuddly von Carstein family lives. Bonus points if you can roam around there with an all Vampires & Thralls group Other than that, Nurgle-rot infested forests, and the Northern Wastes.
I was already totally excited for this as Warhammer Quest is one of my favorite games but with each new drop of information it gets better and better! Thanks for keeping us updated and for fueling the already raging fire.
