Overworld Combat Progression and Weapon Systems updates proposal

[fresh estuary]

While we don’t currently have all the specifics I want to present some ideas for overworld combat, progression, skill and weapons.

Starting with combat and particularly inplementing illuvial usage the thought is to have up to 6-8 illuvials equippable like the autobattler where you have One active illuvial roaming and fighting with you at a time.

The active illuvial will will battle beside you and be partially commandable primarily through controlling the usage of their Omega ability and potentially it might make sense to start developing generic attacks and abilities they can learn and use ex: scratch, growl fire blast, type moves that aren’t exclusive to one illuvial. In addition or instead to reduce animation work similar to genshin or wuthering waves too, the active illuvial will offer and change the abilities you can use such as a fire or inferno infusion ability when using rhamphyre to your weapon, or water shield with atlas among throwing fireballs, water blasts etc depending on how lore shapes up and determines our rangers capabilities in the illuviverse.

Finally for this part take all the synergy systems from the autobattler and apply them here so your active illuvial can bond with your character and change their element affinity and class depending on your equipped weapon, you and your illuvial can go hyper depending on what you’re fighting and also you gain bonuses based on the affinity and classes of your weapon and the several illuvials you have equipped.

That roughly sums that section up.

At the start just have one or two abilities that you can unlock and level up as you use your equipped illuvials and then with time and updates you can increase level caps and add new abilities. This would go well with multiplayer and raids for making it a full fledged rpg/mmorpg esque gameloop.

Will add weapons idea below
Feel free to comment, dislike and tear down this post to make a better one :p

One alternative if we don’t want to just have our illuvials roaming and fighting alongside us is to make the active/primary illuvial alter our suit and weapon, changing element, type and appearance and via the suit changing/adding abilities for our ranger to use kinda like spiderman or iron mans different suits they wear. It could be simpler color changing schemes at first with configurable skin options since I know suit skins are being developed and then eventually more noticeable physical changes to the suits and weapons especially which could be another way to implement illuvial weapons as well. Just a thought though.

The other core part of this idea is creating illuvial weapons that you can make from illuvial ingredients and already existing materials to make cool looking and unique weapons. Such as a rhamphy/rhampyre bow, atlas gauntlets with a water blaster and so on.

While not concrete I think primarily taking advantage of the future inclusion of ethereal illuvials that aren’t capturable you could have them drop illuvial cores and other ingredients instead to be used to make and upgrade these weapons. Basically ala monster hunter. The other side could be to burn or more likely link/bond a illuvial to a weapon and transform it or something of the like. However this is just an idea based on my thoughts and hopes of roughly what the future systems might already look like.

@umbral lance responding to your post It could replace the drones to an extent however it depends on implementation I suppose and how much you want to repurpose and replace what they have. I think though having the drones maintain their position in your partners is appropriate and just modifying to add the illuvials aspect. Typing quick so wording may be iffy. Sorry

[fresh estuary]

@umbral lance Wanted to add in regards to time and complexity requirements the basis of this proposal is really just about reusing assets and animations that have already been made and perhaps are being worked on. The weapons side yes could come later for the visual aspect at least and I’m relatively fine with the ideas Aaron has already presented in the meantime. The illuvials fighting alongside you isn’t much of an addition either so much as a tweak and slight rework of whatever intelligence behavior and attack patterns they are currently developing for overworld combat. Additions there would just be programming behavior to stay near and assist your player though maybe a gambit system could be cool to implement later on. And then the only real pain point is the new abilities to add for your ranger and or the illuvials. This would be the main workpoint atm which is why I’d recommend either entirely focusing on abilities for the ranger to reduce different animation requirements for all illuvials or just do one at most two more generic type abilities for the illuvials and as the game progresses and they have time money and human reaources to allocate, develop the system out more for more abilities alongside new raids and other overworld content.

Big idea here though is a fun combat system that really shows off the reduce, reuse, recycle aspect of our high quality illuvial nft art. Showing that you catch em once and can then use them in lots of cool ways in lots of different games/modes

If I may add, I envision for weapons it would really work well to follow the dodge, block, and parry into counter system at least with melee weapons and i have ideas for guns as well. Though that’s another idea almost entirely and I want to see the current version first before asking for upgrades/changes to that

@woven field finally got the ambition to write a new proposal and would love your feedback again like last time. Maybe this one could go somewhere this time.

[woven field]

Love idea.

1. Does this combat system replace the autobattler?
2. What if the ranger can carry more weapons and armor, then the range equip the relevant geats to synergize with the active illuvial's affinity and class, instead of the other away around?

[fresh estuary]

@woven field It could but really it’s just there to compliment whatever system is currently being developed for overworld combat. I see it working well as the pre auto battler to capture system and as a standalone monster hunter with mmo-ish/action rpg style skill system.

2. I was thinking it over and actually thought that taking the illuvials class into consideration would help in reducing workload i.e: Each illuvial primarily synergizes with and changes weapons that align with their class so assasin type only works with /changes design and or abilities of daggers. Bulwark only works with shields, etc. higher composite classes like Slayer could either just use primary class so no change in what it works with or if its a mix of two base classes have two weapons it can work with and change into.

If it doesn’t match up with the class of the weapon you can still say add bonus stats based on your active illuvial and then take the element of the weapon and primary element of the illuvial just lime how the autobattler does the bonding to determine the new element and give it a particle effect or something to signify what type and damage it does.

Otw kinda along the lines of each working with only relevant weapons you can select ahead of time which illuvial you have in your team to synergize with your equipped weapons and then when you switch to the new weapon it doesn’t matter who your active illuvial is it just bonds with the one you selected in advance. This could be cool too though maybe a bit more jarring. I like the idea of having a different element weapon at times than the illuvial roaming with you and doing some element reactions like genshin and similar games do.

At a minimum i demand an ophisto umbrella weapon that fires and conducts electricity and its omega it turns into a lance and you do a lightning thrust impaling your enemy below overloading them with electricity blowing them into crispy shocked chunks.

It also protects you from rain…

[umbral lance]

As they are developing OW combat (illuvials fighter you in the overworld), you are right that it may be much less work than i initially thought as you would already have illuvials attacking in the OW

Overall im a fan of the idea to choose you illuvial buddy to fight with you in the OW, that would add a lot to the OW and combat experience

Id love to hear the team's take on what type of workload this would represent

[fresh estuary]

@upper quest it’s early in the ideation process so lots could change however, what are your thoughts on the general ideas presented and how it integrates into whats already and could be developed for the combat system? No need to spoil anything, just general comments and works doesn’t work well is plenty. Thanks 🙂

Lunch is over for me so I will be back in a few hours to check in.

[versed gazelle]

intresting

[fresh estuary]

@strange adder Would love your opinions and recommendations on anyone else who would be good to see and review this as well.

[fresh estuary]

After watching the trailer and considering factions it may work really well to introduce this as a mechanic once story progresses and either one of the factions maybe has a special connection with the illuvials/developed technology to closely work with and harness their abilities or even a wise illuvial itself may open the door to bonding with and maximizing the potential harmony between your ranger and illuvials. Would give time to develop the features too instead of just randomly dropping the update without the lore/story connection and logic.

@woven field what do you think about using story progression to introduce these mechanics. Basically creating a reason/rationale behind how and why we can do these things.

[woven field]

yea i think using the existing weapon system can work well and it can save dev time. an addition might be using a load out system where the ranger can change the equipments to suit the illuvial being summoned.

[woven field]

thats sick

[woven field]

yea this is what i like about FFXIV
they introduce different classes and weaponary as you progress with the lore

[fresh estuary]

Iike this idea, keeping things simple for the player and reducing wasted time changing gear. I also thought about it and for armor at least, instead of doing changes for each specific illuvial barring an actual armor based weapon the suit could change more simply based on the element of the illuvial so a water illuvial would change it so its as if water is flowing through the suit and give it a wet misty effect while magma could have molten lava flowing across your back and chest with thin magma veins or something down the arms and legs while emitting steam or even spitting some chunks of volcanic ash out occasionally. Doesn’t necessarily have to reach that point right away however, it would simplify and reduce suit ‘skin’ designs down to the teens instead of over 100 unique designs right off the bat. Maybe save those for paid skins entirely.

[fresh estuary]

@civic hollow Curious on your thoughts being art focused what do you think about these special suit effects when bonded with your illuvial and the illuvial weapon design ideas. Complexity, feasibility, and in general if you think it sounds good / is in any way similar or meshable with what’s being worked on rn. Thanks 🙂

[civic hollow]

I suggest to wait a little bit to see the first iteration of combat system.
There is a lot of ideas floating around and the possibility to expand is huge, but gotta move one step at the time.

[fresh estuary]

Sounds good. Excited to see what the team has planned

[fresh estuary]

@woven field I just watched a gameplay video for Metaphor re fantazio. New game from the guys who make the persona series and they have what looks like a great blended system of open world exploration and real time action combat with a smooth transition system into their classic turn based mode. Definitely check it out and let me know if you think something like that would sound exciting / smooth to play with illuviums own spin on the action combat + shift to autobattler option.

I really like how you can just fight the enemies straight up and slay them in action combat mode or it seems by choice or if they are strong in general you can shift to the other turn based mode to take advantage of more strategic gameplay to overpower them.

The video I watched makes a good point of keeping up the general speed of gameplay with this system to keep it from getting dull or breaking the games rhythm in general.

[woven field]

i just watched metaphor and it looks incredible

theres a huge different between turn based fight system and auto battler tho

the biggest issue with auto battler is that u dnt have the feeling of control, because its auto

[fresh estuary]

Yea, it certainly wouldn’t have the same feel and idk if doing something where you weaken them in the action combat mode and then either kill them for weapon and armor materials or force them into their portal to chase after and capture with autobattler will work for sure.
Guess we should start developing a turn based mode :p idk though. There might be other ways we can set it up and or give bonuses for beating them down in the overworld within an inch of their life and then have it affect their health bar or our party morale once you start the autobattler.

Lots of things to consider i suppose.

[woven field]

i personally prefer turn base system than auto battler

[copper kiln]

Great idea 💯 agree with it

But not for turn based. That could be a separate game in illivium ecosystem. Maybe a mobile one
I would preffer overworld to be fighting/rpg

[fresh estuary]

Yea, it was a half joking afterthought though personally i admit turn based works well with monster collectors

[upper quest]

Thank you for the ideas. We will show you more of combat soon and some of it lines up with your vision.

Also, the weapon and suit reworks were not just for Arena…

Weapon rework is complete, minus art. Suit rework still has n extra element to be added.

“Complete” meaning ready for testing. At launch it will still be clearly beta.