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Do you believe character choices should be permanent?
Vermillion_Raventhal
Member EpicPosts: 4,198
Do you believe in be able able to respec or do you think it helps flavor of the month type gameplay?
What do you think not about not only tobeing able respec but to swap roles on the fly?
Does it less the importance of your personal class choices? Meaning you level a healer but someone in DPS spec can just change into your role at any time.
What do you think not about not only tobeing able respec but to swap roles on the fly?
Does it less the importance of your personal class choices? Meaning you level a healer but someone in DPS spec can just change into your role at any time.
Comments
I'd like to see it more in themeparks. ESO does it, however you're stuck with your class.
If you look at it from a skill based perspective, you should be able to respec to any learned skill-level at any point (exceptions and restrictions applies). Picking and filling your role on the fly should create better opportunities for coop play since you are not completely reliant on specific classes/specs/builds, but still respect the most important but almost forgotten mmorpg concept called roles.
With a skill based system you could have both freedom and choice consequence if made correctly. As an example some skills (and/or skill levels) may prevent advanced use of other skills, making it possible to like hit 70% efficiency which is sufficient for most situations, but getting closer to 100% you need to have chosen a specific path. Although I am more in favor of other choices than spec having stronger effect, such as gear, weapon type, coop role combos, faction, knowledge (studying of mobs to become more efficient); so that spec is just one part of your character not the defining part.
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I prefer a skill system. Also prefer respeccing being supported by in-game lore. A la Superhero genre's 'radiation accident'. All games have abstractions, and sometimes the beginning explanations aren't clear. Gotta deal with people making all encompassing decisions before they get a feel for the 'class'. Practically, a respec is a reasonable idea.
Knew a guy who was a sharpshooter, medic, and skydiver. Stick that into a class.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
To answer the question I'm all for flexibility in games and if I could change classes would still have alts with different skills depending on what I wanted to do.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Srsly tho. Choices should matter and require serious investment, and a similar amount of conviction to reverse. That's what RPG means. If we could reverse big choices on a dime in real life, RPGs would reflect that. They shouldn't, because we can't.
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Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
However, you weren't 100% locked into every choice. You could go to stations every 24 hours and refund one skill, and then you could put those points somewhere else. Over the course of a week or two, you could completely reskill your character into a totally different role. This kind of incremental change I'm fine with, but I really don't care for the whole "switch on the fly" route that a lot of games are going to these days. You're not even making a character at that point. It's just a transforming stat-bot with no anima, just a button for different task modes.
What I would like to see is a game that has attributes such as the ones in Fallout, and those attributes are linked to hundreds of skills. For instance, you have Strength and Dexterity and your level in those two attributes effect how quickly you can train this skill. Then I would like to see the upper levels of a skill deteriorate with disuse.
In other words, you never forget how to ride a bike. I could ride my sons bike right now, and I haven't been on a bike in 10 years. However, I won't be going to the bike park and performing tricks on a half pipe like I used to when I was 18. That skill has deteriorated. Essentially, characters should have to use skills to maintain them at high proficiency and this will encourage characters to specialize rather than some arbitrary class and level limitations.
Now, if these choices are permanent, there needs to be excellent in-game information in order to make good, informed choices. At level up, I don't want to feel like I need to log out (or alt+tab), do research, and come back with my notebook open. Pertinent info should be easily accessible and well explained in-game.
And, there should be plenty of games where all choices are ever-flowing, rarely sticking.
VG
Does respec favor Flavor Of The Month (FOTM)? Sure it does. And for those types of players so does having 50 character slots, and 10 per server. When I was playing WoW, I had 3 warriors, 3 rogues, 3 hunters, 3 warlocks, and 3 mages. The rest were healer, mostly priests.
My point, my playstyle dominated by character build preference, not so much FOTM. I believe that a PvP player will choose a DPS build all the time, or at least most of the time.
In games that don't have respecification. When an update destroys a build, players demand a respecification from GMs. Since players will demand it, might as well offer it at a cash shop price.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
But I think respeccing should be allowed because games are meant to be enjoyed, and being forever stuck up with a choice you don't like is not fun.
VG
- Albert Einstein
I also prefer systems that allow you to adjust skill load-outs to suit different situations and roles. Rift's soul system was great for that and in ESO you eventually can do the same once you have trained more than one set of armor and weapon skills.
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That is, you can go whatever profession you like, and progress through it, get better at it as you do, not having any artificial lock to one profession/class.
These were not your primary attributes (str, agil, dex etc) which were chosen at character creation and could never be changed.
The system allowed you to experiment while leveling, and correct any mistakes you may have made along the way.
One improvement I would have liked to see was a final free respec at level 50. The only way to do so then was from using a respec stone which only dropped from killing the world dragons which didnt get killed all that regularly (was tough to do).
This was almost prohibitively expensive to the average player, prices ranged between 2 to 4 million gold which at the time was a huge amount of money.
In fact, it took less time for most to just level another character of the same class with different specs, so I never bought a respec stone.
The one time I do feel players should get a free, full respec is if their character's class or skills are nerfed or "rebalanced" by the devs in a significant way.
I recall in my first MMORPG Lineage the Bloodpledge, they decided to rebalance wizards so that a particular summoning spell was tied to your primary assets.
Primary assets determined how much mana you had, (or how fast it regen'd, how powerful your spells hit, your hit points and one, charisma how many pet dogs you could tame.
Most players used dogs as extra DD so they spec'd higher in mana and damage attributes, limiting them to one or two dogs only, instead of 4.
Bugbear summoning was different, number you got was random, you could summon between one (not often), two or three (quite often) to four (pretty rare) so players normally would recast the spell till they got at least 3 BB's which was a very powerful number.
NCSoft felt it was too powerful for players whose attribute choices made them strong DD spell casters as well, so they changed it to be in line with dog taming.
Based on my charisma attribute I no longer could summon more than 2 bugbears, and they provided no opportunity to respec the charisma attribute higher.
Rerolling was out of the question. I had spent months saving up a million adena to buy the spell (spells were rare drops in game and this was a highly prized one)
Now the cost of this spell fell to 300K which was one kick in the teeth, but actually a positive to rerolling.
What stopped me was my main had the good fortune to get a drop of the rarest and most prized spellbook, Invisibility, and there was no way I was going to reroll.
So I eventually quit L1 and went to DAOC largely over it so again, if devs rebalance, a reroll is warranted.
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
This would result your character to be different from other characters of same class, but you could swap roles and adapt in depending what your group needs.
Using WoW warrior as an example, it doesn't make sense your mighty warrior forgets how to use 2h sword properly, and has to refuse to join a group because he only knows how to defend.
Where changing a decision fails is in the story-telling aspects. Ideally, a choice, such as quest completion, presents the player with a positive and a negative reward. Allowing the player to choose again, opens the possibility to accept all the positive rewards from a single quest. If the quest was 'please save my cat', the answer can't be both 'the cat is safe' and 'I threw the cat in the river', changing the choice allows the player to present different ethical choices, simply to get both rewards. In cases where the negative aspects are minimal (as happens all-too-often), the combined double-negative (-1 + -1) isn't nearly as detrimental as the double-positive is positive (+10 + +10). Trivialized rewards trivialize the content, and ultimately trivialize the player's decision. Not a good thing in my book.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
VG
VG