While I understand (and to a certain extend like) the devs intention of making wearables purely aesthetic (allowing you too look however you want to etc.) I just can´t get my head around the idea of an RPG(ish) game with items ,namely wearables, that don´t have any impact on the gameplay.
That´s why I want to suggest a (simple) way to allow both, purely aesthetic wearables that still allow gameplay-affecting customisation and allow you to display your preferred-role / profession visually.
My thought process went somewhat like this
Many games allow you to socket gems into your equipment to further customize it.
Boundless will allow you to mod your weapon.
Why not extend 2. into 1. ?
Since B< is already about gems (Oortshards) I think this would fit into the theme quite nicely and wouldn´t be too resource intensive to implement. Especially since wearable modding seems to be planned anyway (based on following quote):
So it seems like an UI to insert mods/customisations has to be done anyway, gems/crystals are usually low-polygon models with simple textures, “gluing” some crystals on certain gear-pieces sounds like a reasonably hard task (from a layman’s point of view).
At this point I want to mention that I think that wearable modding should be very simple since it should in no way compete with weapon modding.
That said I think there should be 2 types of gems (similar to WoW):
Simple stat gems that give you a plain bonus on one of the various stats and don´t chance the appearance of your wearable. This kind of gem can be placed on every type of wearables. (Just like “normal” gems in WoW)
Advanced gems that give you an unique passive bonus like
-x% aggro range
Minor run speed increase
Slight heal upon critical hits
etc.
This gems can only be slotted in certain pieces of wearables which heavily limits the number of ‘advanced gems’ a character can have. Additionally there should be a requirement for this gems in order to be active, e.g. 2 simple gems of health +1 simple gem of Crit-chance on your character in total in order to activate the ‘slight heal upon critical hits’ gem. (Similar to Meta-gems in WoW)
However, I think that it would be awesome if this kind of gem would have (a small) impact on the appearance of the wearable they are attached to, dependent on the category of the gem.
This could look somewhat like this (using shoulder pieces as example):
I used some WoW armors to give an example. This would obviously have to be changed in order to fit into the Boundless theme.
I think this would make a good in-between solution between purely aesthetic wearables and the ‘force you to wear what is good’ mechanic the devs want to avoid.
Additionally it would make a good (and supposedly simple) way to allow players to visually display their preferred role.
And as a bonus it could work as permanent storage of progress since wearables will be permanent and wont loose durability.
Tl:DR
Keep wearables purely aesthetic
Extend the (gameplay-affecting) modding mechanics for weapons to wearables
But doesn’t this do basically the same as the armring/armor system? Though instead of equiping armrings you just add something as a layer on your armor?
Now you are just forced to carry all pieces of armor instead of being able to have an assymetric setup where you for example doesnt where shoulder protection on the left shoulder.
Not really. You could still run around naked except for armrings and be as protected/strong as a fully equiped character.
And that´s the main point I want to get rid of with my suggestion.
This is indeed an issue with my suggestion. A solution would be to only allow a certain amount of gems in total per character. So you are not forced to carry wearables in all slots if you don´t want to.
But as long as that is a choice made by the player is that a problem? If you are going for a babarian look you choose to maybe only wear some leg protection. Or just take the decision that naked is the way you want to look?
If you are afraid of large amounts of players running around without armor because they are lazy or very focused on stuff that provides skill we could just make everyone start with a generic set of starter armor.
I personally like the idea of the stat less armor because it provides so much freedom in how you can choose to look and that (you could say it makes the amount of designs your charracter can have boundless )
Yep, I definitely think that this will be a common sight in B<:
I think this will be done anyway (I´ve never seen a game (ok, except Dark Souls) that spawns you naked).
As I wrote in the first sentence of my thread. I get the intention of this concept and wouldn´t want it to be restricted in any way but I (and apparently some others) play RPGs mostly to get awesome, hard-to-obtain and ,most important, strong items that display the strengt (stats) of my character and what I´ve achieved so far.
With weapons breaking permanently and wearables being purely cosmetic there is nothing left for this kind of players of this community.
That´s why I suggested a compromise between those two camps.
This is an awesome idea that may bridge the gap between stat and statless armor, but I need to see the devs version implemented before I will toss my support behind it fully. I also feel some parts of this idea may need to be adjusted and fine tuned to fit the other design goals planned that we just lack a complete understanding of still.
@Havok40k
With this suggestion I merely wanted to start a discussion about gameplay-affecting wearable modding.
I don´t particularly care for my suggested solution, that´s why I just made a rough example to get the discussion going. Someone (a dev) would obviously have to put a lot more thought into this than the ~30min I spent on writing this before it would be put ingame.
(TBH: I doubt that any “bigger” player suggestion would ever make it ingame anyway)
@sikerow
Sorry but I wasn´t able to find anything for “insent” with google translate
@Clexarews
I´m not really sure if I understand what you want to say / what you are referring to. The “Not in many current games” looks pretty randomly thrown in without quoting what you are referring to.
Typically responses are addressed to posts above them. Such is the case here.
@sikerow: [quote=“sikerow, post:7, topic:4118, full:true”]
Insent armor suposed to be all in one
[/quote]
I interpreted “insent” to mean “isn’t” and then interpreted the overall post to be a question about why gemstones are needed if armor is supposed to be inherently “complete”. I’m guessing this took me less time than it took you to check google translate haha.
My post was meant to suggest that other games currently have requirements for enhancements to the armor, such as gemstones, to make them the best they can be. Examples include AAA titles such as WoW (jewelcrafting, enchanting, leg armor, belt buckles, should inscriptions, etc. have all been seen throughout the life of the series) and ESO (glyphs for armor, weapons, and jewelry as well as set bonuses similar to WoW’s tiers). I’m sure others can think of further examples if they’re needed.[quote=“Vastar, post:9, topic:4118”]
TBH: I doubt that any “bigger” player suggestion would ever make it ingame anyway
[/quote]
Why do you doubt this? I think we’ve already seen the impact the voice of the community can make on the development of the game in surveys and such. The whole point of exposing the development to players early on is to gather feedback and make tweaks early on. It saves a lot of time and money to build a game players want than to build a game you think players want and I think the Boundless dev team has acknowledged that time and again.
Sorry, I got confused by the notification
Totally forgot that I get a notification whenever something is posted in a thread created by me, not only if someone replies to one of my posts.
I´m sure that the devs carefully listen (read) to the community and adjust their plan of the game to what they see (to a certain extend). What I meant to say is that I doubt that detailed concept suggestions about entire core-mechanics (crafting, progression, etc) will get implemented 1:1.
But as i read you sad some armor is specific for stuff like crafting mining and that like if i craft a stone hat i want ti have the same abilities but maybe just a worse tier instead having 70 sets for diffrent abilities
I’m not sure if ‘clothing’ should have effects, i’m not against it, but i’m not jumping at the idea ether. I feel that is more the place of…armor. And you wear armor over your clothing. In my mind a shirt is really not going to stop a sword at all.
I feel like this idea can wait until we have other things settled
I don´t know if you are up-to-date with all the concepts currently going on but currently it seems like we will only get ‘wearables’ (a combination of armor and clothing) and as it stands now it seems like those wearables won´t have any stats (except for the ring piece).
Minecraft and Boundless are pretty different games, except for the 1x1x1 cubes. So you should use that word carefully here.
)
