State of the Game #184: The Great Stats Rewrite

Welcome to another State of the Game!

This week I have been tackling the idea of player leveling and unlocking parts. I feel like this is a very important part of the game, as it provides progression and rewards to the player, but it also provides a natural gating tool, allowing players to ease into the game and not be overwhelmed by choices.

So, the first part of this process is spent doing a LOT of super boring calculations in excel.

From the chart, you can see that I have made it fairly easy to hit level 25, at which point you will have unlocked 50% of the parts in that reward tree. That is ~20 hours of playtime, which I think is fairly reasonable for a person that plays the game casually. From there, it’s a steady progression to level 99, which will take a total of ~210 hours of playtime. At the 90 hour mark, you will have unlocked ~90% of the parts. The last level has a bit of a grind on it compared to the other levels and it will unlock something special.

Now, this is not the full picture though. There is another one of these charts for each roletype as well. As you play, you will earn experience in 2 places. One is the overall player exp, which is the chart I just showed you. The second one is roletype exp, which works by taking the total exp you earned, rationing it out to each roletype based on play style, and applying that experience to the roletype exp buckets. If you played 100% as an attacker while you leveled, you would rank out your player exp and attacker exp, and then have the other 5 roletypes to rank out as well.

If you wanted to max out all 6 roletypes, it would likely take over 1000 hours of game time. I don’t expect hardly anyone to actually complete this, but wanted a way to award parts that better fit how you play. Because of this, there will be some certain parts that are only unlocked by hitting ranks in each roletype as well.

 

With all these ranks and rewards it has forced me to really evaluated the number of parts in the game. It is likely that M.A.V. will ship with less than the 1000’s of parts that I initially planned. I am focusing more on quality, as proven by the current players and some look at player data, the current parts are just overwhelming and 90% of them go completely unused. I am looking to solve this by better balancing the parts [biped legs are already in the middle of a complete re-balance] and by making sure the parts actually fill out the ‘part space’ more evenly. This means making each part have a more significant difference than it’s variations, making the visual variations more pronounced, and redoing the naming of parts to reduce confusion.

I am also using this as a chance to push the manufacturer lore into the actual game, as they provide additional naming clarity [Rox Kinetics SR151 is way easier to digest than just SR151] and will help meta categorization by allowing the players to see themes in parts and ‘know’ what to expect [Wilson Munitions weapons ALWAYS do area damage. Even the mini guns].

That is all for this week! I will see you next week with more progress!

[If that is not enough spoilers, how about this. Terra Tech, Raksal, and this.]