Yeah. And I totally concede of the statistical comparison of the two as I stated before. They really accomplish the same thing in the end on paper. It's mostly just the aesthetic feel of being able to manually equip each item yourself instead of just a suit of armor pre-made for you. Just my thoughts though. I'm sure even if you went the other route you could pull it off, it's not game breaking by any means.

Restricted resources can be done without limiting items as well though. Using potions as an example, allow us to have whatever amount and type of potion we want, but limit it with a cooldown so no one can just spam potions, or from a lore and realistic standpoint, lower the effectiveness of spamming potions over and over or even give it an adverse effect. This way healers in this situation become not only desired but perhaps necessary depending on the situation while still allowing the player to choose whether or not to use a potion/whatever else without putting a virtual cage around the player pushing a specific way to play a game. There is a large portion of the community who enjoys hoarding items, while I am not one of them I can still understand the desire to fill up as much as possible. It's purely because people enjoy options, stretching room.



I actually very much agree with restricted resources as I am a big advocate of survival type games, but within that type of game play nothing is worse than being limited to specific avenues pre-built by a developer. To put it in laments terms - In a game I want to play the game, not follow the games guidelines on how to play!

Is the main battle party six people? And is experience still not shared anymore, cause that might bring in some disadvantages if we have a forced story option. Like I never used Amukiki since I always used the first 6 I got, (Saren, Loren, Myrth, Draco, Dora, and Ramas) but was surprised when I had to put him in during the battle against that nomad boss. It ended up with a very underpowered character in a time where the boss hits hard.

I am okay with the limited items, but not used to it. I hoard my items unless I really need them, so I never used them unless the situation really demanded them, which ended up with me spamming them. That kind of ended the same way with money, as I never bought new equipment unless I really needed it, potions included. I am a horrible miser.

Hoarding is an interesting problem, but quite inherent to consumables. It can only be limited trough things like limited inventory space or expiring consumables, or penalties for inventory size. Something like loose a point of speed for every item in the inventory. Interesting idea... Not planning on actually doing this for these games.

I understand your point and there is no sugar coating it. This will mean less fine grated customization.

If this was a solo or fixed party game with 4 characters I'd readily approve even more slots. But the games has 16 characters, even remembering what the characters have actually equipped becomes quite hard. Equipping such a number of characters becomes also pretty tedious. From the developer side we have to invest quite a number of resources to make that many items (Art, Balancing, Making the items) and it limits out ability to do interesting things with the equipment.



On the other hand we do plan to make equipment customization, so you won't have to simply swallow the premade hard hitting but fast equipment package.

I understand your point and there is no sugar coating it. This will mean less fine grated customization.

If this was a solo or fixed party game with 4 characters I'd readily approve even more slots. But the games has 16 characters, even remembering what the characters have actually equipped becomes quite hard. Equipping such a number of characters becomes also pretty tedious. From the developer side we have to invest quite a number of resources to make that many items (Art, Balancing, Making the items) and it limits out ability to do interesting things with the equipment.



On the other hand we do plan to make equipment customization, so you won't have to simply swallow the premade hard hitting but fast equipment package.

Honestly the simple fact that you recognize what you are doing "less fine grated customization" is a huge factor to ease the hit. I'm glad that you aren't simply propagating an aura of superiority and giving speeches about how you are simply making the game better, and the community is wrong. I'm totally behind you for acknowledging it. Big props!



On a side note, What Jack suggested would be awesome, the whole socket deal like torchlight or an even better example would be path of exile. (For those who haven't really heard of it you should check it out). PoE truly takes the ability to customize anything to the max and is close to the epitome of character customization.



For Example, you could link a regular bow skill say fire arrow. And link it to something like multiple projectiles and pierce. All of a sudden a single fire arrow turns into 5 fire arrows going through every enemy on screen. Taking it a step further, you could then link it to something like cast on critical and fireball. Before you know it, any of your five piercing fire arrows that crits would proc the spell fireball. And because all 5 different skills are linked to each other, each time your fireball is cast from the critical proc, your fireball also turns into 5 different fireballs that pierce all enemies on screen.



An over the top example of the overwhelming customization of poe, and I am by no means holding ToA (Can I use that? :S) to that as comparison as the two games are different in nature. On that note though, it would be a pleasure to see some form of socket customization similar to that for our items.



Simple things like "Proc on being hit" or "Proc when striking" for weapons, trigger gems adds an extreme amount of flavor to a game.



To the point I'd even say I'm an advocate of a much smaller item pool if we were allowed the ability to customize the items we can use with unique triggers and stat gems.

Honestly the simple fact that you recognize what you are doing "less fine grated customization" is a huge factor to ease the hit. I'm glad that you aren't simply propagating an aura of superiority and giving speeches about how you are simply making the game better, and the community is wrong. I'm totally behind you for acknowledging it. Big props!

On a side note, What Jack suggested would be awesome, the whole socket deal like torchlight or an even better example would be path of exile. (For those who haven't really heard of it you should check it out). PoE truly takes the ability to customize anything to the max and is close to the epitome of character customization. [...]



Simple things like "Proc on being hit" or "Proc when striking" for weapons, trigger gems adds an extreme amount of flavor to a game.



To the point I'd even say I'm an advocate of a much smaller item pool if we were allowed the ability to customize the items we can use with unique triggers and stat gems.

Thanks, but I don't think it's that praiseworthy.

Thanks, now I can't stop thinking how to implement such a system.



The plan is a more abstract enchantment system. It's pretty much the same as the socketing of gems though, I'm only keeping a bit more design space open with an abstract concept.

I'm not sure if we're on the same page when we talk about triggers, but it's currently not planned for any enchantment to actively do something automatically. Conditional boosts are a different story and easily implemented with the new framework. Making abilities available to the character is also a possibility.