Future Plans - Thieves

Now that level 35 is installed and running in the game, I figure it's probably a good idea to let everyone know about the game's direction and where we're headed. Things aren't going to be static; there's a lot of really neat stuff planned out for this year.

The next major update is scheduled for some time around mid to end of July. The focus of this update will be the Thief class, which is currently the least played class in terms of high levels, and the class with the fewest skills.

At a minimum, the thief update will include an entire tree for shadow skills. I'm not a fan of traditional ninja skills though, so don't expect Naruto style effects. The basis for the shadow skills will be a type of channeling/synergy with the shadow plane, which has already made itself known with the Guildmaster Assassin in Jo'Kerin.

Also on the high priority list are a couple of miscellaneous skills ('untanking' in group combat, room analysis out of combat), and updates to lock picking to make it more incremental and less hit or miss.

For medium priority stuff that might get implemented, we have disguise skills, bribe improvements, and haggling (possibly for bulk purchases.) My guess is that at least some of this will get into the final build.

For low priority, we've been mulling over the idea of distraction skills, but the effects are pretty ill defined right now. We also really need to take a look at the way poison damage is done, to try to make poisons function in a reasonable way. It's pretty unlikely that either of these will be done for the update.

That concludes things for the proposed thief update. Again, we hope to have it out prior to August. I think it will address a lot of the shortcomings of the thief class, without necessarily making thief into another fighter class with differently named skills.

Coming up next - clerics get some love too.

Melee fighting

While talking to various people over the last few months, a couple of fundamental combat related ideas have come up. Today I'm going to talk about thieves.

In a lot of fantasy/D&D style games, thieves are really just another fighter class, with different fighter skills and less armor. Alter Aeon has traditionally not been much different, and I find that less than ideal. Consider:

Mages - damage casters, inflicting damage from afar using spells.
Clerics - healers and miscellaneous support for fighters.
Warriors - tanks and heavy hitters.
Thieves - light hitters and occasional backstabbing.

It seems to me that thieves really get the short end of the stick here. Not that they can't fight, but pretty much the only thing that sets them apart in combat is the use of backstab as an opening attack.

This seems contrary to the whole premise of thieves - that they use cunning, agility, and other weirdness to accomplish tasks in unusual ways. Yet Alter Aeon is in large part constructed to have only a single track for accomplishing tasks: kill the mob. The option to just steal or 'liberate' a particular goal isn't even available in most scenarios.

This isn't to say that AA is alone in this area. Most games fall into this trap, because it is the easiest way to do things, and because coming up with general ways to handle specific scenarios is difficult or very time consuming.

I don't intend to address all of this inequality in this post, but I believe that I can address one aspect of it: how thieves handle combat. Mages blast, fighters fight, clerics heal. All these tasks are pretty straight forward. But what should a thief do to be different from 'just another fighter'? One answer I've come up with is this: thieves spoil the fight.

A good example of this would be the 'trip' skill. Tripping something small is no big deal, but suppose you and your group are fighting a twenty foot giant. Casters are doing their thing, fighters are doing their thing, but all of this is really setup for the thieves to get in place: suddenly the giant goes down face first, making things much easier for the fighters and casters.

Trip is the most obvious 'spoiler' skill, but plenty of others could be found. There may also be special defensive skills for thieves to allow them to temporarily be in danger - perhaps an enhanced dodge that can give a thief a very good chance of getting alive out of a sticky situation - but only effective for a handful of hits or a very short period of time.

With this in mind, I may be adjusting the various thief and warrior skills to push things slightly in this direction in the future. Ideas?