Grimrock

One thing that bothers me about Grimrock 1 is that you can only select traits at character creation. I much prefer traits/feats/talents/perks (call it what you will) at every level or at least every other level. That way you look forward to leveling up even more, and have more options to customize your characters. Two sword weilding fighters no longer have to be alike!

Any chance we can have this in Grimrock 2?

I agree with this one. Though every or every other level is too often in my opinion.

I too would like level progression to feature more choice and depth.

In grimrock if you picked a trait at every level you would use up every trait quite early in the game. If they made a lot more you'd endup godlike (or at least very badass very quickly). Lastly if they made lots of traits but much weaker then getting them wouldn't be very exciting.

Personally, I think a trait every 5th level works quite well.

Every 5 levels is far too few. And characters won't become 'gods' using these if they are granted more regularly. If there is a balance issue, it can be modified by adding more HP to monsters, or whatever. Thing is, it is FUN to look forward to stuff to choose from for PCs when leveling up. Each level up should bring with it new options to choose from. While skills provide bonuses and sometimes special moves, they are fixed: All characters with the same skill get the same bonus. This too should be modified.

Furthermore, Traits at least don't (currently) require any art assets (unlike spells) so they shouldn't be costly to include more of.

Alpha Stryke wrote:Every 5 levels is far too few.

Actually that would be far too much and IMO far too boring.

Traits are nothing characters should be able to learn on the fly. That's what skill points are made for. In LoG 1 some skill advances can even be used to equal several traits. If AH considers adding traits during play it should not be doable by simple level-up mechanism. Some kind of special task or feat completed seems more appropriate.

<RandomStreamOfConsciousness>

It would be nice to have more choice when levelling up to give more variety to character progression. I don't know what the best solution is, but I like the idea of being able to somehow choose more abilities that you get to 'activate' (which could primarily be unlocking the secondary attack on items).

In the first game, I felt fighter progression was basically 'pick a weapon type and equally assign points to that and armour'. Rogues felt a bit more flexible and fun to play with skills (although, min-maxing again felt optimal). Mages were a case of selecting 1 magic type and spell craft.

I like the idea of picking something similar to a trait every X levels . I don't know if you could do it every level (unless you had a LOT of options), but every N levels would be cool. Another idea that would encourage spreading out of skill points would be to cap the level of a skill depending on the character level. So the max a skill can be is 4x your current level say. Then give out 10 skill points per level (meaning you can basically assign 4,4 and 2). Another alternative is that instead of automatically getting an ability when your skill hits a threshold, you pick an ability every level but they unlock based on your skills. So, you might be able to buy "Pack Horse: +10% Carry Weight" if you have Athletics 20 or Amour 20 say.

One problem is traits would need heavy restructuring. As they are now, most traits help significantly in the short term but become largely irrelevant in the long term. (Now a trait every level would certainly not be irrelevant. Of course it's hard to speculate as the selection would need expanded significantly.) Even tweaking monster hp and other stats, power would scale very... oddly. I don't know, the idea is really hard to imagine. There would need to be a lot of change to trait power and making it so some traits would have a minimum level. I love character customization, frankly I'm addicted to it. But it needs to be meaningful, not like Fable where you master everything. While classes here make that impossible, having traits every level would need to be worked very carefully not to diminish the meaning. For instance even with komags system it would be hard to make enough traits for every skill to make it feel like every axe/armour fighter isn't still the same.

Ok, I know that was long, confusing and passed on very little of my actual meaning. Suffice to say over-customization dillutes the meaning and requires inordinate amounts of work to avoid.

my suggestion - pick one starting trait at the begining and then choose one trait every X level, where X should be value counted based on whole game progress (for example if ending level of average game would be 13-16, you should pick trait every 4-6th level.)