Let's talk about armor and attributes

Hi guys!

I've got some ideas relating to the equipment in the game, and the character's attributes.

I'm going to try to walk you all through my thought process, and how each suggestion begets the next. Try to keep up! Stop me if you have questions.

Okay, so when I picked up a new item in Bloodstained, I compared it to the item I was using. I'd see, for example, that the new item increased my MND by 2, but lowered my INT by 2 and LCK by 1. Which means that I'd have a bit more MP at the cost of my shard damage and a little bit of Magic Find. I made the choice to equip the item or not, and got back to the action.

Fantastic! I love it. I really do. There's nothing wrong with it!

But what if we added another wrinkle? What if we added a little puzzle element to it to make the appraisal of a new item a tiny bit more interesting?

Older games used to have a stat on items that has by-and-large been completely abandoned in most games: hit rating. And for good cause! Hit chance sucks.

But there was something that I found to be pretty fun about hit rating in those old games: for one game in particular, you had to "cap" your hit rating by getting enough of it on your gear. Once you did, you never missed a shot. So at a certain level, you were trying your best to get your hit rating capped, but if you went over the cap, then it was a wasted stat. You see, hit rating was part of an item's budget; you'd get it in place of something like Critical Strike. So if all your gear had hit rating on it and nothing else, you'd be way above the cap for hit rating and no longer benefit from it, and you'd be missing out on rounding out some other stat that would then be more helpful.

So for example, when I picked up a new helmet that was better than the one I had on, I would have to check if my old helm had hit rating on it, and if equipping my new, better helmet would bring me below the hit cap, I'd need to make up for it somewhere else.

I'd take a look at what other boots or chest pieces I had in my inventory to see if they'd have some more hit rating than the boots or chest that I had on, because even if they dropped my STR or INT, my stat priority was hit rating. You had to cap it to maximize your damage, and make sure you got as close to the cap without going too far over.

So I'd start wearing an older pair of boots that dropped my DEF and Haste down a bit, but boosted my Hit Chance back safely above the cap. The damage I lost on the boots was more than made up for by the new helmet: I'd solved the puzzle!

The developer of that game removed hit rating later on, and they were right to do it, because it caused a lot of issues. But that puzzle element was kinda fun, and I've wanted to find a way to bring it back without causing any of the issues it came with before.

Imagine if you will, that Miriam's level determined a cap on all your attributes. Say that at level 15, no attribute (STR, INT, et all) could be effective beyond 20. Just as an example.

So now you're cruising along and find a great new chest piece that increases your DEF from 17 to 23. That'd be awesome, except now 3 points of DEF wouldn't count, as it would go over the cap and be wasted. So it's just a straight increase of 3, rather than 6. Until you gain a level, that is, which will raise the attribute cap slightly, and allow you to take advantage of stronger items.

Some of that DEF is wasted, yes, but now you can choose to solve a puzzle to min/max your gear!

You have 3 points of DEF that you can play with. See if you have another item in another slot that gives you less DEF than your current equipment. If an item of similar power level has less of one thing, it should have more of another.

Ah, here's a pair of sunglasses in your inventory that does 5 less DEF than the helmet you had on, but it gives you 5 INT. Equipping it would bring your DEF down to 18--just below the cap--and boost your INT by 5. Cool!

Now you're a more well-rounded character. That new chest piece you found didn't have INT on it, but since you put it on and adjusted some other things, you've got both more DEF and INT than before.

Presenting this information to the player quickly and easily is key to making these puzzles fun, so we could turn the Status page into something like this:



And when you put your cursor over another item in your inventory:




Do you see what I mean? You should be able to rapidly scroll through your inventory and quickly see the effects your other items will have, relative to the cap. Basically, you'll be trying to balance out each bar in the graph, and keep any one of them from going too high. As you find new items, you'll find better combinations that let you get each of the bars as high as possible. By the end of the game, the cap will be really high, but the items you'll find will be super powerful, so it should be a system that lasts from start to finish.

The cap should push the player into making more interesting decisions by getting them to look at all their gear, holistically.

There's a danger that it could become too complex, and slow the game down too much. If that turns out to be the case, we could always pare down the number of attributes. Kill off MND and CON, for example; I don't know how attached to those you guys are. Or kill off one of the Accessory equipment slots. Or abandon the whole idea completely. But none of that would necessarily be necessary, and I'm confident that they'd be able to tune everything to the point where it'd be nothing but fun.

Do you guys like the concept, or do you think it's too weird?