Update #77 "Crafting Shards and Squashing Bugs"

I kinda understand the criticism over the game being too colorful but i think it's hard to fine tune that, and i think the whole majority ended up enjoying it how it is.

But i wanted to point out the Shard crafting system once more, to say how interesting the whole idea is and go a bit deeper on the comparison between Soul Dominance and Shardbinder.

When we take a look at the "magic/powers" system of Igavanias, i think we can "tone down" the influence of the Shardbinder to two games: Aria/Dawn of Sorrow. Other games, such as Order of Ecclesia and Portrait of Ruin, also had some kind of "collecting powers from enemies" but the MAIN inspiration is Aria/Dawn. IGA stated more than once that Soul Dominance was, for him, the best magic system his team ever created and wanted to use it more, on a refined way. And that's what they are doing on Bloodstained.

If we analyze how these games worked, regarding their magical and powers and see how Bloodstained works, we can see that IGA seems to be trying to collect the best ideas of them and breath a fresh air.

You can collect souls from demons to use as powers, with 4 types of souls: Bullet, Guardian, Enchant and Ability. Souls ONLY had two sources: Demons and "Soul Holders", a special object containing a soul from a demon that for some unknown reason, didn't materialized in the castle. On Dawn, you can upgrade a soul by collecting more and more of the same type, increasing it's power and changing it's looks, and you can also use them to forge weapons, losing the soul by doing that.

You can collect Shards, demonic powers that are crystalized and come in 6 types: Conjur, Effective, Directional, Enchant, Familiar and Skill. As far as we know, you can get shards by killing demons, on "Shard Candlesticks", a special object containing a shard and by crafting, using a shard and something as a catalyst. Shards can be upgraded by collecting more of the same type, increasing their overall power, and can be upgraded in a different way by alchemy, changing their looks and effectivnesss.

Now, looking at all that, we can see that the Shardbinder system of Bloodstained is an obvious attempt to "update" Soul Dominance. Powers dropped from enemies and obtained on the scenario (Shard Candlesticks are Soul Holders), they got Aria/Dawn types (Conjur is Bullet, Effective is PROBABLY Guardian, Enchant...is Enchant and Skill is Abilty), with a "gimmick" new one on Directional and one dedicated to Familiars to not waste a slot of the others with Familiars, as it was on Aria/Dawn and they got the upgrade feature and revamped it, adding other way to upgrade powers and included crafting as a new way to obtain powers.

To be fair, of course that it would be fun to see something completely different, but the Shardbinder system got the BEST of the BEST magical power in Igavanias (in my opinion) and updated it, it seems, on the right direction.

hahaha good one, th--

Actually waitaminute, what if that's one of the asynchronous online features? Sell shop/shard/item features?

purifyweirdshard @autumn

You know, that is actually a nice idea. MAYBE the asynchronous mode will have such feature? Because it was hardly explained what it actually is. Portrait of Ruin and Order Of Ecclesia also had shops where you could buy and sell items and gear to other playes.

I can already see how it could work out. While connected to the internet, you can access an extra option on Dominique, called "Asynchronous Shop", where you can buy and sell items, gear and shards to other players. Of course, some items, gear and shards wouldn't be able to be bought and sold (plot-focused ones, progression ones, etc). That would only work well if the game have a ton of stuff, specially rare stuff. And considering the game has a crafting mode, i can just imagine people looking at such Shop, searching for that rare material they can't find anywhere, to craft that weapon or that shard...

That would be classic. It brings back memories of leaving my Portrait of Ruin shop open, hoping someone would buy the mostly overpriced items in there.

The game could be dark and still pop.

At least the visuals are making most of us happy. The shader was never a big deal to me, as I thought the game looked good enough even back then.

I just want to see how the game'll look on my 50" LG 4K UHD TV, already!

My unshakable trust in IGA will pay off.. I am glad I went the 300 Bucks Tier.

With how the place is structured, essentially a very low functionality comment section with no organization or moderation possible, it can very easily seem like 5-6 people are a majority, and I believe that's largely why they engage in this way. In truth, only around I'd wager 1% of the amount of people who can even post there look at it, and even that's being perhaps generous (650 out of 65,000). It has a cast of "regulars" somewhere around probably 10-15. What I worry more about myself is the amount of non-backers who check it out and think our community looks like that.

Internet comment sections in general aren't usually a great place for anything, but even so, Angel, Question and actually myself (I'm Brent Taylor there) try our best to still address every concern possible. That has its own share of problems, such as the person we're helping getting no notification that we answered, and perhaps worst being that with the above mentioned structure of it, our efforts are quickly pushed down under an unknown amount of "view more" clicks at the bottom of the page without being searchable, and thus, the same people who want to seem like they're a majority raise the same concerns anew repeatedly under the seeming appearance that they were never answered. I couldn't begin to count the amount of times the same questions from the same people have been replied to, but it's a loop that continues because it advances a negative or destructive aim to make it a momentary reality of "bad communication" that someone visiting for perhaps the first and last time will see. By this, I do not mean the current issue with Mac/Linux, but the prevailing atmosphere there all along. Platform cancellation without refunds available is a valid problem, and my thoughts and input on that are well covered elsewhere.

Partially this is just me venting about how all that nonsense works, but yes, my thoughts on the "Games with Gold" thing is as you see there. To reiterate that, it's all around great news for several reasons. ArtPlay/Inti are paid a sum for that (it's not completely "free" to people), many more people come to know the project/series and the platform with the lowest sales afaik gets a good boost. Solid all around. Keep in mind it's not like Curse didn't sell well, it moved 100k digital copies (not including backers) in 12 days, and that was before the Xbox One version even came out.

More on the "free" thing: many have similarly said that Curse of the Moon wasn't "free" because it's part of what was paid in a pledge, so if that doesn't get to mean "free" in your mind, I wouldn't say this does either.

A lot of what I see going on seems very much to be a very high value in one's self as a consumer, to a degree that previous stances and the consideration of others is cast aside. What this project should be about more than anything is delivering a wonderful Igavania game to the world, and not even just us backers. For it to be a thing, and continue to be a thing past RotN, "me me me" won't get us anywhere.