I don’t know where this idea is coming from.
Folks, if anything, the CURRENT ATTRIBUTE SYSTEMS lock you way more into one class. The new system we’re cooking up will not do that and you’ll be able to complement this one class with abilities from the other, etc. On top of that, we can allow players to mix and match skills way more easily this way. The intention isn’t to lock players into a class and then they can’t try new stuff, the exact opposite is the case.
Let’s look at a practical example: You find a weapon that scales with STR early on in your game and in order to increase your damage, you’ll now start putting points into STR. Now you find a great DEX weapon and with our current TryBeforeYouBuy system, you can try that weapon, but never at full effectiveness. In order to get that, you’d need to run the Crucible and unlock the Iron Corpus in order to respec your build.
So how does that system allow for more freedom and self expression? It doesn’t. And by the way, it doesn’t in Souls games or any other games that use these attribute systems either! How many playthroughs have I seen where people basically main their starter weapon all throughout their game when I watched people playing Souls games? Countless. And Souls games have been suffering from that issue ever since Demon’s Souls released in 2009. You can obviously claim that it’s a choice, but in that case, our choice is that we’d like players to be able to experience a bit more gear variety throughout their playthroughs.
All I’m asking for is that you folks give us the benefit of the doubt. I’ve read through all your comments and concerns very carefully and I’m not making the mistakes you folks think I’m making. So far, I have yet to read comment that makes me go: “Oh yeah, good point, the new system wouldn’t cover this.”
In many ways, Wicked is us betting on ourselves because we have a clear vision on how things could be done in a better way even if we have to abandon some old ideas that people have gotten used to. We have always challenged the Status Quo. We approach every element in our games this way. For example, we thought we could come up with a better combat system than what you see in Diablo, PoE, etc. and I think we did. And it’ll only get better.
With this, we think we can come up with a better system than the Attribute System and so we’ll do that and with some love and tuning, I’m certain we can achieve that goal.