Hello, Malicious Incessant team.
I’m a player from China and I really love your game Malicious Incessant. It’s just amazing. It’s my favorite game among the nearly 260 paid games on Steam. I truly hope it keeps getting better. Even though I don’t understand English, I hope I can offer my opinions and participate in the game’s development through machine translation. Here, I’d like to share some of my thoughts.
My ideas are based on the core gameplay of online, action, and roguelike.
- Optimize your targeting system so that players can attack in the direction they choose freely, just like in Ninja Gaiden.
- Add more combat modes instead of just exploration. I think the current maps can’t support multiplayer content well. For example, add wide areas for positional battles, where players can win by occupying regions or by holding out until a certain time. With this idea as a foundation, add more interesting mechanics.
- Add more monsters. For instance, add flying monsters that can grab players and lift them up, and the duration of being grabbed depends on the player’s reaction speed. Or add charging monsters that can throw players around, and it’s interesting to see if they fall into a group of monsters, fall off a cliff, or get interrupted while casting spells. Also, add monsters that use nets to catch players, and players need to dodge precisely or break the nets with runes; otherwise, they have to wait for rescue from other players.
- Add more weapons and runes. For example, add crystal balls and magic books that can float and release buffs to enhance various player attributes, or float around the player and continuously release energy to damage monsters, increasing player output. For off-hand weapons, add a crossbow with a rope that can pull down fast-moving small monsters when dealing with them. I believe you’ve noticed that many players are frustrated with these tricky small monsters. Of course, using this weapon when the small monsters aren’t moving fast will also trigger a struggle between the player and the monster, and using it at the wrong time will bring great risks. When facing large monsters, this weapon can be used to move quickly over a long distance without consuming stamina.
- I hope you can exchange experiences with other game development teams. Your balance and design of equipment stats and effects are not very good. This is reflected in the game as an unbalanced difficulty curve and severe homogeneity of equipment.
- I hope you can do a better job with the translation. In fact, many players in China are very dissatisfied with this. It’s not because of vanity. The poor translation makes it difficult for us to understand the point allocation and equipment effects. The inability of players to allocate points reasonably is also due to translation issues, as it brings about difficulties and ambiguities in understanding.
- I hope you can find a balance between action and roguelike. In fact, I think this is feasible. This idea is not new in online games, such as the early DNF and Dragon Nest. This balance means neither allowing players to kill recklessly nor restricting them too much. This balance requires players to have a high understanding and cultivation of the game, as well as precise judgment of the situation and operations.
- This is the most important part of my idea. Could you add a system where players can determine their playstyle through skill allocation, similar to the talent tree in Warhammer 40k: Darktide?
For example, I initially divide a character into four playstyles: Swift, Zealous, Thunderous, and Cursed. The Swift Style provides all actions accelerated, dodge cancels attack dodge and restores stamina, multiple hits deal damage to monsters and apply debuffs such as Armor Break and Fragile, increasing their subsequent damage taken. It ignores all collision volumes. It offers high single-target output but disables parry.
The Frenzy Style provides attack and charge attack output bonuses, as well as increased resilience. During charging, taking damage increases yellow health, and dealing damage to monsters within a short period can turn it into red health. Dealing a certain amount of damage can restore health. All weights can be shoulder-bumped. It provides parry functionality. When overloaded or holding a shield, it can consume stamina to charge, knocking back all small enemies in the selected direction, stunning medium-sized enemies, and interrupting large enemies’ current actions.
The Thunder Style provides rune damage bonuses, a spell shield, and immunity to enemy ranged and magic attacks. It offers a skill that allows runes to be used without focus when certain conditions are met, though rune damage is significantly reduced.
The Curse Style provides elemental damage bonuses, additional focus gain from dealing damage, and the ability to enchant teammates’ or one’s own weapons with elements. It can release elemental power onto the path walked through a crystal ball or magic book, causing continuous damage and attracting the attention of monsters within a certain range.
Under these four types and multiple effects, players can choose the desired functions through skill points to create their own playstyles. The unique playstyles formed by these combinations must be very interesting.
I believe you have also felt the strength of the staff and bow. I think the best balance for them is to limit the output range and provide a casting range. The staff and bow have attack distances, which requires players to control the distance from monsters. Spells no longer have tracking effects, which requires players to be precise in their battlefield awareness, monster behavior logic, and operation. I believe that most of the interactivity in an action game comes from this. I know this change has shaken some fundamental logic. But I think to provide higher gameplay depth and improve playability, certain changes are necessary. And your skill bar also needs to be changed; four skills are still too few.
The game’s strengths, such as art, maps, special effects, action design, and visual tension, determine that it cannot be made into a high-speed battle or a Souls-like game. It should have its own combat rhythm.
We need frequent high-intensity monster spawns to test our character development strategies, response methods, and operational precision. We gain a sense of achievement and satisfaction by defeating monsters. We also need slow-paced battles to experience map exploration and unique action design.
We need more interesting mechanisms to increase the playability of this process and enhance the element of surprise. For example, when a teammate is carelessly caught by a monster and thrown into a group of monsters to be beaten up, or when they are blown off a cliff by a monster explosion, or when their spell is interrupted by a monster. When dodging is not quick enough and they are suddenly hit by a strange combo from multiple monsters and killed. Or when strange events occur out of nowhere. We can laugh at these poor teammates until we become the poor ones ourselves. This is really fun.
I hope you can open the practice field as soon as possible. Otherwise, our exploration and understanding of skills will always be difficult. I hope you can add more runes, which can be designed from multiple angles, such as control, protection, damage, shield, and so on. This can be referenced from League of Legends, whose skill design is as wonderful as your map design. Add more interesting runes and weapons, and more interesting mechanisms. I hope Malicious Never Dies will keep getting better and better, and I hope I can see the day when it matures as soon as possible.