Ethereal Echoes : The Realm Beyond - Second Thread

[Alkalund]

As per Sephorus' request, I am opening a new topic for his project, and locking the old one; without further delay...


Ethereal Echoes : The Realm Beyond



You can still reach the old topic by clicking here.

[Sephorus]

Cooperative-based gameplay. No one character can hope to become good at everything. Specializing in one particular area (defense, attack power, resistances, etc.) will leave you lacking in one or more areas. Support skills, along with a tightly-knit group of friends, are your closest companions.

Increased diffuclty level. Normal is more of a 'training experience' than anything else, although it'll be hard enough in it's own right. Nightmare would be comparable to most modern-day action movies - it's difficult, but still possible. Even angels will fear to tread in Hell.

Adjusted levlling rate. Experience and levels come at a more constant rate, but levelling is much, much slower. Any 'experience runs' are spread out through the entire game, although experience will still come fast enough to make 'running' more of an added bonus than required.

Rebuilt all items. Base items are being rebalanced for the adjusted levelling rate. There are new affixes, crafts, runewords, sets, and uniques to be found, each with their own particular specialty and flair. Each weapon class has their own merits to using them, and warrior-classes may even find the staff - an inferior melee weapon compared to other two handed weapons - to be an excellent piece of gear to use from time to time.

Rebalanced all skills. Skills have a level cap of 70, meaning that it is possible to use skills from any tier all the way into Hell. Each and every skill has a use - no more days of classes possessing skills that only get used by a variant build.

Edit: I wanted to go back and expand on each area a bit... looking at a line or two for each point didn't make me too happy with things, but real life has a funny way of keeping me away from it until now. More information as I solidify things.

[Sephorus]

Well, guys... things have come to a complete and utter halt as of late, seeing as how I got my entire computer reformatted last week and lost all of my work so far. Sadly, I'm not going to start rebuilding it just yet, due to the fact that we're still in the beta patch, so things could still be changed around at any given moment. Basically put, until the final 1.10 patch is released, I'm shutting this project down... and with the way that things have been going lately, my interest in continuing this project may possibly die by the time that I could actually resume my work on it. My apologies to anyone that had any genuine curiousity for what I had in store.

[ChaoticDeath]

[quote=Sephorus";p="125837"]
My apologies to anyone that had any genuine curiousity for what I had in store.
[/quote]

Which would be me!

Sorry to hear about what happened...

[Alkalund]

Sorry to hear about the loss of your work Sephorus...

Since the project is shut down until further notice, I'm going to lock this topic. Sephorus, you know what to do if you ever feel like resuming work on this really nice project

[Alkalund]

Topic is now unlocked at the author's request, let the discussion continue

[Sephorus]

You know, with all of the times I've lost my work on this damned thing, I think I finally know how Laz feels... but anyways, yes, work will continue (however slowly) on Ethereal Echoes. Don't ask me for a release date. Don't ask me when the beta will be here. It gets here when it gets here, and for good reason. Considering that, when I get back to campus, I might decide to make games for a living, I want my prior experience to be as balanced and polished as I can get it. But anyways, enough of my rambling. On the the features!

Rune Words: I finally hammered out the base system for runewords, and I'm happily impressed with it. In essence, runes will be single words that players can put together to form complete phrases, and the runeword bonuses will be based off of what the phrase actually is. Now, runes themselves won't do anything, so the process of making runewords will be a bit of a gamble : on the one hand, you've got the potential to make something fabulous. On the other hand, you could end up with a phrase that doesn't do anything, and have just blown that six-socket weapon you found..

To help players out, runes will have three things listed on them - their name, the rune level, and the rune slot. The rune levels can range from 1 to 3, each corresponding with a particular difficulty. Runewords will (obviously) only use level 1 runes, while an endgame runeword could use a smattering of all three levels, or just level 3. Heck, a runeword could even have five level 1 runes, plus a level 3 rune, and it's considered 'endgame' in terms of how I'll make them.

The rune slot is simply an indictation of the possible order, and can range from 1 to 6. The lower the number, the sooner it will be in the runeword. You will never place slots out of order, meaning that a slot 4 rune will not go before a slot 3 rune. This is done to help people out a little bit for their experimenting.

Because of this experimentation required, runewords will be roughly 20% stronger than other types of equipment... hopefully, that's high enough to make people mess around with making RW's, but low enough so as not to break the game.

Oh, and one more thing... I will never include a runeword listing. Sorry, but you're on your own there. If someone else wants to compile known runewords, more power to them - it goes with my theme of teamwork then, and makes me a happy Sephy.

Level Progression: Seeing as how this is a team game, I'm trying to balance out experience gains assuming that you'll be with a party. Playing with some friends should allow you to play through with minimal levelling runs (although the occassional one here and there isn't a bad idea). Playing solo, however.... two words: you're sadistic.

Character Strength: Early on, players shouldn't have that much cash lying around, and socketing items will definately be your best bet - magic items won't be as strong as you might like yet, although they're useful if you find them.

Once you get the cube, you should be able to start tinkering with making some items of your own, although you won't have resources to do it very often. Socketing a magic item is possible at this point, although you won't be doing it that often, as the required ingredients will (hopefully) be scarce enough.

Once you get to Nightmare, your ability to make items will be coming more and more useful, and you should be able to resocket items on a fairly regular basis, as well as create magic items to use. Crafts and rares, while possible as soon as you get the cube, will still be few and far between.

Hell difficulty will be where crafting comes into it's own. You should be able to use all but the secret recipies, crafts, and rares on a regular basis, and you'll need it at this point - I am not pulling a single punch in Hell, so you'd better be ready for it.

The Cow Level: I'm going to remove the cow level from Normal and Nightmare, and I'm also going to turn that into my own personal... playground. You'll be able to find some one-of-a-kind reagents here, allowing you to make some very powerful equipment. However, the difficulty will be very jacked up here - think Zy-El-in-a-can, and you'll have a good idea of what I mean.



Oh, and for the record? I've got my files all backed up. Twice. *laughs*