[Suggestion] Make equipment enhancement more streamlined and accessible
I want to start with a (hopefully) short explanation of how I came to this conclusion. My friends and I all started playing Project Gorgon recently, we all have about ~200 hours each of gameplay as of writing this. We love how open PG is - in the sense that it doesn't hold you hand an encourages the player to discover and explore as much as possible. Like other role-playing games, we each enjoy playing specific archetypes to round out our party.
A major draw to PG was the emphasis on player community and the perception of specializing into specific skills to then sell your labour (i.e. one individual trains carpentry to sell their product to another individual who is training fletching; the arrows made by the fletcher are then sold to an archer who will go out into the wilds and collect other resources and so on, etc.) It felt logical in a game like PG that you would have to rely on players who had specialized into a specific skill to be your source for that skills commodities.
My friends and I each chose a line of skills that benefited the group (for example, we pooled our resources so one of us could train cooking and make meals for each of us). I just happened to take the lines of leatherworking and tailoring, in hopes of making great gear for the party. Along the way I discovered the ability to enhance certain traits and abilities into gear, using enhancement features from Blacksmithing, Tailoring, Shamanic Infusion, and Augmentation.
This was where we encountered our first problem... and really, where the majority of my frustration comes from. Each piece of gear has an enhancement value that determines how many enhancements it can have added to it - which seems really straight forward until you consider the flaws of the enhancement system:
Shamanic Infusion:
Offers the ability to infuse relatively minor generic stat bonuses onto specific types of gear (such as max health, max power, and increases to damage). Anyone who has trained Shamanic Infusion can understand the problem right away - Alongside the minor bonuses, Shamanic Infusion adds the requirement of a Shamanic Infusion level equal to the enhancement.
What? Why?
If a Shamanic Infusion requires that an individual has that Shamanic Infusion level... why wouldn't each player just train Shamanic Infusion? What would be the purpose of visiting your local player shaman to have them infuse a desired spirit into your gear?
It makes no sense from either a mechanical or thematic perspective. This desperately needs to be changed to allow players to equip infusions without the shamanic level. A shaman should be able to offer their services to create a more in-depth community.
Augmentation:
Unlike Shamanic Infusion, which has a warning that it will add a requirement to the gear you are enhancing, Augmentation is not new player friendly, nor is it community friendly. Everywhere within the game, augmentation appears to be a great skill for a crafter to enhance gear tailored to a player's unique archetype and playstyle:
- The introductory book for Augmentation references players that can augment and transmute gear for you:
https://i.imgur.com/GFxCMVd.jpg
- Augment mods themselves, which appear as early as the starting area of Anagoge Island, reference the ability for players to augment your gear:
https://i.imgur.com/Iekppo7.jpg
- Finally, the augmentation screen itself lacks any warnings that your actions are going to have consequences:
https://i.imgur.com/oSFTGG2.jpg
The frustrating, and devastating, aspect of player augmentation is that it "Attunes" the chosen piece of gear to the player. I had naively thought that I could improve my friends great gear in hopes of making it amazing, but instead I ended up locking it to myself. Attuned gear cannot be worn by other players and cannot be sold to shops.
This is an incredibly confusing system. Feeling defeated, I went to the Project Gorgon Wiki to discover that my fears were true - player enhancement is a poorly thought out system that does not facilitate a sense of community where players can enhance gear for other players - not even as a service.
Conclusion:
The enhancement system is so close to being a positive thing for the community. After reading into some older threads about augmentation, Citan mentioned:
- "I didn't want the highest-quality items to be passed down among players forever."
- "If you augment an item it's attuned to you forever. That's the whole point of attuning it, to get that stuff out of the economy once you've had fun with it. Otherwise that stuff will slowly become the norm and nobody will be excited to find loot anymore, they'll just use hand-me-down items from their guild forever. Overpowered stuff has to go away eventually!"
I can understand the perspective on not wanting "best in slot" gear polluting the player markets and guild stashes, but that presents two further issues:
- In a game as complex and intricate as PG, it would be disappointing to even see a time when there are "best in slot" abilities to begin with. Players should be inspired to mix and match abilities that suit their playstyle, there should theoretically never be a set "meta" that dictates one specific build that players fall into.
- By not allowing gear to be traded, you've effectively created a money-sink where loot is constantly being destroyed, rather than creating the possibility of sold gear or services such as player augmenters.
The current solution of attuning gear is, put plainly, bad. There needs to be a better solution if the fear of meta is as strong as it is evident.
A possible solution could be for player augmenters to "attune" gear to another player (other than themselves); keeping the attunement system but tweaking it would maintain a sense of control but allow for a greater sense of community.
Additionally, augment mods and shamanic infusions should not be competing; it would be nice to see a system where you could have one augment mod and one infusion on the same piece of gear (perhaps by reducing augmentation and shamanic infusion damage to 50 each), and then further Blacksmithing and Tailoring enhancements on crafted gear.
By opening up this player crafting system you would see more players engaging with one another and a selling of services and labour - in general, a healthier community.
TLDR;
- Shamanic Infusions on gear should not require a Shamanic Infusion level to wear.
- Augmenting gear with mods should not attune that gear to the player.
- Infusions and Augmentations should be able to co-exist on a single piece of looted gear (example: reducing damage from 100 to 50 each)
