Guiding principles
Official PD2 design goals (which I agree with)
- Build diversity
- Quality of life
- Balance
My own (which I also agree with)
- Noob friendlyness : I believe we can get non-d2 players to play PD2 … if we’re noob-friendly enough.
- Fan service, including parents : when the largest part of the community asks for something, something (sometimes slightly different) should be done. Not everyone plays PD2 24/7.
- Power creep : don’t make the game easier with every patch, only to invent harder late game content to compensate. This isn’t only about balance, but also about consistency and staying true to the original game.
Game design philosophy
Build diversity : let’s actually do it
Build diversity isn’t going from 50 possible builds to 51. It is going from 50 to 50².
- Most skills should be worthy to be played as a main skill.
- Most builds should have several viable paths, some with defensive skills, others going glass cannon, etc…
- Most builds should have the choice between using only one skill or having several (weaker) skills.
- …
We’ll know we have build diversity when not all kicksins play Phoenix, when not all (elem builds) mercs play Infinity, etc… If there’s only one reasonable option, I’ll be thinking about ways to give you another option, and that’s what patches should focus on imo.
Avoid boring dilemmas
We’ll sometimes mention the “boring dilemma” concept. By that, I mean having the choice between an optimal strategy that feels boring or bad, or a suboptimal strategy that feels great. When such choices are offered to players, game designers are probably doing something wrong.
Examples of boring dilemmas:
- Precasting / prebuffing
- Gear swapping
- …
We’ll try to detect such dilemmas and fix them.