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General / Re: So what improvements would benefit Underrail 2?

« on: August 19, 2019, 04:06:26 am »

• Less tedium. Currently, to make your character as powerful as possible, you should pick up all saleable items you find, lug them across possibly dozens of screens (without quick-travelling, because there's a cost to using it) to a merchant, sell as much as they're willing and sufficiently solvent to buy, and as long as you have any items left, wait until the shop resets or go to another one and try to continue selling. With the money you make from this, you buy the best items you can theoretically get and use at the moment, which most likely will again involve waiting for shops to reset multiple times. While this may be too mind-numbing for anyone to actually do even with speedhack, the way the game works incentivises approximating this behaviour as far as the player can tolerate it and as long as there is anything to spend additional money on. Free quick-travel, perhaps with more available locations, and shop inventories not changing based on the passing of time would remove major sources of boredom and frustration.
• The skill system could use some changes. First and foremost, some skills are only used for checks against fixed values, and if you don't know exactly what you're doing, it's all too easy to invest useless points beyond the value of the highest of those checks in those skills. Also, Throwing is a bit weird if you use it for grenades in that the amount of skill points you need to invest in it to be able to use it reliably doesn't depend on your level.
• Real-time and turn-based mode should better correspond to each other, or the need for such correspondence should be reduced. Ideally, either all actions should be possible in either mode with their costs in action points and in time being equivalent (which could eliminate the need for combat to happen in turn-based mode), or most of them (with exceptions only for basic things like movement) should only be possible in one mode.
• More information. Sometimes I forget what parts of a complex quest I've already completed, or whether an enemy type I've fought before has a certain immunity or resistance, or I'd like to know the details of the recipe or ability that a blueprint or psionic mentor I could buy would teach me, or how the weapons craftable from different types of frame or mold I could buy would differ. While I can figure out all of these through trial and error or most of them by reading the wiki, I see no reason why the game couldn't just tell me.
• I expect there to only be one experience mode in Underrail 2, probably closer to oddity than classic. Personally, I wouldn't really mind if it were exactly like oddity mode, but I'd prefer a little more focus on quests and less on exploration, and perhaps a system directly awarding skill points rather than (or, if levels and feats would be handled separately from skill points, in addition to) experience.
• More personality and individuality for the player character. Not having to share portraits and character models with NPCs would be nice, as would optional background or personality traits (similar to feats but not strictly advantageous), or having appropriate feats (such as Paranoia or Stoicism) occasionally affect dialogue options.