Soldak Entertainment’s “Hardcore Game Name” Mutations Explained

Soldak Entertainment’s upcoming RPG that may or may not end up being called Din’s Curse 2 will have you play as a Mutated character. The original plan was to have your characters mutate on death, developing new traits with the passing of generations. However, this developer blog post informs us that for the purposes of pacing, that system had to be replaced with at-will mutation points. A bit on that:

During playtesting, I have found that the mutation between characters is really cool, but happening after death was really inconvenient. Adding something inconvenient right when someone might be frustrated isn’t a good plan. 🙂 It also gets in the way of pacing. It introduced a thoughtful, planning process right in the middle of a lot of action. So I’ve changed how this works.

Now you can mutate between characters whenever you want (limited by mutation points). With this change, the player has much more control over the process, it simplifies a bunch of things especially multiplayer, it will scare off less players because semi-permadeath sounds scary, it works better with pacing, and it even makes it easier to explain the game.

The mutation between characters and permadeath have always been tied together. Changing the mutation to whenever the player wants does make permadeath unnecessary, so that is going away also. I think these changes will make the game much better, but it is a little strange that my working name for the game is hardcore and that’s the part I’m removing. 🙂 This is one of the nice things about being an indie. I can explore a design and change anything I need to to make it the best game possible.

BTW, for those that do like hardcore, there is still a hardcore option similar to our previous games.

And then, another blog post explains how these new mutations will work. Check it out:

In our next game, you play as one of the Mutated. They are closely related to the elves and a little to the dark orcs, but one of the main traits is that they mutate slowly over time. There are 3 main ways that this happens: randomly, mutation levels, and mutating with another character.

In rare cases, they can just mutate randomly. This is usually a direct consequence of things happening in the game. For example, if you are killed by a Scree, you might gain a fear of demons. If you kill a bunch of Orcs, you might gain an Orc killing bonus.

The player has a mutation level that goes up as they gain experience. This works similar to normal experience, except it has a high randomness component to it. When the player goes up a mutation level, they mutate in some way. This can give them a free skill level in any skill they have access to, give them a completely new random skill, add a new mutation, or mutate one of their skills.

A new mutation could be something good like Acid Blood where melee enemies take damage when they hit you. It could be something bad like Hemophilia where you receive deep wounds more often than normal. It could even be something in-between like Horns which increases your physical damage, but doesn’t allow you to wear helmets.

Skill mutations affect a specific skill. There is a huge variety of ways that skills can mutate. Let’s look at the fireball skill as an example (other skills work in a similar manner). Some possible mutations: splitting (extra projectiles), efficient (less mana used), quick (faster casting), blasting (larger blast radius), forking (splits into 2 when it hits an enemy), icy (adds cold damage), of lightning swarms (chance of adding balls of lightning when a fireball kills something), or armor melt (chance of adding an armor melt debuff on each enemy hit by a fireball), and many, many more.

For all of these mutations, you can go with the flow and accept them or you can fight against them. Essentially you can can spend skill points to remove the unwanted mutations. This is only a short term cost though, since you will regain these skill points when you go through a full mutation. Every time you gain a mutation level, you also get a mutation point.

For every mutation point, you can go through a full mutation with another character or a class specialty. During a full mutation, any skill that is not currently being used in some manner has a 45% chance of staying as it is, a 45% chance of being replaced by a random skill from the target character or specialty, and a 10% chance of being replaced by any random skill from ANY specialty. You will also regain any skill points used to remove unwanted mutations and your mutation level will readjust to how many mutations you still have.

Overall, while your character mutates randomly, you have a lot of control over the process.