V17 Beta, Discussion about End-Game

Version 17 is slowly being assembled, bringing a new Dark Name. The Fog returns from the previous game, and is now styled as a slowly-expanding region of control around your nobles. It's designed to guide you into expanding geometrically, adding new locations to your fog-sea by taking control of nobles on its perimeter.

The aim is that your agents will work better inside the mists, by increasing their infiltration capabilities (reduced security in all locations caught in the mist) and by preventing them from being affected by exile. We're rolling it out in beta form, in case you want to take a look at a potentially unstable, definitely unbalanced version of the game. Current feedback is that it doesn't do enough to help your agents, which is probably true, so we'll be thinking about maybe adding a new ability which helps you escape paladins more readily (teleport? Better disruption vs Paladins? Paladins fail to track properly if you're in the fog?).

We're also testing better file loading, as the initial build of Version 16 had some nasty crashes, which we believe were linked to non-English language settings/user-names. Hopefully we can get it loading files properly (game parameters and saved IO options) properly on all languages.

We also have introduced key bindings, as I realised, when trying to debug it on a French setting, that WASD isn't a very good key set for moving the map around, if you're using an AZERTY keyboard. So the game options, available in-game, should allow you to rebind those to whatever works best on your setup. Hopefully. Assuming it doesn't lead to catastrophic issues. Didn't on our machines, but, well, it's beta for a reason.

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One major change which we're now discussing is the end-game. Currently, there's no real difference between mid and end game, you just keep pushing darkness or monsters until you win. We're considering expanding it somewhat.

NPC nobles slowly gain 'awareness', which is their knowledge of you, your actions, and the apocalypse. They don't really DO anything with this information, however. The previous game, Shadows 1, had a 'lightbringer victory' counter, where the aware nobles could band together, and form an alliance which could defeat the player, if the player didn't interfere with it. This could bring an end-game threat, and make a dramatic final battle between light and dark.

We'll need to think carefully about it. We want to have a variety of strategies for the player to use to defeat them, both political and military, and we don't want them to just turn up and ruin your game in a way which would be unpredictable or unfair. They should make the game more fun, not just harder. One thing I personally like the idea of is being able to have a player noble be the sovreign of this 'empire of light', to trick the NPCs into voting you as leader of the resistance against your own forces. Playing both sides of the war at the same time is the kind of game I want Shadows to be.

To balance out the NPCs gaining advantages and defences against you, it's possible the player needs an end-game buff. Possibly in the form of 'ultimate abilities' which get unlocked at a certain point. Either every name would have access to an Ult, or the player would choose one from a list when the time came. We're not decided on if this is a good idea, or what form these abilities would take, but it has been suggested that the player needs a bit of a boost towards the end of the game.

So, anyway, that's the current state of the game, and our current focus. After this is done, maybe over the course of a couple of versions, we can look at overall balance. Scale down the monsters a bit, buff politics somewhat, probably. Maybe get a bit more options on the difficulty selection screen.