Okay this is a hot one, I think this is going to be controversial for OG Morbus players, but hear me out, just give it a listen.
The Reason
Brood Alien upgrades are fun and cool in Morbus. It allows the Brood Alien player to express their play style, adapt to the human players, and get stronger.
We want upgrades, we need upgrades.
The Problem
Rounds in Morbus are fairly short, let’s say 8-12 minutes ideally. How much time is it reasonable to spend looking at an upgrade menu?
I probably am going to figure out a “go to” loadout and just repeat that over and over again. Some players have even mentioned that they bound keyboard shortcuts to specific upgrades so they could just press the keys on their keyboard instead of opening the menu. Power users!
So does having all the choice matter if I’m going to do the same thing every game?
Also as an aside, we should consider that Brood Aliens getting an upgrade point after killing a human is giving the Alien team an extra bonus when they already received one (they now have an additional alien on their team.) That’s a recipe for a snowball.
A Possible Solution
We need to optimize for a few things;
Simplify
Big upgrade trees, multiple paths, reading 16 different upgrade options and learnings what’s what. Yuck. That takes too long.
We need something simple with a low barrier to entry.
Diversity
We should prevent players from just doing the same thing over and over again. Live a little! Try something new!
Maybe a bit of a nerf
We should make upgrades a bit weaker, but not just through the numbers. Perhaps we just make it harder to min/max.
Buckle Up
Here’s the demo, i’ll explain it below:
Randomized Options
You are given a (random) set of 3 upgrades to choose from.
The list of upgrades these 3 come from changes based on previous upgrades you’ve picked.
For example, the “Quiet Breath” upgrade requires you to have at least one other “Utility” upgrade previously chosen.
This means the pool of upgrades grows in size the more (diverse) options you pick.
Some upgrades like Lifesteal require you to have two “Offense” upgrades chosen.
Upgrade Rarity
The color “rarity” of upgrades generally reflects their uniqueness or power. If an upgrade requires you to have picked other upgrades (ie it has prerequisites) then it is considered more rare.
The invisibility upgrade requires you to have picked quiet breath first, which requires you to have picked another utility upgrade first, so it’s considered “Epic.” (it’s also just kinda epic too.) Then the even advanced invisibility upgrade which is a better version is a “Legendary” since the previous upgrade is a prerequisite.
Higher rarity upgrades are actually slightly favored to be in the set of random upgrades, so if you’re building towards a certain “legendary” upgrade you’re more likely to get it than a simple stat upgrade.
Auto Upgrading
The classic new Morbus player who doesn’t know how to upgrade their Brood Alien; say goodbye to them. With this system we can automatically choose upgrades for players based on rarity + type preference + some randomness. By default upgrades will be automatically chosen for players. They can either disable this or they can choose a specific “preset/archetype” for this automatic selection.
Right now we have a few, that are variations of favoring offense, defense, utility, some combination of those, or a balance of all three.
Why I think this might work
This actually checks those 3 boxes from earlier;
Simplify
If the upgrade process is automatic, it’s dumb simple and requires no input from the player. If they’ve set a different archetype, awesome!
However if we’re in manual mode, we’re also still very simple: all a player has to do is read 3 options and choose one.
If they’re a new player, 3 different things isn’t hard to parse. We’re talking seconds.
Limited choices = faster choosing.
Diversity
Now I can’t pick my ideal min/max Brood build every single game. I have to make the most of what I have. Builds become less about perfection and more about making what you have work.
Ideally this would lead to people trying something a bit different and actually using all the different upgrades instead of their favored few.
Granted since you can lightly sway the selection algorithm (since higher rarity upgrades are favored to be selected) this is limited, but I think it gives us a nice middle ground.
Maybe a nerf
Nerf through what I said about diversity.
Alernatives
If this is hated, doesn’t work, or just sucks I still have some other ideas.
MOBA mode
There could be an additional “Preset” mode where you build out an entire upgrade progression you want, and we save that. This is at the “lets just give up on randomness” point and we’re just back to the original upgrade tree but you can pre-make a selection path.
It cuts down the time upgrade if you already know what you want, but doesn’t really help the new player or simplify aspect. This just feels like a MOBA game to me though.
Or it’s just back to the original upgrade system, but we can have presets, and then automatic upgrading just uses a preset.
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