This week saw the completion of co-op class design. The design process was a little more arduous than last time due to single classes requiring a different touch from triple classing. There’s not a whole lot to talk about with the design process itself, though. The focus was to give each class an advantage in certain situations and to have more synergy with certain other classes. Not much mind was paid towards balancing absolute power levels between them just yet, right now I’m just trying to create interesting play styles. Balance will come later.

The other big issue of the week was balancing party movement. The old system was that, when partied, each player in the party could move on their turn and bring party members with them. The end result is great for pacing (everyone still gets a turn), but terrible for balance. In PVP this merely resulted in parties being hugely advantaged over solo players (being able to clear as many monster dens in a turn as their number of party members while having a battle advantage to boot), but in co-op it’s an even bigger problem. I want to have co-op objectives that require parties to split up in order to be more efficient with timers. If a full party has a near identical move rate combined with extra combat efficiency, then there’s no real reason for them to split up.

The most obvious solution to this problem was to cycle through each player in a party each round to decide who gets to move the party for the round. This was pretty unintuitive and also created issues (if player C leaves the party after A,B have already done their turn for the round, then the party ends up unable to move). Crazier solutions were considered like merging parties into a single turn taker. Lots of overhead.

I eventually settled on a much simpler solution. When moving in a party, every player has their stamina drained from the movement. To give every player an opportunity to move the party, I also added shuffling the turn order each round based on agility (more perfectly even ideas were considered like cycling the first turn player ie (A->B->C->D)->(B->C->D->A) but this results in one player having to wait 6 turns for their next turn every round which is terrible pacing). This actually has some pretty cool implications for PVP since it allows players to actually have a chance to catch up to other players that they’re chasing. As a last necessary tweak, I also made it so players can’t move after having initiated combat in a round (since parties were still technically capable of multiple battles in a round, albeit not as much as they had before).

This system still isn’t totally there since it creates many turns where party members have nothing to do but end their turn (which is especially terrible in single player). In a truly ideal world there will be an option to access other party member’s menus during the party leader’s turn, as well as leave a party even when it’s not your turn in order to avoid these “pointless” turns completely. But I want to get a feel for how a more constricted party plays before I clean it up.