Talking with my customer/testers in forums, I’ve realized that there are basically 2 groups of people:

1. those who like hard challenges, and are willing even to replay the game several times. They prefer less battles but higher difficulty for each battle, and maybe a time limit
2. those who like just to play RPG and yes, even build up an invincible party. They like to kill thousands of enemies with their super characters, and don’t worry about time limits.

I am actually in the 2nd group too 😀 but I can understand also the needs of the 1st group of people. So I’m going to implement just 2 difficulty levels in TOD: normal and hard. The normal will be the classic standard CRPG, no time limit, no breakable items, etc.

The hard instead… MOUHAHAHA!! 😀 Will have a time limit, breakable items, tougher monsters.

Breakable items is a very important factor: if you find at one point in the game the superbastardsword +5, and you have a character master in slashing weapons, you’re done – because the weapon will never break. Instead if weapons can be destroyed using them too often, you have to carefully manage the items – maybe saving that super sword only for the most tough battles.

I am also thinking to eliminate the need of manually moving in dungeons by putting a sort of automatic mode to go back in specific (know) points. Like if you enter dungeon and arrive at the entrance of level 2, you can just go back to entrance with one click – the party will travel to the entrance and you won’t have to do anything but observe.

That is, if you don’t met a wandering monster in your way back 😉

Ok I made up my mind at last! The first episode of TOD will have only 3 races: human, ice elf and dwarf.

Before you scream in horror continue to read: based on some users feedback, I decided to break away from the standard rpg archetypes, like the elf is a good ranger, the dwarf good fighter, etc. Each race will be capable to be any kind of class from warrior to healer, and will have simply different spells, based also on deities.

The deities choice will determine what kind of “prayers” (spells) your character will be able to learn. For each race there will be 2 deities so those 3 basic races will expand to already 6 different character archetypes. So as you can see isn’t that bad. Plus the already planned races (Dark elves, Orcs, Wood Elves) will be added in the future game expansions.

I’m very happy about this solution, because indeed it gives the user a wider choice. So you can have a ice elf fighter and a dwarf wizard, if you want 😀