Features you want the most?

[Anima_]

Yeah. And I totally concede of the statistical comparison of the two as I stated before. They really accomplish the same thing in the end on paper. It's mostly just the aesthetic feel of being able to manually equip each item yourself instead of just a suit of armor pre-made for you. Just my thoughts though. I'm sure even if you went the other route you could pull it off, it's not game breaking by any means.

I understand your point and there is no sugar coating it. This will mean less fine grated customisation.
If this was a solo or fixed party game with 4 characters I'd readily approve even more slots. But the games has 16 characters, even remembering what the characters have actually equipped becomes quite hard. Equipping such a number of characters becomes also pretty tedious. From the developer side we have to invest quite a number of resources to make that many items (Art, Balancing, Making the items) and it limits out ability to do interesting things with the equipment.

On the other hand we do plan to make equipment customisable, so you won't have to simply swallow the premade hard hitting but fast equipment package.

[jack1974]

A solution maybe could be to use "sockets system" like in Torchlight where you can customize each item adding precious gems and other stuff?

[yayswords]

It's a nice compromise. You could use unsocketed gear for characters you don't care much to fine-tune (that could be all your characters even) but go socketed and carefully adjust the stats where you so desire.

[Anima_]

Restricted resources can be done without limiting items as well though. Using potions as an example, allow us to have whatever amount and type of potion we want, but limit it with a cooldown so no one can just spam potions, or from a lore and realistic standpoint, lower the effectiveness of spamming potions over and over or even give it an adverse effect. This way healers in this situation become not only desired but perhaps necessary depending on the situation while still allowing the player to choose whether or not to use a potion/whatever else without putting a virtual cage around the player pushing a specific way to play a game. There is a large portion of the community who enjoys hoarding items, while I am not one of them I can still understand the desire to fill up as much as possible. It's purely because people enjoy options, stretching room.

I actually very much agree with restricted resources as I am a big advocate of survival type games, but within that type of game play nothing is worse than being limited to specific avenues pre-built by a developer. To put it in laments terms - In a game I want to play the game, not follow the games guidelines on how to play!

Yes that would all be solutions as well. But they only restrict options in a different way. The reason I'm favouring the limited use approach is that is easy to communicate, which lowered effectiveness wouldn't be. It's also easy to have increases of the limit as a character option. Also I think that the limited items per battle actually offer the most flexibility in how the game can be played. You can concentrate the item use on a single character or spread it around (you couldn't do that with the effectiveness reduction), you can also reserve the items for when things go wrong or use offensive items to make the enemy pay.
The actual decisions in the battle are not constrained in any way, you just can't do it indefinitely.

[megaman12321]

Is the main battle party six people? And is experience still not shared anymore, cause that might bring in some disadvantages if we have a forced story option. Like I never used Amukiki since I always used the first 6 I got, (Saren, Loren, Myrth, Draco, Dora, and Ramas) but was surprised when I had to put him in during the battle against that nomad boss. It ended up with a very underpowered character in a time where the boss hits hard.

I am okay with the limited items, but not used to it. I hoard my items unless I really need them, so I never used them unless the situation really demanded them, which ended up with me spamming them. That kind of ended the same way with money, as I never bought new equipment unless I really needed it, potions included. I am a horrible miser.

[Anima_]

Is the main battle party six people? And is experience still not shared anymore, cause that might bring in some disadvantages if we have a forced story option. Like I never used Amukiki since I always used the first 6 I got, (Saren, Loren, Myrth, Draco, Dora, and Ramas) but was surprised when I had to put him in during the battle against that nomad boss. It ended up with a very underpowered character in a time where the boss hits hard.

We'll probably keep the party size. At least I haven't heard or said anything contrary. Experience will be shared, we are only in contention about the exact mechanic. Jack favours designs that still have a level difference between used and unused characters and my favourites are designs that have everyone at the same level. In the end it will probably be a compromise between the two.

I am okay with the limited items, but not used to it. I hoard my items unless I really need them, so I never used them unless the situation really demanded them, which ended up with me spamming them. That kind of ended the same way with money, as I never bought new equipment unless I really needed it, potions included. I am a horrible miser.

Hoarding is an interesting problem, but quite inherent to consumables. It can only be limited trough things like limited inventory space or expiring consumables, or penalties for inventory size. Something like loose a point of speed for every item in the inventory. Interesting idea... Not planning on actually doing this for these games.

[Jaeger]

I generally prefer shared party level/experience. It reduces grinding and the player isn't screwed over during events where a normally unused suddenly forced into a battle. An exception where it doesn't matter all that much would be most Shin Megami Tensei games (and some spinoffs) where the game encourages the player to change their party composition pretty often and demons are pretty much disposable minions.

[megaman12321]

Hoarding is an interesting problem, but quite inherent to consumables. It can only be limited trough things like limited inventory space or expiring consumables, or penalties for inventory size. Something like loose a point of speed for every item in the inventory. Interesting idea... Not planning on actually doing this for these games.

I have a few RPGs where it just plain limits the amount of a certain items you can have. When that happens, for some reason I actually use them strategically. Maybe it's because I know you can't stack them up so I might as well use them before I find a another one and waste space.

[Neverr]

I understand your point and there is no sugar coating it. This will mean less fine grated customization.
If this was a solo or fixed party game with 4 characters I'd readily approve even more slots. But the games has 16 characters, even remembering what the characters have actually equipped becomes quite hard. Equipping such a number of characters becomes also pretty tedious. From the developer side we have to invest quite a number of resources to make that many items (Art, Balancing, Making the items) and it limits out ability to do interesting things with the equipment.

On the other hand we do plan to make equipment customization, so you won't have to simply swallow the premade hard hitting but fast equipment package.

Honestly the simple fact that you recognize what you are doing "less fine grated customization" is a huge factor to ease the hit. I'm glad that you aren't simply propagating an aura of superiority and giving speeches about how you are simply making the game better, and the community is wrong. I'm totally behind you for acknowledging it. Big props!

On a side note, What Jack suggested would be awesome, the whole socket deal like torchlight or an even better example would be path of exile. (For those who haven't really heard of it you should check it out). PoE truly takes the ability to customize anything to the max and is close to the epitome of character customization.

For Example, you could link a regular bow skill say fire arrow. And link it to something like multiple projectiles and pierce. All of a sudden a single fire arrow turns into 5 fire arrows going through every enemy on screen. Taking it a step further, you could then link it to something like cast on critical and fireball. Before you know it, any of your five piercing fire arrows that crits would proc the spell fireball. And because all 5 different skills are linked to each other, each time your fireball is cast from the critical proc, your fireball also turns into 5 different fireballs that pierce all enemies on screen.

An over the top example of the overwhelming customization of poe, and I am by no means holding ToA (Can I use that? :S) to that as comparison as the two games are different in nature. On that note though, it would be a pleasure to see some form of socket customization similar to that for our items.

Simple things like "Proc on being hit" or "Proc when striking" for weapons, trigger gems adds an extreme amount of flavor to a game.

To the point I'd even say I'm an advocate of a much smaller item pool if we were allowed the ability to customize the items we can use with unique triggers and stat gems.

[megaman12321]

I understand your point and there is no sugar coating it. This will mean less fine grated customization.
If this was a solo or fixed party game with 4 characters I'd readily approve even more slots. But the games has 16 characters, even remembering what the characters have actually equipped becomes quite hard. Equipping such a number of characters becomes also pretty tedious. From the developer side we have to invest quite a number of resources to make that many items (Art, Balancing, Making the items) and it limits out ability to do interesting things with the equipment.

On the other hand we do plan to make equipment customization, so you won't have to simply swallow the premade hard hitting but fast equipment package.

Honestly the simple fact that you recognize what you are doing "less fine grated customization" is a huge factor to ease the hit. I'm glad that you aren't simply propagating an aura of superiority and giving speeches about how you are simply making the game better, and the community is wrong. I'm totally behind you for acknowledging it. Big props!

On a side note, What Jack suggested would be awesome, the whole socket deal like torchlight or an even better example would be path of exile. (For those who haven't really heard of it you should check it out). PoE truly takes the ability to customize anything to the max and is close to the epitome of character customization.

For Example, you could link a regular bow skill say fire arrow. And link it to something like multiple projectiles and pierce. All of a sudden a single fire arrow turns into 5 fire arrows going through every enemy on screen. Taking it a step further, you could then link it to something like cast on critical and fireball. Before you know it, any of your five piercing fire arrows that crits would proc the spell fireball. And because all 5 different skills are linked to each other, each time your fireball is cast from the critical proc, your fireball also turns into 5 different fireballs that pierce all enemies on screen.

An over the top example of the overwhelming customization of poe, and I am by no means holding ToA (Can I use that? :S) to that as comparison as the two games are different in nature. On that note though, it would be a pleasure to see some form of socket customization similar to that for our items.

Simple things like "Proc on being hit" or "Proc when striking" for weapons, trigger gems adds an extreme amount of flavor to a game.

To the point I'd even say I'm an advocate of a much smaller item pool if we were allowed the ability to customize the items we can use with unique triggers and stat gems.

The sheer insanity of this is mind boggling. I would be so scared if I had to program all the variables that could factor with each trigger.