Questions about the Samurai
I am some question about what is your (Raptisoft) plans for making Samurai for the later release (mostly because I am worried about samurai might be portrayed as stereotypical samurai):
1. Do you plan to make Samurai melee-only character(stereotypical samurai) or melee+ranged hybrid character(more realistic samurai)? I am asking this because samurai is actually more of an archer or a gunner than a swordman like we think.
2. Would Samurai use some sort of ki-infused attacks or some sort of shinobi art stuff?
3. What is the generic one sentence lore behind Samurai?
4. Can you give us a small peak on skills you think of for the samurai
5. Considering that samurai's are generally had high education, wouldn't samurai be able to use some magic?
6. How would you describe samurai as a game character?
Comments
2. Not planning at this time to make him "mystical" at all.
3. He has a dark past. His father sent him to far away lands to find and kill a man with less honor than himself.
4. They're not well thought out enough yet.
5. No, he is going to be designed more as the "pure warrior" (since the Paladin will have a whole faith section)
6. Very fast
1. Top secret
2. No, that would be reserved for a bard class, if I ever decided to add one (would be purely a multiplayer, support only class with very little fight ability... but I have a loose design for it)
3. No shapeshifting, I really hate that, it feels like a "tacked on" skill tree. There's plenty one can do with a druid without resorting to that.
4. Hadn't particularly planned on it... the Solomon Dark world is not so much "high elven fantasy" as it is "Ye Olde Earth fantasy" so the druid would be working with the wildlife in a European style setting (man eating flowers would be in lands near the edge of the habitable world where the wastelands from the mage wars are, and probably not tameable, and definitely surrounded by the scattered notes of explorer/botanists who went out to catalogue them).
2. I knew you would say something like that because many people misunderstand that just because Bard and druid are different jobs that druid do not do bard stuff. Technically, A celtic druid should be able to do bard stuff because bard education is the first step of becoming a druid.
Gameplay aspect-wise, bard should be part of druid because druid fits well with support role because his summoned friends would most likely to do most of the damage. Also, making a different character just for multiplayer means more work in code, gtaphic, and some sounds.
3.thank god you are not doing that shapeshifting.
4. So... plants are only for tea i guess.
Well, those are more the "priestly druids," i.e. the ones that hang around their stone circles in robes and meticulously calculate exactly where the sun is going to rise on December 21st. To actually go into Solomon's Keep to avenge the burning of a sacred grove, you need one of the wild men of the forest, the ones who sleep in a pile of wolves and bears and crows.
It doesn't mean druids don't sing songs, it's more that a little light melody isn't the kind of thing you'd use to take down a necromancer. You can howl like a wolf, though.
Also, from a pure gaming perspective, I don't want the druid to overlap the paladin, who can emanate auras of goodness and light that would basically perform the same function as a druid's singing. In the same way that the Samurai is supposed to be a more mundane warrior than the paladin, the druid is supposed to be a more mundane version of the necromancer. You don't actually magically summon animals, you have to go outside the keep to call them.
Because Bard would be multiplayer only, I allow some overlap there. But my general design in that region is that you actually would need a little bit of musical talent to play the bard-- sort of like Guitar Hero Solomon's Keep. It's very different, and designed just to be a completely different experience without being capable of being played alone (I may do a priest in a similar fashion at some point as well).