Talent Tree!

10.03.2011

I've remade the talent system in Driftmoon to allow greater flexibility in character customization. There are three main lines of talents, combat, defense, and passive. Each talent has two levels, apprentice and master. Combat and defense talents are usable as skills, a few even outside combat. Passive talents are always active. In effect we have 24 talents - that's a lot of work for me to balance, but it greatly enriches the combat mechanics.

Of course now there's the question of what to do if you want to change some talent you haven't used much. I know it happens to me a lot in different games, especially if I change my combat strategy mid-game. Maybe a trainer in the game could allow you to free talent points for reuse?

[Update] Amarth asked about moddability, so here's the word on that. It's completely moddable, except for the slot placements. You can have as many levels for each talent as you want, I liked two. And any talent can be a requirement for any talent, so prerequisite lines don't have to be straight like these. At the moment a talent can only require one other talent.

And as before, the effects are scriptable. There are two kinds of talent scripts, one that is executed when the talent is acquired, the other option is to run a script each time the player character is loaded and unloaded - the talent is sort of wielded like an item. Each talent level is actually a separate talent entry, so different levels of a talent can have very different effects if you like.