Re: Tentative Entombed 2 Design Decisions
On the pet issue, I think job specific pets would be nice provided their affectiveness at lower levels will remain fairly constant, however if some jobs are to start without one a pet shop might be fun as well.
On multiclassing I personally loved the two jobs system in Entombed. One of the things that always made the game interesting to me was the fact that you couldn't just minimax your party to oblivian. it wasn't just a matter of choosing all the best complementary race, spells, skills and equipment with the biggest bonuses and wailing away, you actively needed to play the hand you were dealt, and if on occasion that hand could be pretty scummy such as an ogre mage or a halfling fighter, well that was what you had to deal with. I don't think I've ever seen another game that had this level of judgement and adaptation required of it's players.
The only thing I would like to see would be a bit more randomness about who you rescue and wh ere and perhaps some choice about who joins your party in the end, rather than specifically giving you characters on the third and fifth floor and no more (particularly sinse the chance to get extra characters later on would encourage players to keep playing if one of their characters died), plus of course with essentially more picks from the random race/job pack you would need to make more choice, ---- do you let that halfling brawler join your party? or do you hold out for the chance of finding someone tougher later on.
the only major issue with the job system in Entombed 1 is that the correspondance between magic based and technique based jobs didn't work out very well, meaning that playing a multiclass fighter/mage style would simply not be functional either way, sinse the magic based jobs just start with one technique point meaning they won't get to used techniques very much, while the technique based jobs get very little by way of mana per level (plus of course their statistics don't advance very much meaning their spells are not very effective).
Within the two bounderies, magic type jobs and technique type jobs there was a lot of scope for variety, but some better correspondence between the two at higher levels might be nice, ---- I once finished the game with my party comprised of a monk/healer, a trickster/thief and a bard wanderer, and actually couldn't kill the last boss sinse even though I killed the lich thanks to some luck with the monk's break bones skill, neither the monk techniques, nor the harm spell, nor either character's attacks could damage the white chrystal more than it was regenerating.
Racial skills or techniques might also be a nice thing to have in the game, stilll more if interaction with the environment is going to be part of entombed ii, after all some races like dwarves and goblins will naturally be better underground, also I was mortified that dwarves did not get th
e axes skill .
I do however agree with Sevrior that a little more by way of logic and information might be needed in the game to explain some of it's aspects. For example, other than it's properties in weapon use or the effectiveness of brawler grabs, I was never completely clear what changes to size with the grow or shrink spells actually did. Likewise, at least a tocan explanation for how your characters attain their second job in game might be nice.
For example, when you reach the correct level: "character name stumbles on the corpse of insert name here, reading her/his diary character name learns the skills of the new job name"
Or "As you rest, character name explains to you that she/he didn't always want to be a "insert first job name", and that his/her true profession is as a "insert second job"
T hat would at least give things a little context and backstory rather than randomly having a paladin assassin for no reason, and in some sense be realistic, sinse hay in reality we don't just do one job or have one thing we're good at (or at least we don't unless we're really! boring).
With wanderers, I did like the fact that they could observe and learn techniques, however the fact that there were only three in the game, and they were more gymmicky than actually effective did make wanderers less useful than they could be. It might actually be fun if the wanderers could learn other things too, like maybe a wanderer could learn the pounce attack of a wolf or other a limited selection of other job's techniques such as the fighter's flurry, sinse that would really make the wanderer as intendede, a jack of all trades.
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