My Suggestions for Legend of Grimrock 2

[Jirodyne]

Darkness (curses, hexes, debuffs) would qualify as the black arts.

Necromancy is only one branch of the black arts, directly related to the deceased. If you include black arts, but nothing related to the deceased, it's not a necromancer.

A practitioner of black arts could be interesting, though. But would you focus an entire class around it? Perhaps it would work to have a caster type that has one or two skill trees based around buffing your allies, and one or two skill trees based around debuffing your enemies, rather than devote an entire class around it.

Black arts isn't a class in any game. That I know of. Usually it's just called Necromancy. Anyways, Mage, 4 'skill trees' With 4 spells each. Weak attack, strong attack, enchant arrows, and a, elemental buff. Air is the only except as it has 1 extra spell, Invisibility.

So for Necro I can see it being something like....

Blood Magic:
Attack Spells: Dealing with stealing life and healing the caster
Enchant Arrows: to steal life on hit
Buff Spell: being a chance that 10% damage taking gets sent back to attacker.

Darkness Magic:
Attack Spells: dealing with blinding the enemy and making you harder to hit
Enchant Arrows: Darkness element, chance to blind enemies on hit
Buff Spell: being small chance to blind enemies that hit you

Bone Magic:
Attack Spells: Dealing with pure damage only
Enchant Arrows: Turns arrows into Bone Arrows (Arrows made out of bones) That has a higher attack damage than normal arrows
Buff Spell: Increases Protection for whole party.

Curse Magic
Attack Spells: Slowness, making enemies attack slower, but still move the same speed.
Enchant Arrows: Chance to slow enemy's attack speed
Buff Spell: Haste, makes you attack faster.

There, 3 minutes and got basic 4 spell trees.

[lowzei]

Just went through some fragment shader weirdness and for some reason i did remember the Medusa Nvidia tech demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKXH0b7z6Mk

It would be very cool if an AddOn or LoG2 could feature a hard to beat and very beautiful Medusa!

[Isaac]

I also tend to agree with an "all attack" type of hotkey. I find in combat I'm finding my eyes fixed mainly on the bottom right of the screen rather than on the main screen, which I think is a bit of a shame.

The 'All Attack' button is pretty bad when you actually get it. What might be cool is to perhaps default the right & left mouse buttons to trigger the attack of the two front row PCs ~unless the cursor is over an active a button; or perhaps this works when the mouse is over a dedicated area of the screen.

Personally wouldn't mind seeing Necromancer

I'm actually agreeing with every single comment of your reply, except for this.

How would you imagine for it to work? Currently, the monsters explode into sparkles without leaving anything worth animating. Also, what if you did raise something into a skeleton, where would it be? Walk around on the map and follow you? What if you wanted to turn around and backtrack? It would be in the way.

I think it could be neat, and not too different from Baldur's Gate 2 ~in a way; (blended in with the party).


Having them cast/summoned would contribute attacks, and perhaps they would default the front line should a PC get killed.

[Grock]

I would really like a sequel that is broader and follows on from escaping the mountain. Something with some NPCs and going into the wilds. In a way along the lines of for example, the old Might and Magic 2/3, in some ways. Not as big or expansive but at least letting us go to a few different places changing scenery and maybe meet a few characters as we find out more about the game's lore before ending on some climax.

I understand that would mean deviating somewhat from the original, though I think it would be a good evolution. Grimrock was cleverly designed for the limited budget, keeping it all in a dungeon etc, but hopefully a sequel could be a bit more diverse and substantial. Leaving the dungeon, going into a forest, a small village, some caves and maybe ending with climbing a tower, which would be a little ironic after spending the first game descending.

Sure any non cave environment might sound strange considering the "square" nature of the game and present some challenges but it's been pulled off before with far greater limits. It's just that as much as I enjoyed Grimrock I'm not sure about how eager I'd be to play another entire game in a dungeon even if the wall textures change now and then. About that, Hint, adding some random elements to your wall textures would have been nice, some randomly places textures over the walls for age, overgrowth, damage etc which for the amount of work required would add a large amount of diversity which the game lacked for obvious and understandable reasons.

[Orthocone]

I agree to Grock's posts.

It would be nice to leave a dungeon to get more differences in the surroundings. There was an old game, some of you may know : Wizardry 7. It was a "square" game too with a huge wilderness and many surprises. I don't know how many hours I spent with this game. I hope that a game like is not to difficult to create, even for a small team.

[Isaac]

Some games work best as just the game... wrapped within what limited fiction it needs to justify the gameplay; with no need to ever actually depict the fiction beyond the gameplay itself. For instance their could be a game based on a fantasy Olympics, where the various creatures would compete in events; and their back stories may work into explaining their strengths ~~but we'd never actually follow them back to their homeland to continue their adventures. It would be beyond the scope of the game; and somewhat pointless IMO.

Eye of the Beholder 1, 2 & 3 is a good example of a game with a world you never need to see outside of the maze in the game; the maze is the point of the game.
LoG would seem the same way; no need for anything beyond the labyrinth. Now Lands of Lore does extend the world to certain surface mazes (linearly via the story), so it's a good example of what could be done for LoG and the illusory backdrop of the rest of their world ~through a few additional mazes; I wouldn't mind this at all myself. But I'm not really anticipating an open world like Fallout 2 had (for instance); not unless they add all of the potential of something like FO2 to go with it, and that just seems like such 'feature creep' for this franchise IMO. A definite stray from the Dungeon-crawler genre.

[Darklord]

EOB 2 started in a forest, an outdoor tileset designed similarly shouldn't be to hard to make?

Daniel.

[Isaac]

EOB 2 started in a forest, an outdoor tileset designed similarly shouldn't be to hard to make?

Daniel.

It did; so did EOB 3. And Lands of Lore did likewise ~once you left the castle. However... The surface maps were very limited, and IIRC only had single cell hallways (or forest paths). The meat of the [EOB] games were all down below in the dungeons. I really doubt that most players (or new players) would look favorably upon a surface world with limited 10' wide paths; or the flipside with wider 'rooms' as the town's open spaces. An open surface world brings the expectation of open exploration... but Grimrock (1) will never compete with the likes of TES or Gothic ~just as they cannot compete with Grimrock. IMO each game should stick to their own arena (so to speak).

** But I certainly would not mind maps with the limited impression of an implied outdoors.

[Darklord]

** But I certainly would not mind maps with the limited impression of an implied outdoors.

Me to.

Daniel.

[mclang]

I liked Lands of Lore a lot!

And wouldn't mind that kind of outdoor places... Lands of Lore had also shops and several NPC:s that added lot to the gaming experience.

Some healer/priest class would be nice, e.g for turning the undead and smiting them. Maybe there could be some items to balance things for groups that do not have a priest?

More varied items are also welcome. How about some cursed ones that can be dropped only after e.g drinking holy water - or taken out after PC dies? There could be more items with good+bad effect like the ring which increases attack power and food consumption. Like a sword that is really powerful, but hits sometimes nearest friend.

But then again, after all this outdoor and more classes stuff, we are speaking about much bigger project than Grimrock I, so most of it may well be unrealistic to implement without risks becoming too big.