Just had to say it, I'm elated.
On slipstreams:
Hyperspace travel was frustrating and boring because of the lack of safe conducts to many areas, requiring either a large amount of time moving around dense clusters, moving slowly through them, or taking a massive economic hit from tanking the supply costs.
Making clear paths through the clouds however, would've made it even more unstimulating and trivialized the existence of storms which are an interesting mechanic.
Slipstreams however, not only respect the mechanics that were already in place, but also add an engaging and fun solution to the tedious aspect of hyperspace travel, each time you can use one to zoom across the map to your objectives, the contrast between that comfort and the laborious nature of avoiding storms makes for a very rewarding feeling. Lovely stuff.
About the skill tree:
An issue many of us had discussed previously was how the way the tree was designed would restrict the flow of the player through it, raising the difficulty of properly balancing skills between each other, both within each branch and between branches. The solution implemented however, allows for a lot of flexibility in fine tuning skills and branches independently, properly tiers through skill point requirements, and the higher level skills have been improved and really express the philosophy that the further you go up in a branch, the greater the return for your investment.
Being able to freely create as many tiers as needed, move skills up and down depending on how many skill points they'd require to reach, and the ability to do this for each branch separately, solves the rigid structure and balancing challenges the previous implementation had, even if skills needed to be tuned now after play testing, now that job can be done so much easier than before.
Both of these changes show creative solutions to gameplay issues that don't sacrifice the integrity of the existent systems, instead managing to enhance them.
If following updates maintain this level of elegance when tuning and adding mechanics, this diamond will be out of rough sides in no time.
As someone who previously whined about both of the issues previously stated, cheers lads, wonderful job!
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Topic: Slipstreams and skill tree changes spark joy (Read 1538 times)