Legend of Grimrock 2 Unveils Shorter-But-Sweeter Skill System

[Andy Chalk]

Legend of Grimrock 2 Unveils Shorter-But-Sweeter Skill System

Legend of Grimrock 2 will make use of dramatically shortened skill trees in order to encourage greater diversity among the players in your party.

Legend of Grimrock had kind of an oddball skill system. Individual skills could be advanced all the way to level 50 but required multiple skill points to gain a single benefit. The net result was forced specialization: To achieve the highest levels of power in a particular skill, you had to focus on that skill to the exclusion of most others. That's not what developer Almost Human was after, and so the studio has changed things up rather dramatically for the sequel.

"In LoG2 when you gain a level, you are rewarded with only one skillpoint. To counterbalance this the skill trees are much shorter. This way, every skillpoint spent matters now and there aren't any intermediate skill levels," the studio explained in a new blog post. "In fact, most skills are only 1-3 levels deep and there are many on/off kind of perks that you can buy."

As an example, the "Armor" skill as it currently stands has just three levels: The first allows characters to wear light armor without penalty, the second does the same for heavy armor and the third and final level reduces the weight of all equipped armor by 50 percent. There's also an "Athletics" skill that can be increased an unlimited number of times, boosting strength by one point with each new level, and a unique, morale-boosting "Leadership" skill that can be acquired by anyone - but only one character in the party may have it.

Some of the perks will have skill prerequisites, and each class will have its own skill tree, although some will be shared; there will also be a separate "mini skill tree" based on race. Almost Human says the new system "unifies traditional skills, perks and racial traits," which will hopefully both simplify and diversify character development.

Source: Legend of Grimrock [http://www.grimrock.net/2013/10/17/skill-system-explained/]


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[Fightgarr]

I don't personally have a huge problem with the amount of specialization you were required to do in this game, but I did have a big problem with the fact that any time you wanted to cast any spell, you had to punch in the runes manually, it made using magic during combat into a very frustrating, clunky affair. That's where I'm looking for the most improvements to the game.

 

[Andrewtheeviscerator]

I hope they fix the magic system in the new one. I get that they were trying to g for something unique with it but it just felt kinda of tedious to me and unless you looked up how to cast the spells mages were useless at least in the early game.

 

[Andy Chalk]

I liked the "exploration" part of the magic system, and I kinda dug the specialization requirements of the old skill system too. But there's no question that I missed out on a lot of cool stuff because I had to focus on just one or two skills per character, and one school of magic for my mage. (A major and a minor, really.) I'm pretty confident that Almost Human "gets it" as these things go, so I'm really looking forward to seeing the new system in action.

 

[RandV80]

I was fine operating the magic system in the first, the only real problem I had is that it basically forced you to use only one wizard because using two would just be too cumbersome. And of course with the skill tree as it was if you were only going to play through the game once that meant you only got to see one type of magic.

So I have no problem with the suggested changes. What I really want to see with the game is for it to go a bit bigger, have some outside environments, town(s), etc.

 

[Buizel91]

I read this is "Legends of Grimlock 2"

Now i am disappointed i thought this was about the king himself. Was about to wonder where the first game was...Oooh well a boy can dream :'(

 

[piinyouri]

Chip in another opinion that the magic system needs a tweaking or possibly an overhaul.
For clarification, I LOVE the idea of the runes themselves, but as other people mentioned, the way you had to input them every time in combat was too tedious and cumbersome and would ensure you only ever had one mage in your group. (To any people who had more than one and wish to speak up, hush. You're crazy.)

Maybe they could keep the rune system as is, but have it so you can assign a rune set to one button, but in order to use it you'd have to manually input the combination at least once?

Also pretty happy about the shortened skill tree. Big problem in the first was you only had about two choices per character realistically speaking.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Oh my..I wasn't expecting a sequel to this, but I think it sold rather well so color me surprised.

Looking forward to playing this game, really enjoyed the first one.

Captcha: patience, child..yep I agree captcha.

 

[Rattja]

There will be another one? Sweet!

While I fully understand that the rune system was a bit of a pain to use, I still liked it in a way.
The whole thing made you a rather poor fighter, as these people should be. Not being able to just spam a button until things die added a lot to the game for me.

Though, I don't think I would miss the rune system too much.

(To any people who had more than one and wish to speak up, hush. You're crazy.)

Guess you did not try a 4 mage burst squad =)

 

[Zeckt]

I had 2 guys who all they did was throw rocks and stuff, and they did it quite well. I would be very interested in seeing how the user generated content toolkit works.