I believe that was how, yeah. Have to pick a class that has them as an option and hope you get lucky and they show up as an option? I am not saying this is the proper way to build a character, but I was really low on health and DPS output and those skills really helped me compete again. I believe the number of Basic skills you can have are limited by your level, but I know I was way behind selecting the number that I could, and it seemed like it put me behind the power curve.
I was wondering about that, I noticed in your screenshot you had a lot more skills/basics than I have available.
I’m really having a good time with the game and I feel like character building and the gear system work a lot better than in Drox 2. However, Drox 2 absolutely beats the pants off of this when it comes to gameplay. The combination of very busy terrain and click-to-move just feels bad compared to the clean environment of space and WASD movement that Drox has. I would love if the next Din’s game has WASD movement as well, click-to-move is just the bane of my ARPG existence.
I’ve been diving into this one because I want to wait until Drox is a little closer to 1.0 before sinking a bunch more time in it but it’s been valuable for me to see the mainline Soldak games in operation (I played Din’s Curse, but only very lightly). I definitely think the stats and gear need some overhaul in their Drox translations. Anyway, I’m rambling now but I’ve found it valuable to play Din’s Legacy because I think it will sharpen some of my feedback on Drox 2. And of course, Din’s Legacy has been a lot of fun in its own right. In a lot of ways it feels like a much meatier game than Drox 2.
It’s really interesting to see the differences between the games.
The Markov chain quests are the strongest component of the fantasy Soldak system, and in the fantasy games, they’re quite personal. Actually, I still think Din’s Curse is the best of the series in terms of design: you have just one town to protect, and the quests are only relevant to your town. When things go bad, you suffer. If you lose all 3 questgivers, you lose the town. The simplicity is what makes it engaging IMO.
Legacy is much more exploration-based given the tremendous amount of land available, and your townspeople can generally take care of themselves, which was not at all the case in Curse. Zombasite ramps up the personal feeling of the town, since you carry your clan from world to world, and survival is genuinely difficult. Each of the fantasy games really has their own flavor, all built around the quest system.
Drox has the same Markov chain quest system, but uses it for a completely different purpose, since the quests have very little to do with you personally (and I think that’s a loss). It makes up for that with a strategy layer that’s actually meaningful, since there are resources (planets) to fight over. This is where Zombasite loses out – without a significant resource, the diplomatic game is just ‘do quests for everyone’. Also, once you have quests for 3+ races and you care about all of them, you can no longer keep track of the quests themselves. Drox wants you to focus on the quests for those races you care about (for your own purposes), which helps give them meaning.
How moddable is this game?
Defender has a couple skills like Riposte and Retaliation. They’re trigger skills in that you first need to parry/block in order to use them. Stat-wise, they don’t seem much better than my regular repeatable skill attack I use and they’re a little awkward to use. The feedback isn’t great to know when you can or can’t use them. Man, I’d love the multi-slot capability that was just added in Drox 2 here. :(
In any case, I’d like to mod them so they are fired off on block/parry instead of being available on block parry. Is something like that possible?
Also, it seems to me the Healer’s Life Leech is broken, unless I’m misunderstanding something. :( I use what I assume is a skill attack (Foul Strike or something, from the Dark Templar). No heals on hit, unfortunately.
A fair bit, but it’s not scriptable, so you can only reuse stuff that the code is able to do.
I have a Balance mod for Curse that sorts through a lot of this stuff. I haven’t done it in Legacy, mostly because the game runs so badly on my machines that I haven’t felt the urge to do so.
I could be wrong, but I think their icons pop up over your character when they can be used.
I’m not entirely sure. The closest model is the stun Block skill (in skills.gdb), which starts the SkillBlock status effect (in statuseffects.gdb). The command used there is WhenMissedSkill, which covers all miss types: block/parry/dodge and there might be another one. So you could use that to activate a skill, but I’m not sure how well that would work for a skill that does damage rather than a stun status effect. You could try it out.
This is one of the new skills that wasn’t there in earlier games. Looking at it, it looks like the skill is supposed to do damage by itself, which translates to health for the PC. It doesn’t create a status effect of any kind, which is what would allow it to apply to other skills.
Just want to make sure I understood you (and the skill) right. This is the description in game:
I read “Any successful skill attack” to mean that it is supposed to work on anything except basic attack, so my Dark Templar’s melee ability or a spellcasters nuke. And from what you are saying, the way it’s scripted that isn’t what it is actually doing?
My bad, I read it wrong. It’s a passive. So yeah, any melee skill attack (like Foul Strike) should do the trick. Sounds like it’s broken.
EDIT: It’s odd that it’s broken though, because this skill was in Zombasite.
@KevinC what was your CPU/GPU setup? I’m trying to figure out which combo causes good or bad performance in DL, and you’re one of those who seem to have the best performance. Also, have you recently updated your GPU drivers?
Core i7-6700 and a GTX 1070, playing at 3440x1440 with shadows off (I did start seeing performance hits especially in jungle areas with shadows on). Drivers are usually kept up to date, although I can’t guarantee I have the very latest. Haven’t looked for a few weeks.
Version 1.012 is out: patches & changes.
This huge patch fixes several potential crashes, fixes some slowdowns, improves NAT punchthrough, adds clan icons next to clan name in most places, and fixes a ton of other minor issues.
Wow, that’s awesome, Steven. I played quite a bit of Drox 2 last week, I wasn’t expecting to see an update for Din’s Legacy! Good of you to support the previous game like this. Were these largely backports from enhancements made for Drox 2 or separate work, just out of curiosity?
I’ve been basically sharing the code base between Zombasite, Din’s Legacy, and Drox Operative 2 so this patch is most of the code changes that went into the engine for Drox Operative 2. While I didn’t have to back port anything, I did have to test quite a bit and had to go over 2 years worth of done notes to see what actually applied to Din’s Legacy.