Artifact Effect Customization

The new artifacts are everything I was hoping for and more, and make Risk of Rain even more replayable than before. However, the rigid nature of the artifacts forces them to either make the game easier or harder, rather than allowing for fluidity which allows players to truly modify the difficulty of the game. For example, the Sacrifice artifact makes the game harder (due to the low likelihood for an enemy to drop an item), while the Glass artifact could be argued to make the game easier (due to it making slaughtering hordes of enemies far quicker). By allowing players to set options within artifacts, they could make the game as easy or as hard as they want, something that would make the artifact system even better than it currently is. For each artifact, the options which could be specified could include:

Honor: Whether bosses are always elite/Whether blighted enemies can spawn
Kin: Whether bosses can spawn (despite them not being the enemy type)
Spite: Amount of damage dealt by bombs
Distortion: Whether "primary" attack can be disabled/Time between change of locked attack
Glass: Damage bonus/health reduction (perhaps with caps to prevent ridiculousness)
Enigma: Use items which can be selected by the "random" use item
Command: Not much to change here
Sacrifice: Chance for enemy to drop an item/Whether shrines can spawn/Whether drones can spawn
Spirit: Max speed bonus
Origin (most important one; as of right now this artifact is really underwhelming but has a lot of potential): Time between imp invasions/Amount of imps that invade

I might have worded this a little strangely, feel free to post if you're confused by what I'm suggesting here.

 

Yes This would be awesome

Just I think that the imps from origin are just too UP. They spawn and they die end of story. No challenge there.

 

This would be really cool, because as stated: Some things make it way harder while others have underwhelming effects or make the game way easier. Glass is OP standalone, but very hard to use otherwise. Especially with Honor on Monsoon a stray electric or missile elite can one hit you in the early levels.

 

It's a shame, too, because I really like the concept of Origin. If imps were to spawn every 3-4 minutes rather than the current 10...now that would add some extra challenge, especially early on.

I can relate to that...damn missile elites sniping me while I'm simply hanging from a rope. Oh, and a really crazy challenge is Glass + Spite; makes those bombs absolutely terrifying.

 

Oh and don't forget. When fighting Gups 500 bombs come out from EACH LITTLE THING of it http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=254940003

Yeah. I thought it would be cool at first but its just a free item from the boss.

btw could you check out my suggestion thread? http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/adenswords-suggestion-thread.78176/

 

Incidentally, a while ago when the artifacts were teased I saw this screenshot where the teleporter was in a harder to reach spot and had a different color for some reason. Was that a mock-up or an actual idea that wasn't implemented? It does seem like an interesting modifier to me, though I do suppose that implementing it correctly could be difficult, what with having to keep movesets for all classes in mind.

 

I laughed uncontrollably at this :')

 

I died uncontrollably to that. Even though I had 3,300 max HP and the bombs only did like 10 damage each they killed me.

 

Well, I'd like a slider to improve the number of bombs.

This clearly is not enough.

 

When the game is lagging so much because of the number of bombs.....

YEAH ADD MORE PLEASE HOOPOO PLEASE!

 

Actually, it would be nice to be able to customize the effects of all the items, not just the artifacts. Even if it's only through an ini file. You could have your hardcore configs and your cakewalk configs.

In fact, why stop there? All of the characters and enemies could be opened up for customization. I'm not being facetious, by the way; I think it would be a lot of fun. And all it should take is exposing the values underlying everything, and reading them from a config file at game startup rather than having them hard-coded.

This would also be the first step towards making Risk of Rain truly moddable.

 

This sounds like a very good idea. I mean, I'd probably not mess with the effects of enemies and characters very much, but being able to edit items and artifacts in detail would be very nice.

 

Hive Cluster, Happiest Mask, Monsoon mode and Chargefield Generator. Put out so many bombs that my CPU cried blood and the game completely froze for a couple of seconds (multiple times), complete with scratched-record-style juddering music. That should have you covered.

OT: I agree with this fully, customisability would be pretty cool on these. Though I imagine it'd mean re-coding the whole thing to accept the extra ini files (similar to how Cortex Command did it - at least with the pre-release versions, I haven't played the full thing - where the properties for every weapon and item were stored in relatively-easily-editable plaintext) - also customising it through ini files could break multiplayer somewhat (Haven't tried co-op myself yet, but if what I've heard about desyncing with enemies is true then dealing with artifact/item parameters edited in ini files would proably be a nightmare)

On a similar note, I'd like to see one of the artifacts that was mentioned in the Kickstarter but didn't make it through - Shell Shock, I think it was called, where it randomises all your items if you go below a certain health percentage - the sound of which I fell in love with as soon as I heard it. Again, the devil is probably in the implementation but it'd be interesting to know what happened to this, was it just that it couldn't work as intended or was the concept dropped for some other reason?