Design Space Manifesto

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I have a lot of suggestions with overlapping areas of effect, so I’ll try to be concise and clear. They mostly have to do with un-utilized design space. I apologize for the lengthiness of this post, but I’m trying to kill multiple birds with one post. They go in decreasing order of their reasonableness, I think.

1. Design space.
Most of the characters in the game have a similar range of abilities: destroy/change tiles, create strike/attack tiles, stun, damage, heal. This excludes a broad swath of design space that influences the game outside the puzzles themselves. To date, no characters have the explicit ability to (for instance) generate extra ISO-8 after a fight, recover HP more quickly between rounds, advance more quickly on tournament leaderboards, or skew rewards from missions toward rarer outcomes. All of these would be attractive abilities to have, and the tension between fielding good “passive” characters and fielding characters with exclusively “in-combat” abilities would make for interesting strategic choices. Examples/suggestions will follow, but at this point I’d merely like to suggest that these options be explored.

2. Positive boosts.
New boosts would shake things up, and boosts that modified this part of the design space might be particularly compelling. If there were a “+20% to earned ISO-8” boost, it would be an exciting gamble during story events where there was a chance of cashing out a 500 crystal prize. Similarly, a boost that made you slightly more likely to earn a rare reward would be super-enticing during PVE missions you can only play once (and if it kept me from earning more superfluous Hammer smashing boosts it would be worth its weight in gold). A boost that healed all involved characters by 20% of their max health after a match would be an interesting alternative to OBW or Spiderman and could keep new players going without resorting to health packs. If any of these boosts proved too powerful, they could cost HP instead of ISO-8. Team-building could be shaken up or diversified by offering positive boosts that gave buffs to X-Men (or Fantastic 4 Characters, or Avengers, or whatever). I’ve mentioned this elsewhere.

3. New abilities.
The easiest way to capitalize on this part of the design space would be to give these passive abilities to existing characters. A potentially more interesting way to capitalize on this part of the design space would be to give these abilities to existing characters that are otherwise neglected. If Juggernaut had a third passive ability that increased his healing rate out of combat, he would go from being a pretty marginal one-star to being a pretty desirable one-star (and, let’s face it, he’s the Juggernaut…he should probably recover pretty quickly even from his own headbutts). A two-star character like Bullseye could gain a passive ability that increases your ISO-8 gain (call it Larceny or Criminal Intent or something) or an active ability to generates a little ISO-8 when you use it (the latter seems more prone to abuse). A 3-star villain like Doom could be given a passive ability that increases the number of tournament points earned from any given match or mission (he is a master schemer, after all). Even a 5% bonus would be exceptionally tempting. Good additional abilities for these characters would give established and starting players something else to aim for (I would love to get a Standard Token pull that was exciting again) and improve the playability of some villains that are hamstrung by their lower level caps.

4. Dual Covers.
This is a pretty fanciful suggestion, but whatever…

Some characters could have overlapping abilities. The passive health regeneration ability I recommended for Juggernaut would arguably make just as much sense for Venom. With Venom, it would allow for a build that only had 4 Symbiote Snare but still allowed him to max his level (which would be awesome). Bullseye and Daken could have Larceny in common. Loki is just as good at scheming as Doom. If there were covers that could work for two different characters, it would allow for some variation in character builds and team compositions. I’m not enough of a comic geek to think of examples of comic covers that show both of the above paired characters prominently together, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t exist.

Just a few thoughts. Hopefully, they’re useless as suggestions because these are things the developers are already working on.

mischiefmaker

Love these ideas, hope some of them make their way into the game.

DirigiblePilot

I absolutely agree, I hope the devs at least glance at this and take some inspiration from it! Excellent ideas.