Greetings, raiders!

With the release of the update drawing near, we wanted to go into some detail about how the new skill system actually works, why we settled on this system, and how it evolved from the initial idea.
This will be a very wordy post, so buckle up!



How does it all work
Its quite simple, you have 10 slots you can equip proficiencies into:


The first slot is reserved for a Warcry.
Most of you should be familiar with these, they are powerful active abilities you gain by killing enemies and help you level the playing field for a short while.
Besides the already existing ones, we have added a few new ones to play around with.

The second slot is your Boost.
These are passive stat increases that also come with a team boosting effect during your warcry.
In the old system, Warcries had these effects built in, but now you can chose which one you'd like regardless of your class.

The remaining 8 slots are for Talents, the lifeblood of battle.
The main building blocks of your build, they can be anything from letting you move faster, reloading while sprinting, or even exploding your grenades when you hit someone with them.


Every proficiency has an unlock level requirement, after which they cost varying amounts of gold to unlock. You only have to buy them once however, after which they will be unlocked for all your other characters as well. Once unlocked, they level up by earning XP up to Tier 4.



Why did we even decide to overhaul this system now?
The original proficiency system the game had left a lot to be desired. It was made in a big rush and wasn't even close to the original intent. It lacked any sort of variety between classes, and wanting to change even just one skill in your built meant paying a hefty gold sum, then picking each skill one by one again.



The point is, that it was one of the biggest contributing factor to players loosing interest in the game very quickly, and it was clear to us that as long as this faulty system is in place, no amount of new content would be sufficient enough to bring players back long term.

Now of course the quicker and easier choice would have been to simply keep the system and try to patch it up: change some numbers, replace skills with different ones, maybe add a 4th row... But continuously adding band-aids upon band-aids onto a system nobody liked to begin with felt like a doomed effort.
No, the system had to go and be remade completely if we wanted future updates to have any lasting impact.

We knew it wouldn't be a simple change, and oh boy was it a challenge...


Where to begin?
The first order of businesses was identifying the underlying issues with the previous system:
  • Only simple stat boosts to pick from, a big lack of any unique or interesting skills.
  • Classes have nothing to make them stand out besides their Warcry.
  • Experimentation is actively punished by expensive respec costs.
  • Damage skills are basically mandatory, forcing you to respec when trying out different weapons.
  • Overall too many skills on the list to account for, lot of irrelevant picks.
  • Impossible to add only a few new skills thanks to how the UI is set up.
  • Most skill icons are hard to recognize seemingly arbitrary shapes.

So, we needed a system that contains a variety of unique and interesting skills, making classes feel distinct, promoting experimentation and different play-styles, and also expandable.
It was also important to not instantly overdo the number of possible skill configurations. Making skill selection totally free form sounds noble on paper, but If you have an all you can eat buffet of 100 individual skills, obviously the players will to flock to all the best ones, while leaving the majority of them completely unused.

We also wanted to avoid skills that simply make weapons deal more damage. Being able to deal damage shouldn't be locked to a skill and everyone will always equip the ones used for their weapons, so why even have them? Eventually we re-balanced the weapons anyways and omitted these kind of skills.

*Note: We are aware that the weapon upgrade system itself is far from desirable, this will also receive an overhaul in the future.


The plan
After some back and forth, we came up with essentially a Pick 10 system where every proficiency can be freely equipped and unequipped at any time, allowing players to mix and match.


*Initial proficiency menu concept art

To mitigate the issue of having too many skills to choose from, we decided to give all proficiencies 4 tiers, where each tier can have its own effect, vastly increasing their value.
All proficiencies start at tier 1 and they level up automatically by gaining xp while equipped, adding just a little bit more complexity.

This came with a few other benefits: Not all talents need to be equally created, some could have 4 distinct effects, some can have only a single effect that gets stronger when leveled up!

*Note: We know that this system isn't exactly without flaws either, if a talent has some tiers you like but some you don't, there's no way to say no to them. However this is an acceptable enough sacrifice, since it adds more weight to the decision making. (sorry if they have something that makes you sick though)


Originally, we had the idea of requiring Tier 4 to unlock by completing special challenges, but this was scrapped during development because they were too disrupting to the experience.
For lower tiers completing smaller, repeatable version of these challenges would also give a small xp boost, but this was also removed when it proved unnecessary.


The hard part
Once we had the base concepts done, it was time to go to work. We all started pitching ideas for possible skills. We knew we wanted to make new warcries too, so we asked the community what they wanted to see and you all delivered. While we didnt end up picking any 1 individual idea as is, a lot of the suggestions ended up being combined and mutated into a state we were satisfied with.

We ended up writing way more ideas that it was feasible to make for one update, but this means we already have a backlog of ideas we can use in the future ;)


While the skill ideas were in the oven, the menu itself took shape surprisingly quickly, all the base foundations were layed down in a few days, and a series of sidetracking and an unscheduled house moving later we could start building the skills.

Creating the actual talents themselves was no small feat, but one of the big upsides of Diesel is the use of the LUA scripting language, which allowed us to rapidly prototype a lot of ideas and iterate over them without any compile times or the need to develop overly complex systems.

A lot has changed about them during development of course, lot of talents got changed, or even split into multiple different talents. Thanks to the tier system, we were able to easily switch out individual abilities and put them somewhere else. This philosophy will extend to the future as well, so it will be likely a lot of skill will go under further changes depending on community feedback.

Some interesting ideas that didn't make the cut:
  • A deployable parachute that saves you from fall damage
  • Splitting up your health into multiple chunks which regenerate, but block healing
  • Sticky Grenades
  • Prolonged bleedout timer via a skillcheck minigame
  • Getting overhealed by medkits
  • Passive grenade regeneration, but reduced grenade capacity
  • Weapons fire faster the longer the trigger is held

When balancing the numbers, we opted to just go what felt good, playing around with them, tweaking the numbers until we thought they were in a good state. This didn't always mean we were right at first of course but iteration is the name of the game, and later on we also got invaluable feedback from the private beta testers.

*This was perhaps the most important takeaway in all of this. Doesn't matter how good you feel your ideas are, it'll be up to the actual players to decide if they work or not!

Lucky for us, the feedback we received was largely encouraging, and with the tester's endless amounts of help the pieces slowly started to fall in place. We can't thank enough all the advice and critiques they've given us, it made the update considerably better then it would have been otherwise.

Not all of it ended up the way we originally imagined it, and things we were hoping to be able to include had to be shelved for later, but there is a point where you have to accept it the way it is and send it.


Here and now
And finally, after months of sleepless nights, it is time to see what fruit will this herculean undertaking bare.

We want to thank all of you who been showing interest in RAID. Seeing so many people show up over the past few weeks and be excited about the update was unexpected for us. We know there are a lot of gripes to be had with this game, and can't guarantee that this update will solve all of them, but we really hope you'll enjoy what we put together, and the long wait has been worth it.

Of course we don't consider this new proficiency system, or the game, done yet. There are still many places in need of improvement and the update itself will surely introduce new issues.
There are a lot of things we want to add, things we want to change (and will need to change), but hopefully with the help of all of you we can help this weird little game have another chance and achieve its Resurgence!

M.U.G Team out