Personally in order to increase Role-Playing i would suggest one aspect from the game “Eden Eternal” and i guess many others. Influence points per Regions. And with the influence points on every region you could buy special items only from that place. A new item type such as “trophy” could be added, with important boosts to stats depending on Character Level so it’s equally rewarding at any level after completing it, and the obtaining influence points would be via Questing from the maps in that region and also adding some “Story questline” (similar to party quests from mercenary post, around 10 diferent quests for each reagion).
In order to roleplay in the game you also need to have a certain reward from following story, so Main quests (all orange) could give statues points, maybe even more than 3, so it’s rewarding for every player. If you could get 150 stat points from quests, you would do it most likely, it’s a one time thing per character anyway.
Furthermore, EXP cards shall be reworked, they used to be incredibly useful because monster EXP was low at the beggining, now sometimes they give only 10% of the EXP of a monster you can one shot with buffs. There are diferent ways to change this. One could be simply changing the amount of EXP given per card.
Another more interesting one could be, instead of the “Share stories of adventure” option on Vibora, have another option which would not give you EXP cards but immediatly make your character advance 1 entire rank.
so let’s put it in perspective: If you have done the ENTIRE story of the game, every single quest there could be, and you don’t want to go through leveling the character, you could rank up fast a new character via this option. How it would work in my mind:
If you clear all quests in all maps under level 20 you are granted experience for base level 20 and class exp 15. The next milestone would be completing all quests in all maps under level 45, then 75, then 120 and so on. The problem about making characters so fast would be that players would not get the feeling on how to play that character so I would also suggest adding a special quest in order to obtain the rank up reward. The quest could be pretty intense from, killing 150 monsters in your level range, to killing a boss solo, to protecting a group of NPC’s from a monster horde. Also this “rank up” system should allow the use of all discovered Vakarines with your entire Team.
So to round it up:
Main quests being more rewarding (Status points). Secondary quests giving better EXP via EXP cards. New characters not needing to undergo questing and being able to immediatly rank up after succesfully passing a test. Vakarine statues unlocked for new characters. Addition of “trophies” as a possible reward for clearing storylines on each region (trophies would be equipable and give effects like cards or statuses).
I feel this should help player base granting a reason to do main quests on all characters, and at least all side quests once on one character.
Also, I agree on the point that Dungeon entries should be reduced to 1 like saalus and reward based on token, maybe making dungeons a bit harder too. Doing 1 dungeon 3 times in a row as a new player is boring.
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