WX 78 Suggestions

[ColbyBaker]

Hello Klei Entertainment.

I've been playing ds and dst for a long time since the first game came out, bought the dlc for ds for nearly every console it was supported on (excluding wii u and xbox) and put countless hours onto dst alone just because of how much I truly love the game. With that all being said I have noticed that WX 78 has his skill tree in beta and I have some suggestions for him.

First off, his drones

I absolutely love that he has drones now, not just Jimmy, ive only tested the scouting drone and the delivery drone so far, so some ideas for the other drones might be planned or missing, so ill state the ideas just incase. I think the scouting drones should be able to have a radius of sight like the players do meaning you can always see what is around the drone on the map for the scouting ones alone, (and maybe the attack drone.) It would be helpful not just to mark out the map but also to monitor if the scouting drones can be uses to see around the general area of influence they cover. Another suggestion i have is to give Jimmy some kind of extra utility because once you've built a big enough army of WX backups and made all the circuits you'd ever need for each WX backup there would eventually not be enough for Jimmy to do after, one idea I have is to give Jimmy an ability to make WX float over terrain for a limited time for situations such as flying over terrain to make an escape or even to pass gaps in general. One scenario i see with this idea is your boat gets pushed a bit away from the mainland, with this you can float over the water and land on the boat to recover it. With the delivery drone I think there should be an option to deliver the drone as a container (the eay it is now where it travels and spawns as a container) or a drop off where when it reaches its destination it will actually drop the items inside and come back to the current WX. For the attack drone I dont have much ideas other than to make it deal damage based on which side from shadow and lunar, maybe the lunar would shoot a constant laser where as the shadow aligned would drop splash bombs or something.

WX backups

For the WX backups I had an idea to allow WX to manually turn on his backups to function as reliable minions who can do a couple tasks for either a limited time or based on hunger levels which adds a new layer of complexity and multitasking control to WX 78's gameplay. The idea came to me at work, I was excited to play the game again and I was just thinking of how WX has a few quotes talking about making a robot army, then I thought about how the backups are just extra robots but deactivate. This then lead me to imagining the robot backups as clay solders which was what lead me to this idea for the backups.

WX affinity

Finally the topic ive been wanting to make, ive always wanted to see WX transform (yes kinda like a transformer) into a combat or utility mode. I dont know what ideas you guys have for his shadow and lunar aligned paths, but my idea was to make WX have a transformation mode for both the shadow and lunar aligned paths. I was thinking the lunar aligned form would make him turn into one of those retro alien tripod machines from those old alien movies, and for the shadow aligned I dont have a particular design, but obviously something retro and menacing, maybe something that uses the same assets from the living artifact from hamlet? I would love to see some representation of the living artifact mech suit in dst. These forms could probably run off of either hunger or power such as nightmare fuel or some kind of lunar item, or Alternatively power from Winona's machines or the lighting rod to give more uses for being charged. 

Additional notes

I think power should be just a little bit more of a mechanic for WX like storing charges to use for later in some itemized batteries, or to power some of his drones so you would have to be strategic with the the things you use the drones for, or even to use as power for the aforementioned transformation modes. While its interesting that WX shares his state's among backups I dont think his health and hunger should share between shells, what I think should be done instead is health and hunger is separate per shell but sanity is the same per unit, but any time the units are inactive hunger doesnt drain for each unit not active. This one might be controversial but I dont think WX should be able to heal himself with normal healing sources unless we claim he has micro bots or something that turns food into healing, but then theres healing from non-foods like spider glands healing salves and booster shots, my idea is let him use Winona's tape to repair himself and give him recipes for repair kits or something mechanical, this last idea was just a throwaway idea ment to poke fun at the silly game logic.

Final thoughts

I didnt mean for this topic to be so long but ive had some thoughts before and even during the testing with the update and I want to make sure to give my ideas before the full release. I hope I could give some ideas if these ideas aren't already in the office before the full release of the update.