Skill trees in Dont starve elsewhere

[Capybara007]

Dont starve together has really turned me down since the addition of skill trees, they are no longer a revisit to old character reworks like winona and willow, and they dont even build on the foundation of what the point of the original character was, willow skill trees is the most obvious
Some people might say that skill trees arent that bad and the problem is how klei changed their ideas for character reworks/skill trees over the years (willow rework was bernie+some new features, now the expectative is at least 20 craftables with new combat moves)

I dont mind skill trees in DST anymore, klei wont just delete the skill trees because 2 people on the forum said they want to play the old dont starve, even i, as a maxwell main im excited to see what crazy new weapon or spell he is getting when he gets his skill tree
The main reason why i dont mind is because if we are being honest nobody plays DST for the inmersion anymore, with all the skins and goofy attack spells the characters do like they are in a MOBA, i dont mind if the next skill tree adds something dumb like a nuke

But with DSE just from that announcement the world looks so much fun, and id hate to see it ruined by some skill tree superpower nonsense (specially willow, i really hate that skill tree)

I wanted to see how much the community would miss the skill trees if they werent on the game, or how much the community would hate the game if the skill trees existed

Edited Tuesday at 04:25 PM by Capybara007

[NPCMaxwell]

I hope the characters will return to their "base-gameplay" and maybe one or two of the more impactful skilltree aspects (e.g. keeping the Beard skills for Wilson, Woodie's beever tail attack, big Bearnie, Wobie fetch and so on) but not as a /tree/ but as a default

[aidancode]

Skill trees are meant to add customization, but we already have customization, 18 different characters. I would prefer for them to add new characters rather than add filler abilities to old ones. A smaller game with more tight design is better than a bigger game in my opinion, and we already have the bigger game in DST.

[mkemal23]

I just hope DSE focuses more on overall gameplay loop and less on the actuall characters.

Character updates are an endless pit of never ending expectations, So I hope that DSE characters are simple as possible with most of the character spesific abilities are added to base game.

Edited Tuesday at 06:27 PM by mkemal23

[Mike23Ua]

Unfortunately… I’m pretty sure that DST is being used as a beta testing ground for features they should and should not add into Elsewhere, so skill trees will 100% be in Elsewhere in some capacity or another (even if there’s no actual skill points to invest in and characters instead just become more powerful through gaining EXP)

We won’t have to worry about that too much as long as Klei successfully handles the rest of the game to work in conjunction with it, in my opinion it’s okay for the characters to have a bunch of wacky crafts and weapons, and in brutal honesty… I hope DSE has a TON of new weapon types.. we only see ONE in the DSE announcement Trailer, but I can’t wait to bash foes with that Coral Mace. I just hope they crank weapon variety up to 11… kinda like how players can use a Bullkelp stalk as a whip in DST but it’s pretty pointless… give us whips in DSE that are actually good weapons, metal chains, hand-made survivor style daggers with shorter attack range but hit faster/does more damage, just idk some really cool weapon type stuff like some of the many many Mods that exist out there.

But ultimately, I want a world filled with dangerous hostile mobs, and weather seasons you have to prepare for with cool Navigational style puzzles you have to solve (aka there might be a tall hill you can’t reach to cross to another tall hill so chopping down one of those NEW very TALL Redforest trees could have it “fall” and smash onto the other hill to become a convenient bridge to cross)

Actually yeah update the tree chopping animations so trees visibly fall, that would be neat.

[Draggofroot]

I hope that if/when they add skilltrees, they focus more on letting duplicate characters specialize rather than making it buff combat in some way, like woodie's curse skill tree having you either focus on combat, exploration, or gathering yk?
 

[Kwaik]

I'd assume skill trees are a near guarantee. The only question is whether they come at 1.0 or come later with power creep 

[Capybara007]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

Unfortunately… I’m pretty sure that DST is being used as a beta testing ground for features they should and should not add into Elsewhere, so skill trees will 100% be in Elsewhere in some capacity or another (even if there’s no actual skill points to invest in and characters instead just become more powerful through gaining EXP)

Think about this for a second, how cool the game would be if each character,  instead of having over 5 different mechanics that have some weird interaction, it was ONE core mechanic that affected all stages of gameplay

Something like this:

- Wolfgang

Spoiler

- 200 health

- 150 hunger

- 120 sanity

His mightiness is not tied to his hunger, but his health, when he is at 100% health, more speed and damage, when he is 99% health or lower, normal, when he is 50% or lower, wimpy wolfgang

This would be a mechanic that is not tied to an item, so playing as him would be 100% unique (so no winona or warly problem) but its also so important that it always has an effect on gameplay

It also has the benefit of being extremely easy to learn, no need to watch guides on youtube, just by reading you already know how to play as him, dont get hit

Even if you are a new player it basically means avoid danger at all times (like wolfgang in character would) to always have free speed and damage, so its not some super difficult mechanic

- WX

Spoiler

- 500 health

- 200 hunger 

- 150 sanity

Because it is a robot, food will not heal it, instead as long as it is above 80% hunger his health would automatically regenerate by 10 per minute, this can be done by having a little robot arm in the health meter doing a healing animation (simpler and easy to understand) rather than having some weird module that you need to craft that heals you (complicated and unintuitive)

This ONLY perk would make it so, because the massive health and automatic health regen, day to day fights wouldnt matter for your health, and you could survive without ever needing to heal (UPSIDE)

HOWEVER, if you fight a boss that you dont know the patterns, you will take a lot of damage and you will be unable to heal instantly unlike other characters

The SAME PERK makes both a DOWNSIDE and an UPSIDE

- Wickerbottom

Spoiler

- 120 health

- 150 hunger

- 300 sanity

She "has the knowledge of an entire library" that means that she doesnt need to prototype anything, if she has the resources for a dark sword, she can make it without any crafting stations

The downside is that, while wilson can prototype something new and gain sanity for it, everytime wickerbottom crafts something she hasnt prototyped yet she looses 30 sanity, she has to craft the crafting stations normally to avoid this effect

She can also do the books (it would be too much sacrifice to remove those)

Skill trees or not, i dont want the average DSE character to be this:

WONKUS

- Can craft an special "gem sword"

- The gem sword attack changes depending on which gem it has (90 parragraphs for each gem)

- Can summon the souls of defeated enemies to aid him in battle

- Cooks an special meal on his special crockpot

- Can craft a crossbow with 17 special arrow types (the game ends up not designed for ranged combat which makes this item horrible, look at walters slingshot or wanda's alarming clock)

- +5 sanity when close to a potato cup (it reminds him of his uncle or something)

Edited Tuesday at 07:58 PM by Capybara007

[Harrowick]

If they bring back skilltrees I think it'd be neat to see each skill introduce an upside, and a downside. Trade-offs and that kind of thing. Maybe offer a few skills that replace upsides with new ways to interact with that character.

A quick example would be a perk that gives Wilson's hair natural rain resistance (paired with a straw hat would negate wetness altogether?) but as a tradeoff your beard can only grow to its first stage, something like that!

 

I don't mind if trees are in either way, the game looks so good already AHHH

[Bumber64]

If they do, they shouldn't put a bunch of filler skills in. Limit it to a small, meaningful tree, or don't do it at all.

DST is too many skills for too many characters. The boring number boosts were unavoidable.

[xhyom]

4 hours ago, aidancode said:

Skill trees are meant to add customization, but we already have customization, 18 different characters. I would prefer for them to add new characters rather than add filler abilities to old ones. A smaller game with more tight design is better than a bigger game in my opinion, and we already have the bigger game in DST.

I think it's arguable that it don't even add customization to the game, since basically all of them have very obvious choices and you can easily have everything without sacrificing anything. I like the improvements they bring to the characters, like Willow, who without her skill tree is just a bland, maybe even bad, character, but the skilltree as a mechanic is completely irrelevant, It would simply be easier if everything that's there was just in the base kit, and the choice was only in a special ability related to the moon/shadow, and that's it.

 

The way Klei started doing the skill trees is also kinda dumb, because not all characters were aligned to receive one, and since they committed in principle to making a skill tree for EVERYONE, you end up with weaker characters getting trees that just fix them, while stronger ones get even more buffs. It’s like everyone needs to get something, just for the sake of having a skill tree. Maybe things will be different in Elsewhere if everyone starts from a more equal baseline but I’d rather Klei just decide what each character is supposed to be, keep things at least somewhat balanced, tweak stuff when needed, and just not bother with skill trees at all. It doesn’t really feel like a system they fully figured out, and there’s no real reason to crack their heads on it.

BUT

If skill trees are going to be a thing no matter what, I’d much rather they go all-in on it like, give every character a clean base with just stats and core downsides, and put everything else into the skill tree, only stat differences and those more characteristic downsides, leave the rest in the skill tree. It's very difficult to create a skill tree on top of something that already exists, If they did it this way, there’d be way more room for variety. They could make really different path playstyles, like a Wigfrid that gives up tankiness and damage to be more of a bard, or a Webber that doesn’t focus on building a spider army but instead leans into his own spider enhanced abilities, climbing walls, leaping, trapping stuff with silk, etc.

Edited Tuesday at 09:53 PM by xhyom

[NPCMaxwell]

3 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Unfortunately… I’m pretty sure that DST is being used as a beta testing ground for features they should and should not add into Elsewhere, so skill trees will 100% be in Elsewhere in some capacity or another (even if there’s no actual skill points to invest in and characters instead just become more powerful through gaining EXP)

We won’t have to worry about that too much as long as Klei successfully handles the rest of the game to work in conjunction with it, in my opinion it’s okay for the characters to have a bunch of wacky crafts and weapons, and in brutal honesty… I hope DSE has a TON of new weapon types.. we only see ONE in the DSE announcement Trailer, but I can’t wait to bash foes with that Coral Mace. I just hope they crank weapon variety up to 11… kinda like how players can use a Bullkelp stalk as a whip in DST but it’s pretty pointless… give us whips in DSE that are actually good weapons, metal chains, hand-made survivor style daggers with shorter attack range but hit faster/does more damage, just idk some really cool weapon type stuff like some of the many many Mods that exist out there.

But ultimately, I want a world filled with dangerous hostile mobs, and weather seasons you have to prepare for with cool Navigational style puzzles you have to solve (aka there might be a tall hill you can’t reach to cross to another tall hill so chopping down one of those NEW very TALL Redforest trees could have it “fall” and smash onto the other hill to become a convenient bridge to cross)

Actually yeah update the tree chopping animations so trees visibly fall, that would be neat.

New skills in the sense of XP is something I can tolerate though! It is the confusing decision sickness and user disagreements what I hate most about the skilltree stuff

[Mike23Ua]

9 minutes ago, NPCMaxwell said:

New skills in the sense of XP is something I can tolerate though! It is the confusing decision sickness and user disagreements what I hate most about the skilltree stuff

Yeah I like the idea of Wolfgang starting out wimpy by default but as he gains EXP through doing stuff he becomes stronger, instead of just doing 2x damage, he can start out doing like .50 damage and as you play and fight as him he eventually reaches 2.0. No confusing skill trees it’s all just built right in from the start, as you level up gaining Exp you’ll unlock new abilities (yes technically this IS A SKILL TREE) except: You don’t get to pick and choose what your unlocking, and I’m only going to use Wolfgang as my example because his is most simple to explain. As you gain body strength (by hitting enemies in the face) you’ll get strong enough to perform other tasks (faster resource mining, effortlessly carrying heavy objects etc) but again… this is a PER WORLD EXP SYSTEM THAT AUTOMATICALLY UNLOCKS SKILLS you don’t just get to set around being idle unlock 15 skill points and invest them however you please to drop into a new game world already at God Tier Status.

[Karitha]

Skill trees sound interesting on paper, like increasing replayability, but it's not. I usually stick to two skill trees, one of them is for long-term and one is for short-term gameplay, which only have a few differences (like I pick tree guards idols on Woodie if I'm going to rush and pick a walking cane, etc).

My feelings about skill trees are mixed. They really add content per character, they focus on them, but they take their challenges from them. Characters lost their identity to become whatever I want, which I don't like very much. There were farmer, fighter, collector, discoverer characters; now most of them can do anything. You can play with any character, which makes character swapping less important. Also I want to mention how long it takes to give a character skill trees, which maybe it's only for me, but makes characters without skill trees feel boring to play. I love Warly, for example, but I don't play with him. Being able to cook with garlic powder is nothing when you consider the WX-78 body swap and drone mechanics. It feels outdated.

So in the end, I would like to see hardcoded, detailed character updates instead of the “you can be anything, pick whatever fits you” concept. I already pick whatever I want on the character menu.

Also I am really shocked at how many users don't want skill trees on DSE. I was really expecting that it would be among the last picks. Let's hope devs think same with us.

[Cassielu]

I hope that DSE will place more emphasis on the game world content rather than the characters content.

DST has crossed the line at that.

[Mysterious box]

My main issue with most skill trees is that they give the illusion of giving depth despite having next to none and give the illusion making characters more unique. Since skill trees have started the cast has begun to blend together far more than ever before. Multiple characters now have character exclusive revival methods, temperature control methods, ways to increase work speed, a primary weapon pushed by the game, and perhaps most noticable to a silly degree exclusive followers. There's very few actually unique character mechanics left in dst which also makes it much easier to start drawing comparisons between characters and makes it easier to feel dissatisfied with the state of one character when compared to another.

All that said skill tree skills are fun but they have plenty of issues and even in many cases don't really encourage meaningful progression to players like they were advertised to do initially.

[Picklesaurus]

16 hours ago, NPCMaxwell said:

I hope the characters will return to their "base-gameplay" and maybe one or two of the more impactful skilltree aspects (e.g. keeping the Beard skills for Wilson, Woodie's beever tail attack, big Bearnie, Wobie fetch and so on) but not as a /tree/ but as a default

More impactful skilltree aspects and beaver tail attack on the same phrase doesn't fit well.  Weremoose's third hit mega punch fits that tho, When I last played Woodie I couldn't imagine myself without it, it feels really good to use and is literally impactful - the player screen shakes. The beaver tail "attack"  is more forgettable than the semi useless Weregoose random fly.

Edited Wednesday at 09:14 AM by Picklesaurus

[NPCMaxwell]

3 hours ago, Picklesaurus said:

More impactful skilltree aspects and beaver tail attack on the same phrase doesn't fit well.  Weremoose's third hit mega punch fits that tho, When I last played Woodie I couldn't imagine myself without it, it feels really good to use and is literally impactful - the player screen shakes. The beaver tail "attack"  is more forgettable than the semi useless Weregoose random fly.

It was just an EXAMPLE. Since I don't use skilltrees and have no overview of them I just mentioned a skill that I was /READING/ about a lot (which is the beaver tail) so I assumed it had some impact. (consider it a /PLACEHOLDER/ from a person who despites skilltrees and just remembered random aspects from skilltrees)