Another huge feature currently being implemented into the character generator is the introduction of character traits; an element that was highly inspired by classic role-playing games. Traits are passive abilities that affect various properties of your character, their powers/attacks, or how they interact with the world. Players will be able to choose from four unique traits for a single character. These traits come in a vast range of properties. Here are a few:

Water Breathing: Negates the need for oxygen when submerged in water; 100% resistant to drowning effects.

Robotic: Negates the need for breathing; shows no visual breathing during animations; resistant to many element attacks that affect organic life.

Perceptive: Grants a higher chance to detect lies, or avoid misdirection during dialogue. Grants a higher chance of naturally interpreting different progression chains during puzzle sequences.

First of all this is a really great idea and a really great deed that this feature will be implemented! My respect!

Water Breathing should also buff the character when lingering in the water. Otherwise the Robotics-trait is more attractive.

What do the future players think about that?

I think the robotic trait should come with at least a slight weakness to EMP based attacks or some other sort of thing robots would be weak to, to keep it from being something everyone just picks.

It sounds like you are talking about Genetics on this blog post, valiance.shogn.net/blogs/general/27-development-continues

As always, we have continued to improve the character generation experience. We've expanded the traits concept into an element we're now calling Genetics. Genetics is a two-sided aspect of your character, and for each Benefit you apply you're forced to apply a Detriment. These pools are designed to give your character interesting passive abilities and properties, while still presenting flaws into the system. If your character has a Benefit such as Far Sight, they are able to see a greater distance than normal people; an ability that allows some ranged sniping attacks to work as an actual long range sniper attack. You’ll also have to pick a Detriment that is of an equal tier in order to move forward with character generation.

As far as I can tell, no other successor project is planning to implement something like this and in fact over on CoT boards, the community viewed it negatively thinking it will lead to FotM builds or underperforming heroes. For myself, I'm happy VO is going to take a chance and implement something unique(it is to me at least). I take it more in the spirit like the crazy systems implemented in another Shogn network game, Project Gorgon, where they have things like a skill in dying, lol.

I took this information from there: valiance.shogn.net/blogs/general/23-the-road-to-the-alpha

But it seems yours is fresher LOL

my interpretation is its a continuation of mutation natural magic ect origins.

with like 3 sub origins unlocked from main origin so if you had robotic you couldn't have a living trait wheres water breathing you could have on a mutant origin which might come with enhanced energy regen or enhanced health regen or something.

i think its a really nice touch it always added a lot of flavour to CoH toons depending if you had a taser or a dart or a throwing knife extra. id love to see that built on further. really exited to see this in

i very much doubt it leads to any more flavour of the month toons then you get in any superhero mmo.

its a rare person that dosent build to make their toon as effective as possible

more options is good it means more variety

Well I wouldn't restrict the traits based on origin, the players creativity is greater than that.

Who says you can't have air breathing or water breathing robots? Who said you can't have organic life which needs no air?

Traits can also be balanced by point cost systems.

For this example, I'll use Moo2.

In Master of Orion 2 you had to pick a number of racial/government traits for your empire. The better something was the most points it cost. By default you had 10 points to pick and choose. If you chose a negative you'd gain points, and could take up to -10 in penalties for 20 points of positives.

Some drawbacks of course were never picked because they were to debilitating, such as "Uncreative(basically your race is so stupid as to never let you pick what you need in technologies) and feudal(government is narrow-minded and hates science and your research is cut in half, this could cause you to be rendered 100% harmless long-run due to technology issues). But the game still had a lot of other not so severe penalties and the game also had very powerful advantage picks. But the best ones were the most expensive: Lithovore, Tolerant, and creative. You couldn't have all three(if you could you'd be unable to lose the game, trust me).

Tolerant removed all polution, made all planets reasonably good for colonization(lowered/removed maintenance, made most biome types good as terran), it let you build things so fast so quickly that some people would even ban it from multiplayer. It cost 10 picks, yes, 10.

Lithovore removed the need to farm for your race. 10 points. Because you could put more people onto science and industry, especially science. Research players loved this one.

Creative: Another high cost (8 picks, not 10 as the two above curb-stomped this one). This was the "Foo strategy" of moo 2; while you got many "free techs" as you got to research all choices, it was also so weak early on that many players found rushing it was ideal.

Just an example anyways. Picks would be things like "resistant to smashing or lethal" or "superior accuracy", high cost ones would be combat-focused low cost picks would be more economic in a sense. I would keep economic picks very low for the reason of the fact players in a game like this are likely gonna want to be the best combat-wise, but picks should balance out overall. Or just have like two separate set of point picks: One set for combat and one set for economic.

I'd also like to mention this: I'm kind of glad people aren't to afraid of traits(or as they are calling them, traits) here. I will say there will always be "min maxer delights"(something most min maxers will take) in any game. Everyone remembers City of heroes and stamina and how it ended up becoming made default. With genetics though I could see it being balanced more without making some resultant min/maxer delights though and end up with it a manner of preference. And those that are there are only slightly ahead such only a small nerf would be necessary instead of something really big.

Laughing Alex wrote:
sure you could what you did was have a lot of races and have good espionage and make piles of spy's and steal tech or have high diplomacy and get positive trades and by trading with 5 people end up with all their techs meanwhile focusing all your research on missiles or beams or kinetic weapon path so you where ahead on a single weapon path meanwhile your invasions are kicking butt because you had extra points to make your troops maximum bonus in combat


but yeah a m002 style trait system could also work if they did diversify it out that far it would be pretty cool