New content suggestions
Sat, 11/07/2020 - 12:56
Spiral Knights is in desperate need of a new content update for veteran players and some slight content fixes for newer players.
Currently, the final mission that is playable is Dreams and Nightmares, which marks the "end" of all the previous missions. From the start, the goal was to reach the core and figure out if there was a way to harness the energy there to be able to escape the planet. It would be nice to see a "second chapter" in the Spiral Knights missions. The first chapter was venturing through the clockworks to get to the core. The second chapter could build off from Dreams and Nightmares and venture through the core to get to the bottom of the swarm and figure out the mystery of cradle.
With this there would obviously be new gear. Shadow lairs are already at tier 4 and tier 5 difficulty. But we don't have any new gear to be able to do these in. So we would need to get 6 star and maybe even 7 star gear. We would need new names for the orbs of alchemy and fire crystals. For the fire crystals maybe we could do something like "shimmering fire crystals" or "gleaming fire crystals".
Spiral Knights also needs to change how the current midgame works. Right now, the early game is ok, the midgame is terrible, and the late game is fun. The midgame acts as a serious bottleneck. Early game 1 and 2 star items are basically given to you. 3 star items are a little harder to get, and then getting from 4 star to 5 star is ridiculously hard. Most players end up quitting spiral knights at around the defender elite rank because they can't get up to the champion rank. I would either suggest making shining fire crystals more common as well as elite orbs in prize boxes or just make the missions give them more as rewards. Since there really aren't any good levels to grind as a defender elite. As a vanguard you could easily just grind out vanaduke for thousands of crowns, but as a defender elite you don't have any sort of level that you could grind easily for crowns to convert to energy to buy orbs.
The midgame acts as a serious bottleneck.
I see the issue in 3 ways-
A) Players are learning the game at this stage, and this is frustrating
B) Players are not very patient, and are told to grind.
C) The mission system drives players into a wall.
One interesting solution would be to put orbs as the reward for early danger missions. Maybe do 2 for the danger and 1 orb for the less-danger mission. That way, talented players can access content faster than otherwise.
Another thought that I've been liking is my idea of tying the arcade to missions in a concrete manner.
https://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/95121
This idea is that you'd encounter missions in the arcade via a scenario room, and unlock them this way. It would lengthen the game significantly, as well as force farming etc. There are many comments, concerns, and such in the thread.
"So we would need to get 6 star and maybe even 7 star gear"
Slow down there cowboy. If we make all the five star weapons more upgrades, well, that's a lot of developer work and for what? So that we can become that much more powerful? At this point it would further trivialize vanaduke, dreams of nightmares, etc. just so that we can grind more. Not a good tradeoff IMO.
Why not just adjust the power level of "tier 4" to fit whatever we want it to be?