Bestiary as a Core Game Mechanic

I love the bestiary mechanic, I feel it made the game really unique and it is a major reason I came back to the game. I am really upset, but I will see what the end of the week holds for the next update.

I think it is unfortunate that bestiary will not be in core game.

I felt it would be good as a core mechanic, despite the reward system having bad QoL in temp (crafting is a huge chore and your cage sizes have no business being limited in size). As league mechanic, it was too restrictive. Aside from that though, it's like you get more cool monsters every zone. Even with no beastcrafting it would be almost good enough for me. In permanent league it would be less annoying to go through crafting. (Though personally I liked it anyways)

Keeping my hopes up in the "for now"

I hope the system can be tweaked just a bit and return to the game :)

While you seem to have made your decision it seems this is a lot to throw away when there could be useful ways to keep it in the game. For example scrap all of the leveling stuff, reduce the number of beast mods and make Einhar (or whatever his name is) as a map only master.
Turn the menagerie into a crafting table.

I'm sure you have statistics on what the, say, 15 most popular crafting recipes were and could also leave the beast fights in the game this way. It would be a lot simpler if there wasn't a maximum of beasts allowed to be captured and the number of beast mods was 1/3 of what it is now.

While this certainly wouldn't be "beastiaty league" in the main game, it would salvage a lot of what was worth having and get rid of a lot of the complaints. On top of that if Eignhar can only be found in maps it completely negates the need to worry about new player issues.

To make this one step more salvagable, the idea of getting rid of nets is probably the best suggestion there is. Just have Eihnhar auto capture the beasts when they are on 5% life or some such thing. Worst case scenario when you find him in a map he just gives you a next and you go capture a beast.

To make the above viable there would almost need to be 2-3 beasts per recipie at max or multiple captures per Einhar, but either way it would still be a viable mechanic.

Equally you could have his dailies be a number of beasts equal to his level to facilitate crafting for those who get lvl 8 masters regularly. This would, amazingly, give people a reason to run a lvl 8 master mission.

Just spitballing, but I figured I'd try and give you guys some options since it's pretty clear a lot of work went in to this and, as bad as the reception was at the beginning, it seems that some of this could be worth keeping.

Awesome news!

Pretty much an admission that beastiary wasn’t able to match up to the size of its ambition. But I believe true innovations only comes with risk taking ;)

Good. This should have been the answer when you first thought of the Bestiary, but whatever.

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ACGIFT wrote:

y'know, the facts. In terms of the initial player peak, Bestiary had far fewer players than either Abyss or Harbinger... And also saw a much quicker decline as people gave up on playing

http://steamcharts.com/app/238960

Fact: Bestiary has the second highest peak concurrency of all leagues at 81k though it was sharper as the table flipping clear speeders wet themselves all over reddit and doubtlessly colored a lot of peoples view of the league.

Fact: Bestiary's two month floor of 24.8k is still very comparable to the 2nd month of AByss (27.8k) and is way higher than Breach's 2nd month of 19k. So the game clearly is still growing despite Bestiary turning off the lawn mower sim gamers.

Anyway have fun playing a game of increasingly stupid and senseless loot pinatas along with all the mindless redditors who think that's going to be fun. Its quite evident that Chris Wilson is more than happy to sell out his vision of a Hard Core ARPG so as to rake in as much cash as he can.

Was Bestiary frought with poor design choices from their increasing influx of new devs? yes, does it have bloat and really dumb aspects? Yes. Should it have been dropped 100% as a sacrifice to the casuals Chris Wilson wants to sweet talk back into the game? No, it should have been improved, recipe bloat cut out, net mechanics made more intelligent and less wishful thinking.

Oh well enjoy your game lawn mowers its yours now, Chris wilson has rolled over and shown you his belly.

Coming back from retirement just long enough to say I'm impressed. Great decision. Maybe you guys really did learn something.

I'm relieved it won't be added. It is unfortunate, though, that some probably worked very hard on Bestiary and will see their hard work pulled out of the game.

I would suggest that the rapid dropoff in player count probably wasn't just player reaction to Bestiary (even though Bestiary was a clear focus for a lot of commentary). I suspect that it was Bestiary + re-running Masters + re-running trials and labyrinth + running through the zones required to reach maps + Atlas completion + working through map sustain challenges that's making building new characters seem more taxing than before.

In short, you might want to think through how much more "new" stuff the game can pack into it in the form of mini-games / required elements that need to be repeated for each character / account before player retention starts to become a much larger issue.

You might want to consider how to give players more control over their own in-game experience so players don't as often feel trapped into "Do this un-fun thing in the hopes of doing something fun later", whether that "un-fun feeling" be attached to Bestiary, Labyrinth, Masters, the re-leveling process, or the various frictions associated with building and managing a pool of maps.