New idea.
Currently there are two main objects each player has – his totem and the flare (which is actually shared, but still). A good sharpening of the gameplay would be to have those two be essential to the players.
If those two items become:
- more useful (as in different uses)
- more powerful (as in greater impact of each separate use)
- more directly impactful of the final goal
…then they can be the pivotal game element.
The game could then be revolving around the shared flare, the two totems and the minimaps. More concise this way, ya?
What can we do about the primary tools?
Totems – most importantly – each player can track his own totem on the compass. To enhance that – the player can recall his dropped totem at any time.
Fares – so far the flare is used only for navigation. However it can have additional roles, to take advantage of the fact that it’s shared. Namely – it can give the player holding the flare additional powers. This would give more meaning of the decision when to send the flare to the other player.
Example powers:
- Attack damage – if the regular mob dies from two hits and the really tough mobs die from four, one additional point of damage is a huge boost.
- Light – uncertain if that would help, unless the overall lighting is low. Which it could be.
- Vision range – very powerful indeed. There’s a pitfall there – the players do not know the scale of the map and do not have a very stable intuition of their actual vision range. When they get used to the idea that the flare gives additional range, I fear this might lead to a feeling of blindness when the flare is in the other player, simply because of overestimating the vision bonus they are currently not having. We’ll see…