In Ascent Quest, your character progress with a classic experience system. When you kill monsters, finish a story mission or even when you craft, you get “experience points” or “XP” in short. With enough points, your character level is increased. The maximum level is 50.
Gaining a level boost a little bit your maximum health and energy. You also get a “talent point”.
The talent tree is where you will use your talent points. It is the same for every player, regardless of their specializations or equipment. You can access this interface anytime. Here’s what it looks like in our current Alpha version.
What are talents ?
All those icons with the numbers “0 / 5” or “0 / 1” under them are talents. The first number is the amount of point you’ve spent in it, and the second is the maximum you can. When you spend a point in a talent, a passive bonus is applied to your character. Note that EVERY talents are passives. It means that you will never have to activate it manually. You got them, they are active when you need them.
Each talents have a unique purpose and effect. Some increase your strength and so your damage with melee weapons. Others can help to gather plants. When you can spend more than 1 talent point, usually it simply increases the effectiveness of this talent. Here are some examples :
As you can see, talents can unlock very different effects. In the tree, they are currently regrouped in 3 categories: combat (left), crafting & gathering (center), magical (right). You will notice on the tree that there can be lines connecting all those talents (circled with dotted red line here).
Those lines indicate that you have to fully unlock the previous talents to get to the next one. In that case on the previous image, you need 5 talent points in Dexterity (those sharp little blades) before you can spend points in Discretion (the eyes in the bush).
So some talents may need that you spend more points to be reachable. There are a lot of talents and a lot of those line. On top of that, we plan to increase the size of the talent tree when we implement new features … and there is 50 level max, so 49 talent points!
Your first reaction may be: “Ok, I have to choose wisely what will be the focus for my talents. And if I want to change it, I will pay gold to reset the talent tree.”
Yes, you can reset your talent tree, but it’s not necessary. Let’s explain what happen at the max level.
Talents after max level (50)
When you reach max level, you have 49 talent points at your disposal. The full tree has hundreds of talents to unlock. The trick is, you still gain experience at max level. You can still fill your experience bar and when it’s full, you stay at level 50 but – you gain a talent point! So technically, if you continue playing your character after max level, you can unlock all talents. It is still recommended to choose your talents with a bit of care, because filling the whole tree can take a lot of time since the experience bar you have to fill after the max level is much bigger than during the level 1 to 50. If needed, you can also reset the talent for few gold coins in the cities of Valendis or Arkania.
The good :
- We keep a sense of progression after max level. Experience points still matter.
- You don’t have to rack your brain on how to over-optimize talent or pay a talent tree reset too often. Just gain a bit more experience to get that sweet talent you missed!
- We, as developers, can add more talents in a content patch to continue this sense of progression for new features. For example, if we add fishing, we can decide to add more talents that improve your fishing skills.
- We can also add talent points as reward! For example, killing a strong boss for the very first time may reward you with a point.
The bad … and how we avoid it :
- A fresh level 50 player can have a lot less talents than an old veteran. It can be a problem where veteran wants “stronger” players who have full talents in the party. To avoid this, talents that increase the raw power in combat will all be at the beginning of the tree. So a fresh level 50 player already has an easy access to all of the most important talents to increase damages, health etc. Talents at the end of the tree mostly adds optional tools or out-of-combat advantages that are great to have, but not an issue if you don’t.
- This system could reduce the interest of having multiple characters if their talents don’t matter too much. Yes, but that’s also why the past level 50 experience bar is bigger. Talents still matter a lot because unlocking all of them can take a lot of time. Having a second character on which you put all your talent points in crafting/gathering can be very handy for example, it’s like your “Citizen” character.
Learn more about the Talent system in the devlog #04!
We’ve explained a bit how the talent work in our devlog #04. Remember that all presented footage are from the game in development. The final version will be much higher quality.