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[Insomnia]

Yggdrasil: Classic With a Twist
First and foremost, Yggdrasil is very much a side-project that exists solely as an area for Insomnia to experiment and discuss ideas. These ideas may never see the light of day. The general premise of Yggdrasil is to re-imagine a "classic" setting, traditionally with 2nd job classes only, but with many of the tweaks offered by Mythos of Midgard (MoM). Feel free to read through the various sections in the table of contents to find out more information about the purpose, goals, and general settings and features of this project.
 
Table of Contents

• About
  • Overview and Goals
  • Storyline and Player Direction
  • Balancing Goals
  • Player Progression
  • General Settings
  • Player Commands
• Job Classes
  • Overview and Novice
  • Swordsman
  • Magician
  • Archer
  • Merchant
  • Thief
  • Acolyte
• Crafting (formerly Professions)
  • Potions
  • Foods
  • Weapons
  • Armor
• Monsters
  • Monster Behaviors
  • World Map Adjustments
• Items
  • Healing Items
  • Modification System
  • Rigidity System
  • Refinement System
• Miscellaneous Features
  • Stat/Skill Reset and Reallocation
  • Card Captor Expansion
  • Weather and Night Systems

 

 

 

 

 

Overview and Goals

Although Yggdrasil mostly exists as a big "what if" type of project, it is important to view the ideas discussed in this section through the appropriate lens and understand the general setting of the project. Like Mythos of Midgard, Yggdrasil is a highly customized environment and it does not make sense to provide specific rates, nor an official episode number, but rather a general theme as a reference point: per-transcendent classic.

 

The goal of this project is to start with Mythos of Midgard as a base and revisit nearly everything about it from the ground up in order to create an environment that resembles what Mythos of Midgard was at it's peak (with only 2nd job classes) along with all of the newfound knowledge and improvements that we have come by over the years. This means base mechanics and settings, every single monster, every single map, every single NPC, etc. all need to be reviewed.

 

After recently playing a more vanilla, official-like, version of the game, it came to my attention just how much room for improvement there was. Not only room for improvement from vanilla, but room for improvement for Mythos of Midgard. It's very easy to lose sight of what the early and mid-game experience is like as time passes. The population as a whole is an average higher level and stay in more end-game types of areas and that ends up being where most of the dev focus is. However, perhaps the early and mid-game are the most impactful for an onlooking player.

 

Why only 2nd job classes?

The reasoning behind this is to simplify some aspects of the game, namely the number of classes and skills, for balancing purposes, but still offer a lot of the improvements made over the years. My personal opinion is that there might be too much power creep by having a 3rd job class (or transcendent classes outside of MoM) and there might be too many skills to take into consideration when it comes to balancing for both player vs. monster (PvM) and player vs. player (PvP) aspects of the game. My opinion is that by restricting job classes to 2nd job class only and slightly altering some of the skill trees in the 1st and 2nd job class branches we can offer a more balanced and understandable environment.

 

Slower leveling, but not slower gameplay

While there are not "rates" in the traditional sense, Yggdrasil is intended to be much slower in terms of leveling pace. Slower leveling does not have to mean slower gameplay, though! In vanilla settings, slower leveling is often due to the harsh nature of the game involving extremely slow HP/SP regeneration, limited skill use, very spread out monsters, and difficult map-traversing. Yggdrasil aims to create a very exciting experience early on such that it doesn't feel like the game starts at end-game. You may only be a Lv 40 Swordsman, but you will be very frequently using a variety of skills, entering instances with your friends, and dealing with new and unique monster behaviors. This is in stark contrast to the usual, slow-paced vanilla environment of using 1 skill per 40 seconds due to slow SP regeneration and your vanilla battle interaction essentially being a one-by-one melee whack-fest that barely beats a cookie-clicker game.
 

 

 

 

 

Storyline and Player Direction

One of the most notable things about the vanilla version of the game is the general lack of an overarching story or any sense of direction from the game itself. The player, aside from a brief and convoluted introduction, is mostly just thrown into the world and told to figure it out. Some may view this as great from a general "sandbox" experience perspective, but I think that it ultimately results in the game being off-putting to anyone who hasn't already played some variation or who doesn't have a friend explaining things to them. My opinion is that the game needs to give the player some sort of initial quest(s) to get the player going. That can be a few types of "experiment with this" sort of quests, beginning a storyline quest, or some combination of the two. This doesn't meant that you lose the sandbox, exploration-type of feeling nor do you have to hold the hand of the player throughout the whole game.

 

An overarching story quest is intended to be present, shortly after the introduction on Yggdrasil, with a lot more emphasis than existed on Mythos of Midgard. The general story will need to be tweaked slightly based on the map/monster designs, but the goal is to make it a bit more involved for those that want to do it. It's important to note that the story quest should be mostly optional. There will be rewards including items, experience, and access to areas, but for the most part, it should feel optional.

 

 

 

 

 

Balancing Goals
Balanced means a lot of different things to people. There's inter-job class balance where you don't want people to feel like they are permanently advantaged/disadvantaged by picking one job class over another. There's feeling like fights are fair and rewarding when fighting monsters of appropriate levels in general. And there's also feeling like fights are fair between similarly comprised groups of players whether those groups are fighting each other in a PvP environment or teaming up to tackle a boss in a PvM environment. I'll touch a little bit on my experience with each.
 
1. Player Vs. Monster
In my experience with Mythos of Midgard and the previous project, monsters lacked substance in the early and mid game, but at the same time became harder to create in the later stages of the game. Some of the feedback received was that game felt like it really starts once you reach 3rd job class: your job class becomes more interesting and the monsters become more interesting, even if there aren't a lot of areas to explore. This is also partly due to the relatively untouched nature of monsters before 3rd job areas. While there is a lot of manual input on these pre-3rd-job-areas, there is also a lot left unchanged. Many of these monsters simply perform basic attacks, hardly hit you, and nothing more. Likewise, as a first job class you have access to a limited number of skills and a small SP pool to use them with. It's a somewhat unexciting 1v1 whacking battle. This improves a bit some 2nd job classes and only a little for other 2nd job classes. It's not until you get to 3rd job classes that you start to gain a lot more interesting skills. However, I don't think it needs to be this way. I think that there's the potential to restructure both job classes and monsters to prevent this from happening.
 
 
2. Player Vs. Player
Tied in with the "too many classes, too many skills" mention above, balancing is especially hard for player vs. player scenarios. The first project back in 2018 had a relatively decent PvP scene until 3rd (or transcendent) job classes were added. At that point the damage became too varied and bloated to make balancing feasible. Since then, PvP has mostly sat on the back-burner when it came to effort spent on development. Given the current trajectory of MoM in adding 3-2 classes, I doubt PvP could ever become a reasonable thing to expect, even more-so given the limited amount of dev time available. PvP is one of the few current ways that players can generate their own content and create a somewhat unique experience each time. There are numerous games where there is limited content, but have massive replayability simply due to the fact that each time you have a different team or are just presented with different situations to act upon. Despite re-balancing damage for MoM, I still think there is just far too much to consider to have a viable PvP scene and that cutting back to pre-3rd job days would add a lot of life to the game.
 
 

 

 

 

Player Progression
Despite cutting back to 2nd job classes being potentially better for balancing reasons, it may also introduce some challenges when it comes to player progression. Players like to see progression and one of the main ways you see progression is by become stronger and gaining access to more skills. Being a permanent Novice that performs basic attacks only and incrementally gains more HP and damage over the span of Lv 1 to Lv 99 is certainly not as much fun for most people as it is progressing through 1st job, gaining new skills, 2nd job, gaining more skills, and then 3rd job, gaining even more skills, (and 4th job classes to gain even more skills!). This begs the question, are new job classes necessary, or could fun progression in this game be accomplished solely through spacing out skills and having new items unlocked?
 
Job Class Progression
This is a rough outline of what I believe job class progression would look like without anything beyond 2nd job classes. Players will spend quite a bit more time in the 1st job class and this is where the biggest improvements can be made. (See the other threads specifically geared towards job class balancing and skills.) For starters, 1st job classes need slightly larger HP/SP pools to allow for more skill usage and to feel less fragile against harder monsters. Additionally, a few skills need to be shuffled around, added, and existing skills modified, to make 1st classes feel less like "basic attack only" bots. Increasing the amount of active-based play as 1st jobs alongside increasing monster skill-usage should make 1st job classes a lot more fun to play and less like something you feel is in the way of you getting to the main game. Likewise, this same concept applies to 2nd job classes as well where we need a bit more shuffling and some 3rd job skills (balanced for 2nds) placed into the 2nd job skill tree to make them feel more complete and unique.

• Novice - Base Lv 1 -> Lv 10
  • Goal
    • Players should spend only a small amount of time as a Novice only to learn the very basics of the game.
  • Changes
    • Still has the same 10 job levels to obtain with the ability to place 9 skill points.
    • Those 9 skill points are spent just learning some basic abilities as they already are in Mythos of Midgard.
    • Basic Novice skills to be revised to better fit other changes to the game
• 1st Job Class - Base Lv 11 -> 50
  • Goal
    • Players should quickly acquire job levels and new skills in order to allow for more frequent skill usage.
    • Job Lv 43 (the point of obtaining most skills) should be achieved by as soon as Base Lv 35
    • Job Lv 50 (required to change jobs) should be achieved at roughly Base Lv 50
  • Changes
    • Add in new skills wherever necessary to make the 1st job classes feel a bit more playable and less boring.
    • Increase the HP/SP pools for these job classes so they are not as fragile and can frequently use skills with minimal downtime.
• 2nd Job Class - Base Lv 51 -> 99
  • Goals
    • Players should acquire the majority of their 2nd job skills early on (relative to Base Lv) to maximize player ability.
    • Job Lv 43 (the point of obtaining most skills) should be achieved by as soon as Base Lv 65
    • Job Lv 50 (completing skill trees) should be achieved at roughly Base Lv 70
  • Changes
    • Same premise as above of adding in a few new skills wherever necessary to make the class feel complete. This may come in the form of removing, editing, or utilize previously 3rd-job skills within the 2nd job class branch.
    • Players should feel as thought their character is mostly complete at level 90 with the final 9 levels being more of a "completionist" type of goal where reaching level 99 does not feel imperative to enjoy MvPing, PvP, or other end-game related activities.

 

 

 

 

 

General Settings

While there are numerous changes and custom mechanics, this section is to provide a quick overview for a frame of reference of Yggdrasil. This means that while there are some significant differences from vanilla, you can build a picture of where we started (and where we are going!).

• Base Mechanics
  • Classic, Pre-Renewal
  • Yggdrasil has deviated quite a bit on some mechanics such as defense calculations, cast time reductions, stat point break-point removal, etc. However, the goal is for the game to feel closer to a pre-renewal setting than a renewal one.
• Episode and Area Availability
  • Episode 1
  • Yggdrasil does not following any sort of vanilla episode progression path; however, you can expect the over areas available to be similar to Episode 8 from vanilla settings, though there are many surprises! Go out and explore!
• Job Classes
  • 2-1 and 2-2 job classes only
  • There are no plans to introduce transcendent, 3rd, or 4th job classes. However, there are numerous changes to 2nd job classes, included entirely new skills and a few skills from unavailable job classes as needed to help distinguish unique skill tree paths and job class identity.
• Max Level
  • Base Lv 99 / Job Lv 50
  • While the maximum level is 99/50, keep in mind that the goal is that players are feel complete at level 90/50. Players also have the ability to level up prestige skills after reaching level 99 though these are not required for characters to feel complete.
• Max Stats
  • No limit
  • Yggdrasil utilizes a reworked stat point system that does not involve stat breakpoints nor do we have instant-cast. Players are free to raise stats above the traditional limit of 99 on Yggdrasil because doing so does not create any "broken" mechanics. However, it does get quite costly raising stats this high.
• Experience Rates
  • Low Rates
  • The goal is that there should be a plethora of things to do (quests/instances/etc), a variety of monster encounters, and significantly more skill usage and battle conditions very early in the game. Lower rates simply means that you'll spend more time at each level, but it does NOT mean that "the fun part" is gated behind a ridiculously long grind-fest.
  • Yggdrasil utilizes entirely custom EXP tables for players and custom EXP rewards for monsters, uniquely catered to capture the intended feel of the game.
• Drop Rates
  • Low to Medium Rates
  • Typically, servers adjust drop rates to boost rare items, but this inadvertently causes a lot of common items to become 100% or close to it. Yggdrasil uses an entirely custom monster drop table where common items are similar to 1x rates, appearing at roughly 50-90% drops, but rare items are closer to 5x-15x rates depending on the item.
  • The goal is for players to feel comfortable hunting their own items when needed and to provide a wide variety of random modifications on equipment in circulation, but without inflating the economy due to an overabundance of miscellaneous items.
• Resetting Stats/Skills
  • Base Lv 1~40
    • Option to completely reset both stats and skills when resetting. (Cost: FREE)
  • Base Lv 41~50
    • Option to completely reset both stats and skills when resetting. (Cost: 100z per Base Lv)
  • Base Lv 51~70
    • Option to completely resets skills when resetting. (Cost: 150z per Job Lv)
    • Option to completely reset one stat type (STR/AGI/etc) (Cost: 150z per Base Lv)
  • Base Lv 71~90
    • Option to completely resets skills when resetting. (Cost: 500z per Job Lv)
    • Option to completely reset one stat type (STR/AGI/VIT/etc) (Cost: 1,000z per Base Lv)
  • Base Lv 91~99
    • Option to reset your character back to Base Lv 90 with completely reset stats and skills. (Cost: 1,000,000z)
    • Option to remove 10 points from a single stat type (STR/AGI/etc) with no loss of levels. (Cost: 100,000z)
  • Having the option to reset or adjust stats and skills, especially in the early game, allows players to feel comfortable experimenting and trying new things without feeling like they need to create a spreadsheet or detailed plan of action just to play the game. However, character identity is important and as you level up, your identity should become more solidified and resets/adjustments become more costly.
• Max Party Size
  • Up to 10 party members
  • Although the party size is up to 10 members, smaller parties do receive a slight boost to EXP that is divided among the party.
• Party EXP Sharing
  • Unlimited share range
  • Players should feel comfortable always being able to party up with friends and feel mostly unrestricted. However, if any party members are more than 15 levels below the highest leveled party member, they will receive reduced EXP. Higher leveled members will still receive full EXP.
• Multi-Clienting
  • Yes and No
  • Yggdrasil strives to make changes to ensure that players never feel like multi-clienting is a necessity to play, unlike vanilla settings. If you feel like you are missing out by using only a single client and a single character, then we have missed our mark.
  • The game client allows multiple windows to be open, but more than 1 character can only be logged in under certain conditions and with restrictions.
    • Only able to have multiple characters online if they are in a town-designated map. This does not apply to the initial character logged in.
    • Unable to utilize functions such as banking and storage; however, you can still trade and open shops.
    • Autotrading characters are exempt.
• Traversing the World
  • Faster base walking speed, sprinting, mounts, airships, unique NPC warps, and more!
  • A goal of Yggdrasil is to feel more immersive, and as such, you will not find traditional Kafra warps, a "Warper NPC", nor anything similar. Instead players can utilize the airship to visit most towns and are also rewarded for exploring the world to find unique NPCs that take players to various other locations.
  • While hopping around the map instantly via Fly Wings or Teleporing is limited, it is important that players are able to traverse the world quickly. This is accomplished via faster base walking speeds, a new sprinting skill, and being able to ride a mount.
• Donations
  • None
  • Yggdrasil is completely paid for by Insomnia and there are no need for donations.

 

 

 

 

 

Player Commands

• !settings
  • This is the default command used to access all available player commands to be enabled or disabled upon login.
  • Note: This is saved per sub account.
• !autoloot <drop rate percentage>
  • Enabled (100%) (Default)
  • Allows all items to go direct to inventory from monsters killed at a distance of 13 cells or less.
  • Note: <drop rate percentage> is in increments of 1% up to 100%
• !arealoot
  • Enabled (Default)
  • Automatically loots all available items in a 5x5 area around an item that is picked up from the ground.
• !alootid +<item name / item id>
  • Allows the player to selectively autoloot only the specified items.
  • Note: This follows the same autoloot rules and only works on monsters killed at a distance of 13 cells or less.
• !nolootid +<item name / item id>
  • Allows the player to selectively avoid autolooting only the specified items.
  • Note: This follows the same autoloot rules and only works on monsters killed at a distance of 13 cells or less.
• !showrares
  • Enabled (Default)
  • Creates a small effect and announcement to self when finding a piece of equipment or an item that drops at a rate of 1% or less.
• !refresh
  • Refreshs the current location of the player
• !memo <0~8/clear>
  • Allows memorizing the current location of the player in up to 9 different positions. Players can utilize Memory Portal to return to these locations.
  • Cannot be used in certain maps such as dungeons, MvP maps, or PvP maps.
• !autotrade
  • Disconnects the player to continue vending or buying with their active shop.
• !shopsearch (!ss) <item name / item id>
  • Allows the player to search all vending stores for particular items.
• !buysearch (!bs) <item name / item id>
  • Allows the player to search all buying stores for particular items.
• !noks <self/party/guild>
  • Enabled: Party (Default)
  • Blocks others from mistakenly attacking monsters that you are already attacking.
• !monsterinfo <monster name / monster id>
  • Displays rudimentary information about the monster.
  • Only shows the following: Name, Level, Size, Race, Element, and Item Drop Rates
• !whodrops <item name / item id>
  • Displays the item's name, type, buying price, selling price, weight, and lists monsters that drop the item.
• !hominfo
  • Displays information about your homunculus, if available.
• !petinfo
  • Displays information about your pet, if available.