I have a variety of plans to make the combat interesting, but today I want to lay out my Essence Fusion System.
Essence Fusion is the process of taking Souls, unique to each demon in the game, and fusing them into a piece of a equipment in order to transform the equipment from ordinary into unique. Each demon's soul belongs to one of 9 categories. There are 6 basic categories, hearth, tundra, gales, stone, miasma, and ray (an attempt to create some more interesting names for the basic elements), as well as 3 special categories, Pure, Abyss, and Unknown. The special category souls will act slightly different from the rest of the souls and will be acquired slightly differently too. Finally, souls will contain a rating of 1-5 stars to indicate how powerful they are.
Basic Souls will be acquired from enemies via a negotiation system. Enemies will need to be convinced to give you their soul through dialogue and gifts. A demon may ask you questions that you have to answer (again think SMT) or they may ask for certain combat conditions to be met, such as poison him, or kill all the other demons without hurting him. Depending on how well you navigate through the negotiation, the soul the demon will give you will vary in quality, and there will be 5 level of quality, each of which produces more gems when you refine. Perfect souls will produce 6 gems, flawless 5, normal 4, blemished 3, and cracked 2.
After acquiring souls, the player may refine the souls into soulgems, which can be inserted into equipment, or fuse two souls together to create a new third soul. The fusion itself will produce a third soul that is nothing like the two components, for example 1 hearth soul and 1 tundra soul will create a miasma soul, but the fusion process will be predictable and create a higher level soul, though you cannot fuse a soul higher level than you. I have all the permutations charted, but more on this later.
Each piece of basic equipment has a certain number of slots available to fit in soulgems, and the unique weapon created will be based what combination of soulgems are entered. For example, a Flame blade will be created by having a weapon with at least 2 hearth souls of rank 2 or less and no more than 1 of any other element. The resulting weapon will have higher stats than the basic blade, and will deal fire damage, instead of neutral, and increase the wearer's fire affinity (relevant to combat, will discuss more later). The soulgems will be locked into the weapon and cannot be reused in the future. You can destroy a soul in a piece of equipment in order to place a new soul in its place.
Certain unique weapons will require more specific soul arrangements, such as 2 tundra souls of rating 3-5, 1 ray soul of rating 3-5, and 1 gales soul of rating 3-5, and no other souls. The more specific the conditions, the more specialized the result. While players may stumble upon one such unique combination, in order for the unique item to be at full strength, a recipe must be acquired, either bought from an NPC, acquired from a chest, or given to the player be demons during negotiations. Instead of a soul, the player may ask for a recipe. Recipes are not Equipment slot specific.
That's the basic idea of A) how equipment will be made, and B) how the soul system will work. Does this sound like it would be fun to play with and explore?
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