In today's stream, I did some quick colouring work on the Phoenix Guard: a new playable Venture focused around ranged artillery and formation buffs!

The Phoenix Guard is the rank-and-file soldier of the Sol Empire, with an incendiary rifle and grenade launcher as their starting equipment. Their abilities are focused around formations and groups: whenever a Phoenix Guard fires at an enemy, all allies within a certain range can React to also make ranged attacks against the same target all at once, creating a powerful volley of artillery fire to overwhelm the opposition!

Reworked Ventures

I also briefly talked about the direction I wanted to take Ventures (i.e. classes/jobs) in V0.5. We have a lot of ideas for playable Ventures to populate the Voyager world - at least 27 as of writing. Given the fact that we also wanted to have recruitable, preset characters that players can play and build teams around, that means I needed a streamlined way to tackle Ventures, so that they would still offer decent depth, while not being overwhelming for the new player.

To tackle this, my current approach is to streamline and unify all the Ventures together into 4 Core Abilities.

This is similar to what you would see in a game, e.g. a MOBA like League of Legends or Genshin Impact, where each character has a core set of 3-5 abilities with different functions (e.g. an attack, active ability, passive and ultimate); the format is the same but how they work is different.  All the characters have a Special ability, but all of their Special abilities are different: one may heal allies while another may deal damage.

Below is a comparison of two different Ventures, the Shinobi (ninja) and Venator (RWBY-esque fighter), to give an idea of the format.

As you can see, both of these Ventures have the same format of four abilities, but they are expressed differently:

1. A Core Trait/Talent. This is a passive that enables the rest of that Venture's playstyle. For the Shinobi it's stealth and for the Venator it's weapon customisation.
2. An Augmented Attack: a unique enhancement of that Venture's bread-and-butter attack. For the Shinobi, it's a high-damage single target takedown that you can pool multiple dice into for damage, and refunds them back to you if successful. For the Venator, it's being able to use your weapon's gunshots and recoil to propel yourself into the air.
3. A Special: a unique ability of some sort. The Shinobi can create a distraction which can be used in and out of combat (tentative), while the Venator can load their weapon with elemental ammunition that can create effects like fire and stone walls on the battlefield.
4. An Assist: a special Reaction or team-based action that allows you to act outside your Turn. The Shinobi can save themselves or an ally by creating a fake decoy to take the hit from an attack; the Venator has a Tagteam Strike that can automatically trigger Crits when attacking alongside an ally.

Core > Master Abilities

These 4 abilities form the Core Abilities of that Venture: a Trait (Passive), Attack, Special and Assist (Reaction).  Multiclassing is relatively straightforward: You can learn any other Venture, but you must always start by learning its Core Trait first before learning any of its other abilities.

Some Ventures also have additional Master Abilities: extra abilities and attacks that allow you to specialise further into a given Venture. They can only be accessed when you learn all four of a Venture's Core Abilities. This typically allows you access to Ultimate abilities that are more impactful than regular Specials, as well as direct upgrades to your Core Abilities. 

Design Decisions

A lot of the driving principles behind this new approach to Ventures is for the following reasons:

• Easier onboarding for new players. All you need to start playing a Venture is to understand their 4 Core Abilities.
• More balanced cohesion between Ventures. A lot of Ventures in V0.4 suffered from some having a lot more details and features than others.
• Condensing player fantasies. Forces me to cut out anything that didn't directly communicate the core fantasy of playing a Venture, keeping their idea as easy to grasp as possible, and evocative enough to immediately entice the prospective player.
• Easy to create and homebrew for. Adding new Ventures to V0.5, whether officially or in unofficial homebrew, is as straightforward as figuring out the new Venture's Core Abilities, and any Master Abilities should they have any.
• Limits player paralysis. Given that there's at least 27 planned Ventures, I didn't want to doubly hit new players with a huge amount of playable Ventures and a huge amount of abilities for each individual Venture. I wanted to keep one side less dense than the other, while still keeping these Core Abilities varied enough to give decent depth and player expression within just 4 abilities.

Much of dev time moving forward for V0.5 is to rework and streamline all the Ventures to match this format! I can't guarantee that all 27 will be ready by V0.5, but certainly a large number of them will be ready for playtesting once it comes out!

As always, you can continue following my dev streams or join the Discord server to be fully updated on all Voyager news and development.