The Wind’s Return

There are over 150 equipment items in Hand of Fate 2, there are weapons in three different styles, armour, helms and so much more. They are all designed to meet certain challenges that the game throws at the player or to facilitate certain play styles. For this first Deep Dive into my work on Hand of Fate 2 I have chosen my favourite weapon in the game, ‘The Winds Return’ a pair of short blades that allow the player to attack in a swirling flurry of strikes, with a blade in each hand.

It is my favourite not just because I think it is fun to use but because I think it exemplifies the way in which I evolved Hand of Fate 2’s weapons in comparison to the weapons from the original game. Before we can get into the details of the weapon’s design I need to explain how Hand of Fate’s weapons worked in general.

The three most important attributes for a weapon in HoF2’s combat are: Damage, it’s special ability and the number of hits required to unlock this ability. Players must accrue chains of hits, without sustaining a hit themselves, to unlock the weapon’s powerful ability. If the player takes a hit, then the count resets to zero. This is the same system seen in the Batman:Arkham and Middlearth: Shadow of… series. 

Inherited Problems

This weapon system was brought over intact from the original Hand of Fate to it’s sequel. In its predecessor these mechanics, along with the games’ Rogue-lite systems, meant the player was highly incentivised to avoid taking damage during combat. Firstly because any hit reset their counter for the weapon ability but also because Health was a resource that was very precious in Hand of Fate. In the original game this manifested in some players spending entire combat encounters dodge rolling around the arena while attacking only opportunistically. This was a style of play that we wanted players to avoid for a number of reasons: it ignored many of the mechanics of both the player and the enemies, it made combat encounters take vastly longer than they should and most of all it wasn’t very fun.

HoF 2

So in Hand of Fate 2 we made changes to multiple systems to help reduce the appeal of this style of play, including: new dodge animations, changes to i-frames and much more. As one of my key responsibilities was the design of player equipment, I knew that I wanted to address this issue when designing the equipment. 

To achieve this goal the team created some objectives for the combat in general. Not every piece of equipment needed to hit all of them but each should achieve at least one objective or touch on a couple. These objectives do not sit solely within the equipment or combat systems but do significantly involve them. 

1. Give the player more reasons to be proactive. Priority Targets, Enemies with clear tells that can be interrupted and equipment that rewards engagement with mechanics and enemies.

2. Increase the skill ceiling. Another issue that led to players dodge rolling around in HoF 1 was that there was a limit to how effective a player could be in combat. In terms of risk vs. reward, this meant the “risk” of fully engaging in the combat system and potentially taking damage wasn’t being outweighed by the rewards for maximising damage output.

3. Different play styles should be supported. Hand of Fate 2 sets out very clear challenges, more so than the first game: gather food, gain gold, defeat this enemy, find this item.With clear goals, we wanted to allow different play styles to be successful. This meant that, at a high level, the equipment should have varied benefits and create as broad a collection as possible.     

4. Choices should be clear. Hand of Fate 2 gives players much control over what cards they want to take with them on a run than the previous game. Therefore we wanted equipment to have very clear and specific uses. The choices should be akin to picking the correct key for the lock rather than picking the most efficient battering ram. The equipment’s name, mechanical design, visual design and VFX should all support a cohesive identity that means players will know when they should or shouldn’t choose this piece of equipment.

The Wind’s Return

Hopefully we now have a suitable background to the combat system and the goals of HoF 2’s development that I can discuss the specific design for this weapon with some common understanding.

Concept

I make no bones about stealing ideas from other games, in this case the idea for this weapon was taken directly from the character of Draven from League of Legends. One of his abilities is to throw his axe at a target, after it hits it’s target, the axe it will fly into the air and spot on the ground will be marked. This will be where the axe will land, if the player positions Draven on that mark by the time the axe lands, then the cooldown on the attack is removed. In a game where positioning is absolutely key, one of Draven’s core abilities forces the character to be constantly on the move to maximise their damage output. (You can read more about Draven and League of Legends here).

This lept out to me as exactly the type of mechanic we could make a weapon out of and it was exactly what we needed in Hand of Fate 2.

‘Deatharangs’

The weapon started out with the working title of ‘Deatharangs’ and used exactly the same mechanics as Draven’s ‘Spinning Axe’ for it’s weapon ability with just minor tweaks to suit HoF 2’s mechanics. Using the weapon’s ability the player can throw one of their axes at a target causing damage and stun,the weapon requires a combo chain of at least 14 hits to be activated. If the player catches the thrown axe, they are rewarded with 10 hits towards their combo counter. This means that with correct positioning, and 4 extra hits, they can almost continually use the weapon’s ability however, missing the catch or getting hit will make the weapon much less effective.

You will notice that Hand of Fate’s throwing axes aren’t anywhere near as efficient as Draven’s ability in League of Legends. This is because of the differences between League of Legends and Hand of Fate 2. In LoL, there is strong opposition to the player pursuing maximum damage output, in the form of opposition human players and the need to return to base to spend gold to improve attributes. Hand of Fate 2 lacks such strong inhibitors to skilled players, therefore to stop the skilled player from winning easily, the weapon ability isn’t fully recharged upon catching an axe, it requires a nominal number of hits for the weapon ability to be used again. While this increases the skill required by only a small amount it also significantly reduces the DPS of the weapon and keeps it in-line with other weapon choices.

Death to Mages

You will see in the weapon description that the weapon has extra utility against Mages. This wasn’t part of the weapon’s initial design. As the design team did multiple passes on the game balance we realised that the player lacked sufficient anti-mage weapons. At that time the weapon didn’t have functionality specific to any enemy type, once it was decided that it was going to be an anti-mage weapon then the question was:

 “what will it do?”

This is another area where we wanted to evolve our designs from the original Hand of Fate. I wanted the equipment designs to be less focused on just an increase in efficiency and more focused on providing mechanical opportunities in combat. Therefore, we ended with a weapon that stunned enemies and stunned mages more effectively for a few reasons:

• Mages are evasive characters in HoF2 and can be tricky to pin down to damage them. Even then they have a shield spell they will cast. Stunning them removes their ability to evade and their ability to cast spells.

• For all enemies, the ‘Stunned’ status effect increases the damage an entity takes, this weapon enables the player to maximise the damage output against enemies but specifically mages. 

• Mages often come in threes and have linked attacks that they perform in unison. Stunning all of them prevents them from behaving in concert.

• This creates an extra thematic reason for them to ALL be stunned if one of them is hit by this weapon’s ability as they are all ‘magically’ linked.

This is the final weapon design: