A Truly Infamous Superior Update
Updates incoming for every superhero hunter out there!
Thanks for tuning in, Hunters! For those of you who are new here, I’m Gwen, a Senior Designer on Superior. Recently, the lovely Mr. Bitbender hosted an AMA where we touched on some of the exciting updates coming soon to Superior! You can watch the whole AMA here, but today I wanted to do a design deep dive into a particular topic we only briefly covered. So, without further ado…
What’s the Deal with Rarity Skills?
When we first designed each character’s skill tree, we wanted to give higher rarity characters something unique to make them feel a bit more special. We decided to do this in the form of Rarity Skills. Each rarity above common had access to one more Rarity Skill than the tier below it. While the intention makes sense, this created a few issues:
⦁ Players of lower rarity had no way to know what they were missing. This led to a sense that higher rarity characters were “Pay 2 Win”, despite our best efforts to balance those skills against others in the skill tree.
⦁ As only a few players had access to these skills (particularly the Legendary and Ancient ones), they were often disregarded when looking at the player’s experience as a whole.
⦁ It’s just not as much fun.
Our goals have always been to create a fun and compelling character-based shooter founded on teamwork and community.
Play 2 Win
With all that in mind, we are happy to give a sneak peek at the new system coming down the pipe: Infamy Skills.
Replacing the old Rarity Skills, Infamy Skills will be available to all players and are unlocked over time as your character’s become more and more infamous!
The original 5 Rarity Skills have all been updated, renamed, and rebalanced to fit into the new system, along with 5 new skills that will surely take your Superhero hunting to the next level! These skills can:
⦁ Increase the number of snacks you can eat on a run
⦁ Increase the interest in the ATM
⦁ Make items cheaper
⦁ And more!
Along with all this cool new stuff, the Infamy system itself is getting a bit of a makeover.
The New Road to Infamy
Previously, higher rarity characters started at a higher base level cap. We want to respect this benefit, but we also want to take this opportunity to improve the experience. Let’s get into it.
The primary takeaway is that it’s very confusing to know what yours or another player’s max level is without having to reference out of game resources. We are solving this by making every character’s base level cap 30 and then granting additional Infamy levels for each character. To break it down:
The benefit of this is twofold. Firstly, higher rarity characters will immediately be able to take advantage of the new Infamy Skills at their rank and below. Additionally, every reset will now only be a 30 level setback. This simplifies the process for all characters and saves time for players who have high rarity characters.
I want to stress: Your effective starting max level will be unchanged, it is now merely represented through Infamy instead of hidden inside an FAQ or blog post.
What Now?
We hope to release this update as a precursor to our Phase 1 Play And Earn plan (detailed in the AMA, link above). We want to get these new skills tested and balanced before we move onto the plan in earnest. This update will not include GYRI migration. Infamy will still be local to your character and not yet transferable. We want to get that rolling as soon as possible, and it’s easier to start when everything else is locked in.
Like all updates, this new system is subject to change based on feedback. The response from the community on past updates has been amazing and really helped to shape Superior into what it is today. We want to continue that partnership with the community into Phase 1 and beyond. We’re glad to have all you Hunters along for the ride. Now… go kill some bad guys ;)
