We can see a problem there in the video, when we see the last two hair styles (those head tattoos from Rayya’s). The entire head changes colors to white skin.
Woohoo, this new set of customization options is going to make roleplaying so much more varied and fun!
I’ve probably spent as much time re-rolling seeds and starting parties to find an interesting narrative setting as I’ve spent designing buildings at this point – to me, Stonehearth’s greatest appeal is its potential as a story generator, but every good story needs an “equilibrium” to start out from so there’s something to build up to for the climax. So, I find it important to have a well-balanced starting party and at least a couple of narrative prompts (e.g. hearthling names.) When there’s a hearthling with a name like Yui Founder, a cleric-in-training named Edessa Belltower and a strong, shaggy-bearded hearthling named Brom Pounder it’s easy to imagine a story of how those hearthlings will create a thriving town together.
However, I can’t count the number of times I’ve felt the need to re-roll a starting party because it’s missing one of the “key” characters – e.g. not having a suitable healer, or no hearthlings with the high strength required to make effective soldiers. It’s possible to play without those characters, but it often means that your story “stalls” while you take time out of character and setting development to fight off enemies (having to rally the whole town to do it rather than having soldiers who can take care of it on their own) or give your hearthlings time to recover. While those events can make fun side-stories, they’re generally too frequent if you don’t have dedicated characters for those roles. I find that a bit of a grind, since every couple of days there will be another desperate defence, food shortage, or so on.
That’s why I’m super excited for the ability to slightly customise our starting parties, and re-roll “duplicate” and “passenger” characters. Once there’s a character to fill each key role, everything else can be left totally to chance in order to drive more story events; but this means that getting those ideal starting characters will take much less time now! It also allows for some more fun narrative twists – e.g. if two hearthlings share the same family name, we can now make sure they look like they’re related; or if one of the hearthlings is destined to be a cleric we can give them a suitable haircut.
And when you think about the potential that’s added by awesome mods (and how much easier it will be to make use of them now, e.g. being able to mix mods and tweak the resulting characters to avoid conflicts or “blend” the two mods’ effects together better), the narrative prompts just got a lot more varied and exciting!
And that’s before even mentioning traits… but we have plenty of discussions around those so I won’t take up any more space here hahah
All in all, I’m loving the way that the new embarkation screen is shaping up!
-untranslatable squeaking noises-