Mob Beyond randomized bodyparts and breath attacks: "Traits" suggestions to revamp procedural monsters:

Something I found myself thinking a lot after a thought I had today but, though it's already been widely discussed... procedurally generated monsters are a bit... "generic". I believe this was admitted by the devs when they decided to implement more "uniques" handcrafted monsters into the game.

I recall how, for a while one of the major focus of development for procedural monsters focused on attack patterns(the triple jump, charge etc) as well as "special attacks" and the likes.But ultimately... whether poison breath was exchanged for blood vomit, many people still felt that, well, it only "felt the same" all the time. But after a recent thought I had due to a recent unrelated discovery.... I found myself wondering if the problem all along had perhaps just been that people, both developpers trying to figure how to make procedurally generated monsters more uniques and the players criticizing them as a "failure", had simple been thinking too much inside the box rather than outside. If anything, I always felt discussions about how to improve procedurally generated monsters ultimately always revolved about attack patterns or "special attack" abilities.... rarely stuff that wasn't directly an attack of any form.

So, lately, when playing nightly I've spotted that there are now items to give "toxic resistance" to players and basically make them immune to effects like poison debuffs... while recently learning that players weapons could give some of those damage effects to monsters.

So I suddenly found myself wondering: What if monsters, beyond just having procedurally generated selections of body parts and the occasional special attacks, had also "procedurally generated traits"?

It might require a minor UI reworks so that such traits could be listed under the monster healthbar so players could know what they are facing(a bit like how Diablo 2 would list the special abilities of a unique monster under it's name), which might even double with a "random monster name generator" that would generate species name that might even cover some of those traits such as calling one monster "Burning Roxenstabber" by selecting a prefix relating to fire-elements to represent it's fire-resistance and/or fire damages ability.

Stuff like this might even leak off into visuals, such as a "burning" effect being applied on a monster who deals fire damage.

Such a trait system might not have to be purely combat related.
It could be stuff like "Bioluminescent" which could cause the monster to glow in the dark like Novakids do, while even possibly giving off a light aura.

It could be something like "Apex predator"... which would make that breed of monster thougher than what is normally found on the planet... but also make it attack other monsters as much as the player.

Similarly, another(tying indirectly into combat) could see a monster listed as a "Scaredy Cat". Giving it faster than normal movement speed, but actually make it AVOID combat like villagers NPC as it tries to run away from the player.... in turn it might give a better pixels or rewards payout. Such monsters might even get better chances to get such ability as the ability to generate concealment smoke and/or turn invisible(or "very transparent" as a way to still make it somewhat possible to track their movement).

 

Yes it's been discussed before, and yes I would still really like to see it in the game...