Pixel Dungeon
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I'm glad to see Shattered sales doing well~ Updates really help keep Shattered alive, players can also spread the word to keep the momentum going
I'm eager for city and halls quest, but I'm very concerned with that dwarven vault idea. If none of the player’s items can go with them, it'll be extremely difficult to balance this quest with high challenges. Sewer and prisons have the highest death rate due to players having no options in their bag yet, and that city quest will end up as another sewer. Builds also become unusable, and some players don't like this quest idea.
There's some great suggestions for city quest: What if the devil imp takes the player to an arena in the dwarven kingdom? That's often the most fun event in RPGs, where you have the choice to fight a few enemies for small rewards, or risk it all for better loot. The imp could set up a fight against weak enemies at first, eventually leading to a boss fight with corrupted Thymor from those lore pages. Dwarf tokens drop from enemies, which can be exchanged with the imp for rewards such as the +2 ring.
This suggestion will solve several problems. Arena fights will allow newbies to get used to slugfests prevalent in Dwarf King's fight. But more importantly, Thymor will allow useless items in this game to shine. This warlock should use ice spells, as there are almost no ice enemies in this game to justify using Icy Touch's ice immunity. He could also buff at the start of the battle, since no enemies use buffs in this game for cleansing dart to remove. Of course, players can choose to brute-force this fight with healing potions instead, or escape the arena before Thymor appears, as you will have enough tokens for the +2 ring without Thymor. But defeating Thymor could drop an additional Devil Fruit that fills satiety and adds +6 Max HP. This boss reward should be useful but not game-breaking, as the final boss is already easy without challenges.
Challenge tweaks and new challenges that buffs enemies are also nice. Slay the Spire encourages players to clear the game multiple times using most characters, which unlocks a hidden act 4 final boss as a final goal. Shattered needs that replayability incentive, as right now when new players clear the game once, they get bombarded with challenges that they usually find unappealing, which leads to them quitting without trying most of the game characters, killing the momentum of players sharing the game.
Whether or not the quest is like the sewers is entirely up to how it's designed. I would design the quest with this sort of limitation in mind and the intention certainely wouldn't be to have it kill >50% of runs. If anything I think giving everyone a common starting point will make it much easier to balance this quest, as the state the player is in during the quest can be much more tightly controlled.
While I prefer a token gambling collosseum, or something like the caves quest, it's up to you on how to proceed with the city quest!
Though I'm not sure how to balance that vault idea other than completely eliminating challenges during the quest. On diet, swarm, champions, pharma, and barren lands are lethal, but FIMA will be the worst offender as it eliminates most of the gear progression in that vault microcosm, making all melee weapons + armor useless. That "starting point" is always the most lethal in high challenges, but by the time players reach the city it's usually a winning run already and they have the correct builds to proceed. If the city quest can even cause 20% death at this stage in the game... my biggest worry will be not experiencing the imp update entirely because skipping it becomes the optimum play on high challenges. Hope that's not the case!
Players can prepare against tengu or caves quest to boost the winrate, but this vault quest is something that they cannot prepare against, and that constant death rate might be too unappealing as it goes against the core gameplay of "preparing for the next fight". It might act as a fun minigame if done well, but it seems hard to execute well.
It's hard for me to really address this specifically when the quest is an idea in my head and not precisely designed currently, All I can really say is that I am going to try to plan for the player to have proper means of skill expression, I agree that just forcing the player into basic equipment and then turning the quest into stats vs. stats would be boring and overly punishing for chal players. That doesn't have to be how it's designed though.
The game's a rougelike, not rougelite. You aren't supposed to unlock game changing options by doing things.
I'm not asking for the kind of progression that give permanent upgrades or starting gold to heroes. The thing is, we are already unlocking tons of "game changing" options by doing things in Shattered. We unlock characters, alchemy recipes, challenges, seeded runs. The final boss unlock might as well be another 10th challenge.
Longevity and replayability are key aspects of roguelikes and roguelites, and superbosses create a new goal for players who finished the game once. More importantly, these will create online guides, discussions, gameplay videos and reactions. This is the key for growth and momentum, and it's one of the reasons why some roguelikes and roguelites are so successful, they have this recipe jotted down.
The only gameplay changing things you unlock are characters, and their option unlocks are so easy to achieve you might as well call them locked behind a tutorial. Challenges are locked behind a completion of the game to not overwhelm the newbies and to not put the expectations of the challenges if they didn't even beat the game. Challenges don't add content nor brutally change the game, they just restrict it or make it harder by tweaking some values. The rest is not really game changing, seeds and daily runs just change how the layout of the dungeon is generated, but so is starting a new run. Alchemy recipes are locked, but you still can craft them without having the recipe, thus not being a game changing options. You just don't know you can do it yet. You can, though.
A whole new boss, though, is significant content added through progression, defining characteristic of rougelites.
SPD is already replayable enough. Achievements and the random nature and variety this game holds naturally is enough to keep players replaying it. A new boss won't add more replayability to that, as you are just asking the player to do a second run to see new unlocked content. Content that will only satisfy the player once. Different updates, the kind of updates Evan focuses around, updates that interact with the rest of mechanics of the game, that enhance gameplay, are the long term updates that actually promote replayability. By implementing this "new boss" you only fall on spirals of new fast content (as this new content doesn't encourage replayability, it has to arrive faster than the one we currently receive) that works well for bigger teams (as they can make these type of updates fast enough), Evan can't, he is just one person working on this whole game by himself. It is better for content and replayability to make these updates because, while they don't produce that growth or momentum you were talking about, it does promote replayability. Another problem these kinds of update have is that they are also overwhelming for new players, as it is not as natural as the already present content in the game, and it will overwhelm new players in the long run. This will only ruin the simple nature of the game which has, in the end, the opposite effect of what you want to achieve, as it discourages new players to join in due to the complexity of the game, if it followed that direction.
Emmm but it looks like the above idea already satisfies most of your worries 🤨 It's locked behind a completion of the game to not overwhelm newbies. Check. And unlike those painful challenges it doesn’t brutally change the game if it's an optional lategame fight
I dunno, I don't have the motivation to replay SPD when there's no hard post-game goal to conquer. I play SPD, get the amulet... and it's done. New trinkets and classes don't motivate me to replay I think? No one complained when StS or deadcells added a new postgame boss, instead they get praise and high replayability. It's the ultimate goal that will make the 'item updates' worth playing and more new players joined
IIRC the only time I revisit SPD is when they added that crystal cave boss. Now that is a tangible goal and I'll always vote for a boss update, I'm willing to put money if the boss development needs art and stuff
A big part of the playerbase barely wins
It's also disappointing for new players to not be able to access content without beating the game first
Imagine someone doing 500 runs without winning and missing out on that content
You mention the Crystal cabe boss, but that's a part of the base game, as everything should be