Dustgrave: A Sandbox RPG · published
Hello adventurers!
Ever since we released version 0.6, we’ve been focused on Dustgrave’s next big milestone: the Revelations Update. Today, we’d like to share some key highlights of what we are working on:
World Map Rework: a more compact, richer, and detailed map designed to make exploration more engaging and rewarding.
Settlement Simulation Overhaul: new simulation mechanics to better represent settlement prosperity and better simulate their development.
Expanded Dynamic Narrative: new dynamic quest structures to ensure greater variety and deeper storytelling.
Character Progression Revamp: New class specializations and hundreds of additional talents, providing more depth and build diversity for your heroes.
Determination: we are removing Morale and turning it into Determination, to make fights more varied and interesting.
Today’s dev diary will focus on the last element on this list. After extensive internal testing and valuable player feedback, we have decided to change how Morale works and remove cooldowns from skills. Let’s dive into why we made these decisions and what we’ve implemented instead.
Morale was initially designed to add tactical dept, causing characters to flee. However, in practice, it brought unintended gameplay issues:
Boring builds: characters focusing on Morale have never bun as fun and engaging as standard characters.
Quest and scripting complications: fleeing characters disrupted quest flow, dialogue sequences, and sometimes led to game-breaking bugs.
After considering multiple fixes, we concluded the best way forward was to redesign this system entirely.
The second area of concern is how Active Skills worked with cooldowns. This encouraged repetitive, predictable gameplay patterns: use your strongest skills as early and often as possible.
We wanted players to consider when to use powerful skills, instead of using them automatically the moment they became available.
We’ve now removed all cooldowns from Skills, and replaced Morale with a new mechanic: Determination.
Determination Points (DP) work as follows:
Skills consume Determination: powerful skills cost more DP, basic ones cost less.
Determination regenerates each turn: every character gradually recovers DP at the start of their turn.
Shouts still matter: Shouts still replenish DP for allies or reduce it from enemies, allowing allies to use spend more Determination on Skills or preventing enemies from using theirs.
This approach gives you full strategic freedom: you decide exactly when to unleash your most powerful skills. No more waiting out arbitrary timers! This also means we can create much more powerful Skills, since using them in place of a less powerful Skill will require spending more Determination.
All existing gear, Talents, and Skills previously linked to Morale will now work with Determination instead. We already started testing this new system and the early impressions are excellent. In particular, high-level characters now feel truly powerful, having a high Determination and therefore being capable to take down hordes of enemies with their Skills!
You have questions? Feel free to join the conversation on our Steam Forum or in our Discord server. You will find us there!