1:02 PM
back here, was busy for a while
@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica As for the second type of Tendency, that is Character tendency.
That is a basic "alignment" value. Goes up by killing evil npc, down by killing friendly ones.
Has almost no influence on the game outside two specific things, and that contributes to the idea Tendency was originally going to be tied to the game ending.
First thing Character Tendency does is changing the damage of three very specific weapons in the game. One gets best damage at full black, one at pure white and the third at both
The second thing it does... When you are at pure white character tendency you are given a single item from an npc. It is a ring, so there is no reason for getting more than one on multiple playthru.
Another ring can be won from a quest that requires pure black character. In this case you are tasked to kill almost every npc in the nexus.
This permanently damages your game until the next "new game +" run since you basically kill the vendors that provides you services like weapon repair, spell switching, inventory storage and such
Most players do this quest only once only to get the ring, and wait till they are at the final boss of the game so that they can quickly move to the next new game afterward.
As you can see, both mechanics are quite unbalanced.
For world tendency, you are basically punished for playing the game as intended and use body form when you are given the chance (beating a boss turns you back to body form, that's why I mentioned players killing themselves in the nexus after each boss. Death in the Nexus does not affect tendency) so players just play in soul form most of the time.
This in turn unbalances the rings feature since while in soul form you will probably always wear a specific ring that reduces the disadvantage of being in soul form. Considering that you get two ring slots, and you want to also have the Thief Ring equipped most of the time... (reduces enemy detection, useful everywhere and basically required in a specific area because of constant snipper fire otherwise)
Character tendency is the opposite, as playing the game and beating bosses will normally push you to white. To stay black you would need to kill friendly npc, but that damages you as explained before.
Technically, you could kill other players online to gain "evil points" too, but then you would have to go online in the first place, and that had its fair share of problems with World Tendency as already described.
It was an unbalanced mechanic either way.
Not blaming FromSoftware since I still believe that what we got was just a cut-version of the original plan, but it is sad that you get a remake and don't use the opportunity to restore the original vision.
