Reclaimed Notes

* A lot of this references Dark Souls/Elden Ring because that’s the core inspiration for Reclaimed. It’s an “if I made a souls game, what would I do?” type project. Anything relating to the actual creation of a game is all hypothetical. I’m not a game dev.

Story/Worldbuilding

• There are two types of being consumed. One is by nature and can be positive or negative depending on the person affected. The second is being consumed by man-made materials, such as armor (idea credits to @belldeers on twitter!). The latter is almost always negative, as it's a result of a direct rejection of the natural world.
• The second type of consumption first happened because of Alaric studying how to permanently stop nature from overtaking him. His alchemists managed to create a concoction that halts nature, but at a price.
• I want there to be no clear good/evil, save for... like... Alaric, since I find leaving things up for interpretation is really interesting in most cases. I like how Dark Souls and Elden Ring did this, and I want to include some of that kind of thing into Reclaimed's concept. The only clear-cut bad thing, really, is Alaric's total rejection of nature. This, ironically, leads him to be consumed faster. Nature is spiteful.
• Questions to be asked: how much technology can we create until it’s severely detrimental to nature? What are the benefits of advancements in technology (prosthetics, long-distance communication, easier transport, and other medical advancements)? What are the detriments (alienation from other people depending on what it’s used for, pollution, dependency on systems that may not be around forever/constantly)?

Mechanics

• Character Creation
• Able to choose body type and pronouns separately. Not sure if pronouns should always default to “they” in in-game dialogue, or if it should change depending on the pronouns you chose (based on how much effort it would take to record lines three separate times. Maybe this is totally possible, but I wouldn’t know).
• Body types will be labelled as A, B, C, etc. Character sliders will allow for more diverse body shapes, like fat characters all the way to super skinny characters. You can remove or add muscle definition a significant amount.
• This might pose an issue with hitboxes (regardless I would want to include it), since larger characters would have a larger hitbox and vice versa for skinny characters. Maybe there should be one type of hitbox that’s present on all characters? Or maybe it doesn’t matter? Not sure.
• Stats would not be affected by a character’s body type.
• You can give your character prosthetics (arms, legs, eyes, hands, fingers, etc).
• You can give your characters body scars (including top scars :]) and tattoos as well as face scars and tattoos.
• I think including a combat wheelchair would be cool, but I have no idea how that would work with a soulslike combat system. Gonna think more about this. (Maybe something inspired by the flaming chariots in Elden Ring?)
• Voices aren’t limited by which body type you pick.
• Multiple (at least three) hairstyles from 1A to 4C.
• Color picker available alongside presets for everything, like in Elden Ring.
• Stats can be chosen manually with a point allocation-type setup or can be chosen from pre-existing classes like you normally would in a souls game. You can also choose starting gear which includes basic armor and basic weapons/catalysts. Choosing a class will affect your starting gear and choosing preset starting gear will affect your class. You can get around this by setting everything manually.
• Instead of just censoring names, slurs are outright banned from being inputted (it wouldn’t let you confirm the name). This would also account for methods of getting around censors in souls games, like using all uppercase or leetspeak. I don’t know if there’s a way to keep people from implying slurs by changing around spellings (i.e switching the first letter of a slur for a different letter) without causing harmless words from being censored, but if there is, that would also be banned.
• I personally wouldn’t mind seeing profanities like “fuck” in people’s character names, but that would still be censored with asterisks (not banned).
A very basic mockup of what the character creation screen would look like:



• Invasions
• Like Elden Ring, but you can just turn off single player invasions in the settings. Maybe some areas where invasions can happen regardless?
• Three invaders max for a total of six players in a world at a time. Three can only happen if an item is used to bring more invaders in, otherwise two is the max.
• Also, having a dedicated duel arena like in DS3’s DLC would be cool.
• Multiplayer
• You can summon up to two other people to co-op through levels. I think I’d want to keep this like the DS3 method of summoning, since I wouldn’t want Reclaimed to be open-world (DS1 had my favorite map setup so I’m thinking something more like that). Because of this I think getting de-summoned after a boss fight would work well. You would still be able to summon people even after defeating area bosses.
• Combat
* I’m gonna get specific because I have Opinions (tm) about Elden Ring and Dark Souls mechanics, even though that’s what I would want the combat to be like.
• Variety of combat styles from Elden Ring, but with weapon mechanics more like DS3. I.e great swords and ultra-great swords guarantee a second hit if you land the first hit (honestly I think this should’ve been kept in Elden Ring since hitting with an UGS is already difficult), plus they swing faster than in Elden Ring.
• DS3-like backstabs, Elden Ring parries, passive poise like Elden Ring (but with less… strange? Poise requirements. I.E you can poise through one straight sword swing with maybe 25 poise, and with 50 you can poise through two swings before staggering) + hyper armor like DS3 (this just felt nicer to me in DS3 than it does in ER. Not sure why).
• JUMPING
• Elden Ring dual-wielding but bring back the viability of one-handing a single weapon from DS3 (like straight swords). Maybe do this by making one-handed movesets have benefits that two-handed or dual-wielded movesets don’t have (faster, more range?).
• Chain casting is sick. Bring it back.
• More offensive faith-based spells, like quick projectiles. Since faith would probably still have the benefit of healing, these would probably still do a little less than their int-based counterparts.
• Bloodborne dodge. Because it’s cool. Not sure if this should only be available by equipping a certain ring/talisman equivalent, or if it should be the base dodge (the alternative would just be a roll).
• Romancing
• Certain characters are romanceable. You can also build non-romantic relationships with characters. Your relationship with a character can affect major and minor decisions, as well as boss fights. Some characters will be able to follow you around (sort of like companions in Skyrim).

Accessibility

* These would all be present in the pause menu and on the options button in the start screen.

• Able to change text size (small, medium, large).
• Narration toggle for prompts that normally wouldn’t have narration (it would say the name of an item picked up or read off menu options)?
• Able to alter color settings (colorblindness setting, decrease/increase saturation/contrast/etc).
• Able to reduce or eliminate flashing/screen shake (if flashing or screen shake would even be a thing in Reclaimed).
• Subtitle toggle.
• An accessibility mode where button inputs are made much easier (not sure how to do this yet) and enemy health and damage is significantly reduced, but multiplayer/invasions are disabled since this would pose PVP balance issues. Basically, this mode would make the game a whole lot easier for people who just want to experience the story/world and/or have trouble with the base button inputs.
• Dark/light menu and HUD modes.

A basic mockup of what the HUD might look like: