Gauntlet: More Classes

[GMMichael]

Warrior shot the food!

Wizard needs food, badly!

Valkyrie now has reflective shot!

Elf is about to die!

What other classes should have been in Gauntlet? The original five stats were what differentiated the classes: shot, melee, armor, speed and magic. In what stats does your class specialize?

 

[Celebrim]

Warrior shot the food!

Wizard needs food, badly!

Valkyrie now has reflective shot!

Elf is about to die!

What other classes should have been in Gauntlet? The original five stats were what differentiated the classes: shot, melee, armor, speed and magic. In what stats does your class specialize?

Every class that could of been in Gauntlet, was in Gauntlet.

With only 5 (or 6, because shot broke into shot speed and shot power) stats to vary, you have a very limited range of distinctive possibilities that are still (close) to balanced with each other - particularly since not all the stats are even or can extend over a wide range. Even as it was, it was generally recognized that Wizard and Warrior were superior to the Elf and Valkyrie, and later attempts by the manufacturer to balance play time per coin (which really sucked, and made the arcade generally less fun than ports to other formats) recognized this.

 

[GMMichael]

A little more homework tells me that the Jester, Knight, Sorceress, and Dwarf disagree with you.

Good point about the Warrior and Wizard, though. I'll see if I can avoid that in the game I'm working on.

If we're gonna crunch numbers, I guess we could say that each class has a different arrangement of highest to lowest stats. That gives us 5x4x3x2x1, 120 different possible classes. If we reduce that to about 10, then the classes might still be different enough to be interesting, no?

Maybe some races: hobbit, elf, dwarf, goblin...

And humans: warrior, wizard, valkyrie, priest, knight...alchemist?

 

[Celebrim]

A little more homework tells me that the Jester, Knight, Sorceress, and Dwarf disagree with you.

Gauntlet Dark Legacy added expanded game play options which added several new distinctive abilities, including the ability for each class to make two different types of ranged attacks, the ability to strafe, the ability to block attacks, the ability to perform charges, a power up meter called 'turbo', and new class specific combination attacks that could be built up by different sequences of attacks, and cooperative attacks that could be performed by particular sequences of two characters. Plus the game was 3D rather than 2D.

Adding many new variables obviously adds new distinctive character creation options. You can make a class for example with the same defense values differ relatively in ability to block, ability to charge, and the sort of combo attacks it can perform. That being said, I'm not really convinced that the 8 classes in Dark Legacy were as differentiated as all that, as it could well be that Knight/Valkyrie, Wizard/Sorceress, Elf/Jester, and Fighter/Dwarf and differed mostly by the sprite they were represented by, which means you still had only 4 classes but you had 8 avatars.

You however asked about Gauntlet, and my answer still stands for that game, with one caveat. For Gauntlet II, there were several very subtle balancing options hidden in the class design, such as how much bonus food would be found on a level (the aforementioned 'later balancing efforts'). These were used to balance weaker classes like Valkyrie with Warrior/Wizard by giving more frequent health boosts. Those sort of features could be used in a Gauntlet I inspired game, so for example you could add a Halfling that was generally weaker than other classes but found more food. I'm not sure however whether that would be advisable game design.