Elderand is pretty good, but it could be great with a few changes.
Elderand is a Metroidvania game with beautiful pixel art, smooth gameplay, and cool sound effects. It has a lot of tools and even more enemies to fight. It even has a trader who goes from place to place. All of this works well together to make a game with a big trip and even bigger challenges that can be played in a short amount of time.
Elderand doesn’t need to change much because it already has so much going for it. It has plenty of room to build on what it does well and add new, exciting features where it might be lacking. Bigger isn’t always better, but in a world as rich and beautiful as Elderand’s, it’s hard not to think about what could happen after you beat the final boss.
Make Ranged Weapons More Viable
A great Metroidvania has a well-balanced arsenal of weapons. Elderand’s selection of bashers, slicers, and pummellers gives players a lot to choose from, but the most useful ones tend to be in the close direction. Most of the time, swords, whips, and battle-axes are better than bows, staffs, and throwables as you fight your way through tough mobs and bosses.
Elderand could not only make ranged weapons stronger overall, but it could also add features that make them more useful on the battlefield. For example, it could give them the ability to aim and remove the ammunition limit on bows and throwables in exchange for a rechargeable stamina reserve that works like mana.
Make The Game Longer
Elderand is a very short game, especially considering how detailed the settings are and how creepy the enemies are. After the final boss is killed, players who already know the ins and outs of the genre and don’t need to learn how the game works and what the best strategies are might be left wanting.
All games have to end at some point, but it’s easy to picture a bigger Elderand world, maybe in the form of DLC or a sequel, with more mysterious lore to find, more dark corridors to explore, and, most importantly, more scary enemies to defeat.
More Magic, Please
With some care, adding more magical features to Elderand could add an exciting new dimension to the way the game is played without making it too hard. Your hunter already has a supply of mana, which is mostly used to control the ranged attack of staffs. That blue, ephemeral stuff that sorcerers use has a lot of promise to be the basis for a wider range of spellbinding abilities.
What if your hunter could cast spells like Amon, the Master of Serpents? What if staffs could be used with swords at the same time and used magic to make them stronger? These are just a few ideas for a game that seems ready to make better use of its fighting systems, which already work well.
Hunter Needs More Stats
As it stands, you can only improve your hunter’s strength, magic skill, health, and chance to land a critical hit on four numbers. There’s nothing wrong with this setup on its own, but when you put it together with the other ideas on this list. It’s easy to imagine a more advanced skill tree that lets you create a unique hunter.
In addition to making players pay more attention to how they spend their attribute points, an Elderand skill tree could add specialisations that credit players for playing in a certain way. But make sure that it’s easier to understand than Salt and Sanctuary’s.
More Creative Afflictions
Aside from their basic ways to attack, such as speed and range, most mobs in Elderand aren’t very complex. A few of their effects, like bleeding, are the only exceptions. Otherwise, they just hit hard and often. Most of the time, this works, because they usually hit harder and more often than you want. But as you learn to be patient and figure out how to dodge. You might wish they had a few more moves.
If mobs had different abilities based on their type and where they came from. Players would have to change how they play more from one place to the next. This is something that bosses already have. But there’s no reason why their loyal workers shouldn’t have even a little bit of that extra power.
More Character Customization
Just before you go to Elderand, you can change the way your hunter looks a little bit. You can’t change your decisions until you start a new game, so try not to feel bad about them.
Elderand could give players the option to change these small details as they play. But why not also add a more advanced set of customization tools? Even though you only have a certain number of pixels to work with. You should be able to give your hunter a cool scar or a few extra inches of height.
A Crafting System
In a game where finding and opening boxes hidden around the map is the main way to find new things, the idea of making things seems far away. Chests can get boring fast, so letting players build and brew with raw materials dropped by mobs, for example, might be a nice addition to the game.
Elderand’s enemies are already made to look like they belong in their biomes. So it wouldn’t be hard to add a larger group of dropped items as a prize for exploring the whole map. With these items, you could make things like more potions or even new weapons.
Side Quests
This could be part of the “make the game longer” idea, but even if Elderand wasn’t physically expanded (that is, if the size of the playable area didn’t grow). The game could still add a lot more NPCs who give quests. This would add to the story of Happy Wheels game and give players more to do.
This would also make hidden chests less important because there would be more creative ways to give people loot. It could also make combat feel more important if quests required players to kill a certain number of certain enemies or gave them a certain amount of time to finish a job.
Hunter Needs A Wingman
Pets in games rarely get in the way. They’re more of a win-win situation. You get a friend who can help you reach your goals in some important way. So why wouldn’t you want one in Elderand?
Your shooter might be able to get a hunting dog that can be let loose on your enemies. Or maybe it’s not a pet at all, but a bipedal companion. Someone who goes with you on your mission into the dungeons and makes battles more difficult and gratifying. There are a lot of options.
Disable Enemy Respawn
Okay, this is something you should expect from Metroidvanias, but you’d be lying if you said you never got a little annoyed when you left a room you spent ten minutes clearing out and then realised you forgot to open a chest full of valuable loot.
Even though letting players stop or slow enemy respawn would cut down on Elderand’s already short play time. It might be a good choice for players who want a more casual experience.
