A Better Forgotten Altar

This mod is meant to redesign the Event "Forgotten Altar" into something more fun for the player while maintaining the core design aspects and theme of the base event.

The Event "Forgotten Altar" has its options reworked. Now the event allows to player to choose from a handful of different sacrifices at the altar to receive rewards in relation to the scope of their offering. The player will also have the option to make multiple sacrifices should they feel daring enough.

If the player does not have the Golden Idol relic, they will instead have the option to make a (fittingly) large health sacrifice to obtain the Bloody Idol. The player will also have to option to receive some other unique rewards for lesser offerings.

The event has been given a conditional requirement such that the player will not be able to encounter the event if they are below a certain health threshold. (There is also a option to disable this condition in the mod’s configuration panel)

The event has also been given a set of minor adjustments when encountered at or above Ascension 15.

This event rework also includes a hidden text easter egg with a related base game event based on their themes.

The standard event suffers from not having a clear vision for its purpose. At a meta level, it functions as a generally negative event result to counter balance the relative expected outcome of any given event space. From a lore perspective, its theme is somewhat weak, which is further enhanced by the existence of unused alternate options in the text files, hinting at larger plans for this event that got scrapped. From a gameplay perspective, the event wants to reward the player for having taken the golden idol earlier, and punish them if they didn’t.

These factors all made this a difficult event to reimagine a clear vision for, and as such had to be scrapped and rethought several times.

Starting with the perceived potential flaws of the event, even though the event’s typical negative outcome serves to lower the expected value of choosing an event space, the manner in which the individual event punishes the player feels very dissatisfying; more the result of bad luck, than any potential poor decision making on the player’s part. Additionally, the one positive outcome of the event relies on the player having had the luck of finding one specific event earlier in their run, which further enhances the feeling of futility in the bad outcomes. "I am not able to receive the one good reward because I didn’t get lucky earlier and have the game offer me the thing I needed here?" Feeling the consequences of your actions can be a very satisfying design when used properly, however, in this case the decision the player is being punished for is not really a decision in which they had much choice.

Conversely, showing up to the event with the proper relic and trading it is one of the largest single power increases that can be found in the game. This leads to the event feeling very much like a "Win More, Lose More" type scenario. If the player already had the good luck of getting the Golden Idol earlier, they get the added bonus of now being able to get one of the most powerful relics in the game. If they didn’t get that random reward earlier, they are forced to choose from one of two very undesirable outcomes. This creates a negative feedback loop from a gameplay perspective, and from a player mentality perspective.

In considering all of these aspects, it became apparent that a major overhaul of the event choices would be necessary to achieve any meaningful improvement beyond just doing a simple numbers change. Alongside this, the core thematic aspects of Blood, HP interaction, and Sacrifice were identified. In the event text, there are countless references to blood, from the name of the idol, to the self-harm themes, to the visual design. Every choice also resulted in a mechanic that interacted with the player’s HP in some way or another. Lastly, each option required a sacrifice of some kind, either a relic, or HP, or deck quality, not to mention the statue explicitly demanding sacrifice upon entry. As such, these were the central aspects that the theme of the event was reimagined around.

From a gameplay perspective, one major goal was to make the event feel less binary. The player should not either get a strictly positive or negative outcome based on oe single random prior factor. To accomplish this, the event was altered to function more closely to a "Blood Shop". The player can choose how much sacrifice they are willing to give, and will get rewarded based on that sacrifice. Nothing comes for free, but now the player should feel more fairly treated by the game’s systems. Each option now has the potential to be a good one depending on how they’ve played so far, and how they plan to continue.

In the base event, the player has the option to desecrate the altar and get cursed for their trouble, but from a logical perspective, it doesn’t make much sense for the character to randomly destroy a shrine without some kind of reward to reap, or rationale for acting as such. To remedy this, "A Better Forgotten Altar" recontextualizes the choice into one of defiance. The statue demands sacrifice, but the player does not acquiesce thus causing whatever higher being inhabits this shrine to dole out punishment. Conversely, should the player choose to present an offering to the being, they will receive rewards that should be able to help them on their journey, provided they are able to survive the coming rooms. These alterations should hopefully give the player more thinking to do instead of always choosing the good option if available, and choosing the less harmful option if not.

In order to remove the role that earlier randomness plays in determining the quality of this event, the Bloody Idol can now be obtained with a sufficiently large sacrifice should the player arrive without having seen the previous event. Additionally, the Blood Vial felt like a natural alternative reward to receive at an altar dedicated to a blood god, as was thus chosen for another potential reward, along with a blood potion. Special interactions were also designed in order to make arriving at the event already in possession of the relevant relics feel rewarding in its own right.

The goal here was to provide functionally useful rewards for prices that sometimes will be worth paying, and sometimes will not, ideally dependent on the choices the player has made in reaching this point. I am particularly proud of the manner in which these gameplay considerations were able to be tied to the core themes of the event.

Where previous event reimaginings, such as "A Better Match" drastically improved the power level of the event, "A Better Forgotten Altar" hopefully stays closer to the intended balance level of the standard event, while making the decision making process much more dynamic and engaging, and simultaneously reducing player frustration.

I hope you have a good time with this mod, and I welcome any and all feedback.
Special thanks to 旅渚Lastcel for the Simplified Chinese translation!

If you enjoyed this mod, consider checking out some of my other mods:
A Better Note
A Better Sensory Stone
A Better Match
A Better Knowing Skull
A Better Third Choice