Skills

Skills

Instead of classes, Tirvale is a game where you build up a set of skills, the combination of which creates your unique character. Some skills are taught only by specific guilds to members. Skills are limited - you can only have 3 combat skills, 3 utility skills, and 2 bonus skills. This is part of how we enforce player uniqueness. You will ultimately need to choose where to specialize.

Furthermore, your choice of region, religion, and nation will also differentiate your character from others who may have a similar skillset. Skills are generally improved by performing the relevant action, aka swords is improved by fighting or training with swords. However, key points along this journey will require outside intervention to continue your leveling, such as finding an appropriate master or skill tome.

Skills have four tiers, the first three of which have 10 levels, going from beginner, intermediate, advanced, and then master. Becoming a master will be very difficult.

Combat Skills

These are skills focused on fighting. Many unlock actions in combat beyond what a weapon can do at its basic level (anyone can stab and slash with a sword, but the swords skill will unlock other moves such as cleave, and parry). Generally, you can choose to build "tall" or "wide".

A tall build could be one focused only on swords. You could have your highest level skill be swords, then a second skill that is a more niche skill for using a specific type of sword (e.g. katanas), and then finally an even further niche skill around a style you learned while on a long and arduous quest, Art of the Lightning Draw. These three related skills will stack bonuses and make your sword style truly formidable.

Conversely, you could go wide by maybe dropping both vanilla swords and katanas, and instead picking up mounted combat and combat breathing. Mounted combat will let you effectively fight while riding a creature, and combat breathing focuses on heightening your overall physical abilities and extending your ability to fight. While your single move damage would be lower in this build, you might be a more versatile and effective combatant.

Utility Skills

These are skills focused on your "profession" outside of combat. They range from survival, travel, bartering, gathering, crafting, and more. We suspect that a character's "identity" will likely be driven either by a combat focus, with supporting utility skills, or an artisan focus, with supporting combat skills.

An example of the former would be a monster hunter who has some tracking utility skills, and survival skills, but really has focused on being good at killing their prey. And the latter might be a sword smith who has high level crafting skills but also has picked up some combat ability both to survive their travels in search of rare ores and recipes, and so that they can practice with and demonstrate the blades they craft.

Bonus Skills

These are skills unlocked by unusual means and don't follow the typical development patterns of other skills. The most common example are racial skills, of which each race grants one to a character. Other skills in this category might be a reward from a particularly difficult quest or exploration. But most come with tradeoffs or serious implications to gameplay. Some might even be non-optional (such as a curse), and would become a large part of your narrative - do you lean into this newfound power at some cost or begin a quest to free yourself of its influence?

Note: This is a partial list of known skills. Many more skills are available in the game, including guild-specific skills, quest rewards, and other unique abilities.