An idea I had early on in EBF5’s development was the option to “sidegrade” equipment by changing one main aspect of it – like elemental properties. This would allow crafting items to still be useful after everything was fully upgraded, and it would allow you to use your favourite equipment in more situations. Sidegrades could be obtained in the form of crafting recipes, so that would create more treasure to find. It’s also a mechanic that players can completely ignore if they are not interested in customising their characters to such a degree, so it need not complicate the game.

Anyway, I realised this idea probably wouldn’t feel good unless all the different versions of equips had their own graphics to distinguish them, and that would be too much work.

I did play around with this idea a bit with the Alternative Equips mode in EBF5, but that took things a bit too far and gave equips all new stats, and things got a bit silly. I think changing only one important aspect of an equip would make it much simpler for the player to remember what is what, while still making a big difference in battles.

So now I’m testing out some alternative equip graphics for the original idea. Turns out the idea was viable after all…

In related news: I’ve been redrawing some EBF5 icons for drawing practice.
My style has changed a little bit – there’s almost 10 years between these icons!