No.



I have mentioned this before but in less formal ways, so I thought I might as well put it here in our new design blog for future reference.

We have not don this and we have no future plans to ever do a “community god design.” God design is an extremely iterative process. We change abilities often during development. More info can be read on my “god design process” post. We wouldn’t do something like this because the final product god would not stay true to the original design. We have years of evidence to prove that the freedom to make changes during development is critically important to creating a successful god.

To my knowledge, no designer has ever borrowed or stolen a kit or ability from a community concept on purpose. Anything that resembles a community concept (or other game’s ability) is purely coincidence.

There are 2 main points i’m trying to make here (specifically for god ability/kit designs):

Community concepts can definitely inspire a Hi-Rez Team. They can spark ideas that lead to other ideas or open up new ways of thinking. However, community designs are never used as direct copies in our designs. This is not because we purposely avoid them, but because in the infinite realm of possibilities we always come up with something different. We definitely do not see all community designs and we definitely don’t remember and consider the ones we do see while designing gods.

Even if a design was attempted to be copied directly, its impossible that it would remain 100% the same in the final product. We would surely learn something during development and make some adjustments.



Many god designs lend themselves to similar mechanics. I designed Camazotz. I also read plenty of community concepts for him because I pay attention to our forums and social media and he was a popular topic of discussion. I’m sure I read some “echo” abilities in the process. When we started on the god of course I wanted an echo ability. Now this wasn’t because the community convinced me of it but just because it fits the god. I have no idea if someone out there designed Camazotz’s Screech ability in the same way that I did. Its entirely possible that they did. The point is: That ability had a general theme that was prototyped, tested, and changed multiple times to result in what plays best. The original text is only a very slight part of the process.



The things we do notice from the community about gods are more general. Here are things you could post, comment, like, upvote, etc that we notice and do act on.

I wish we had more healer gods! (or other general archetype)



I wish we could get Set in the game! (or whatever the gods name is)



I wish we had a god with more traps (or any other type of game mechanic)



We notice these things. We want to make gods that you want. Ones that are mentioned by name often, or mechanics and archetypes that come up often are always brought up and discussed internally. It does guarantee their development, but we definitely consider them.

I don’t want to dissuade fans from doing their own god concepts, They are really cool pieces of content that are fun to read and could even be portfolio work for the creator, depending on their career path. Just know that they generally do not affect our own god design process, beyond noting how often the community attempts to design a potentially popular god. We follow the steps I detailed in my other post and rarely, if ever, use outside sources.