Do you (developers) ever feel like you bit off more than you could chew? Ever feel like the races in PS are redundant?
The traditional lot: Humans, Elves and Dwarves.Do you really need two different races under each category with hardly any difference in their stats and traits? They aren't warring factions or drastically different culturally. The Humans in PS don't have any special traits, with Xacha being slightly more inclined towards magic, which is possible for any humans individually. The Dwarves are, in fact, just different clans according to their description, with identical traits. The Dermorians seem to be a mix of traditional High or White Elves and Wood Elves. The Nolthrir initially seem to be inspired by Dark or Night Elves but they are not in conflict with Dermorians and are hardly different, with nearly identical traits (with some of Klyros thrown in). Did anyone notice that by comparison, Nolthrir seem to have the least background history, even though they're the oldest of the two? Dermorians escaped from Nomadic Knights, Nolthrir's past is a blank...
The additional lot: Lemurs, Kran, Diaboli, Enkidukai, Klyros and Ynnwn.Most seem to be a class/profession turned race type. However, why is there Ynnwn? They aren't different enough from Diaboli and add yet another layer of redundancy (and work).
Every race requires a new and unique 3D model, unique clothing and armor and a lot of work overall. The less models you have to make, the more you can concentrate on customizing them. You're not a commercial team, remember? In fact, it's redundant even for a commercial team. Besides, different Humans, Elves and Dwarves can be inclined towards different things culturally without being a whole new race. They can be differentiated enough through clothing, armor, architecture etc.
Initially, Diaboli seemed like a very interesting race, with the possibility to be the PlaneShift's "Dark Elves" or "Undead" but they were ruined with the whole "inclined towards Xiosia" thing in a fruitless effort to make them "non-evil". Now they are just uninteresting instead.
The game touts a classless and levelless system but seems to try to compensate for it through races and runs into all sorts of problems.
Lemurs - traditional "magic users" or "casters"...
Kran - traditional "warriors"/"melee" characters...
Diaboli - traditional darker/chaotic oriented "casters" initially but now useless...
Enkidukai - traditional "rogues"/"thieves"...
Klyros - traditional "rangers"/"archers"... (because of the bonus in bows or bow making for growing up in a Klyros village)
Let's say for a moment that there is a Shadow Priest class in the game, who is primarily a magic user or a caster class. A Shadow Priest comes up to an NPC in search of a quest, the game does a check on your class and level and gives you a suitable for your character quest that is doable and challenging enough at your level that it won't send you to kill an Ulbernaut to get its heart at level 1, for example. Not to mention class-specific quest rewards. How does the game know what difficulty of quests to give to a player now? It doesn't because it's oblivious to such details. Certain quests have faction prerequisites, most do not.
NPCs could also give out specialized quests for different classes or have alternative means of completing a quest, suitable for your character. Right now, some quests do have alternative paths to take but most do not and cannot be discarded unless completed as intended. Often, there is no way to tell whether there are alternative paths or a suitable outcome for your character. A quest can start out fairly mundane but ends up giving you evil, chaos or thief faction points and vice versa. If some NPC has a menial task like buying a cake for them, it's likely that a Shadow Priest would not want to bother with it or have suitable paths as an option during the quest. Of course, no one knows if such a quest simply ends with buying a cake or has a branching path with something unexpected and suitable for your character. If it doesn't, your Shadow Priest just ends up getting "good" or "purchasing cakes" faction points. Does anyone see anything wrong with that? The game is, once again, oblivious to such details.
It may be possible to make an interesting system that doesn't have classes or levels but it doesn't seem to be working out for you very well at the moment.
Any thoughts on the races, classes and levels?
Is this going to end up in "complaints department" or locked because someone gets upset?
