Skill Tree Reworks

From removing random nodes to perk rearranging, dive into how our team is tackling the skill tree reworks.

Our team has been taking the time to look through every character's skill trees in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to better the player experience. Random Nodes have been a point of frustration for the community, and we have been listening to feedback about some of your favorite characters and the perks they have access to. We let our team cook, and we are happy to unveil one aspect of our Skill Tree reworks in our 6/11/2024 update.

Firstly, we are removing random nodes entirely from every playable character’s skill trees. With the random node removals, a dedicated perk is replacing it. For example, the first random node to the right on Sissy’s Skill Tree will be replaced with the perk Activated. This way, players can respec freely without worrying about needing to respec multiple times to get a perk that they want. When you load into the game for the first time after this update, all character skill trees will be reset, like a respec, and perk levels will remain the same. Players can then go through the new skill trees and explore to find a build that fits their play style. From both player feedback and our design team, we have given Sonny the perks No Sell, Fast Hands, and Extra Drip. We’ve seen a lot of feedback from many of our Leland mains about wanting a health perk; We are happy to say that Leland will now have the perk Extra Drip. Another change of note is for Sissy, we gave her the Victim perk Slippery, as it fits her character.

“The team designed the metagame to leave some elements randomized, hoping to create opportunities for a surprise score in the skill tree by way of a perk unlock. The random nodes unfortunately did not work out that way, and many players expressed frustrations at these nodes, wanting to just reroll until a specific perk could be obtained.

After a lot of examination and iteration, the team has decided to replace the random nodes fully with perks we think will keep the trees fair and balanced, but also allow some opportunity for better build diversity and synergy.

This change also leaves us in a better position to balance around emerging metas, shuffle up the most common builds, and introduce new perks in the future. So it's not simply about removing the random nodes but the bigger picture of better management of skill trees for what we see as a long life for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”

- Mattshotcha, Brand Strategy, Gun Interactive

While this change will be a lot for the community to take in and get accustomed to, we know there may be more still to do on this front. And so, the team is still head down working further on refining perks in game. In the near future, we have changes coming to how Grandpa perks function and unlock in game. We also will be keeping an eye out for opportunities to shift perks around, rework perks, or replace perks entirely. We even have been considering introducing some new Unique perks for certain characters, where applicable and necessary.

Please talk to us about these upcoming changes and keep the conversations going across our official subreddit, r/TXChainSawGame, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Thank you for reading.