This has been a topic of discussion since Skylanders Imaginators has been announced, and Skylanders confirmed it at GamesCom this weekend.
When you select a battle class for your Imaginator and save it to your Creation Crystal, you can never change that battle class again.
I don’t mean for that specific character, I mean for any character you choose to save to that crystal.
At anytime you can delete your character, and make a new one, but it will then always be the battlecast type you chose when you initially set it up.
So let’s say you put your fire Creation Crystal on the portal (which comes in the Starter Pack) and you decide you want to play as a Sorcerer. You make your new character, go and fight in the Skylands, and then you realize you like melee combat more. Well, you can design a new character, but he will always have to be a Sorcerer. If you want to play as a Brawler, you would have to go out and buy a new Creation Crystal for $9.99.
Here are the full quotes from the GameInformer article:
I asked Toys for Bob co-founder Paul Reiche about the decision. “We wanted to make sure that there wasn’t a sea of options, and that there weren’t so many different factors affecting the gameplay of the character that you couldn’t focus and create what we thought of as a class,” he told me. If you could constantly shift absolutely everything about it, you almost lose the fun of having a particular kind of character and the distinctions that we have. So as we were building it, we didn’t know to what degree people would be changing their characters. What we have found is that they settle on a physical form for the base character pretty fast. Then they’ll adjust gear, because it has stats. And if something shows up, like a new tagline piece or voice, they might experiment with that. It sort of resolves itself in less than an hour, and then people stick with that character and press forward. It is primarly to give people a direction. We think that helps define the name you give it, the appropriate voice, the color set you choose.”
We confirmed that resetting isn’t an option. You can still reassign owners, but you can’t tear a Imaginator back to its base form or reset its level.
“We allow changing of ownership, but we’re not resetting the Imaginator,” Reiche says. “You can tear it down all the back to the star form. The idea is that they start as a constellation, and you pull them out. They’re made of stars, and then you make them more physical. You can go back to that as much as you want. But you can’t go through the reset functionality.”
The “star form” Reiche is referring to is what you see after choosing the class, but before applying any of the many customization options. These include head, body, arms, legs, ears, eyes, and more.
This is an absolute terrible decision from the Skylanders team. One that they can still change, and hopefully will change.
I have been working on an editorial about the topic all weekend, which I’ll hopefully post in the next few days.
