Alright time for some DMC brainstorm session brought to you by the good ol' toilet seat.
I was thinking how Capcom can really incentivize players to actually explore the environments for some good stuff that doesn't involve just boring health upgrades. When it comes to speed runs and just combat min/maxing... most of the exploration in DMC games is completely unnecessary. The reward from exploration in a DMC game boils down to getting a health upgrade (as a collectible, through a secret mission or through a combat adjudicator) or a consumable item (which no one wants to be using anyway)... that's really lackluster and is not a good enough reward for exploration or for Capcom to design good levels.
For there to be good incentive to explore, there needs to be a good reward hiding in the levels. And by that I mean stuff that increases your combat prowess far beyond just numbers. DMC1/DMC3 sort of have weapons in the environments but there aren't that many of them and most are usually in plain sight. No I am talking about a new system of collectibles here that enhance the combat.
Keeping in line with the tradition of DMC1, I am going to introduce "Runes" into DMC. As you guys may know, the DT gauge in DMC1 was symbolized by a series of rune symbols. In other games runes are usually attached to weapons to give like damage/crit boosts as in most RPGs. That's not suitable for a DMC game, no one wants to min/max DPS gauges or toughness... nah, I am suggesting that is to go even further beyond.
Every weapon can be equipped with 5 runes. However, you aren't equipped the 5 runes to the weapon.. you are equipped runes to the moves of the weapon. Think of them sort of like Support Gems in PoE. Here are a few that I thought of very quickly:
*Jump cancel rune: The move you equip this rune to has the property of being jump canceled out of during any frame. So you can attach this to Stinger and as soon as it connects you can jump out of it and do whatever you want. This is like tip of the ice berg stuff obviously, the experts can already see the applications of this.
*Phantom hit box rune: This extends the range of a move far beyond it's visual hit animation, sort of like how Vergil starts getting phantom hit boxes when he is at maximum motivation.
*Crazy cancel rune: You can attach this to a move and you can cancel that move into another move that has a rune equipped. So you can create synergies with moves that you didn't think of before.
*Dodge cancel rune: Move equipped with this move can be canceled into a dodge at any frame.
*Dodge offset rune: If you hit the attack button right after a dodge, the move that has this rune attached will come out instantly from a dodge.
*Devil enhanced rune: Attaching this rune to a move will give it the same properties on normal usage as it would if it was Devil Triggered. So Kick 13 gets enhanced to the DT Kick 13 version without needing to actually be in DT.
You get the idea. Basically, these are mechanics changes to moves that enhance customization of combat and greatly advances combat depth/breadth. Of course because you need 5 per weapon, you need to have at least a few copies of a rune in the game so you can attach a similar type of rune to different weapons in your load out (like have a jump cancel rune on Stinger and then have another one on Straight). There can even be lvl1, 2, 3 versions of runes on higher difficulties but that would probably only apply to certain runes.
There would also be runes you can attach to the character's basic moves (like air hike, wall run, rolls etc.) but those are more special types of runes and are more unique. So you can have a rune that turns your dodges into dashes if you time them properly to an attack or another rune that allows you to dodge an additional time or yet another rune that increases the i-frames on your dodge.
