Overlord 1
So hey have a post comparing Overlord and Pikmin and finding Overlord a bit wanting.
Dragging stuff
In Pikmin, time is limited, and the number of forces you can have on the field is limited, making the process of working out decisions about how many Pikmin to assign to drag a given thing back to base a complicated decision. The more Pikmin you assign to an object, the fewer Pikmin you'll have for other tasks, but the fewer you assign to the item, the longer it will take to arrive -if you're closing in on the end of the day, taking too long can mean the object never arrives at all and the Pikmin just die.
In Overlord, your force size is still limited, but time is not, and no replacement mechanic makes carrying objects a meaningful game mechanic. The result is that the player tends to be primarily concerned with their time as a player, rather than as part of the gameplay. Overlord occasionally tries to make it meaningful by ensuring your forces will be ambushed on the way back, but that doesn't make the dragging mechanic meaningful; it just emphasizes that dragging things back wastes the player's time by making it so if you don't already know whether they'll be ambushed or not, you should escort them just in case they do get ambushed, instead of getting on with actual progress while they handle the task.
The net result is that I'm not really sure why the drag-back mechanic even is in Overlord. It basically just serves to waste the player's time compared to if, say, Minions were teleporting pickups after a 10-second ritual that would be interrupted if they're attacked (Which would ensure you'd have to go through the effort of clearing the area before grabbing pickups), outside of a few cases where you're taking an object to some location other than your base.
The sheer pointlessness of it is part of what motivates the Pikmin comparison: Overlord seems like a game that looked at Pikmin, thought its basic mechanics were cool, and haphazardly copied parts of them without understanding what the point was or how they were integrated with other mechanics to be meaningful themselves.
Combat
Pikmin's combat works more on the basis of the larger context than on the actual combat being directly engaging. In Pikmin, you're constantly thinking about whether it's worth the time to fight a given enemy, whether the enemy presents a problem for trying to drag loot back down the line or can be safely ignored, whether the enemy is worth enough Pikmin to bother to kill, whether you're capable as a player of killing it with sufficiently few casualties to make it break even or pull you ahead on Pikmin count, etc. The combat can afford to be a bit simplistic because actually winning a fight is only one facet of good play.
In Overlord, fights are actually even more simplistic than in Pikmin on the level of 'winning the fight', and then it lacks the timer that ties all of Pikmin's mechanics together. The odd thing is that Overlord actually gives you a lot more tools to precisely control Minions, but most of the time you don't care about these mechanics, and generally when you do care it's because the game went out of its way to force you to use that particular mechanic, not because it's a naturally beneficial idea. Fights are boring timewasters in Overlord, which is a bit of a problem given Overlord doesn't really have anything else in the gameplay to be compelling.
Casualties
This too comes back to the time mechanic. Pikmin has time, and the original Pikmin in particular has a limited amount of time total for you to complete the game. Taking serious casualties that force you to grind out replacements matters to the core gameplay.
In Overlord, it just adds more grinding to an already grind-y game.
Colors
In Pikmin, managing colors once again comes back to the time mechanic. Often, you don't need to use any color in particular to handle a given enemy -enemies in water can be baited out, enemies that use fire telegraph their attack, and high up enemies usually come down at some point- but using the right color speeds things up, which... time mechanic. Fast is good, giving you more time to handle the rest of the game. And this applies to handling non-enemy situations; having Blues tear down a gate in the water is ideally done swiftly. Using Bomb Rocks to vaporize a stone gate ideally happens in just the one trip, without you looping back for more Bomb Rocks. Because you really have only so much time.
Pikmin 2 doesn't have time important anymore, but it manages to make color balance a tricky challenge anyway by having you do dungeons in a single sweep with a limited capacity to acquire reinforcements; you need to get the right balance ahead of time, avoid casualties of key colors, and just generally juggle a complex set of priorities that doesn't have easy answers. More Purples and Reds is better for slaughtering enemies, but if you don't have enough Yellows to even move some high-up item, you'll need to come back later. If you don't have enough Blues to drag something out of the water, you'll have to come back later. Etc.
Overlord... sort of tries to go for something more like an RPG party sort of thing, with Browns as your melee meatshield, Reds as your ranged DPS, Blues as your supporting healers, and Greens as your sneaky Rogue sort of fellow, but it honestly doesn't work very well. In practice Browns are simply far more powerful than the other colors in most situations, with it being a good idea to have some Reds just because of the mechanical difficulties of stacking a million Browns into a limited amount of space and a good idea to have some Blues to undo casualties. The game periodically forces you to use Greens to deal with a gimmick enemy or to clear a poisoned path, or Reds to attack through impassable terrain or open a fire-blocked path, or Blues to get at something across water, but the Minion color mechanics don't really achieve anything in particular in real design terms.
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And no, Overlord 2 doesn't really smooth out Overlord 1's game design problems. I could make an argument it actually had all-around worse gameplay, in fact.
Better writing, at least. Still flawed, but better.
Plot: As I Understood It
Before I ever had firsthand exposure to Overlord's plot, I ended up incidentally learning of the basic sketch of the story... kind of.
The version of the story in my head went like this:
Once upon a time, there was an Evil Overlord and 8 Heroes. The Heroes invaded the Evil Overlord's tower, and then killed him, but one of them fell in battle. The other seven then wandered off and it turned out they really weren't that great of people outside of having opposed the Evil Overlord, and so they went on to become a Seven Deadly Sins-themed bunch of monsters. Meanwhile, the Minions, now masterless, ended up digging up the fallen Hero, who for whatever reason had lost their memory (Near-death experience, sure why not), and crowning him as their Overlord because Minions need an Overlord, that's just how things work.
At which point the game starts. I was pretty hazy on what plot, if any, came after that. I knew the player would find out they used to be a Hero, but it wasn't clear if that was anything the player character reacted to, and if so whether it was a player choice or a fixed reaction or what.
That sounded like a pretty neat story. It's subverting the usual (dumb) story notion that defeating a bad guy means you're a good guy. It gives the game some room to indulge in bad guy behavior and imagery while still giving people something to work with if they're uncomfortable with playing Basically-Sauron; you were a hero the whole time, and you can just assume that once your character found that out they abandoned their evilness, or whatever. The Seven Deadly Sins theme provides a basic framework for making each of the heroes a distinctive bad guy, and also makes it a little easier for the audience to tell we're not supposed to think they're good guys just because the player is ostensibly playing a bad guy and fighting them. And of course it was suggestive of Minion culture/psychology in a manner that was appropriately alien and interesting.
It was a sketchy framework I had some concerns about, but that was okay. I knew I didn't know that much about the plot.
Unfortunately, it turns out it actually goes like this:
Once upon a time, there was an Evil Overlord and 8 Heroes. The Heroes invaded the Evil Overlord's tower, and then killed him, but one of them fell in battle... and secretly, the Evil Overlord actually possessed Not-Gandalf. He proceeded to corrupt the other six Heroes into Seven Deadly Sins-themed monsters because, er, he's Evil, what do you want from him? Oh, and he had a Clever Plot to turn the fallen Hero into a replacement Overlord, who would go around smiting the Seven Deadly Sins-themed Heroes to achieve the old Evil Overlord's goal... of... things?... look, it's all Just As Keikaku, alright?
And then he confronts the player Overlord, steals all the Spells and Minions, and laughs at you a lot.
Then for no reason you get back your Spells. And then some of the Browns turn out to be still loyal to you, for no explained reason. And you're able to retrieve your Minion Hives to somehow reacquire the loyalty of the other colors. Look, you've had your low point of the villain proving he's superior to you in every way, just... just go kill him. It's a cool boss fight, alright? This is a video game, plot isn't everything.
And then you either go on to be a benevolent tyrant or a really bad evil ruler, depending on what you did in regards to the game's morality system.
I... was pretty disappointed, to be honest. Partly just because, if you hadn't noticed from my description, the plot has some pretty big holes in it (Exactly why did the old Evil Overlord have you made into a new Evil Overlord? He already made the Heroes non-threats to him, so having you go smite them doesn't accomplish anything...), but honestly I'm more disappointed with a subtle element. The version of the plot I'd thought was true was one in which events play out organically, the point is made that opposing evil people doesn't actually automatically make you a good person, and was just in general an interesting-sounding plot. The actual plot is... not only does it have holes in it, but it has this undertone that people only do bad things if they're made to be bad by outside powers (Which among other points doesn't even fit thematically to Overlord wanting to give the player morality choices), it indulges in a stock 'the villain had everything planned out because that's just how villains work', and... eeeh.
The odd thing is the game apparently won awards for its writing. I honestly can't imagine why. Gnarl is occasionally entertaining, I suppose?
Still, the What You Are In The Dark thing it's got going on is a nifty variation on a classic concept. That's something Overlord does of note.
Too bad the sequel totally ignored it...
Dragging stuff
In Pikmin, time is limited, and the number of forces you can have on the field is limited, making the process of working out decisions about how many Pikmin to assign to drag a given thing back to base a complicated decision. The more Pikmin you assign to an object, the fewer Pikmin you'll have for other tasks, but the fewer you assign to the item, the longer it will take to arrive -if you're closing in on the end of the day, taking too long can mean the object never arrives at all and the Pikmin just die.
In Overlord, your force size is still limited, but time is not, and no replacement mechanic makes carrying objects a meaningful game mechanic. The result is that the player tends to be primarily concerned with their time as a player, rather than as part of the gameplay. Overlord occasionally tries to make it meaningful by ensuring your forces will be ambushed on the way back, but that doesn't make the dragging mechanic meaningful; it just emphasizes that dragging things back wastes the player's time by making it so if you don't already know whether they'll be ambushed or not, you should escort them just in case they do get ambushed, instead of getting on with actual progress while they handle the task.
The net result is that I'm not really sure why the drag-back mechanic even is in Overlord. It basically just serves to waste the player's time compared to if, say, Minions were teleporting pickups after a 10-second ritual that would be interrupted if they're attacked (Which would ensure you'd have to go through the effort of clearing the area before grabbing pickups), outside of a few cases where you're taking an object to some location other than your base.
The sheer pointlessness of it is part of what motivates the Pikmin comparison: Overlord seems like a game that looked at Pikmin, thought its basic mechanics were cool, and haphazardly copied parts of them without understanding what the point was or how they were integrated with other mechanics to be meaningful themselves.
Combat
Pikmin's combat works more on the basis of the larger context than on the actual combat being directly engaging. In Pikmin, you're constantly thinking about whether it's worth the time to fight a given enemy, whether the enemy presents a problem for trying to drag loot back down the line or can be safely ignored, whether the enemy is worth enough Pikmin to bother to kill, whether you're capable as a player of killing it with sufficiently few casualties to make it break even or pull you ahead on Pikmin count, etc. The combat can afford to be a bit simplistic because actually winning a fight is only one facet of good play.
In Overlord, fights are actually even more simplistic than in Pikmin on the level of 'winning the fight', and then it lacks the timer that ties all of Pikmin's mechanics together. The odd thing is that Overlord actually gives you a lot more tools to precisely control Minions, but most of the time you don't care about these mechanics, and generally when you do care it's because the game went out of its way to force you to use that particular mechanic, not because it's a naturally beneficial idea. Fights are boring timewasters in Overlord, which is a bit of a problem given Overlord doesn't really have anything else in the gameplay to be compelling.
Casualties
This too comes back to the time mechanic. Pikmin has time, and the original Pikmin in particular has a limited amount of time total for you to complete the game. Taking serious casualties that force you to grind out replacements matters to the core gameplay.
In Overlord, it just adds more grinding to an already grind-y game.
Colors
In Pikmin, managing colors once again comes back to the time mechanic. Often, you don't need to use any color in particular to handle a given enemy -enemies in water can be baited out, enemies that use fire telegraph their attack, and high up enemies usually come down at some point- but using the right color speeds things up, which... time mechanic. Fast is good, giving you more time to handle the rest of the game. And this applies to handling non-enemy situations; having Blues tear down a gate in the water is ideally done swiftly. Using Bomb Rocks to vaporize a stone gate ideally happens in just the one trip, without you looping back for more Bomb Rocks. Because you really have only so much time.
Pikmin 2 doesn't have time important anymore, but it manages to make color balance a tricky challenge anyway by having you do dungeons in a single sweep with a limited capacity to acquire reinforcements; you need to get the right balance ahead of time, avoid casualties of key colors, and just generally juggle a complex set of priorities that doesn't have easy answers. More Purples and Reds is better for slaughtering enemies, but if you don't have enough Yellows to even move some high-up item, you'll need to come back later. If you don't have enough Blues to drag something out of the water, you'll have to come back later. Etc.
Overlord... sort of tries to go for something more like an RPG party sort of thing, with Browns as your melee meatshield, Reds as your ranged DPS, Blues as your supporting healers, and Greens as your sneaky Rogue sort of fellow, but it honestly doesn't work very well. In practice Browns are simply far more powerful than the other colors in most situations, with it being a good idea to have some Reds just because of the mechanical difficulties of stacking a million Browns into a limited amount of space and a good idea to have some Blues to undo casualties. The game periodically forces you to use Greens to deal with a gimmick enemy or to clear a poisoned path, or Reds to attack through impassable terrain or open a fire-blocked path, or Blues to get at something across water, but the Minion color mechanics don't really achieve anything in particular in real design terms.
-----------------
And no, Overlord 2 doesn't really smooth out Overlord 1's game design problems. I could make an argument it actually had all-around worse gameplay, in fact.
Better writing, at least. Still flawed, but better.
Plot: As I Understood It
Before I ever had firsthand exposure to Overlord's plot, I ended up incidentally learning of the basic sketch of the story... kind of.
The version of the story in my head went like this:
Once upon a time, there was an Evil Overlord and 8 Heroes. The Heroes invaded the Evil Overlord's tower, and then killed him, but one of them fell in battle. The other seven then wandered off and it turned out they really weren't that great of people outside of having opposed the Evil Overlord, and so they went on to become a Seven Deadly Sins-themed bunch of monsters. Meanwhile, the Minions, now masterless, ended up digging up the fallen Hero, who for whatever reason had lost their memory (Near-death experience, sure why not), and crowning him as their Overlord because Minions need an Overlord, that's just how things work.
At which point the game starts. I was pretty hazy on what plot, if any, came after that. I knew the player would find out they used to be a Hero, but it wasn't clear if that was anything the player character reacted to, and if so whether it was a player choice or a fixed reaction or what.
That sounded like a pretty neat story. It's subverting the usual (dumb) story notion that defeating a bad guy means you're a good guy. It gives the game some room to indulge in bad guy behavior and imagery while still giving people something to work with if they're uncomfortable with playing Basically-Sauron; you were a hero the whole time, and you can just assume that once your character found that out they abandoned their evilness, or whatever. The Seven Deadly Sins theme provides a basic framework for making each of the heroes a distinctive bad guy, and also makes it a little easier for the audience to tell we're not supposed to think they're good guys just because the player is ostensibly playing a bad guy and fighting them. And of course it was suggestive of Minion culture/psychology in a manner that was appropriately alien and interesting.
It was a sketchy framework I had some concerns about, but that was okay. I knew I didn't know that much about the plot.
Unfortunately, it turns out it actually goes like this:
Once upon a time, there was an Evil Overlord and 8 Heroes. The Heroes invaded the Evil Overlord's tower, and then killed him, but one of them fell in battle... and secretly, the Evil Overlord actually possessed Not-Gandalf. He proceeded to corrupt the other six Heroes into Seven Deadly Sins-themed monsters because, er, he's Evil, what do you want from him? Oh, and he had a Clever Plot to turn the fallen Hero into a replacement Overlord, who would go around smiting the Seven Deadly Sins-themed Heroes to achieve the old Evil Overlord's goal... of... things?... look, it's all Just As Keikaku, alright?
And then he confronts the player Overlord, steals all the Spells and Minions, and laughs at you a lot.
Then for no reason you get back your Spells. And then some of the Browns turn out to be still loyal to you, for no explained reason. And you're able to retrieve your Minion Hives to somehow reacquire the loyalty of the other colors. Look, you've had your low point of the villain proving he's superior to you in every way, just... just go kill him. It's a cool boss fight, alright? This is a video game, plot isn't everything.
And then you either go on to be a benevolent tyrant or a really bad evil ruler, depending on what you did in regards to the game's morality system.
I... was pretty disappointed, to be honest. Partly just because, if you hadn't noticed from my description, the plot has some pretty big holes in it (Exactly why did the old Evil Overlord have you made into a new Evil Overlord? He already made the Heroes non-threats to him, so having you go smite them doesn't accomplish anything...), but honestly I'm more disappointed with a subtle element. The version of the plot I'd thought was true was one in which events play out organically, the point is made that opposing evil people doesn't actually automatically make you a good person, and was just in general an interesting-sounding plot. The actual plot is... not only does it have holes in it, but it has this undertone that people only do bad things if they're made to be bad by outside powers (Which among other points doesn't even fit thematically to Overlord wanting to give the player morality choices), it indulges in a stock 'the villain had everything planned out because that's just how villains work', and... eeeh.
The odd thing is the game apparently won awards for its writing. I honestly can't imagine why. Gnarl is occasionally entertaining, I suppose?
Still, the What You Are In The Dark thing it's got going on is a nifty variation on a classic concept. That's something Overlord does of note.
Too bad the sequel totally ignored it...
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