Doom Roguelike Enemy Analysis: Imp
HP: 12
Protection: 0
Ranged Accuracy: +3
Melee Accuracy: +3
Ranged Damage: 2d5 Fire
Blast Radius: 1
Melee Damage: 1d3 (+2) Melee
Speed: 105%
Inventory: Nothing.
Experience: 32
Danger: 2
Minimum floor: 1
Maximum floor: 17
Experience per Danger: 16
Can open doors and has 25% Fire resistance.
Evasion: Base of 50%, +5% per tile of distance, making for a maximum of 90%
Attack Chance: 40%
The Imp, much like in classic Doom, is the basic demon enemy with non-hitscan projectiles who thus is generally less threatening than the zombies with guns you normally encounter first. In Doom Roguelike's system, this is represented by having Imps be very susceptible to the Dodge system, where they have a minimum 55% chance to mis-target Doomguy if he keeps moving.
Also, I should explain this 'Speed' stat on enemies, because it's not what you'd expect from eg digging around on the wiki. Enemies in Doom Roguelike don't use modifiers to time taken (Or more precisely, to Energy spent) the way most of Doomguy's time-interaction-modifiers work, but rather have different Energy generation, just like Berserk and the Scout's innate quickness. This has less innate jank to it than when that behavior is applied to Doomguy, but still means it can be a bit of a headache to wrap your head around how Doomguy's actions will compare against enemies whose Speed is anything other than 100%.
Imps having 105% Speed is one of the more subtly wonky cases, because it's such a small value that the overwhelming majority of the time an Imp is indistinguishable from an enemy with 100% Speed, but over 20 game seconds it will be 1 second 'ahead' of a no-modifiers Doomguy, resulting in random-feeling (But not actually random) moments where an Imp gets two turns in a row, or acts before Doomguy's next action when most of the time Doomguy would've gone first.
Also, the Imp is representative of a non-obvious quirk to how several ranged enemies are designed: their melee damage is designed to be roughly equivalent to their ranged damage, even while cleaving to that odd rule of 'roll a d3 and modify the result by a fixed number'. That is, an Imp's ranged attack is 2-10 damage, while its melee attack is 3-5 damage, but an Imp's ranged attack largely ends up rolling in the vicinity of 5 damage in the first place, so the result is that the melee damage is only a bit lower on average.
This exact implementation is opaque from the player's end and so some of its implications are very counterintuitive. First of all, because the tuning is for the average damage to be similar, but with melee ranges having tighter damage ranges, this makes melee combat against such enemies generally more predictable than ranged combat, especially since (most) ranged enemies will always attack Doomguy if in melee range but only might elect to fire when there's space between them and Doomguy. Second, for a few of the later-game enemies, this has the result that they can trigger Berserker with their ranged attack but not their melee attack. (eg Barons of Hell) Third, Angel of Max Carnage runs forcing all damage rolls to be max at all times makes 'get in melee range to reduce enemy damage output' much more absolute of a rule, because it no longer matters whether the average damage of an enemy's melee and ranged attacks are similar.
Outside Angel of Max Carnage, though, closing to melee with an Imp actually tends to improve their damage output, simply because they'll launch attacks much more consistently and don't have to worry about Dodge checks anymore, contrasting heavily with the zombie enemies who are pathetic at melee combat.
On that note, I should point out that melee attacks are a case where the game has oddly misleading audio, in that enemies have specific noises for attacking in melee (Pulled from classic Doom, of course) that play regardless of whether the attack hits or misses, even though in most cases the audio sounds very specifically like a hit. This applies to the player attacks too, for that matter, so make sure you pay attention to the text logs and/or check if your target's HP description changed, rather than assuming you hit just because you heard the punch impact sound or the Chainsaw revving or whatever.
Also, I covered this in the Boots and fluids post, but I should once again point out that Imps will in fact survive Lava for a turn (Or two turns, down on I'm Too Young To Die) thanks to their innate resistance to Fire damage.
On a more general note, something I'd like to point out is that Doom Roguelike's AI really prefers to move diagonally when it's unaware of Doomguy's position. It kind of stands out: I'm used to games that allow diagonal movement having a noticeable preference toward orthogonal movement when it comes to pathfinding and AI doing its thing. Even the 'when unaware of Doomguy's position' thing is sort of misleading, in that the AI defaults pretty heavily to moving diagonally until it's horizonal or vertical coordinate is within one tile of Doomguy's, at which point it goes orthogonally because diagonal movement wouldn't accomplish anything. (Well, it would accomplish things since Doomguy's ranged attacks are subject to Dodge, but the AI pretty clearly isn't coded to leverage that and in fact I suspect the devs don't actually realize Dodge is applied to Doomguy's attacks)
Also, Imps are one of the enemies most heavily changed by Angel of Max Carnage in practice, due to their ranged attack being Fire-typed, exploding in an area, and able to roll up to 10 damage. In a standard run, an Imp will semi-regularly knock Doomguy around with its ranged attack, and very occasionally destroy items on the ground with its explosion, but in an Angel of Max Carnage run every toss that isn't fouled by a Dodge or hitting something else first will knock Doomguy about and every fireball will annihilate every non-Unique item in its blast radius every single time. Maintaining an awareness of what's behind Doomguy gets a lot more important so you don't get a valuable Exotic deleted instantly by an Imp; this can happen in a standard run, but an Imp rolling max damage is sufficiently rare that ignoring the possibility entirely will only rarely backfire.
I should also point out that while Imps have a unique death sound, their pain sound and their random noises while wandering about are shared with Former Humans, Former Sergeants, and Lost Captains. As such, you shouldn't give all those noises too much weight as far as planning goes: a plan assuming you heard an Imp might get you unnecessarily hurt because it was actually a Former Sergeant.
-----------------------------------------------------
Next time, we move on to Lost Souls.
See you then.
Hello, Commander (and/or King of Ghouls). Apologies in advance for the long comment. Long time reader (2022 - 2023 maybe?), first time poster. As you might suspect, I started with your XCOM articles, specifically through XCOM2. I've read through most, if not all, of your archives despite not having played many of the games you covered. I want to highlight your analysis of Chimera Squad, which deeply impressed me (in a way the game itself largely didn't).
ReplyDeleteAs a person who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the mechanics of games, I must admit I've learned a great deal from your work. I suspect you're already aware the Firaxis XCOM games have a great deal in common with tabletop wargames and TTRPGs (and show their influences fairly transparently). They've in turn had a fair bit of influence on the mechanics and conceptualization of modern tabletop wargames and TTRPGs.
Which brings me to my point (and question): what is your experience and opinion (if any) of tabletop wargames and TTRPGs? We've seen a revolution of the hybridization of tabletop games and video games, and XCOM very much feels like a tabletop game rendered on the screen (I haven't played the actual tabletop game).
Finally, it really frustrates me to know that someone whose work is as insightful as yours is struggling with access to basic necessities when they really would be available to everyone. I suppose you'll have a major leg up during the inevitable and likely imminent undead uprising. Until then though, happy to send what help I can your way.
My experience is complicated.
DeleteTabletop RPGs-wise, I have essentially no direct experience: I exactly once did a session of a Starcraft RPG, and it was very much not 'the intended experience'. I have a lot of indirect familiarity, though: my parents both played D&D in their teens (And a little bit into my childhood), and I've pretty persistently found myself moving in circles where basically everyone around me either has such direct experience or is close enough to people who do to habitually use the lingo and so on, not to mention reading people's D&D-and-so-on stories.
I've long been interested in the experience, but things have never lined up for it to really happen.
Wargames-wise, I have much more direct familiarity. My father was always into wargames, and so I played Ogre, Risk, Talisman (If one counts it), Stratego, and a smattering of other boardgames I don't remember right now of varying degrees of wargame-ness. (I have vague recollections of some submarine-focused wargame, but have no idea if I could run it down)
I also pretty spontaneously constructed wargame-type constructs in my childhood, and of course have played a LOT of video games that clearly ultimately descend from the wargame lineage. (Such as the King's Bounty games, the XCOM games, several different RTS series...) I'd probably have played more physical wargames if I'd been born in an earlier era so video games weren't around to be the infinitely more convenient form of wargame. (eg I've played Blood Bowl exclusively through the digital versions)
I'm not sure what you're asking as far as the 'opinion' part, though.
Firstly, it's unfortunate you haven't had the opportunity to give tabletop RPGs a shot. They're not for everyone obviously, but your dissection of game mechanics has actually better helped me see the places where TTRPG and video game design intersect. So I was curious what connection you had, if any.
DeleteI definitely have a similar experience on regards to war games - I probably would have played more of them if I didn't have increasing access to video games. Plus the whole thing with taking hours to painstakingly set up a game and then barely play it is... rough. I can't imagine playing Axis and Allies on a physical board.
My question on your opinion was honestly pretty open-ended, depending on your experience. With your answer in mind, have you played CRPGs on the lines of Baldur's Gate (old or new), Planescape: Torment, the Larian's Divinity Games, Owlcat's Pathfinder & Rogue Trader games, etc.?
I suspect I'm not missing out too terribly on the tabletop RPG end of things. My earliest reasonably direct Dungeons & Dragons experience was Neverwinter Nights, and while it was interesting in terms of class conceptualization and whatnot, it made for a pretty shallow gameplay experience. I was surprised when Temple of Elemental Evil showed that the D&D combat system actually has a pretty strong foundation that requires fiddling around with actually tracking exact placement and whatnot to have that foundation produce a strongly interesting experience. (It's really unfortunate Temple of Elemental Evil is so abbreviated...)
DeleteWhich I'm rambling about because I've become pretty clear lots of groups -maybe even most of them- don't cleave to the full design-intended tactical experience, playing D&D in a more Neverwinter Nights-esque shallow experience manner, and I suspect the ability to use the system that way is actually where the 'magic' happens for a lot of people. A tabletop RPG is predominately a social experience, collaborative storytelling. The combat mechanics and progression system and so on are a scaffold to build the storytelling experience on, not the point in themself; in that context, being a deep, well-balanced gameplay system isn't really a positive, in some ways is actively a negative since it can result in the collaborative storytelling aspect getting forgotten in the shuffle.
It's sort of funny how D&D started life as a tabletop wargame, looking retrospectively.
And yeah. I can remember taking 30 minutes to an hour to set up an Ogre session, while playing the session took around an hour, maybe an hour and a half. It didn't feel great; I never played Ogre as much as I wanted to, because it was a really interesting game but the setup time really dragged down the experience. (I keep meaning to check out the digital rendition...)
CRPG's-wise, I've ended up reading Let's Plays of a LOT of them (They're very popular as screenshot LPs), but have personally played not that many. I actually played partway through Beyond Divinity back in the day, but only know the complete plot from reading an LP. (It wasn't put together very well, unfortunately) Partly this was simple circumstance/timing stuff -the early Might & Magic games were effectively Before My Time, for example, where I didn't check them out because I had no idea they existed until way too late- but partly it's that it's a subsection of games I've been pretty consistently not impressed by, where at this point I tend to default to avoiding that section of games. Too much time tends to be spent on the storytelling, when said storytelling ranges from 'I don't care' to 'what do you mean this awful story got non-ironic awards for its writing?' (Even before how often the undertones of the storytelling often range from 'uncomfortable' to 'pretty unambiguously offensive to me') The gameplay systems tend to hit the Neverwinter Nights note of being a complicated system to get into on a basic level without actually being a deep experience, where it's all the learning curve pain of a deep system with none of the long-term interestingness. (I was never able to stick out Dungeon Siege, because it was abstractly interesting but actually playing the game wasn't very engaging most of the time)
I think the framework has potential, but I've yet to see an example I'm positive on in a comparable manner to eg Ocarina of Time.
I think that's fair, honestly. Different strokes for different folks and all that, although the world of tabletop games is a pretty vast one, where the quality ranges greatly from outrageously terrible to masterpiece. But I think that's just the reality of the any medium. I'd say that same of movies, television, literature, video games, etc.
DeleteIn terms of collaborative storytelling versus mechanics, there's also a massive range. Most TTRPG shows with the broadest reach tend to be very narrative based, but they don't represent the genre as a whole. Some games are basically wargames with a half-hearted attempt to include roleplaying, and others a vague construct to facilitate collaborative storytelling. Most are somewhere in the middle. I could digress into the fact that TTRPGs tend to swing back and forth between more narrative based and more mechanics based systems every decade or so, but that's a much larger topic.
Game balance in TTRPGs is also a complex topic, partially because people mean different things when they discuss it. I think more important than balance is whether the mechanics achieve the design goals of the system. Sometimes balance shouldn't be the goal, even in war games or video games, if gets in the way of the experience or doesn't add to it.
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of D&D5e, or whatever they're calling the new version. The very best of the WotC adventures tend to compare poorly to other publishers, Paizo tends to be the go-to example, although I can't speak to their newer content.
To show my bias here, video games I've loved whose mechanics are heavily based in TTRPGs include KOTOR, the Shadowrun games by Hairbrained Schemes (the actual mechanics are actually pretty bad but the story, setting and characters are superb, especially in Dragonfall and Hong Kong), the Owlcat CRPGs (which run of a variant of Pathfinder 1st edition) and are lovingly made but have some inintuitive jank. I did play Divinity Original Sin and a tiny bit of the sequel, and both were very well made. I've heard very good things about Baldur's Gate 3 but haven't had the chance to play it. I can't say that Dungeon Siege Nevereinter Nights, or Beyond Divinity are the strongest entries in the genre. To be fair, all subjective obviously and I'm sure some people would strongly disagree.
But back to my initial point, I know quite a few people whose interest in TTRPGs is almost exclusively theory and mechanics, with little or no interest in actually sitting down at a table with others. I'm somewhere in the middle - I design and write a lot of TTRPG mechanics, but I also enjoy playing as well.
To your last point, Ocarina of Time is a high bar (nostalgia side), but I'm interested what you mean by that. Do you mean in terms of storytelling, mechanics, or something else?
When I talk about 'balance' in a game, people never seem to hear what I mean. I'm not sure what most people mean when they think of 'balance'. I personally mean, essentially, that all explicitly presented options should be at least theoretically sensible takes at least some of the time in actual game conditions. I don't necessarily care about 'X class is overall a stronger class than Y class' outside competitive contexts where it's genuinely important that every major option be as close to a 50% win rate as possible, but I do care when eg a spell on a class is largely or completely pointless because it's on the same tier as a spell that largely does all the same things and more.
DeleteD&D 4th edition is the last edition I paid enough attention to to have some idea of what it's about, and felt too much to me like it had taken a lot of the wrong lessons from video games.
Knights of the Old Republic is actually pretty precisely one of the CRPGs I'm thinking of for 'puts me off the genre'. It's classic Bioware fare, in the sense that it's making many big promises it doesn't manage to keep, its plot doesn't really make sense, etc. (That Bioware has been a successful company at all, let alone for so long, has long left me mystified, honestly)
The first Shadowrun game was too heavily aping Firaxis XCOM without understanding the design. What I saw of the second entry seemed a bit better, though I've never motivated myself to properly go through the second and third entries in full. (They were all given away, like... twice, so I have them just sitting in two libraries. Maybe even three)
Ocarina of Time is complicated. The short version is that it's a masterpiece, by which I mean it's the thing that makes me understand why 'masterpiece' is a term at all, because it's not simply 'all-around greatness', it's that everything fits together so well that untangling things to understand what all Is Important to the quality is basically impossible. Something that's Really Good, but in a normal sort of way, you can separate things out a bit: you can say you love the music, or this particular character arc, or the worldbuilding of this series, or whatever, because there's other bits that are clunky or outright a bit bad that you can pretty clearly say aren't essential to the experience. Ocarina of Time is put together too well in too many ways that intersect to readily extract specific lessons or reasons behind that success.
That said, there are some specific bits that I can name. One of the main ones is the smoothness of the jump to 3D: a lot of game series in that timeframe were making the jump from 2D to 3D, and lots of attempts failed. Lots of attempts that succeeded 'cheated': sure, we're using 3D models now, but the actual gameplay is the same as it was in the prior 2D entry. And lots of other successes had to change the formula or framework to work -Super Mario 64 is also an incredibly good game, but it's a *very* different experience from eg Super Mario World, with a much greater emphasis on exploration and puzzle-solving rather than on platforming.
DeleteOcarina of Time is atypical for making the jump such that I (and others) meaningfully feel it's 'A Link to the Past's gameplay successfully translated into a 3D form'. And doing so extremely smoothly, while being the first 3D Zelda game: usually if a series that started 2D got A Great 3D Entry later, it was its second or third or *fourth* attempt at 3D, where they got to learn from the failings of their prior attempts. Ocarina of Time succeeding so well at being 3D Zelda is really shocking given it was the first 3D Zelda!
Ocarina of Time is also striking for how it's full of stuff to do, but the core experience is brisk. If you *want* to play the game until the cows come home, you can hunt for Golden Skulltulas and run down all the weird secrets and minigames and Do Everything. But those aren't chores you absolutely have to do: there's no pressure to 100% the game, and in fact I suspect almost nobody has actually done so. (I never have, in spite of playing the game somewhere over a dozen times) Lots of games that promise 900 Hours Of Content implement it in a way that isn't 'the fun never ends' but rather is 'I have HOW many things on my checklist before I can get back to vaguely interesting content?' This isn't a unique accomplishment of the game, but it's an uncommon one, and the earliest example of such that I'm aware of.
There's also just tons of somewhat more 'narrow' thing, like how the C-Buttons being variable assignment for your inventory items was multi-facetedly great in context.
And of course, Ocarina of Time is light on faults, with its faults mostly themselves being minor. (ie the Equipment sub-screen doesn't work very well, but using the Iron Boots in the Water Temple is the only intrusively bad part of its wonkiness)
Firstly, I do believe I've got a pretty good grasp on your idea of game balance, and largely agree with it. After all, it's been a reoccurring motiff of the blog. My comment was mostly to point out that there's a lot of people talking past each other on the internet on the topic, which I realize isn't very unique. I've found your analysis of DML in the way that the math breaks in interesting ways, often accomplishing different outcomes than the devs (most likely) intended.
DeleteD&D4e became very popular to hate for a while in the 2010's, and sadly I never had the opportunity to experience it directly. A great deal of the friction was as much about the way licensing and IP was handled as the drastic changes to the setting and system, but again I digress. I think there's value to be found in understanding why games or mechanics don't work well, which again is a big part of why I really enjoy your writing.
I will admit, KOTOR could be a nostalgia thing for me, but it was only years later that I realized the game was basically 1:1 based on D&D3e's mechanics. I do think Bioware has been quite innovative over the years, but their big swings miss as much as hit. That said, the financial success of a given title and how good it is are often unrelated.
I would definitely agree with the first Shadowrun game, although I suspect that the small size of the studio combined with an influx of kickstarter money led to some of the unpolishedness of the game, but the first game is fun in spite of the mechanics, not because of them. The later titles do a far better job in polishing and refining the mechanics, but it's still a pale comparison to the Firaxis games.
I would have to agree that Ocarina of time is a masterpiece of a game, but it's very difficult to separate out nostalgia. Many of the elements in the game work together incredibly well, and there honestly wasn't any sort of comparable title at the time (not to my knowledge). In my opinion, other games have done what Ocarina of time did only better (including other Zelda games), but they also had the benefit of not being the first 3D sequel. And it's worth mention, that's a great deal of jank and unintuitive design in Ocarina of time, including frustrating gameplay loops and often unclear objectives where you could just get stuck. But to the game's credit, it was pioneering the very concept which would define a genre even today.
With all of that said, I'm not quite sure how to correlate Ocarina of Time with TTRPGs, or with other kinds of media. I can definitely point to examples where the elements of a work come together to make a masterpiece (in my opinion anyway), but those elements can vary pretty heavily by medium and genre. If that makes sense.
Yeah, balance and difficulty are both concepts that people tend to agree on as notions at the broadest of levels, but very clearly have different working models internally that result in a lot of 'I think it should be more difficult!' against 'I think it should be less difficult!' where they don't actually mean the opposite of each other at all. (I'd thought I'd cover this topic more on this site, honestly)
Deletetbh I'd forgotten the licensing and so on drama. I just remember 4th edition was heavy on encounter powers and other concepts clearly pulled from video game formatting, which didn't really fit to the context and in particular really pushed away from the storytelling experience with how gameified your abilities behave. I have only the dimmest sense of the worldbuilding/storytelling end of things, because the presentation made it difficult to care about the world: I'm not playing a dragonman in a fantastical world. I'm playing a video game killbot where I pretend to myself there's spritework of a dragonman, mowing through video game levels like this is an SNES-era beat-em-up or something.
My vibe is that people tend to like Bioware products because they do make those big promises, and it's not necessarily immediately obvious that the big promise isn't delivered on. I liked Neverwinter Nights initially. It lost its shine for me as it dawned on me that the plot was very on rails and all this 'you can be anyone and do anything!' stuff was not actually respected by the core plot at all, nor by most of the gameplay. A lot of their stuff is like that, where eg Jade Empire's worst faults aren't obvious if you do the Open Palm (or whatever the 'good' style was called) approach to things, you have to contrast this with a Closed Fist run to see that your choices don't matter and their failure to matter often doesn't make any sense.
(In a bizarre twist, the Bioware game I'm most positive on is Sonic Chronicles, even though it's a rushed mess with a dumb gimmick final boss and was built with a sequel in mind that never happened. It's actually a really fun game with good writing and stuff. So weird)
The first Shadowrun game is pretty blatantly suffering from being a first effort, yeah. So many things get a lot better in the second game, in design terms, in engine terms, in writing terms...
I really can't think of a game that approaches Ocarina of Time's competency, even just putting it on a scale with games that came later. I guess I could maybe place Metroid Prime 1 as its better? Like, I like Majora's Mask more, but it's too different for a direct comparison to be all that meaningful. And this isn't nostalgia talking: I revisit games, where eg in my childhood I rated the as 'DKC2 best, DKC1 second, DKC3 bottom', but 20 years later I swapped DKC1 and DKC3, because DKC1 was impressive and noteworthy but both following entries really are just way better. Ocarina of Time holds up; it's better than Wind Waker overall, it's far superior to Twilight Princess, and non-Nintendo attempts are either less good or too different for direct comparison to work.
(Caveat: Breath of the Wild is yet-unknown to me, and hugely praised. Maybe I'll change my mind after playing it, someday)
I definitely on balance and difficulty. I've found it difficult to articulate, much less discuss these topics when parties are using the terms to mean very different things. I think defining terminology (and explaining why you chose those definitions) is a common thread throughout the blog - and one of the reasons I enjoy reading it.
DeleteAs I said, I never had the opportunity to play 4e in any form. The fact that it was so reviled for reasons that were at least not primarily mechanics based makes me want to try it someday. Interestingly, I do see a lot of mechanical similarity between D&D4e and Pathfinder 2e, although while that's not meant as a criticism it's a very quick way to turn a forum into a flamewar.
I think your criticisms of Bioware are valid, including heavy reliance on illusion of choice and outright railroading (as someone who writes, runs and very occasionally plays TTRPGs, I have complicated thoughts on this). That said, I think it's when the curtain gets pulled back that you realize that you were on rails who whole time, so often I expect the question is more how successful the misdirection or how engaging the experience is in order to forgive the required suspension of disbelief. Nostalgia has definitely colored my feelings on Bioware's older titles, but the criticism is valid all the same.
Personally, I enjoyed SR Hong Kong the most, but it really only ever made it to "competent" mechanics, and that's layered over the absurd unique jank that is every edition of Shadowrun.
But back to nostalgia, it's hard for me to separate that out when it comes to games like Ocarina of Time or Metroid Prime I, but they truly do hold up. I'd argue Ocarina of Time in particular suffers *heavily* from how poorly designed the N64 control is - not that it stopped me from spending inordinate time with it, obviously. But I'm not sure I'd be able to go back to Ocarina of Time from that perspective as readily as Windwaker or Twilight Princess.
In terms of Breath of the Wild (and Tears of the Kingdom), it's hard to compare them to other Zelda series games. They have things in common, but are entirely their own beasts. I'd argue that both games are a masterclass in good game design on many, many levels, but that doesn't necessarily translate to "everyone will love this game". Nor should it, I think. People like (and want) different things from games, and that's okay.
It has come to my attention that very little (none) of my ramblings (which you've kindly indulged) are on topic in terms of DRL's Imps. I somewhat wish there was a forum or place for general discussion on the site, but also realize there's significant lift involved.
Finally, to bring this full circle, I've noticed in TTRPGs that game mechanics often lead to very unexpected and unintended results. Sometimes this is game balance (some choices are vastly weaker or stronger than others) but can also push play (optimal or not) in unplanned directions. I guess I just wanted to say how much your writing has impacted the way I look at game design, even adjacent spaces.
Ah, yeah. I do make a strong effort to define terms before discussing things, up to and including at times ignoring 'official' terminology in cases where I feel the 'official' terminology is misleading/confusing/inaccurate. (eg the 'weapon upgrade' system in XCOM 2, which I always call the 'weapon attachment' system)
DeleteThe Bioware point I'm trying to articulate is... a subset of a broader trend in my frustration with mainstream video game discussion and so on? Like, No Man's Sky is a game that's infamous for making a really big promise ("You look up at the sky. Every star you see is a real location you can actually visit.") that got people hugely excited for the game, and then the core gameplay was not compelling, so even though No Man's Sky actually *did* deliver on its core promise, it got a lot of backlash.
And I see this a lot, where the Grand Vision offered gets people excited, and this kind of... overshadows everything else? And people often don't have a healthy skepticism of these big claims, even if they've been in the industry for a while, and in fact even if eg they've been personally burned by Bioware's last three Epic RPGs and so ought to at least *suspect* the next Big Promises Game will probably be like those previous three that were also Big Promises Games.
Like, I personally very quickly stopped paying any attention to the latest 4X game insisting that THIS game will finally have REALISTIC diplomacy, unlike every OTHER game that failed. (Y'know, every other game that had also said exactly this) I just filter that out as empty marketing hype, basically.
So by the same token, I stopped being interested in further Bioware offerings once they were three for three on making big promises that they didn't deliver on, especially as each successive game was no closer to the big promise than the last.
Whereas I've seen real people go 'actually, I really regret buying X game from Y company and don't want to buy anything like X from Y ever again' and then- they promptly buy the next overhyped game they don't really know anything about.
It's a weird trend I don't understand, with Bioware's offerings being probably the most prominent example, but far from the only time I've seen this happen.
Personally, I've never understood the criticisms of the N64 controller. The Gamecube controller is better and I'll be surprised if I ever feel another controller design is a clear improvement over it, but I always found the N64 controller perfectly comfortable. That said, there is a 3DS remaster of Ocarina of Time, so... that's one way to experience the game that sidesteps that exact controller point. And it thankfully is a pretty unintrusive remaster, with its main intrusive change being the highly positive one of switching the Iron Boots to being a C-button type item like in Wind Waker.
I do in fact have a Discord for Vigaroe that... is much more hidden than it should be. Ugh, what did Blogger do, why is the sidebar only possible to open on the main page, this isn't how it worked when I set it up... and the layout crap won't let me set it back to how it used to be... ugh, I really need to redesign the site somehow someday.
'Unexpected consequences' is definitely a thing I prefer to put the focus on. So many games have ended up defined by details that probably weren't thought about at all and certainly weren't expected to be used in the way they ended up being, like how in Starcraft Supply Depots are used as cheap walls in competitive play, where the devs pretty clearly were thinking of them as a vulnerable weak point you'd put in back of your base.
Well, I guess I'll just have to join your Discord, then.
Delete