oh right i can just change his class whenever
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yeah, wizard isnât a good class for him, he needs to be faster and more dodgy
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also canopus is probably better than your generic archers even though he doesnât have a bow aptitude if only because he can get into range more easily
but you can have sisteena and byan and aloser by then iirc and that makes it pretty doable
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my last playthrough ended in a legit rage quit when i lost canopus halfway through a multi-part battle at the end of chapter 2 i think, maybe itâs time to avenge him
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It has occurred to me that action RPGâs thrive in the beat-em-up template. Fixing and condensing that kind of twitch play really extends the possibilities of what an rpg system can do in that context. Fixed stages capsulizes this very idea much farther than any âtraditionalâ aRPG can with its persistent scaling (and scrolling) world.
Gaiaopolis and Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara really solidified my convictions on this matter.
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As in, having tight, defined levels helps bound the stat comparisons and provide small, noticeable upgrade loops, compared to an open, less-linear structure that falls into poorly-communicated difficulty or level scaling in an attempt to shape player routing?
Kind of like how Dragon Quest builds micro-RPG loops (new area: underleveled->level up->become powerful->move to new level & repeat), giving it balance and the RPG pleasure loop at the cost of linearity?
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I would say so, yes.
Of course, what would a modern take on a beat-em-up aRPG be in regards to linearity? Perhaps one could make a game where the stages of a region is set up in a hierarchic superstructure with back-tracking (kind of like a gigantic hub-world that webs these tightly-defined set stages into a cohesive whole).
I think a lot of modern design is very aware of the power of player agency and explicit loops. So we have much less linear routing in almost all games, with true openness, a Metroid-style connected world, or side quests to meet players at different engagement points. And then weâre in a high tide for explicit RPG systems that promise power progression and are constantly communicating both investment and the promise of more to come. Itâs hard to close those doors without feeling like a deliberate throwback to a deliberately simple structure like an early-'90s arcade game.
As a comparison, the progression of action-roguelikes such as Dead Cells and Hades allow for tight balancing bands and wild variation due to upgrade combinations, enabled by the short session length. Unlike an arcade game, though, these modern games build an explicit meta-structure to compel players to return, which colors the way a player thinks about play sessions; they wager time on a âgood runâ or a âbad runâ instead of putting coins in.
sorry, Iâve been writing wiki pages all day and my tongue is VOCABBED UP
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finished The Legend of Tian Ding just in time for Chrono Cross. Itâs a fun game and feels about the right length for this sort of thing.
I liked that the collectables were all real life Taiwanese historical knick knacks like advertisements for tea and cigarettes, although a lot of them seemed like anachronisms.
You spend the bulk of the game just straight up murdering Japanese cops with their own weapons.
The last boss was too frustrating though, so I turned the difficulty down to âgentleman thiefâ so I could get it over with.
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Final verdict on Satisfactory: It has the compulsions of an idle game with the veneer of Factorio and thatâs kind of okay but not really. Iâm uninstalling it.
The final straw was discovering that my plastic and rubber output was extremely low, and fixing that bottleneck would have required setting up a completely different system of production, specifically moving the oil out in barrels to a larger, flatter area for processing. This would have involved setting up a new trucking route and researching liquid transportation. This sounded exhausting.
If you canât get me excited about setting up a new trucking route and oil processing then something is wrong with your game!! Honestly itâs a lot of little decisions that add up to tedium.
The main issue is that each building requires a bespoke conveyor input for solid goods. The Inserters in Factorio are brilliant because they let you run a main belt and just pull what you need from it. In Satisfactory you have to use a system of increasingly time-consuming splitters and mergers to make this work. This is not a challenge when space is readily available, and not an interesting challenge when space is at a premium. It is always tedious.
The lack of inserters also means moving goods out of a building is irritating because you absolutely cannot mix goods at all. There is no âsmart conveyorâ that only extracts the goods you need, and most buildings only have one exit anyway. So it means just building more containers and conveyors.
The trucking system is a mess too. You have to basically drive the entire route yourself while recording it, and if you mess up by hitting a tree or a rock at a weird angle, welp, start over.
(Technically you can delete nodes but this is more tedium: you have to finish the whole route, then walk back along it deleting nodes you donât like. More tedium.)
The fact that the game is not grid-based is also a secret curse. It makes it ten times harder to predict the amount of space a given setup will need, and I often found myself placing buildings only to have to destroy and remake them because the conveyors wouldnât link properly. You can make the game grid-basedâŚby building foundations everywhere, which is just more tedium.
The gain from lack of grid-based system is that you can basically just make shit collide at stupid angles and it functions just fine. Conveyors, pipes, and power lines can overlap with basically anything and they still work. This makes setting things up easier but extremely ugly and stupid looking.
All in all I feel like the gains from making the game 3D (Z Axis! Itâs fun to look at! Navigation is actually kind of fun once you unlock the blade runners! Hypertubes are basically roller coasters!) are outweighed by all of the frustrations it introduces. The only reason I played this game for 50 (!) hours is because of my compulsion to solve problems once I have the solution in my head, and because Idle Game Mechanics Are Evil.
So yeah, uninstalling for my own health and well-being. Cannot really recommend it since other games are prettier, more fun to navigate, have more rewarding automation mechanics, have more interesting environments, better combat, etc. Just not all at once. I wish a game did all of this perfectly, but Iâll have to live with modded Factorio for now.
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so you couldnât just build another line but higher?
weird, that would defeat the point.
ironically building in 3D is actually a huge pain in the ass. The actual solution without rerouting everything would have been to build about 200-300 foundations onto this huge lake and do the processing there. figuring out that was my next step was what made me uninstall the game lol
that⌠defeats the point of making this game 3D, what in the hell?
They sure added a lot of new content to Vampire Survivors while I was off playing Elden Ring. My $3 investment in the game keeps paying dividends.
Edit: I made a terrible mistake. It wasnât my $3 but a generous gift from a SB member. I had never seen the game before receiving that gift copy.
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I will not even touch those factory games because I know Ill enter one of 3 obsessive states:
Analysis Paralysis, Infinite tuning or cluster fuck repair mode.
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Interesting.
Well Iâm definitely not asking for a throwback of the 90âs and ripping it to the present to try out this experiment. The model principle design from a game like Gaiaopolis can definitely be extrapolated further and I believe that is worth discovering. I would certainly be disappointed if everything ânon-linearâ and strict âopen-nessâ ala Metroid-style is the only way to reach dynamic player agency (regardless of the multiplicity of routing).
Iâm also concerned with how we perceive non-linearity in regards to player-engagement. Itâs not like an ostensibly non-linear game doesnât âsufferâ from linearity; the player, after all, is choosing to take on the task of independent choices that ripple through the entire playthrough. Those choices alone are a linear sequence (a world line, carved by the playerâs agency; supplied by the gamemasterâs routing schema) and so therefor renders the concept of non-linearity paradoxical. Sure, the games you aforementioned are dynamic in providing options to carve such a sequence out, but on the outside-in, you are still creating a wholly linear experience. There are multiple approaches to reaching investment and power progression related to how the overall course is designed.
Itâs the difference between Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics or Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion. Which game is deeper if weâre factoring in how linearity is handled? I would argue both for apples and oranges.
One is multithreaded and the other pointillistic.
Tight set-stages ala beat-emâ-ups isnât also relegated to your proposed linearisms. Meta-structure can be applied to this design and I think it might even be a deeper experience if executed properly. I definitely think that beyond the Coin-Op Paradigm a game designed in this vein could have such a dynamism of âgood runâ/âbad runâ.
Anyways, I appreciate the discussion!
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hello halken welcome!
I define player agency as: the playerâs ability, throughout the experience, to choose their own engagement, be it through intensity, activity type, or even route. I think itâs a huge and important reason that open world has taken over big single-player games, because it allows games to meet players in many different moods skill levels. So stage linearity is a part of this but it can also be satisfied by different game modes or even player-created modes, like the way Fortnite players bounce between hanging out and competing even when the game structure wasnât really supporting that.
The different game analysis models of the last decade have all included agency as a marker. For example, âPlayer Analysis of Needs Satisfaction (PENS)â, which builds its model by attaching psychological needs to game systems, puts autonomy (agency) as one of its three pillars. Now of course these analysis models are inherently backwards-looking and can only attempt to explain existing successful games, but theyâve reached a consensus that increased autonomy/agency is one of the major differences in games from the last 12 years.
Of course as games have emphasized that theyâve lost tightness, simplicity, and focus; you can see in the complaints about âRPG cruftâ and endless progression that people are starting to get tired of the common systems to combine agency with some sort of progression and balance. I donât think it means weâll stop seeing agency as such a focus of design, that weâll start seeing tighter, more linear games, but I think weâre going to see more experiments in the progression and other RPG systems that bind it together.
I donât think I understand what you mean by saying an ostensibly non-linear game is linear, when viewing the playerâs route post-facto. Do you mean, path choices, like in a Metroid or open-world game, are different than strategic or build choices, like in a strategy RPG?
They definitely are. If we look at them through the PENS model, patch choices mostly emphasize player autonomy, while strategic choices emphasize both competency and autonomy â as long as the difficulty is correctly tuned to test the player on their strategic choices. Of course, the type of branching level structure I really like is the one married to hard combat difficulty, like in Demonâs Souls or La Mulana, where it interacts with the progression and player skill so that the player is pushing at all the edges, trying to decide where they should go and where they can go with their skill. That really fuels an aesthetic of exploration for me, much more than straightforward 3D map exploration like the early 3D platformers.
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@halken have you played legend of mana or tokyo jungle? theyâre very different, but in my onion, they are the best combinations of rpg and beat em up yet seen
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Ah I think we have quite a differing philosophy on what player agency is here, so it might be for naught to divulge further in this âdebateâ on this topic. I think the open-world model is problematic in many ways and going by your take that its taking over single-player games is a little disheartening.
I will have to check out that PENS consensus model, thanks. I am wary of such models though, as I think, as youâve stated, they can overlook a lot of minutia and nuance (a similar attitude I have with Dormansâ Machinations).
Ostensibly non-linear meaning there is an overt structure leading to multiple pathways to provide optional sequences of player engagement. Metroid Fusion locks the player into specific zones that require conditions satisfied to unlock. It is a block-chain-esque kind of superstructure. It is more ostensibly linear by counterexample.
Not if the set-stages have layers of enigmatic props that can only be accessed through inference of the playerâs engagement, progression, and knowledge-base/token-acquisition in the game (by returning to that specific set after exploring other parts of the world).
EDIT:
@vodselbt Oh hey man, yea thanks, happy to be here!
@loki I have not played either. I will now ad them to my backlog list! Cheers!
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