“The player only has to realize which is the most trivial way to dominate…”
Well, that’s more about the type of player you are. If you’re the type of player (and I’m going to presume you are based on the comments in this discussion) who deliberately makes the effort to dissect what skills/actions can be used in concert to maximize efficiency… well sure, you’re going to find excessively powerful combinations.
But there are a significant number of people who play who, even if they have the capacity to analyze the art out of the game, choose to just play through it without deliberately making those efforts. They’re thinking “how can I beat the game” not “how can I beat the system”. I’m going to venture a guess that, for those players, they don’t have this problem and would suffer from “nerfing” the component skills enough to eliminate those combinations.
There are also players who don’t want to think at all and complain if the game wants it from them
Of course there are different players. I usually don’t analyze the game for maximum efficiency. While playing, I just “stumble” over methods that are so dominant that all other possibilities simply cannot keep up. When I speak of a “nerf”, my goal is not to take away the possibilities, but on the contrary to have more variations in order to play “successfully”. Because if the dominant methods have been weakened, the other combinations have more relevance to be used.
That’s why you can have both. And that’s why you create different difficulty levels / modes to care about both group of players. Otherwise you will alienate a large group of your target group. Why do you want to alienate them?
The 3.8 % could mean that the game wasn’t interesting enough to play to the end. That’s not a sign that it was too difficult.
Yep. A lot of streamers simply gave up playing through in the middle and never started again. And they had no problem beating the game, on the contrary. But they still play Darkest Dungean or XCOM 2 for the x time.
And it’s not about making game more difficult by upping the numbers of enemies.
I give you an example. I’m currently like 60 hours in the game. Started playing 2 weeks ago.
Every nest I do is mostly the same. Run to the flowery thing and shoot. Like I did 15 nests already and still probably need to destroy 25 of them to finish campain. I already know with 99% certainty that the next nests will be the same stuff. Why is this so? Why nobody put a time to create these in a way that you wouldn’t know what to expect and they would be needed to be done differently? This actually would convince me that playing next 20 Nests mission will be more interesting and unexpected. Why put a rule that Hatching Sentinel had to be destroyed in all Nests the same. These makes them too predictable. We have a map that is not fully utilized only because someone put a rule that Nest are with Hatching Sentinels only.
It’s predictable too much. And what’s predictable is boing fast. So I don’t wonder why 96% of players didn’t want to do 30 more of the same nests. How many you can do? 50? 100? You mostly dash and shot shotguns to the face currently over and over.
Why do you spawn in the same place together all the time. Spawn each soldier in different corrner of the Nest sometimes. It would be scarry. It would be fun. Like you can brainstrom 100 variants of nests based on the current graphics and system implemented already in the game… But no, we get one to do over and over 100 times because?
It’s only an example. But this game has this all over the place like a mark or something.
This is another point. Nothing is scary if your team has multi Magisters/casters with weapons that can hit and eliminate enemy’s from the other side of the map, again, again and again with no counter by the opponent.
Don’t know about final Bosses because I need to do 25 more Nests that are the same as the Nest before.
Final Bosses are irrelevant mostly. Like how many time do you do final mission? vs how many nests?
The thing is not to make more or less nest missions or something, The thing is to make it more varied, more unexpected which will force player to adapt.
Like you need to do more different nests than more of them only. I don’t want 30 exact same nests. This map is awesome. Its potential is wasted currently. Do Mist Foggers and force me to play each nest in a different way. Or at least so it would not feel repetitive.
Make different levels of nests, so one would be much harder than the other. You would not be able to attack all of them with basically any squad. You would need to choose and possibly leave stronger ones undistrurbed.
Do 20% spawns with every soldier on different corrner of the nest. Probably these would have more egss but less enemies. Finding balance would be needed.
Change egg mechanic. They need to awake based on you shooting an egg next to an egg and on greater distances. They need to awake rarely on their own and do their thing on your turn. This is mostly not milked mechanic. They need to not awake always when you move next to them in a way that you can always predict and plan. It would introduce risk / reward and unpredictability. You would need to go inside the nest and risk these things awaken all at once behind your back.
Make nest variants with massive amounts of eggs.
Make nest variants with civilians with mind fraggers already on.
Make nest variants where you spawn in different corrnes.
Make nest variants with terror sentinels and mist sentinels.
Make nest variants when you spawn in te center and trying to get out.
Make nest variants with goo spawning.
Make nest variants affected by different Mist Foggers, like you lose proficiency for certain weapons, forcing certain weapons, reducing significanlty certain abilities, reducing perception by 80%, reducing movement, wearing cappacity.
Hundreds of them we can brainstorm and choose the best ones. This is not very hard to do.
“have more variations in order to play “successfully””
First off, I’m absolutely a fan of variation, so don’t read any of this as being against that.
Second, although I’m a pre-release backer, I’ve just started playing and don’t know what those combinations are at the moment.
Now, that said… are these limited combinations actually needed in order to play successfully, or are they just so powerful that they trivialize the game? What I mean is, I’m on my first playthrough (Veteran difficulty), I have no knowledge of those elite combinations and am still one mission away from completing the game (New Jericho is at 100%, I just need to research a topic or two to get the last mission). I can’t speak for the higher difficulties yet, but it doesn’t feel as though I need to abuse skill-combinations to play successfully.
In lots of games, there’s some “meta” that trivializes the game to a great degree. Skills have to be individually useful so they’re individually strong enough to be fairly universal, find the right combo and suddenly it’s “WTF!?”.
I think in most cases, it’s probably easier to just avoid using the known meta, than to nerf certain skills (which may make them individually subpar) or to increase every other skill to create a number of uber-tough ombinations.
“And that’s why you create different difficulty levels / modes to care about both group of players. Otherwise you will alienate a large group of your target group. Why do you want to alienate them?”
I’m deifnitely not against a variety of difficulties. I just don’t think skills need to be adjusted to do so. Enemy stat-blocks, quantities, tactics, etc. could be adjusted to give more/less difficulty.
Yep
In fact, many here use excessive self-restriction rules for certain skills / combos / equipment, and so do I, although I no longer play the game because of this weakness.
There are a lot of them. But I don’t want to spoil your mood
All the things that trivialize the game aren’t really hard to find either. They’re not hidden or anything … I don’t know if you can call it “meta” either. As I said, I just stumbled across it, not all, but many, until it became absurd.
Small hint - you don’t need to do these nest missions. But yes, we agree that late game crunch is boring and can discourage players from finishing the game. This is pain of sandbox game.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you accept that way, you can’t change it. And boring late game crunch will stay forever because someone think it’s a given.
Small hint - you don’t need to do these nest missions
No I don’t. But why we need to accept it. It’s easy to adress those problems and make them more unique. If you approach it from position of understanding and willingness to improve. If you are: You don’t need to do them, then nothing will improve, at least in that regard.
Hah. I would like to improve many things. I just know that devs aren’t capable of many improvements. They will improve some things… I’m not sure if changing nests has high priority for me.
I think this is wrong approach. Game is like a puzzle. We have these elements that designers created: graphics, systems, elements. These are created already. Boring crunch is mostly created by someone putting these small little elements of a whole puzzle in the wrong places which caused that they don’t fit together very well. Is just a matter of rearranging already created elements in right way not about creating new and thinking boring crunch will go away on its own. PP game is rich alredy to do that. You need only put elements in right places.
I can have fun myself with puzzles in wrong places, but is not good to look at them. And the truth is more people will be playing when they would get whole puzzle not elements only. And it’s odd to me to se attitude “who cares”.
The boring crunch is because, at a certain stage you have 1000 extra pieces that you don’t need to complete the puzzle.
Last night, I did the 3rd to last mission for NJ… then waited several in-game days to finish research… then waited several in-game days to finish NJ’s construction project… then completed the 2nd to last NJ mission… and began waiting several MORE in-game days to finish more research to access the final mission.
See all those in-game days spent waiting? I did about 3 missions. 2 haven defense and a nest. But you either deal with boredom of doing nothing or do random missions that, at that point, serve so little purpose to the end-game that it doesn’t inspire me to take them on.
Scavenge missions? Don’t need supplies.
Synedrion attacked? No big deal
Anu attacked? F’k them in particular
New Jericho attacked? Well… I’ll defend them since it makes sense for my character to. But I’m at the endgame… so I don’t even really need to do that.
From the perspective of “I just want to mindlessly engage in isometric battles for nothing more than the sake of engaging isometric battles,” well sure, i suppose that works. But from the perspective of advancing and/or competing the story of saving the remnants of humanity from the Pandoran scourge… it has hit the point where nothing serves a purpose, its just going through the same motion for no reason. At best, I get resources I don’t need. At worst, I lose a soldier.
All risk, no reward. And that’s what makes it tough.
Not only that. It’s more about individuality of missions and campaigns as a whole. It’s too predictable what will happen in a campaign. And what differes is not made important enough that it matters. Longness of campaign doesn’t mean it have to be boring. Predicability and repeatability makes that. When you start everything is new so it feels great but later is you searching for something new vs other way around.
I’ve given yesterday some brainstorming about making nest more unique:
If we do nests 25 times in a campaign lets do multiple variants of them so actually in one campaign it would be different that in others depending on RNG.
Multiply this on every other aspect of the game and it will be significantly less boring even if you’re deep into the game. Now the only thing that is different is a composition of enemy parties. 2 sniper guys vs 3 shield guys more. And where pandoran attack on the globe. This is smiply not enough. And like how hard is to do this stuff. You’re using what’s already in the game. Take every mission player does and do some brainstorming what we can have with mechanics that are alredy in the game. Do the same on the globe part and you can resolve crunch problem in a month if you want.
Yes but why people end up not doing nests in the end? Do you wonder? Because how many times can you do that. And current vision of the game is to give a player a choice what he does. So they are there no matter what. So why not make them more unique? You’ve finite ammount of map types/graphics in the game right now. Why waste a map for only one play if you have a bottleneck in this department. Doesn’t make any sense too me.
Place some soldiers from NJ faction in the center of the nest and make PP resuing them. Give player playing NJ at the start and swarm them. Spawn PP reinforcments. Like we can’t have that because someone wrote story about nests being attacked only by PP. Someone made some bad choices and if the game wants to go forward you need to roll back from them.
