StarCraft as a bad example but I know what you wanna say, yes there are enough players who want a change and the Devs will certainly take a closer look at one or the other skill but please don’t say that all game play is broken because loopholes are possible!
Designing around potential super soldiers does have a pretty significant influence on the overall game. One could argue that you do have to break the game in order to provide sufficient challenge for those that use all the tools at their disposal. Certain type of Chiron come to mind. I am farly certain that the idea was “if the player can attain such powerful tools, so should the enemy” - and we all know not even they are powerful enough to make the literal dent while creating quite some controversy among beginners.
SnapShot is a start-up company with limited resources and what they offer is really an excellent game. We can talk about the details, but you have to be patient with the wishes. The Devs are listening to you and I am sure there will be changes, but you also have to give them time.
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If it’s in the game, whether by design or oversight, one is following the rules of the game. If it’s not in the game and one uses console commands or mods, then one can say one is not following the rules of the game.
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But clearly rules can be broken by design.
Phoenix point is described as a strategic and tactical game.
“Just use whatever skills you like and are not too strong”, does not sound very strategic and tactical.
But I tried to make some games with editors in the past. Balancing took me more time than creating the game itself (and was terribly boring). Guess we need another year or more
My impression is that they are not going down that route, based on things said here and there, and most importantly on the changes made to the game since release.
The direction seems to be to decrease lethality, increase survivability of both enemies and PP operatives so that the former get a chance to use their abilities and the latter survive them.
Which, imo, is a very good thing.
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Rules can’t be broken unless one cheats. If it’s in the rule book and outside cheats aren’t used.then the rules aren’t broken. They may be bad rules, but using the rules doesn’t mean one is cheating. Change the rules, that’s okay. But until they are changed, one is playing within the rules, and nothing is broken. Or, are you saying that the rules are written to be broken. Then they are no longer rules. How can one have rules that dictate how the game is to be played, but if one uses the rules to their advantage, one breaks the rules? Rules are rules, if one uses them to their advantage, who’s at fault? I know, you say the rules. But until they are changed, no one is breaking the rules.
Is that the game that is being presented, though? Is a game defined by how the rules can be exploited? That certainly seems to be the thinking of many, but it’s not a feeling that I share. Min-maxers are always going to find ways to exploit things, and tactical gamers are going to play in a way they find enjoyable. Much of this debate seems to revolve around shaping the game to fit a particular preference.
Snapshot clearly bit off more than it could chew, but they’ve laid a foundation for what I believe will eventually be an exceptional game. The development process is definitely non-standard, but I’m actually enjoying it. Having changes implemented on an ongoing basis based on thousands of gamers beating on it is actually kind of fun. Every update brings a fresh experience.
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Let’s take rage burst as an example. It’s a heavy skill, so is meant to be used with the cannon/lmg, both of which deal a truckload of damage. Is it really so different applying it to a sniper, aside from the range at which the damage is dealt? I don’t see that it is — that’s not broken; it’s a design choice. It needs tweaking more than fixing, like upping the AP and WP cost.
For me, the broken stuff is things like the AR/RC combo that enables you to recursively clear the field with a single guy.
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Yea, this we can definitely agree upon 
I see this
as a consequence
And the Snapshot, together with the Moders + Community, had every reason to bring this to the “New Standard for TBS” and “Work with the Community.”
But IMO there were two cretical mistakes:
- Disgustingly prepared and explained transition to Epic
- Skills for the super-duper-Click-Hero, which are very very(for AAA, not for Indie) difficult to balance with the “system of ballistics, injuries, Willpower …”
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Where is border between “Snapshot hardly work with community” and " Snapshot couldn’t make normal game by themselves"…
This (the one that is real) game cannot be made without Moders + Community.
Everything else depends on the Snapshot.
Once again, you make my point for me.
From various discussions over the past months and the way it was nerfed, it has become increasingly clear to me that RB was never intended to be a Sniper tool. It was always meant to be a MG-only skill. But Snapshot failed to notice that if you multi-classed a Sniper with a Heavy, you got a Lvl7 Squaddie who could fire 15x120/130 HP shots right across the map with pinpoint accuracy.
Now Snapshot’s (admirable in my view) design philosophy is ‘don’t shut down player choices wherever possible’, so instead of completely closing the loophole, they nerfed it down to 5 rounds - the size of a Deceptor MG magazine.
But that meant that players who wanted to could still field, say, 3 Lvl7 Snipers capable of taking out a Scylla on the other side of a Citadel in 1 Turn. It made such a mockery of the citadel mission that they’ve completely redesigned it to prevent that from happening. It also made missions so easy that the DDA started ramping up Panda strength and numbers to overcompensate, which forced many players to invest in super-soldiers to fight back, which ramped up the DDA… And Snapshot found themselves in a vicious circle where players were complaining that the game was getting too difficult precisely because a whole series of broken skills was actually making it too easy.
Now I can attest that if you don’t use Sniper RB or Terminators with infinitely recycling AP-engines, the game never once presents you with a field of 20+ Pandas tooled up to the max, and you can have a pretty rich tactical experience playing this game. And I do that by playing the way you advocate - deliberately not using the OP skill combos that I think are breaking the game.
But on these forums, I’m a really small minority. A large portion of the people calling for these combos to be nerfed don’t even play this game any more, because they think it’s so broken. They’re waiting for the Steam release, and if it’s still broken then in their eyes, that’s what they’re going to post on their Steam review and then they’re going to give up on it. Another large portion desperately use these combos as survival tools and complain that the game’s too hard without them. And another large portion uses them to ace the game and complain that it’s far too easy.
How do you as Snapshot reconcile all those conflicting views giving essentially negative feedback on your game (even from those who love the concept and the freedom it gives)?
Answer: you ultimately have to rebalance the game to get rid of the combos that are breaking it, whilst making it both winnable and, more importantly enjoyable without resorting to using your Sniper Rifle as a machine gun or turning your Squaddie into The Flash and teleporting him all over the map.
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I would argue that it is.
Let me give you an example from a field that I know well. There’s a boardgame called ‘For a Few Acres of Snow’: i’s a brilliantly innovative deck-building strategy game representing the French Canadian Wars with the British in the 1700’s (the one where General Wolfe took Quebec). When it first came out, people raved about it, quite rightly, becuase it was a genius piece of game design.
Then someone posted on Boardgame Geek what became known as the ‘Halifax Strategy.’ Put simply, the way the game was designed, if the British player used a particular combo of cards and pushed north through Halifax, he had a 100% chance of ultimately winning the game. So the game was completely broken. You could still play it by agreeing not to use the Halifax Strategy, and its mechanics are still a work of genius, but that game is now out of print and very few people play it any more because of an OP power combo that renders all other tactics meaningless.
So yes, all games are defined by how their rules can be exploited, because it is the job of a games designer to build a set of rules that gives a satisfying game experience precisely by exploiting those rules. For me, a game works, and is properly designed, when I realise that the exploit I’m being encouraged to do is exactly what the designer wants me to do and is pushing me down a route that the designer always intended me to go down.
I can very confidently attest that at the moment this is not true for Phoenix Point.
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This is not accidental or omission is intentional.
But let those who want to be deceived be deceived.
Fine, you guys can play as you wish within those strange rules. I see no point in arguing about what is right, what is a good rule and what is broken. I will mod game to have tactical game rather than this silly mix of who knows what.
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Rage Burst is also an example of why these balance issues are about gaming experience, rather than just OP combos, loopholes, or exploits.
Rage Burst is a skill that is supposed to epitomize the massive, indiscriminate, imprecise gore that a heavy can inflict, perhaps on a crowd of enemies rather than a single one. Something like the Saturation Fire heavy skill in XCom 2 (where the heavy unloads the HMG in a cone, damaging everything in its path).
In Phoenix Point, it has ended up being a damage per AP multiplier, primarily used to compensate for the low damage per AP of Sniper Rifles, or to turn the Athena into a Scylla and Chiron organ harvester.
Sure, some players might be OK with defining their own gaming experience and thus upon discovering that RB can be used with SR, ignore that it’s there. I’m not going to argue that. (However, to Snapshot’s credit I will say that I have never seen them say anywhere that they expect the players to balance the game for them, or to define their own gaming experience, or not to make use of game elements that they think are OP, or anything remotely in that direction. Once they understood that some players were playing with self imposed restrictions their reaction wasn’t “oh, that’s nice, those players are doing well enough, guess we can just leave them to it”).
My point is that it’s just a lame skill, even when used ‘as intended’. Most of us here love the game (I’m the one who went out on a limb and called it a masterpiece back in December 
), but let’s face it, this is a skill that would fall far from the expectations of any player coming from XCom 2.
Shoot five times at the same place with 50% accuracy penalty… yeah, how inspired…
Edit: typos
Not sure if I understand this correctly - are you saying that game cannot be balanced without the modding community ? That would be absurd.