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deep dish peat moss posted:Something I've been thinking about lately (admittedly in the context of a JRPG roguelite-ish game) is having the players start with inexhaustibly large health pools, then having near-zero sources of healing, making the real challenge of combat long-term attrition. Like imagine a JRPG type game where you play as a party of a few Kaiju smashing through cities, and the enemies you fight are little platoons of soldiers and tanks - and individually they're not dangerous, you have 9999 hp and they hit you for like 10-20 damage. But over the course of the game you fight hundreds of them and if you play brashly and let them get those tiny plinks of damage off on you, you'll eventually fall. Your characters would slowly evolve into glass cannons throughout the game as they gained power but lost irreplenishable health. A skilled player would know how to take measures to reduce their health lost throughout the game, but a new player making mistakes never immediately has their run ended by a couple mistakes. It's not exactly what you're looking for, but Tactical Nexus and other puzzle games in the vein of Tower of the Sorcerer play a bit in that space, where the amount of damage you take from fighting a monster (you both attack each other, attack vs defense, until one of you dies) is deterministic based on the stats, and the gameplay comes from making use of your limited health pool and picking your battles carefully to get at resources like health potions and stat boosts without having to use up too much in the process. Health doesn't regenerate on its own, nor does it have a fixed cap; it's essentially a currency you spend to bypass enemies.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 17:10 |
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# ? Jun 12, 2024 16:49 |
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I'll have to check that out, thanks for the rec! IIRC Desktop Dungeons was similar in that regard. I'm imagining it on a larger scale than Desktop Dungeons had it though (where your health reset on each stage). Basically I just think it would be a fun way to balance taking damage in a roguelike/lite but I'm wondering how it would look late-game when maybe an hour into your run you lose because you've taken too much damage so far, and ways to compel the player to keep playing when their health is lower than they want it to be, and things like that. I guess you could always add some system where you sacrifice your remaining characters to gain part of their stats on a new run or whatever so that even when your health is low, you're compelled to keep pressing forward to gain stats to make the next run easier. But that seems to veer too close to "you need metaprogression stats to win"
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 17:14 |
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deep dish peat moss posted:Basically I just think it would be a fun way to balance taking damage in a roguelike/lite but I'm wondering how it would look late-game when maybe an hour into your run you lose because you've taken too much damage so far, and ways to compel the player to keep playing when their health is lower than they want it to be, and things like that. This is the turn-based equivalent of something like an arcade action/shmup game with lives. In practice players will abort any run that is going below their previous expectations and end up practicing/seeing early stages a lot.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 17:18 |
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I think attrition is great and almost mandatory for any turn based game that wants to include lower stake but not meaningless fights, but straight attrition is just such a bad feeling for me in most cases. There are a few things I've noticed that make it all come together for me Attrition without ability to adjust game length is just mean and leads to 'dead man walking' situations really easily, where if you dip below a certain level before hitting certain milestones you know you really ought to just abort your run now. I like it when games soften that up a bit by making attrition more of a hunger clock, where you can get extra stuff if you stick around and have more encounters, but you can also just skip things and jump straight to the boss fight or next level or whatever if you're feeling borderline. Attrition can work really well in a 'push your luck' dynamic. Even something like Hades letting you choose between a miniboss room and a normal room gets at this dynamic That doesn't really work if you don't also have periodic resets, though. Either a partial one (bosses drop a bunch of health items on death) or a full one (you do a full heal whenever you go down a level). Knowing that if you can survive for long enough you can largely make up for any losses you've taken (but that getting there will be harder) also helps fight 'dead man walking' hopelessness I'm also a big fan of bounded losses, where you can't lose more than a certain amount within a certain encounter without just losing the game. This might be something like limited numbers of inter-encounter healing items, or something like the Ninja Gaiden health bar system where you heal automatically but take 1/5th of any damage as a reduction of your max HP that lasts until your next big reset--if you lose all your HP you die, but if you survive with 1hp remaining you still get back up to 4/5th your old full power. I love a lot about roguelikes, but the pacing of most of them drives me absolutely insane--mostly for the reasons everyone's talking about.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 17:49 |
Jack Trades posted:Err...if an encounter isn't potentially lethal then why have the encounter in the first place? It's just a waste of time at that point. Into the Breach followed this principle and while I enjoyed it I ultimately found it way too exhausting to actually complete. Even Rift Wizard had plenty of kernels for you to pop with your sparkly spells.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 18:15 |
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GetDunked posted:It's not exactly what you're looking for, but Tactical Nexus and other puzzle games in the vein of Tower of the Sorcerer play a bit in that space, where the amount of damage you take from fighting a monster (you both attack each other, attack vs defense, until one of you dies) is deterministic based on the stats, and the gameplay comes from making use of your limited health pool and picking your battles carefully to get at resources like health potions and stat boosts without having to use up too much in the process. Health doesn't regenerate on its own, nor does it have a fixed cap; it's essentially a currency you spend to bypass enemies. Gonna second the Tactical Nexus recommendation. It's not a roguelike and it has metaprogression, which I realize makes it a hard sell to the roguelike thread, but I do think the way they do metaprogression is genuinely fascinating. Gives it that feeling of constantly wanting to go back and do old levels because your Medals and Sunstones unlock new paths and areas to improve your score to get more Medals and Sunstones.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 18:27 |
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Arzaac posted:Gonna second the Tactical Nexus recommendation. It's not a roguelike and it has metaprogression, which I realize makes it a hard sell to the roguelike thread, but I do think the way they do metaprogression is genuinely fascinating. Gives it that feeling of constantly wanting to go back and do old levels because your Medals and Sunstones unlock new paths and areas to improve your score to get more Medals and Sunstones. Yeah, for those who don't know: the basic idea is that you have a puzzle-RPG level where you have to figure out how to efficiently get through, killing enemies and bypassing others, opening doors, getting stats, etc. Hopefully you get through well and get a good score. Getting a good score gets you medals, getting a great score gives you 'Sunstones' (I'm simplifying, but work with me here). Every level has a specific, separate custom backside to it where you can spend any medals you have, even from other levels. You have there some keys to open a single door, potions for more HP, cards for a moderate chunk of stats. All those things are a drop in the bucket compared to what you have at the end of the level, so you want to use them efficiently to make bigger gains. You can also use any Sunstones you have for stats on a 1-1 basis, so if you start a level with 20 attack (and end with 1750 or whatever) but you have 4 Sunstones, you could have 24 attack, which could open up a few metaphorical doors. so the style of 'metaprogression' in TN isn't the weak-rear end "grind until your stats are big, then it's p. easy" it's more like... okay, so you do pretty dece on levels 2, 3, and 4 (numbers given are just for example), and get two silver medals, and a coveted gold then you're messing around on level 1 and you see what those can buy you hmmm, 30% more experience? could be nice early on or maybe an actual piece of equipment, hmmm then, after much consideration, you realize that a flat +15 attack is more valuable, because it lets you (again, example) kill the guy guarding the big packet of early defense on the second floor, the one you're 'supposed' to use a red key on and if you have a spare red key, you can use it on the fifth floor to get through that shortcut to the EXP-granting monsters, if you're willing to give up a yellow and a blue key... which you ARE, because you'd use a spare blue on the third to get that defense which you now don't need, and a higher level will make you take NO damage instead of SOME damage from the entire fourth floor and holy poo poo I just busted this thing wide open the meta aspects are intended to, and almost always do, increase the tactics available to you rather than decrease them, which is what makes the game good and interesting
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 18:43 |
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SKULL.GIF posted:Into the Breach followed this principle and while I enjoyed it I ultimately found it way too exhausting to actually complete. Rift Wizard works because it makes resource management central to the design, so all those trash mobs represent an efficiency puzzle that must be solved one way or another. And generally, if you've optimize your build hard enough that you no longer need to think about how to conserve ammo on trash mobs it means you've reached a point where you just wipe out all the trash mobs away instantly.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 20:10 |
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I bounced off ITB but loved Rift Wizard. While both are "efficiency puzzles", RW is sufficiently forgiving that you can usually play slightly inefficiently on regular runs without it being too big a deal.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 20:30 |
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I got Revita since it had been talked about here and it's pretty fun. I've gotten a few 0 shard wins under my belt ( actually made it to Enigma on my first run but had a lovely curse that hosed me over most of the last area and I got owned) I'm not to sure what i'm supposed to be doing to unlock alt levels though. I know killing all the bee hives sends you to the alt second level but no clue after that. Curses I think are stupid as hell though, since there's no "cursed item" pool to make them worthwhile you just get regular rear end items with possibly debilitating curses attached to them and you can't even tell which curse it is without taking it. Some are ok but "seemingly 50% chance to lose any pickup" is real horseshit.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 20:33 |
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Captain Foo posted:I bought star renegades based on someone telling me that the writing wasn’t actually as atrocious as i thought it was and I’m enjoying it a lot Right? It's stupid, but it knows it's stupid, and the gameplay actually kinda fucks
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 20:44 |
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SKULL.GIF posted:Into the Breach followed this principle and while I enjoyed it I ultimately found it way too exhausting to actually complete. Into the Breach suffers because there is a low ceiling on unit strength and very little variability. It's exhausting until you're familiar enough with the game's structure, and then it collapses into a series of solved problems (or known unsolvable problems, if you play with one of the underpowered squads). It makes an interesting contrast to Slay the Spire, another "every encounter is potentially lethal" game but with a much higher ceiling.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 20:46 |
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Curses I think are stupid as hell though, since there's no "cursed item" pool to make them worthwhile you just get regular rear end items with possibly debilitating curses attached to them and you can't even tell which curse it is without taking it. Some are ok but "seemingly 50% chance to lose any pickup" is real horseshit. The more curses you have, the more likely cursed enemies are to show up-- they are a little tougher but they drop 50% more soul which adds up very quickly. I forget how you get it but there's a pretty early meta unlock that makes it so you always get a choice between two different curses whenever you're cursed, that one makes a huge difference and makes doing curse-heavy runs actually a viable option. Oh and the second alt-stage is unlocked by giving shields to the little goddess statues that show up in the ice level. I'm pretty sure a shield has a highly increased chance of dropping as loot in rooms where they appear so it's usually not too hard to pull off.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:06 |
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I think ITB is treated unfairly for being a game that doesn't last forever. It's very close in nature to a "classic" puzzle game with just enough randomized preconditions that it doesn't quite read as such, but not nearly as many people would get on, like, SpaceChem or Baba is You's case for being finite. It's a great game for 20-40 hours and then you're done.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:07 |
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Given the recent discussion of metaprogression here, folks might enjoy this talk by Jim Shepard (Dungeonmans) at Roguelike Celebration 2017. (And while you're at it, check out his other RC presentations—they're all great IMO.)
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:13 |
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I had a blast coming back and getting all hard mode medals with ITB. I do agree by the end I was seeing maps repeat and could reliably play and win it while listening to a pod cast. It wouldn’t hurt to be a hair more forgiving but also by the end I was chaining 4+ wins in a row.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:14 |
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goferchan posted:The more curses you have, the more likely cursed enemies are to show up-- they are a little tougher but they drop 50% more soul which adds up very quickly. I forget how you get it but there's a pretty early meta unlock that makes it so you always get a choice between two different curses whenever you're cursed, that one makes a huge difference and makes doing curse-heavy runs actually a viable option. Oh huh, I don't have that meta unlock. Maybe I missed seeing it, but that absolutely would make cursed items way less of a "pass" from me. e: Also do you /need/ the no hit boss items for something? I can usually get 3-4 of them in a run but I'm curious if I'm stressing out over nothing or locking myself out of a good ending cuz I can't perfectly do every boss yet.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:19 |
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Oh huh, I don't have that meta unlock. Maybe I missed seeing it, but that absolutely would make cursed items way less of a "pass" from me. There is a late late game unlock from giving a character in the final secret area each of the boss trophies. You can do it over the course of multiple runs, you don't have to no-hit them all in one go. -- other than that, they're just +1 max HP. I double-checked and the unlock I mentioned just comes from collecting 15 curses total across all runs, so not too hard
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:38 |
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I think ITB is treated unfairly for being a game that doesn't last forever. It's very close in nature to a "classic" puzzle game with just enough randomized preconditions that it doesn't quite read as such, but not nearly as many people would get on, like, SpaceChem or Baba is You's case for being finite. It's a great game for 20-40 hours and then you're done. I give the game a lot of flak but that's mostly because it was pitched as (and its fanbase pitched it as) a tactical strategy game when it's really more of a pure puzzle game. I played it for 8.4 hours before I felt like I had "solved" it and there was nothing left for me to see or do, which is probably more time than I've ever spent with any other puzzle game (not because I'm good at them, but because I don't play them). But I left it behind very disappointed and with a bad enough taste in my mouth to hide it from my Steam library because the entire time I was expecting it to be, and wanting it to be, a strategy game. And in my personal definition of strategy game, a game where every event or action is explicitly telegraphed ahead of time and has an ideal, knowable solution is not a strategy game, it's just a busywork puzzle. If it didn't pretend it was a tactical strategy game and just admitted it was a puzzle game in the first place I would have no problem with it at all. But especially around the time it came out it was impossible to discuss tactics/strategy games without people bringing up ITB which felt like, I don't know, bringing up Tetris in vertical scroller bullet hell thread because things scroll from the top to the bottom in tetris and you have to avoid getting overwhelmed by too many blocks. (And to your point, I would say that I generally expect strategy games to be open-ended and replayable, which is not something I would expect out of a puzzle game) e: I guess a better way of explaining how I feel about it is that it's a game where you as the player do not get to employ your own strategies. All you do is react to the enemy's strategy - because since it's so explicitly telegraphed the encounters are balanced around you performing whatever specific actions to counter it, and doing so is the only way to ensure victory. That's not my kind of thing but it's totally fine and cool and good - it just shouldn't call itself a strategy game in that case. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Jun 22, 2022 |
# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:48 |
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Don't forget to enable it in the store. I have absolutely accidentally disabled important upgrades in revita, lol
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 21:52 |
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deep dish peat moss posted:I give the game a lot of flak but that's mostly because it was pitched as (and its fanbase pitched it as) a tactical strategy game when it's really more of a pure puzzle game. I played it for 8.4 hours before I felt like I had "solved" it and there was nothing left for me to see or do, which is probably more time than I've ever spent with any other puzzle game (not because I'm good at them, but because I don't play them). But I left it behind very disappointed and with a bad enough taste in my mouth to hide it from my Steam library because the entire time I was expecting it to be, and wanting it to be, a strategy game. And in my personal definition of strategy game, a game where every event or action is explicitly telegraphed ahead of time and has an ideal, knowable solution is not a strategy game, it's just a busywork puzzle. I feel like these definitions maybe aren't universal, though? I suppose I see what you mean but I'd never have had a problem with labelling ITB as 'tactics' or 'strategy' or 'puzzle' because I guess I feel like 'strategy' is also a flavour thing. Like it *feels* like a strategy game because of the setting and what you're doing in the game. I follow your argument but it had never occurred to me before.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 22:07 |
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That's just the problem with genre names I suppose Just like Roguelike and Roguelite they're always going to mean different things to different people. Most games I've got into throughout my life have either been (traditional) Roguelikes or (some flavor of) strategy game so "roguelike" and "strategy" are both genre names that have explicit meanings to me and it bothers me when they get used to mean other things, but I recognize that I'm part of a small and pretentious grognard market who's overexposed to these things.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 22:19 |
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I would argue that while it’s puzzle-y, it’s not really a puzzle game. There aren’t bespoke solutions to every map. It feels a lot like playing small scale miniatures game where the goal is survival instead of holding an objective or just murdering the other team.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 22:21 |
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A New (Card) Hope~ https://oldoakden.itch.io/dungeon-faster-deadlier quote:Something ominous is in the air. The landscape is bleak and devoid of any living soul. It wasn't always like this. A group of adventurers know their stuff. But only you can untangle the spindle of fate.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 22:52 |
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Naramyth posted:I would argue that while it’s puzzle-y, it’s not really a puzzle game. There aren’t bespoke solutions to every map. It feels a lot like playing small scale miniatures game where the goal is survival instead of holding an objective or just murdering the other team. There aren't bespoke solutions to in the sense that enemy placement is randomized and your units can have different capabilities, but nearly any situation the game presents has a clear, most optimal solution.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 23:02 |
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Does using Tickets in Revita disable any unlocks or anything? I saw one opens locked doors and stuff but I just did a regular run because I wasn't sure.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 23:05 |
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John Lee posted:giant tactical nexus post I mean it's like, a giant incoherent wall, I have no idea if I missed something in a one-time tutorial popup (I can't find the "rotate" button for instance lmao, it definitely told me but I skipped it by accident) but it's fun a.f.
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# ? Jun 22, 2022 23:58 |
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Schwarzwald posted:There aren't bespoke solutions to in the sense that enemy placement is randomized and your units can have different capabilities, but nearly any situation the game presents has a clear, most optimal solution. Is that really a problem though? The part of the game where the player is playing is when they are figuring out what solution to use. Yeah, I guess if you already know the optimal solution for every scenario it's no fun, but at that point you've won in a more fundamental way than any victory screen could show. The thing that makes it not a puzzle game is the extremely wide array of non optimal solutions that are still valid actions the player can take. As was said better before, just because it's not an infinite game doesn't mean it's a bad game. Similarly, just because someone wants it to be something else (or a different genre I guess) doesn't mean it's doing a bad job at being the game it actually is. It's not like the game is above criticism or anything - this criticism just always seems like it's more about the person playing than the game itself.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 00:27 |
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Ibram Gaunt posted:Does using Tickets in Revita disable any unlocks or anything? I saw one opens locked doors and stuff but I just did a regular run because I wasn't sure. I'm not sure if you can get normal unlocks from the daily run/weekly run tickets, but you can get cosmetic hats and a good amount of currency from doing them. The other, consumable "metro tickets" give you extra starting items at the cost of starting out with less health or occasionally a curse. Typically there's no reason not to use them and they're only available for your next run so there's no way to hoard them.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 00:38 |
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deep dish peat moss posted:Something I've been thinking about lately (admittedly in the context of a JRPG roguelite-ish game) is having the players start with inexhaustibly large health pools, then having near-zero sources of healing, making the real challenge of combat long-term attrition. Like imagine a JRPG type game where you play as a party of a few Kaiju smashing through cities, and the enemies you fight are little platoons of soldiers and tanks - and individually they're not dangerous, you have 9999 hp and they hit you for like 10-20 damage. But over the course of the game you fight hundreds of them and if you play brashly and let them get those tiny plinks of damage off on you, you'll eventually fall. Your characters would slowly evolve into glass cannons throughout the game as they gained power but lost irreplenishable health. A skilled player would know how to take measures to reduce their health lost throughout the game, but a new player making mistakes never immediately has their run ended by a couple mistakes. Not the exact same but Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter does something like this. Your main character has a percent bar that starts at 0. It goes up by 00.01% every so many steps... or you can in any combat turn into a dragon, which means you win. Once you are a dragon you win. But turning into a dragon, any attacks you use as a dragon, and ending your turn as a dragon all add % and the game has no way to lower the meter. If it hits 100% you game over and have a few options for starting a new run. It's a JRPG but one specifically intended to be done in several runs. Some cutscenes won't even play your first time through, you have to die and loop.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 01:29 |
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Truspeaker posted:Is that really a problem though? The part of the game where the player is playing is when they are figuring out what solution to use. Yeah, I guess if you already know the optimal solution for every scenario it's no fun, but at that point you've won in a more fundamental way than any victory screen could show. The thing that makes it not a puzzle game is the extremely wide array of non optimal solutions that are still valid actions the player can take. I'm actually with Tuxedo Catfish on this. It's a great game for what it is, it just isn't the kind of game you can play forever.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 01:36 |
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I'm thinking the perfect example of attrition vs lethal encounters would be Slay the Spire vs Magic the Gathering. MtG just doesn't work well without every game putting both sides at risk of death (Shandalar tried this with its dungeons but that just made for really degenerate strategies) so a MtG roguelike would have to make every encounter lethal and heal you to full after it. But then it would also have a lot less encounters than a StS run because each one would be longer and more involved individually. And thus they'd have a very different feel from each other which is really what we're lacking a bit right now, attrition is just a bit over-represented IMO. Actually I was also thinking I'd like a roguelike where you just draft a whole bunch of upgrades at the beginning and then play out a relatively short but intense gameplay session after that. As opposed to the typical paradigm where you slowly work your way through levels picking up upgrades periodically as you go. Especially for the more action-based roguelikes where it's less fun to work around weakness.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 02:17 |
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Mithross posted:Not the exact same but Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter does something like this. Your main character has a percent bar that starts at 0. It goes up by 00.01% every so many steps... or you can in any combat turn into a dragon, which means you win. Once you are a dragon you win. But turning into a dragon, any attacks you use as a dragon, and ending your turn as a dragon all add % and the game has no way to lower the meter. If it hits 100% you game over and have a few options for starting a new run. It's a JRPG but one specifically intended to be done in several runs. Some cutscenes won't even play your first time through, you have to die and loop. Dragon Quarter was an incredibly cool game and I still can't believe they got away with making it. Would love to see some new iterations on the design.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 03:15 |
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Angry Diplomat posted:Right? It's stupid, but it knows it's stupid, and the gameplay actually kinda fucks I bear the first difficulty on my second run and there’s so many things to unlock and now I’ve thrown a few runs at Harsh (accidentally torpedoing my best run so far by accidentally bringing a nitro weapon to the ice planet boss)
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 03:19 |
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DACK FAYDEN posted:holy poo poo this game is fun rotate? I don't think there's a rotate button in Tactical Nexus or a need for one?
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 03:55 |
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John Lee posted:Tactical Nexus Did they make good on their threat of rising the price with each expansion because the interaction between stages meant that you'd get more content and more tools to increase your score? I enjoyed the base game, but that made me pretty anxious.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 09:32 |
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Fat Samurai posted:Did they make good on their threat of rising the price with each expansion because the interaction between stages meant that you'd get more content and more tools to increase your score? I enjoyed the base game, but that made me pretty anxious. Kind of, the first DLC is cheaper than the rest but the price point is the same afterwards and they haven't done the increasing escalation of price with each DLC release. The DLC are hefty chunks of content and worth it if you love the game, but they do not make the game any easier. Instead the levels add so much mechanical complexity that you'd be a fool to buy them to try and do well on earlier levels. It may also be impossible to beat them at low sunstone levels (and low sunstone levels can mean less than several thousand, with early game players only receiving >10 or so a level).
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 10:04 |
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fez_machine posted:rotate? I don't think there's a rotate button in Tactical Nexus or a need for one?
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 11:55 |
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tactical nexus is a vortex that will consume your life, its pretty cool and weird, steer clear.
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 14:20 |
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# ? Jun 12, 2024 16:49 |
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So I looked up Tactical Nexus and I have to ask: why does this AUD$26 game with 61 steam user reviews have $60 in DLC?
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# ? Jun 23, 2022 14:32 |