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I've always understood the nuance of "overtuned" vs. over/underpowered referring to a more deliberate change. When there's a known imbalance and devs try to nerf/buff something back into balance and overshoot the mark, they overtuned it. It's still a pretty artificial distinction since there was presumably a similar balancing process that arrived at the original values, but players don't have a direct experience of that so it feels different.
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Apr 19, 2022 15:55
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Kvlt! posted:1. An action game with permadeath weird, there sure is a lot of discussion of action games with permadeath in the roguelike megathread
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May 2, 2022 19:01
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Please? no. more pixel graphic games!
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May 4, 2022 15:27
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DACK FAYDEN posted:it was a 3 and I decided gently caress it and clicked at random and it all worked out until it didn't and I died a couple stages later What do you mean? Actual Minesweeper is extremely guessing heavy, that kind of scenario is quite common. On a big board you might have enough room to work around it via other logic paths, but it's entirely possible that you get stuck with a lovely little start like that, and big boards almost always have at least one 50/50 guess in the end.
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May 10, 2022 21:36
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Splicer posted:See the 2112 at the bottom? The ones to either side are safe. That 2 already has a danger flagged to the upper right, so there's only a single danger out of those three spaces and there's no guarantee that it touches the 1. YOU JUST BLEW UP MOTHERFUCKER
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May 10, 2022 22:46
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I've heard they did do something like that at some point, but every version of Windows Minesweeper I've clicked on in the last 30 years has had guessing (unless you got particularly lucky on board generation.)
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May 11, 2022 15:00
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I dunno that Backpack Hero is selling itself to me. It feels like it wants to be a shorter game, it seems prone to long stretches where your loadout is basically set aside from fiddling around the edges with curses/consumables and lots of fights are same-y (including literally fighting the same enemy groups multiple times per area.)
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May 17, 2022 01:50
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deep dish peat moss posted:Probably the biggest frustration I have with it that I have is that if you can't kill everything in one turn, you need to dedicate a lot of backpack space to passive defenses. A two-column tower of bricks with a roof (which is like 10 total spaces) is enough passive defense for everything... up to the last boss. So what I've been doing instead is ignoring defenses altogether and stockpiling consumables. Armor seems a lot more efficient than bricks. A helmet + glove + boots + shield takes up ~7 spaces and means that for the occasional energy you never have to worry about attack damage. Honestly there doesn't seem to be much better usage for that space in the long run, so you might as well. The main issue is that block won't stop you from being eaten by poison or curses, so offense is still the name of the game. I like the 0 energy weapons just fine with a lot of gems (plus there's an item that refreshes the uses on an entire row.) You still want some form of scaling for bosses etc. but you can get some impressive baseline burst and still have energy left over for whatever.
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May 17, 2022 06:52
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tbh I don't really give a poo poo if other players are compelled to ruin their own fun doing stupid poo poo, but yes part of the job of a game designer is trying to make the most fun way to play the most optimal way to play and vice versa. There's going to be some subjectivity about what is "most fun" but you should be incentivizing having fun somehow as opposed to rewarding the player for doing something nobody actually enjoys doing. If you don't, most players are good enough at managing their tolerance for tedium to cope with it anyhow, but it will still hold the game back a bit compared to games that make it really rewarding to just absolutely cut loose and pursue every edge.
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May 17, 2022 22:11
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None of this explains what is added by having the option to rerun old zones for HP or what would be lost if that option was removed or truncated. In fact, if your claim that it is irrelevant is true then that seems like all the more reason to take it out!
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May 18, 2022 19:23
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Kanos posted:I think most people are coming at it from a perspective of general game design(i.e. devs should strive to eliminate or remove tedious/boring paths to power to protect players) rather than really caring a lot about RL2's specific game loop.  To me it's not even just about protecting players. Most players are perfectly happy to protect themselves, and given something like RL2's backtracking for HP upgrades they might try it once or twice and decide "eh, that doesn't seem worth it" before moving on with their lives--if it even occurs to them to bother. But then it's still not really adding anything to the experience and you could streamline things by just taking it out.
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May 18, 2022 20:24
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Eschatos posted:Been a while since I played but IIRC you're generally better off being able to constantly cycle between the types of combat, specializing in just one will screw you over. You gotta be investing plenty of gold in appropriate gear too, it makes a big difference. Yeah, a big part of the game is optimizing the economic side of the game so that you can afford the upgrades you need to survive later expeditions. Typically you want to min/max around a given token and pile all the upgrades you can into it so that you get more per token and also get more of that token type. Research, captain bonuses, helpers, specialists, relics, whatever you can get. Note that a lot of specialists that give you rewards for winning skill challenges with characters in a specific skill do not require that the challenge actually be for that skill, so as you accumulate specialists you can cram a bunch of extra skills onto a single character and now every time they succeed any skill challenge (which will be quite often, since they have so many skills) they rack up a poo poo ton of extra tokens. Tactically, being flexible with moods gets really important later on once enemies start switching their mood on you--if you have a character or two with reasonable defenses you don't really need super high end armor to keep them alive, but if you get caught in a disadvantageous mood you will get murdered. Up until you reach the endgame I don't think there are any encounters that can switch between more than two moods, so there is always at least one "safe" mood (e.g. you can go aggressive against enemies that switch between friendly/aggressive, that way you're never at a disadvantage.) Also, don't underestimate the defensive value of speed and mobility--the ranged scouts (Harry and Hatice) have gently caress all defense but that doesn't matter if the enemies can't reach them. A team with a ranged scout, a physical tank, and a speech tank is going to be pretty easy to keep alive. (I remember winding up using Jan-Piet+Yvonne as my defensive core quite often back when I played, since they can simultaneously heal + attack.)
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May 25, 2022 22:41
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Odd Wilson posted:Yeah, I think the game directly lists Legacy of the Wizard as an inspiration. Kanos posted:The combat is incredibly mashy and tedious and the stages start ballooning into gigantic ridiculous fuckoff mazes that you'll run around in for half an hour trying to find where the hell you're supposed to go. Mission accomplished I guess 
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May 28, 2022 23:50
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:the game gradually shifts from being about efficient turn-by-turn play to being about developing a powerful combo and getting it off from a position of safety, eliminating or temporarily bailing on aggressive threats, and dealing with things immune to your main combo with "silver bullet" one-off solutions; both modes of play are challenging and fun but the tipping point from one to the other isn't necessarily obvious (or the same for every strategy!) and it's easy to get stuck in the low double-digits if you don't know that you need to make the switch in the first place Personally I enjoy the turn-by-turn play and just lean into that for basically the whole run. Starting out the main stumbling block was trying to go for big combos right off the bat and then stalling out around rift 10-15; the big switch for me was buying way more spells and taking advantage of the range of tactical options this afforded me for really good turn-by-turn play. Officially RW development has wrapped up and the dev is working on a RW2 that will explore some bigger revisions to the formula. There is mod support (by which I mean the dev dumped the entire source code and told people to go nuts) and a fair amount of new stuff is getting made, although unfortunately the dev moved on before implementing Steam workshop or any sort of mod frontend so at this point it's basically downloading files off discord and moving them around manually to enable/disable stuff.
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May 31, 2022 22:44
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Tried out Time Break Chronicles and man, what a heartbreaker. Ran headlong into a dangerous fight on my first mission, lost half my party, took my backup character + picked up a new recruit and struggled through the rest of the mission short a party member. Very fun, delightfully tense. By the time I hit the next high danger fight on the second mission I'm up a couple of skill points and all semblance of challenge has gone out the window. Is there any way to crank up the difficulty on this? I finished the first act and there's an option to do escalating difficulty runs on the first act missions but they look like they need to be unlocked in order, which seems like a fair bit of grinding just to get to a difficulty level that's not a snoozefest.
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Jun 5, 2022 03:25
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Roguelike mode does seem a little bit more my speed, although I'm still bummed that the game doesn't even seem to attempt to deliver on the promise of a long term campaign progression with any semblance of balance or difficulty. And the roguelike mode still looks like it gates challenge options far more slowly than it actually needs to. I think a big part of my problem is that most characters have several really high impact upgrades, so the game flips from being very punishing for new characters to being trivialized by a relatively small amount of SP (this is way worse in campaign mode since most characters can knock out a quest pretty quickly for 2 SP.)
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Jun 5, 2022 18:36
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power word- Jeb! posted:i finally got over the hump on rift wizard, have won twice now Yeah, you're in it.
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Jun 17, 2022 13:16
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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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Yeah, I was expecting something a lot tighter from what people were talking about. There's a one-screen board that's pretty great but most of the levels are like 20 floors to go back and forth between and it's just too much.
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Jun 25, 2022 22:25
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contacting CPS to let them know that you're playing anime games in front of the kids. it's anime jail for you, sicko
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Jun 28, 2022 18:02
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goferchan posted:Independent of any setting, I think a roguelike where there are only 10 enemies across the entire game is a neat idea. Like it's a kung-fu master and his 9 students holed up in a monastery and you show up to kill them all. Maybe beating one lets you learn their signature technique, Mega Man style, and to be successful you need to figure out the best order to take them down in to exploit their weaknesses. Slasher movie roguelike. One enemy, multiple expendable characters. Randomize the rules for how the killer works, try to figure it out before you run out of victims.
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Jul 5, 2022 06:39
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habituallyred posted:There used to be a really neat 2e auto dungeon game. An automatic run around illustrated flowcharts. But the game had metaprogression unlocking new shops and classes if you retired with enough money. Probably died with the end of flash anyway. Dungeon Robber, or were you thinking of a different one?
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Aug 10, 2022 15:09
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Angry Diplomat posted:
Chess can't be a roguelike, it's not a platformer.
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Aug 13, 2022 15:51
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I feel like Rift Wizard is a bit misleading in that it looks like a crazy combo building game, and there are some crazy combos, but outside of the most broken stuff it's honestly probably easier to just do goodstuffs builds.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:04
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Arzaac posted:Iirc Good Stuff is a term from MTG, where instead of trying to come up with synergistic combos you just stuff your deck with Cards that are Good. Right. If you're trying to make your entire build run on one spell and maybe a support spell and a desperation backup cantrip, your combo had better be really efficient and really flexible or you're going to get hard walled by some enemies and/or burn through charges unsustainably. But there are a ton of great problem solving spells you can pick up for a couple points (Chain Lightning, Chaos Barrage, Toxin Burst, etc.) that are usable out of the box and fantastic with just 1-2 upgrades or skills, and they will patch over a lot more problems than most engines could expect to fix for the same price. So instead of trying to build a single all-encompassing engine you can make a halfassed engine with a bunch of toolbox spells in your back pocket or even just say gently caress it and take a bunch of toolbox spells with no engine at all. Truspeaker posted:I went into a deep Rift Wizard fugue state early this year, and I extremely disagree - for one, there's a person on the discord who has done a single spell run (and won) with like 95% of the spells. People were pretty nice there last I looked, lots of good tips and advice for anyone struggling. Sure they're doable, but they are challenge runs for a reason. The Wolfer trial has a lower completion rate than the back to back win achievement, and that's considered one of the easier single spell runs.
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Aug 15, 2022 20:39
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Tonfa posted:My takeaway from Backpack Hero a few months ago was that the item pool expected you to go for all-in synergies but had very little in the way of sensible on-ramps to them, so it felt like you had to pick a synergy that is currently a waste of pack space and pray you got more pieces for it. Kind of? You had room to carry around a fair amount of random garbage poo poo while you waited to see which synergies you rolled into, and then jettison the ones that didn't pan out once you had enough of whatever turned into your main synergy.
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Aug 16, 2022 04:21
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DrManiac posted:Oh wow gently caress these later curses in backpack hero. I just lost a promising bow run because I didn’t know placing a 2x2 curse would permanently erase my items. Yeah, Backpack Hero seems really unfriendly to block builds since curses are so punishing. You have to dedicate a lot of space to armor/buildings and then you need even more space so that you have room for curses. You can take damage to skip the curse but it goes straight through block, it scales each time you get cursed so it eventually becomes unsustainable, and if you have enough healing to overcome the curse then you probably don't really need that much block in the first place. Actually in general it feels a bit underbaked to me. Too many passive bonuses, so once your build starts to come together the game encourages you to just sit on the same loadout forever with very incremental adjustments, which makes both the combat and inventory management get very repetitive. After the first couple floors the game usually turns into mindlessly clicking through combats to get loot drops that you will just discard anyhow.
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Aug 17, 2022 19:29
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Grab Im Moor posted:Backpack Hero endless mode is still as brutal as on demo. Later magma core v2 enemies have 5k+ health each, even the most hosed up multi hit death machine I've built so far can't handle that. I guess block+spike builds are key but then you still have to deal with the later enemies dealing 20+ poison and/or burn all the time which quickly overwhelms any block focused build. I feel like there should be more poison/burn counter equipment in the game, there is still what, a potion and a rare accessory and that's it? There's also a legendary sword that transfers your poison to enemies, which is quite expensive in space+energy in addition to being super rare. On the one hand, I appreciate that the ramp is insanely steep, it means even endless runs wrap up in a fairly reasonable time. On the other hand, yeah, it really does rapidly restrict viable builds to some very specific and necessary abilities. I was able to loop twice with a damage boosting tome+wand build but I've had some pretty nutty runs just utterly crash and burn on the deep/magma cave sections of the first endless loop.
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Aug 21, 2022 16:05
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The average Bia is 5.5"? I thought it was 4". This is very unsettling.
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Aug 22, 2022 20:55
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grate deceiver posted:I've been talking poo poo before about Erannoth and its dogshit UI, but since it's for dirt cheap right now I tried it again. UI still dogshit, but I hope I get to this stage but so far it just seems like an overly complex way of mashing the punch bad guys in face button.
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Sep 21, 2022 02:03
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grate deceiver posted:What helped me get into it was picking necromancer instead of a generic punchman. There seems to be a million different archetypes and playstyles, pick something that looks cool and interesting and try to figure that out. Eh, I think Slay the Spire does a much better job of expressing different archetypes and playstyles with 4 classes than Erannorth does with 800 million. I am starting to groove on it a bit but it's pretty slow and grindy and a lot of the interesting stuff that might differentiate different characters beyond "this guy optimizes for this symbol and that guy optimizes for that symbol" takes quite a while to get to.
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Sep 22, 2022 19:39
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Broadly I think the Backpack Hero devs actually have the right idea, the demo was already running long if anything. The game is strongest when your loadout is in flux, and the longer the game goes the harder it is to find things you want to keep over the stuff you've already accumulated. I think the concept is there, the issue has always been with the execution--baffling balance decisions, too many incentives to set your build in stone and not enough incentives to mix things up and rearrange on the fly.
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Sep 22, 2022 23:07
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GlyphGryph posted:All Backpack Hero needs to do to become a significantly better game is to give your backpack a few "side pockets" so you can hold onto a few items that you can't actually use in a fight. The dev branch does apparently add container items to address this, although you still have to find them in the first place. I'm having a hard time mustering the interest to go back to it now though, maybe they'll eventually hammer it into gold but I'm going to wait and let them work before I invest myself again.
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Sep 23, 2022 15:44
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Finished a run of Erannorth Chronicles with a sylph elementalist. The midgame levels are definitely the most interesting part of the game, the early game mostly sucks because you don't get to do anything fancy yet and the late game mostly sucks because there are fewer and fewer ways left to improve but you still need to grind out the stats to be able to beat the endgame quest. Other than the final boss the only real threat in the last third or so of the campaign was accidentally nuking myself because I mixed up a play-on-self with a play-on-enemies or played a buff on myself with a damage synergy up that I missed. Overall it was fun but I'm glad I grabbed it on sale because I don't know that it has a lot of legs for me personally. I feel bad because you can tell a tremendous amount of effort went into kind of a disappointing end product. I suppose at least it does seem to have found some sort of audience.
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Sep 26, 2022 02:42
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The good news is that even if you lose the metaprogression argument, you will earn valuable experience which will help you progress further the next time it comes up ITT.
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Sep 26, 2022 22:43
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HopperUK posted:Can't we just like different things? Some people can say 'I don't like that game, because I always play optimally and the optimal path in that game is boring'. Some others can say 'I don't play like that, so I like this game, but I don't like this OTHER game, because of another issue that you don't mind about'. If you're framing it as an argument between people who don't like a thing and people who don't care about that thing that kind of seems like an admission that it's actually bad and it's just a matter of degree of tolerance. It's not clear that anyone is actually arguing against the notion that good design is aligning the most optimal way to play with the most fun way to play, just saying that minor issues aren't a big enough problem to be worth caring about for them personally.
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Sep 26, 2022 23:03
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Yeah, Darkest Dungeon was an aesthetic with a crude game stapled to it. It managed to work because the gameplay and aesthetics complemented each other extremely well, but I haven't been holding my breath for DD2.
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Sep 27, 2022 14:54
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Count Uvula posted:I genuinely enjoy Darkest Dungeon's gameplay It's not the worst, but it's simultaneously fiddly and shallow. There's virtue in simplicity but DD gets in its own way too much, and there's just not enough content there to stretch such a simple game out as long as they want it. If it wasn't for the aesthetics it would be a Flash game good for killing a couple hours. To give due credit, marrying a bunch of push-your-luck mechanics to gothic horror was a fantastic idea. The game does an excellent job of baiting players into engaging with it on its own terms and that's a great design accomplishment even if a lot of the mechanics are shaky.
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Sep 27, 2022 16:50
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A tasty leg of wall chicken
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Sep 29, 2022 01:22
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 15:36 |
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goferchan posted:I've been following the dev on twitter for a while and thought this game looked neat, it released today. Purgatory Dungeoneer is a roguelite that seems to really go all-in on traditional JRPG combat with over 100 classes and 40 races to mix and match between. It seems there's also a meta town-building element as well? I remember a few people in this thread asking for games that mix old school Dragon Quest style RPGs with roguelike gameplay so this may fit the bill. I'll probably check it out tonight, it's $10 Thought this looked intriguing so I tried it and oof, it's rough. I actually dig the aesthetic but the interface is bad. There are up to 400 recruitable characters and the way you assemble your party is by physically traversing a couple dozen rooms where they're scattered randomly; if you want to replace a character, the only way is to empty your party and start over. Each character has 11 equipment slots, you can't view everything a character has equipped at once (!), and there's no way at the start to remove items from characters outside your party. Help topics are accessed through the inventory menu, which must be navigated a couple layers deep between topics. There are several dozen crafting materials with arbitrary names & icons and the only way to find out what they're used for is to scroll through the lists of multiple vendors; there is no rhyme or reason as to who carries what crafting recipes. The enemy pool is just as large (if not larger than) the character pool so you get thrown into random fight after random fight against enemies with completely unknown abilities. Half the skills have vaguely descriptive name and half of them are gibberish. There's a huge range of buff and debuff options and they mostly don't matter because combat largely boils down to mashing your various "delete enemy" skills. There's a small resource management component to it but missions are short enough that it just boils down to lightly rotating whose delete buttons you use. Sometimes the enemies get delete buttons too and it's luck of the draw if an enemy with good stats gets a good delete button and maybe they will murder a party member or maybe they will use a single target stat debuff on a character that doesn't meaningfully use that stat. Each character is only able to level up once or twice before you're required to do a special mission specific to them to advance, which throws you into a much higher level mission with a party of preassembled randos dragging around your lovely underleveled guy. You have to do each character one at a time. So the game wants you to rotate through the giant cast, but there's extra hurdles to bringing new characters up to speed with story missions. Also, a lot of classes have a mix of races with really good and really bad modifiers available, so some characters are just pointless and some of the character missions will saddle you with useless teammates. The one clever aspect is that between fights you're required to pick an additional penalty modifier that persists for the remainder of the mission. They're pretty big modifiers, like "enemies have +40% to a stat for the first 3 turns", "the party gets +100% to one stat and -50% to all of the rest", "party members have -40% to a stat while above 50% HP", etc. So there's often painful choices to be made as you progress through a gauntlet of fights, although it's luck of the draw whether the 2 options presented are devastating or inconsequential. Still, I think it's an improvement over the similar system in Time Break Chronicles, which is otherwise a much superior take on the "roguelite-ish JRPG with a giant cast" concept IMO.
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Oct 7, 2022 19:11
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