deep dish peat moss posted:

I don't agree with your conclusion, because with the game providing 100% information about everything I don't see my actions as mattering at all - the game is taking those actions and showing me which one is best, which is what makes the game too easy. The game does have numerous options available but there's always one clear and obvious best-in-class thing to do on any given turn which was my main complaint - I never got to think about what I had to do on a turn, the obvious solution just stood out every time. You're probably right about difficulty though, it's been 5 and a half years since I last played it so I don't even remember what difficulty settings it has, but I do have the achievement for beating it on Hard and the achievement for beating it once on each length

LifeLynx posted:

Pirates Outlaws and Breach Wanderers selling their metaprogression currency for real money gives me the ick. Pirates looks good, at least. Breach Wanderers looks like a mess of pixels, which could have charm, but I can't see what the cards do without lifting each one up individually.

Ibram Gaunt posted:

Enjoying Cobalt Core. I'm bad at it so I just play on normal, but I've gotten 2 wins under my belt after a handful of games and it's still cool.

Razakai posted:

Nowhere Prophet is competently made but never really grabbed me. Having your "cards" take permanent damage and die if they fall in battle also felt kinda bad. And I never felt like you could make an interesting synergistic build, it was just grabbing random goodstuff, but I only beat it once so maybe I missed something.
The art, setting and music alone makes it worth playing though.

malnourish posted:

Preach it, dude. I have been craving a game like this for ages.
I think it's a lot more difficult to create -- you need an AI which can play cards, manage creatures, etc. And it would need a lot of content since you'll be seeing those cards many times.

I'm toying with a game that addresses the cards from a different angle. Instead of drafting cards/building a deck of cards, you have "components". These are things like a creature's power/toughness ratio, effects, etc.

Then, every time you would draw a card, you instead randomly generate one based on the distribution of components in your supply.

Similarly, you have templates which influence how the components are put together. High cost templates have bigger numbers or more lines of effects than low cost templates.

I still find making games (graphics and UI in particular) quite difficult, despite over a decade of professional development experience.

goferchan posted:

This is probably like exactly what the person looking for something close to Runeterra wanted. The demo only has the "roguelite" draft mode but it's my understanding the story mode in the full game involves building preconstructed decks. There's also apparently multiplayer in the full release but it seems like more of a side focus as opposed to the game being balanced around PVP. I was pretty impressed with the demo, love the detailed play log and all the stats available.

Snooze Cruise posted:

I checked out the Path of Champions mode in Runeterra since it was mention earlier that Cross Blitz is based off of it. Had a fun for a few hours before getting annoyed at it shoving the chest and exp stuff in my face too much so I uninstalled. Fortunately Cross Blitz itself is coming out in like 9 hours.

Snooze Cruise posted:

Oh I am aware its just annoying to see that after every battle, really slows things down.

Snooze Cruise posted:

Did the full release added some options to speed up animations? That was my main complaint with the demo.

goferchan posted:

Cross Blitz is cool but the roguelite mode kinda faces some of the same inherent issues as Runeterra's. Trinkets that apply upgrades to cards in your deck are fun, but like Runeterra, the upgrades apply all at once to every copy of the card in your deck (and ones you may generate during combat etc) and often the right choice is not upgrading your big splashy cards, but upgrading the cheapest ones possible -- adding "draw a card" to "1 mana, deal 2 damage to a minion" when you have 5 copies of it is almost always gonna be nuts. The game sort of deals with this by having powerful higher-rarity enchantments that can only be applied to higher rarity cards, but rarity doesn't always correlate to card cost, and again, often adding "draw a card" to something cheap is the most powerful thing you can do.

The other thing which is a big oversight IMO and something I hoped would be "fixed" from LoR is cards that heal the player. Nothing wrong with that in the main constructed game mode where each player starts from scratch in each round with max life, but in the RL mode where your character's health is persistent between rounds it encourages some tedious play patterns where you may end up in a situation where it's better to artificially stall victory by finding repeatable ways to heal yourself before winning a match. Maybe there's somebody out there who finds that fun but I certainly don't. In something like StS cards with healing effects are rare, are almost never usable more than once in a match, and typically there's a risk/reward element to even stalling a game long enough to use them once, because most enemies have some mechanic that makes them inherently more dangerous the longer a battle takes. None of that is true here and it makes me question whether persistent HP between combats was even the right decision to go with in the first place.

All that said the game is still very fun for the same reasons Runeterra's Path of Champions is fun. I've found some really neat combos already and there are a lot of ways to build broken bullshit -- I will definitely keep playing. For anyone who likes Path of Champions I think it's a great pickup, I suppose I was just hopeful it would refine on the formula more. That said the game is in EA so there's still time for adjustments, and they made some pretty drastic changes to the metaprogression (wayyy fewer permanent power upgrades) between the demo and EA launch, so good things may be coming

Impermanent posted:

Wow Against the Storm is good. I somehow put 30 hours into it this week since picking it up on Tuesday.

It feels quite a bit like a fusion of Anno and some popular worker placement board games, like Die Kolonists and Agricola. I am not sure if that's a true inspiration or if they're just playing in similar pools, but the drafting of available building and slotting of workers reminds me of board games.

Strong recommend if you're on the fence!

Elswyyr posted:

I'm not really a fan of metaprogression in run-based games, since it makes things feel like a grind to get to a level where you're allowed to beat the game.
Are there any newer roguelikes/lites/whatevers that go whole hog into the concept of metaprogression, where the point of a run isn't really to beat the game, but to gain as much metacurrency/progression material as possible? The closest I can think of is something like the old flash game Motherload, where each "run" consisted of digging a mine, getting as many valuable things as possible, then ending your run by going back up, selling items and unlocking upgrades to make the next run more profitable.

cock hero flux posted:

there's also this bizarre mentality i've seen in a lot of different places from both developers and players where they will say things like "well if i'm not unlocking content, what is the point of playing?", seemingly unaware of the idea that you would play a game because it is fun

goferchan posted:

Anyone ever hear of Withering Rooms before? Stumbled upon it today and it looks cool and weird as hell. Sort of a roguelike metroidvania meets Clock Tower? I'm gonna give it a whirl. While it says it's EA, apparently the game is functionally complete -- the dev is just waiting to coordinate an official 1.0 launch with upcoming console version releases.

resistentialism posted:

It's been entertaining to read through pages of many people earnestly writing posts with complete nonsense words

megane posted:

I found it pretty frustrating that you can think up a cool synergy in RW, build it, and then it turns out it’s just not good enough.

Immunities are the most annoying kind of difficulty and RW loving loves them. Oh, good, this floor is full of glass-iron ghost werewolves immune to literally every element except lightning, how fun.

cock hero flux posted:

rift wizard's biggest flaw is that 100% immunities are ridiculously common and the nature of the system is that, because killing everything is mandatory, even a single enemy that you are unable to damage instantly ends the run. This used to be less of a problem because you were able to map out future areas 2 levels deep instead of 1, and having access to more information drastically reduced the impact of both this problem and the mana potion drought problem. Then the developer removed it and gave no reasoning for doing so beyond "some players don't feel like doing it", which I found so annoying that I dropped the game on the spot.

cock hero flux posted:

if you're willing to just hold skill points you can get low levels spells on demand to cover whatever damage type but enemies spawn infinitely and casts are limited so you do need to make some kind of actual build that kills things quickly, and if a late game level has enemies that are totally immune to it then banking 3 points to get some basic spell with a different damage type is not going to clear infinity guys for you.
The actual answer to this is that you either need a build that covers every possibility or you need to hoard dragon horns or portal keys to fix bad levels for you

the holy poopacy posted:

This is the crux of it to me. Path of Achra is the game that people think Rift Wizard is. RW was designed as a pretty tactically intensive game that also includes enough combo potential that you can create builds that will win the game for you, but that wasn't the original focus and it's not designed to facilitate that. As a tactical blow stuff up game Rift Wizard is not especially hard and builds are very open-ended. As a build simulator it's quite difficult and there are only a limited few builds that work consistently without needing an obsessive level of systems mastery.

RW2 seems to be trying to clarify its design vision and reinforce the tactical side further, which I think will help with a lot of the expectations mismatch that people bounce off RW from.

nrook posted:

Yes, this seems right to me. It’s Plato’s skill issue: some players feel trapped into pursuing only a few powerful builds, and thus feel ill-used when the game punishes them for a lack of versatility. If only they could just leave the cave and see the beautiful world of playing good!

the holy poopacy posted:

A lot of players approach RW that way but it's not the only way. Yean, yeah, synergy is a good thing and all. But there are also a lot of fantastic toolbox spells in RW that just efficiently do a job without needing any support at all, and if you string together a bunch of these then 1) you don't actually need much synergy and 2) you will actually have plenty of points to put together whatever you want. Obviously Arch Sorcerer makes this easier but something like Chain Lightning or Mega Annihilate can be dropped into literally any build and will do what it needs to do.

Like you say that it's hard to get past level 5--it's just not. You can buy 4 cantrips on the first floor and steamroll the next 3 floors with that alone, probably without touching a potion. Now you have 9 SP and can buy almost anything, and it's fairly hard not to buy something that will carry you through the next few floors, enough to get another 9 SP. There's a limit to how far this will go without needing some sort of synergy, but you need surprisingly little synergy in your build if you have a well rounded toolbox to fall back on.

SKULL.GIF posted:

I'm really enjoying how the lore is all coming together. I'm strongly reminded of 70s, 80s fantasy, the stuff you'd see on Robert Howard anthologies, but twisted that everyone's a writhing mutant.

Ofecks posted:

This seems like a cool idea.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Reprise
A romhack of the GBA original that has procedurally-generated roguelite features.

victrix posted:

resistentialism posted:

The thing with Noita is that the basic monster behaviors are mostly predictable, but for the first 20 or 50 or 100 hours you play it you don't know what you need to predict, and not knowing makes the enemies seem incredibly dangerous. So you play real careful and try to only ever peek at them from cover. You let them push you around and some arced shots chip away at your health while you constantly retreat. After a (long) while playing, though, it's not all that hard to wander right past of a lot of enemies and just dodge all their shots, all without firing a wand. At some point the things that kill you mostly come down to either hubris or dumb poo poo happening, and that stuff is hilarious.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

That said, I personally only really dislike the second one ("select 3 things randomly drawn from a pool instead of having full control over character progression!"). The first one just looks like a skill or tech tree that limits your overall choices at any given moment (while remaining deterministic) which is a nice compromise between the homogeneity of totally free-form point buy on one hand and linear progression on the other.

cock hero flux posted:

some kind of compromise between the two is best I think. Total control does make things a bit samey and overly straightforward but too much randomness just makes me feel like I'm not even really making decisions

I like Achra's method as a compromise, where you can control what abilities you take fully but equipment can also be extremely impactful and your control over what you get is pretty limited.

cock hero flux posted:

see I don't like it because the decision space is constrained to the point where the actual decisions in it either end up losing meaning or become excessively frustrating

with this setup the developer has some issues with making the available possibilities both interesting and functional. If the options you can pick come with substantial downsides, then any reward carries with it the risk of being run-ending. This very much goes against the idea of a reward. If you allow players to refuse rewards, then the problem instead becomes that players will just turn down anything that isn't beneficial to them. So rather than encouraging improvisation all it does is make it so that some percentage of the time the player is rewarded with nothing. This was actually a big problem in One Step From Eden for runs intended to loop: you could only carry a limited set of items and could refuse but not discard them, so it was optimal to turn down any reward that wasn't super strong. So the way a lot of the games that use this system solve this problem is by making rewards purely beneficial, because then a reward is always a reward. But this carries with it its own problems: either the player rapidly stacks big rewards and the game becomes too easy, or the rewards are beneficial but too minor to actually be interesting. You either become ultra strong and coast through the game, or every reward is like "here's some stats" and the resulting decision is "well this one is a stat that I want so I pick this one".

cock hero flux posted:

i like everything about cogmind except playing it

Serephina posted:

Thinking about it, is anyone out there making new traditional RLs with high production values? Like the last I heard of was Tangledeep, which I might not have liked but I certainly bought and supported and was happy to have done.
edit: and RiftWizard2, but that's a foregone conclusion lol

King of Bleh posted:

The oldschool games with "spoilers" like Nethack etc are really just metaprogression in another form, and are arguably worse in that regard than the +1-to-starting-HP format because they give players the false impression that memorizing a bunch of obtuse secrets and gotchas has anything to do with skill or mastery.

Tea Party Crasher posted:

I would love to have that kind of experience more often with games. The communal aspect of both information and misinformation elevated the poo poo out of Dark Souls for me