- Joined
- Jun 7, 2012
- Messages
- 3,160
I love build tinkering in old CRPGs. I love building decks in any TCG. I love putting armies together in wargames, building OP characters in D&D, and theorycrafting in general.
This liking matched really well with Arcade and Skirmish modes: you test your build against a set of enemies in hand-tweaked encounters, maybe fight a couple of bosses, and get a rating at the end. Each encounter is hand-designed and could pull your build in very different directions.
What I've found it has happened in the last decade+ (curse you, Dominion) is that we've replaced Arcade with Roguelite, and strategic building with tactical building.
Putting together a deck has now become deckbuilding from random packs (StS, Monster Train), instead of point-buying armies we're purchasing them from a store pool (TFT, Gladiator Guild Manager), our RPG parties get built out of random traits (DD, Iratus), movesets in action games are also chosen from a pool (Hades, Dead Cells)...you get the gist. It makes the game more replayable, as no game becomes "solved" and every run is a spin of a slot machine into what could be an epic build you'll use to oneshot the final boss.
And that would be fine and dandy if only these games did not almost all of them suffer from the same thing: simple encounter design. As a good variety of builds have to be viable, as content has to be randomly generated but still solvable, and as players cannot prepare for complex situations; every encounter and every enemy is boiled down to 1-2 simple AI behaviors that you can pattern-recognize. Difficulty levels increase stats, maybe add a third behavior, but it never becomes puzzly enough that it isn't either hyper-narrow or overly broad. It's never quite like the well-tuned realistic opponent you'd get from a fighting game.
To close this mental diarrhea I wanna say I know there are still good encounters in games all around, but they're often wrapped in a larger package. Either you have to play a 30h+ JRPG campaign just for the couple of interesting bosses, or maybe to build an army you have to play a 10h+ campaign with a strategic layer (TWH3, Winter Falling), or worse of all you have to grindwall/paywall your build just to be competitive (every f2p/mobile game).
I wish modern games had Arcade/Skirmish modes because I love their mechanics but don't like tradeoff they took for infinite replayability.
This liking matched really well with Arcade and Skirmish modes: you test your build against a set of enemies in hand-tweaked encounters, maybe fight a couple of bosses, and get a rating at the end. Each encounter is hand-designed and could pull your build in very different directions.
What I've found it has happened in the last decade+ (curse you, Dominion) is that we've replaced Arcade with Roguelite, and strategic building with tactical building.
Putting together a deck has now become deckbuilding from random packs (StS, Monster Train), instead of point-buying armies we're purchasing them from a store pool (TFT, Gladiator Guild Manager), our RPG parties get built out of random traits (DD, Iratus), movesets in action games are also chosen from a pool (Hades, Dead Cells)...you get the gist. It makes the game more replayable, as no game becomes "solved" and every run is a spin of a slot machine into what could be an epic build you'll use to oneshot the final boss.
And that would be fine and dandy if only these games did not almost all of them suffer from the same thing: simple encounter design. As a good variety of builds have to be viable, as content has to be randomly generated but still solvable, and as players cannot prepare for complex situations; every encounter and every enemy is boiled down to 1-2 simple AI behaviors that you can pattern-recognize. Difficulty levels increase stats, maybe add a third behavior, but it never becomes puzzly enough that it isn't either hyper-narrow or overly broad. It's never quite like the well-tuned realistic opponent you'd get from a fighting game.
To close this mental diarrhea I wanna say I know there are still good encounters in games all around, but they're often wrapped in a larger package. Either you have to play a 30h+ JRPG campaign just for the couple of interesting bosses, or maybe to build an army you have to play a 10h+ campaign with a strategic layer (TWH3, Winter Falling), or worse of all you have to grindwall/paywall your build just to be competitive (every f2p/mobile game).
I wish modern games had Arcade/Skirmish modes because I love their mechanics but don't like tradeoff they took for infinite replayability.
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