NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I like Arcen a lot and this is very much a game I will get at some point.
But holy crap. They released a video on youtube in the past few days about “different timelines” and that was the fastest I went from “this should be fun” to “I need to really set aside some time to learn this game”. And I play Dwarf Fortress and Terra Invicta.
False@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s been a couple years since I played TI, so maybe they’ve improved it, but I think this is a lot simpler than TI.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
It would be genuinely difficult to find a game more complex than TI. And I grew up on the frigging derek smart battlecruiser games.
It mostly speaks to whoever in marketing thought the best way to describe the gameplay loop would be to do the FULL gameplay loop and introduce like ninety difference concepts in ten minutes.
False@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, Chris (the Arcen guy) makes some great mechanics but “things that look appealing” is his big weak point.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
He DEFINITELY has that problem (and it is part of why I encourage anyone who thinks they are a “completionist” to play A Valley Without Wind). It is more just that the presentation is horrible.
Iti s basically “Hey, we have a multiple timeline system. Now, let’s look at this mid-game mission. You might be able to spawn in Keanu who is awesome and let’s give him ninety million modifiers. Oh, did we mention that you have to use Keanu because you can’t use humans for this? Also you have humans. Oh, and this mission will end your run if you fail it. But hey, it all works. But if you didn’t have that you could have done these things to mitigate it. Now let’s jump forward to the end of the game where we can see we have two different timelines on the same island. If timelines are on separate islands they are disjoint but because they are on the same one they bleed together. With that, we can roll time backwards and…”
Versus something as simple as
“Hey, some missions can be done by humans and some by robots and some missions you need to pass, to some degree, to beat the game. Let’s look at one where we need to succeed but can’t because none of our robots are good enough. Well, the good news is we can instead just kill everyone. We’ll take a hit but we won’t fail. So let’s do that. Now let’s fast forward to the endgame where we can see we lost. But, and this is kind of a spoiler, we have the ability to reset to a different timeline. The mechanics of that get a bit complicated, but let’s just use it to show how we could have handled that mission where it all went wrong. We have Keanu here. Keanu is awesome. Let’s send Keanu back in time along with all these guns and modifiers and…”
One immediately blasts players and shuts brains off. The other actually walks through why that system is there and even explains the gameplay loop.