Brutal Gamer Interviews Arcen Games

[Cyborg]

Have you tried Disgaea 3, or any of the series? That takes the best part about proper positioning and stances(allows you to have your team combo attack depending on position and team member), a wide variety of classes, different metagames, great itemization, ability to upgrade( and play the game inside of) nearly every item, and player choice for researching abilities.

My only complaint, leveling needs to use the paw trick after the fourth world.

[x4000]

Neat!  That sounds really excellent, actually.  I haven't played any of Disgaea, but I keep meaning to.

What's the paw trick?

[Cyborg]

The puppy paw stick trick goes something like this. You are aware that the game is unabashedly and unashamedly over-the-top when it comes to leveling and itemization. Everything is upgradable, everything is metagame including the classroom and anything that has stats.

So, most people do not want to find another Baal Sword or whatever item you are looking for. So they either steal from Axel or do an optional quest after you beat the game to get the paw. After you equip it, you have a 20% chance of grabbing the item( including any stats) of your target if your  paw lands the finishing blow.  This sounds benign until you realize that you can combine items and steal from your classroom dropout clones. Those really hard to get items can now be equipped for a little extra effort on whomever you want, allowing you to gain levels really quickly because you have just taken your mega-sword and duplicated it. It's like creating unlimited Lionheart's (seeing as we are familiar with FF8) or duping in Diablo series.


Of course, this kind of mechanic is not immediately obvious, and it's mainly for people that want to go wild against optional bosses and pirates. I said it was game breaking, but in a way, by the time you exploit this item, it's really good for going after the optionals, and by this point you probably already have enjoyed the "main campaign," which is a very small part of the game.

[x4000]

Wow, that's really interesting -- thanks for the explanation.  Reminds me of some of the troubles we had with parasites in AI War, except even moreso.

[superking]

Wow, that's really interesting -- thanks for the explanation.  Reminds me of some of the troubles we had with parasites in AI War, except even moreso.

/tangent
Do you ever feel like the old parasites, for all their overpowered utility of aqquiring any ship you destroy, actually were a great deal of fun to use? I used to design stratergies around finding high MK raid machines/superterminals and harvesting the resulting waves to create high MK fleets in 3.0

it wasn't exactly balanced, in that it was alot of power for little expense, but it was a very entertaining mechanic that encouraged players to pick fights with high MK ships. the new parasites are comparatively worthless, which is kind of a pity.

[x4000]

Well, I do think the older parasites were a lot of fun.  I also think that those shotgun exploits in CoD sound like they were a lot of fun for the folks using them, though.

The difference, obviously, is that the shotgun exploiters were harming the experience of other gamers, while in a co-op setting that is just not the case with parasites in AIW.  But I think that as a strategy game developer we're under a form of contract with players to try and give them the most balanced experience possible.  Not because if we don't the game won't be any fun, but because if we don't then the game shrinks.  How many people were once only ever starting with parasites, because they couldn't bear to use anything else?  Quite a few. 

That's trading in a larger body of fun (the whole game in general) for a very much smaller body of fun (parasites only) for a lot of players, which isn't going to make people happy-long term.  Once you get bored of the parasite mechanics, what's left?  And it's not like we take older versions of the game off the market or something -- the license keys still work on the older versions that have installers floating around out there; we just don't provide support for anything except the latest version.

I'll also note that it's not like we unilaterally decided to change things.  We had persistent, ongoing complaints about how game-breaking the older parasites were, and we revised them continually over a span of a year and a half until they arrived where they are now.  And, to be honest, I still don't think we're done with them.  The complaints now are that they are not as useful as people want them to be, but there's a mixed message in there in that some people want the over-powered fun of them, etc.  So we've kind of been biding our time on that, and waiting to collect more feedback from players once they have more time with them.

[superking]

My dream parasites would be a combination of the old 'tagging for reclamation' leech starship with 40/60/80 weak projectiles, and all parasite ships coming back as full HP zombies like how the botnet golem handles it. This way they are as powerful- if not more powerful- than they used to be for straight up battle, but lack the long-term army-building utility since zombies are uncontrollable, spread out and tend to do stupid things.

[x4000]

I think we're hitting points where things are diverging based on just those two opposing goals -- some folks like to army-build, and the current leech/parasite mechanics are focused on that.  And probably will stay thus, for good; I think that's most popular for them.  But then we have the during-battle more powerful zombies stuff, which right now is mostly centered in the botnet golem.  Maybe in the next expansion, doing a bonus ship type that is basically like parasites that create zombies, would be a good way to meet your main goal.

I just think that, ultimately, parasites were trying to do too many things and thus were too powerful.  So splitting off their functions somewhat lets people get the different aspects of them in a way that's still enjoyable but not overpowered.  Ideally.

[Nalgas]

Maybe in the next expansion, doing a bonus ship type that is basically like parasites that create zombies, would be a good way to meet your main goal.

Splitting them like that could definitely be a good idea, and you never can have too many ship types (as long as each is unique and serves a purpose, at least).  I do like using them to steal ships I can't otherwise get and hoard them for special occasions, but swarms of zombies are also fun and useful, just in a different way in different situations.

I have to agree that the two aren't really compatible in a single ship type.  If you make them able to steal large numbers of ships, they're too powerful if the reclaimed ships don't have some sort of drawback like lack of direct control or limited lifetime, but with one of those drawbacks in place, you eliminate the possibility of more long term planning and use of parasites and reclaimed ships.  If you try to balance for one case, the other is inherently unbalanced, because they work from conflicting sets of rules/priorities.