Great Game Utterly Wasted on Exact HP Mechanic

[Judge Cudge]

While an 'interesting' idea, this is the exact definition of a gimmick for a gimmick's sake.
The game has enough meaningfully compelling things about itself to distinguish it from other games without throwing a massive wrench into the mix in an attempt to put another feather in its cap.

I would much rather the enemies just be strictly unkillable without hitting their exact HP. But even then I would resent the mechanic for introducing, as it does now, a 'use heavy attack to break the shield' mechanic with just an obtuse pretend dressing.

Every odd numbered hp unit needs a heavy attack, every even hp unit doesn't. That's what the mechanic boils down to. The only thing that distinguishes it from other similar systems is that:

1) The heavy attack is now needed seemingly at random, instead of being connected to meaningful visual elements of the enemies body structure indicating it needs to be heavied.

2) The prevalence of the heavy attack being needed to break the 'shield' is now much more common, as large swaths of enemies need and do have odd numbers to reinforce the mechanic, and this without any rhyme or reason of design being necessary for these additions. No plates or armor, or bubble barriers, or carapaces. Just odd numbers.

3) It is now possible to beat a fight and lose out on progress. Which is all and only frustrating and will lead either to painful redos or slow deliberate trodding tedium. Fake winning is just losing to most players, so it will be avoided in the same way.

4) The fighting must be, and visibly has been, simplified and slowed down to make room for this chore mechanic, limiting the ceiling on meaningful complexity and difficulty in order to support the chore and best avoid the novel fail state.

If the chore is easy it's tedious, if the chore is hard it's ghastly frustration.
'Killing the enemy wrong and getting nothing' is perhaps the worst idea I've ever heard of as a permanent core mechanic, and the fact that it boils down to shieldbreak but divorced from enemy design, but now with a whammy punish state that theoretically forces you to reset the fight, is beyond the pale stupid.

If anyone has anything positive to say about the mechanic aside from, "I don't mind it" or "I think it's neat and new." I'd love to hear it.

But if not, this has singlehandedly soured me on what seems to be an otherwise wonderful game with a lot of effort and polish put into it.

[Chocos Ramabotti]

I agree, expect the whole game didn't do it to me and actually never felt that special as I would have expected. the substraction mechanic did nothing that improved the game in any thinkable meaningful way to me, tying it to exp just opens up new places for frustration for a game that tries to avoid it actually.


The challenges felt pretty like the bog standard 2d indie action-game. Just moment to moment action from room to room, countless trivial rooms. I'm pretty puristic in a sense that I think any gameplay segment shouldn't be wasted for not introducing anything meaningful to the experience either for tutorialization or for unique ways of challenge.

Since you respawn at the beginning of every room, any challenge is "moment to moment" but this means every repeated fight against the same enemies is just blatant padding.
This would be different if you had to survive for more than one room at a time. So either you do this "moment to moment" way of challenging the player right, by having every screen unique. Or you make them more level based challenging with attritions you need to housekeep.

[MOLN]

I agree. I absolutely disliked that mechanic too.

[Lots Of Blue]

For me it was the opposite: I liked how the system made every battle feel like an opportunity to show off that I had understood my moveset and get rewarded if I did it right. Not trying to invalidate what anyone is saying ITT; every player is different and for some, the frustration from missing out on the reward if you don't execute perfectly will outweigh the satisfaction one gets from succeeding.

Originally posted by Judge Cudge:

I would much rather the enemies just be strictly unkillable without hitting their exact HP. But even then I would resent the mechanic for introducing, as it does now, a 'use heavy attack to break the shield' mechanic with just an obtuse pretend dressing.

Every odd numbered hp unit needs a heavy attack, every even hp unit doesn't. That's what the mechanic boils down to.

I would probably see it that way too if the basic and heavy attacks you start with were all the game had to offer, but there're plenty more options for dealing with odd HP that are made available as the demo progresses:

• The Quickdraw move is available early in the upgrade tree and cannot overkill enemies, which makes it a great finisher regardless of whether the enemy is at 1 or 2 HP.
  
• The SAB gun's shots embed themselves in enemies and continuously deal damage in 1 HP ticks, which guarantees a perfect kill and lets the player focus on avoiding attacks or dealing with other threats as the enemy's HP counts down.
  
• In the cathedral-looking building you can find an enhancement to the third hit of the carbon blade's combo, which makes it do an additional 1 HP of damage after a brief delay. This makes the move able to perfectly kill enemies at both 2 and 3 HP.
  
• Pretty far down the upgrade tree is a second melee weapon; the carbon hammer. It deals odd damage for both its regular and charged attacks (5 and 9, respectively). Since the player can switch weapons at any time, this lets you adapt your damage output on the fly as the situation dictates.

At least for me, this was enough to keep things interesting and give me enough options to play around with for combat to feel fresh and fun for the duration of the demo.

[Judge Cudge]

There are multiple methods that appear to "break the shield" in other games too. But what you can't do is kill the enemy wrong and be forced to redo it.

I would be glad to hear that the terrible game ruining gimmick mechanic is more fleshed out than I thought, but unfortunately it is in fact still terrible. And the more ways to hit odd that are present just signal to me it's definitely here to stay, and definitely going to repulse anyone else who sees it for what it is.

A bad 'interesting' idea.

[dervish.candela]

Also, automatic pistol exists, and works as a perfect ranged finisher for HP 10 and less.

The mechanic itself is quite interersting.
In current form it can be possibly rebalanced by simply providing mediocre XP on thoughtless kills and a good bonus on perfect kills (a la "stylish combat" metrics in console slashers). No one would balk at such implementation.

However it would be nice to have some more depth to this instead.
I have no idea how this can look without introducing types of damage/ types of hp / shields etc. Shields are fine per se, but have been done a thousand times. Damage types are a cancer.

[Judge Cudge]

I really have no problem with shields. And have in effect, explained why they are strictly better while complaining about this, simply because they actually involve the enemies design somewhat in how you go about fighting them.

But this is all without even touching the meat of the issue which is the novel fail state of 'killing things wrong' introduced by the numerical system which is unsalvageably obnoxious.

[57E]

This is not that different from games like Bayonetta giving each fight a rating and rewarding more cash for reaching higher ranks. Only here it's shown excatly what you need to do for each enemy to get an optimal reward instead of only learning afterwards why your end rank got docked for using the moves wrong.

[Judge Cudge]

Getting S++ rank in Bayonetta, and "killing the enemies wrong" in this game are massively distinct in terms of reward and expectation.

For a million reasons, the most glaring of which is that you can grind for cash in Bayonetta, and doing this is expected, easy, and obvious enough that the average player will not be pulling their hair out for not having done every single fight perfectly.

Meanwhile, in this game, the average player will be frustrated if they ever fail to complete their progress denying limited edition gimmick-chore, and will likely retry by any means necessary, usually killing themselves. Or more likely, just not buy/refund the game.
Leaving only people who are infinitely forgiving/defensive of bad mechanics, and people who aren't progression motivated at all and just ignore it.

[schmoo]

please dont listen to this dude. exact hp is so sick i wish i had thought of it, makes every battle more interesting

[Judge Cudge]

It makes it exactly as interesting as a shield bubble, except with a built in 'you killed it wrong' punishment.

[Spoonpile]

Someone already mentioned above that some weapons deal even damage and other deal odd so I'll spare you reading it again. All I will say is that there is a gun that does 1 damage per shot, if the enemy is at 1 hp I can just shoot it rather than slice. using the charged attack would become mind numbing if that was all i had to work with, but it's not.

[Judge Cudge]

Yes, and some weapons deal shield breaking damage and others deal non shield breaking damage.

More iterations doesn't prevent this from being a shield breaking mechanic with less flavorful visual indication and the worst whammy state imaginable.

[cringe ass nae nae baby]

exact hp is the entire reason the game's combat is interesting.

having more than one fail state ("killing the enemy wrong") does not bad design make. it allows the player to choose the level of challenge they want for every combat encounter. if you're struggling with an enemy you can just stop paying attention to the numbers and wail on the enemy to make it easier, but you'll have to balance that choice against potentially making the rest of the game harder through not being able to buy as many upgrades. being punished for choosing an immediate difficulty reduction with a deferred one is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sick form of player reinforcement. but if you don't think consequences are fun idk if the game is for you, and i can totally see why people would think that

you might say "well the only reason exact hp is needed to make the combat interesting is because the combat was 'simplified and slowed down to make room for this chore mechanic'". it's obviously a matter of taste but the simplified combat is a good thing imo. it makes everything feel less physical and more cerebral. i prefer having to do math on the fly over actual "mechanical depth" (read: more boring ass reaction time mechanics like the parry systems every other game is obsessed with these days). it works to rtu's benefit that it doesnt really care how its combat system compares to other games

the quickdraw mechanic is a copout and should honestly be removed because its only purpose is to attempt to appease players who dont like the combat system. the first rule of making good games is that you will never make a game that appeals to everyone so you should just stop trying to appease people who are diametrically opposed to your entire design for taste reasons before you ruin it for the people it does appeal to

[Judge Cudge]

Yes, because they used this instead of any other more palatable and entertaining gimmick.
Now you understand another reason why it's bad.
It crowds out the design space of any actually good way of making the combat gripping.

Slow, tedious, disassociated combat with a novel depressing failstate is in fact, bad.
This despite the fact it is novel.
Nearly no one will ever actively choose this failstate, as the consequences are a permanent irrecoverable gimp to your character.
And there is no "cerebral" math to do, it is evens or odds.

Further, making a game uncompromisingly bad is not 'good design' regardless of the guise of aiming for a specific niche audience.

If your niche audience is only people with a high tolerance to bad game design under false pretenses like these, you have just and only made a bad game.

[Tanasinn [AZ]]

Terrible opinions made by people who just want to press buttons without thinking. I'm sorry for anyone who actually read anything in this thread.