Mitsoda likely saw a lot of problems with the original.
Not with BL1 but I was amazed how accurate he recognized all the
issues of Dead State in a "what went wrong" section of this postmortem.
While we were able to achieve an impressive scope for the project, we definitely had to work with the base of what we could afford. Most reviewers called us out on the lack of activity in the Shelter or the turn-based combat not being interesting enough, and while we would have liked to have done more with them, we simply did not have the budget to make those features happen.
meh, bullshit.
Underrail's combat(character building, etc.,) is way better, what kind of budget and team did it have?
Combat and character building in Dead State(to be clear here -- I'm not picking on Dead State, this applies to a
lot of cRPGs) is subpar because it's obvious the designers never bothered to learn the fundamentals. It's like trying to draw lifelike figures without even studying anatomy but just guessing. They did a rough approximation of what they think it should look like.
Honestly, it's sort of ridiculous how he seems OK with just having bad combat. It's like an FPS having bad shooting mechanics and the designers saying "well, our priorities were elsewhere!"
