set
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 21, 2013
- Messages
- 944
I have the following remarks:
1. Encounters are bland: Enemies, Abilities, and Positioning (almost) don't ever matter.
I honestly can't tell you who is more dangerous - archers, mages, or warriors. In Tyranny, they all seem to do the same amount of damage, tank the same amount of damage, and have the same amount of utility. At the end of the first act, I remember getting pummeled by Fifth Eye's melee attack, but besides that, not a SINGLE ENEMY ABILITY stood out to me as being significantly dangerous.
On the hardest difficulty.
I didn't even use consumeable items (besides the obligatory potions). As I didn't even feel the need to make my party Enrage themselves, or cover their weapons in poison. Immunity to Bleed consumeable item? I wouldn't even know when my party members were bleeding anyway, or when an enemy would be preparing to use bleed, or if bleed even did anything significant.
Mind you, I haven't beaten the game yet, still in Act 2.
Also, the cooldown crap on items is stupid. If you want to load up on poisons you have to wait in between uses, even if you're prepping before a fight. I don't have the patience for that, when the fights are so boring and simplistic anyway.
2. The sigil system accomplishes nothing a traditional skill system would not have already accomplished. I'd argue a traditional system would have been more fun, letting the designers create fun spells instead of letting me very slowly acquire a lame amount of boring "slightly modifiable spells".
Like, yes, Lightning Rune + Close Quarters Rune = Close Quarters Lightning Dage Spell. So what? I can "accent" the rune a little to have further reach, but it's not like I actually "designed" the spell's properties.
I would look to other Skill systems of a similar vein and note how they accomplish it better:
In Path of Exile, your equipment has sockets that are 'linked'. You put a skill in a socket. You put supports in linked sockets. The active skill has its propreties changed by the supporting passive property skill effects.
You can have Fire Ball + "Multiple Projectiles" + "Faster Projectiles" + "Reduced Area of Effect But More Area Damage" + "Projectiles Pierce" + "Projectiles Chain" to create a skill which fires many fireballs which have reduced area of effect by pierce and "chain" (like chain lightning) enemies they hit. In Path of Exile, although they're still iterating on this stuff to give you more options, there are at least some support skils you can socket that change how you play your character.
Sure, PoE's system is lacking in some respects, but it could be interated on. In its current state, it vastly outperforms Tyranny's system, which is literally "stack Lore receive skills". The whole cooldown thing certainly doesn't make the system very engaging, either. In PoE, the system allows builds to utilize the same skills in different ways. In Tyranny, whether you accent a skill or not, it essentially does the same thing.
In Path of Exile, you have a limited number of sockets, similar to your lore limit, and how they further restrict creativity is by putting attribute requirements on specific supports. How you then open up the freedom of choice is making more supports readily available - in PoE you rapidly acquire support skills to socket into your active skills. In Tyranny? I was sitting on a couple cores and a couple accents by the end of Act 1 - which are easy to miss too by the way - making the system extremely limiting in terms of creation. I get they wanted to limit OP spell growth, but if the sigils themselves couldn't be used because of an attribute score instead of a lore score, you could allow them to just be purchaseable right after you step off the boat.
3. The skill trees suck.
The review does an adequate job explaining this.
4. This game resembles Dragon Age 2 too much for me:
-Character animations flashy, gameplay not impactful
-Enemies are extremely rinse-and-repeat - melee, archer, mage; enemies don't have impactful skills
-Story is sort of interesting, with you competing between two warring factions (Obviously Tyranny does a much better job, but same concept in essence)
-Talent trees are stupid, linear, limiting, and don't offer all that much diversity or development as you play the game
-No challenge
The most positive roleplaying aspects I've had so far are roleplaying as "Lawful Evil Lawyer/Diplomat". Kind of an interesting take. I wish more games let you play the "dark side of the law" / court politics.
Considering the spires thing, and the same look/feel, I'm really surprised this wasn't just a direct sequel to PoE. Its story could have fit right in, really. Did they really need to distance themselves from it? Did PoE perform that bad?
I'd like to rate it higher than a 6/10, considering there is some genuinely good design mixed in here, but I just am not finding the game very interesting. While there are thankfully not that many combat encounters in Act 1, the main draw of the game is still combat and it's not very engaging.
Oh and one more criticism:
5. Your characters scale by "doing things"
This is literally the dumbest thing ever. This means your main character should have at least subterfuge/athletics(horrible stat name btw)/lore as high as possible on char gen, because your other skills will just auto-scale for you. Furthermore, because of how dumb this system is, the party member that does the most damage, or does the most damage in the most XP effecient way, will get the most levels, which will create a positive feedback loop - causing characters to wildly form XP gaps between each other. This is completely retarded. Everybody with ANY rpg game design sense KNOWS you don't make your XP system based on "using skill raises skill's level" because even if it doesn't get abused by your players (it will be), it makes it nearly impossible to balance advancement. And it just doesn't make any sense anyway, cooking shit more doesn't make you a good cook past a certain minimum level of skill. I will not become a cordon bleu chef just by making toasted cheese every day.
Also, I initially rolled a quickness character. Upon realizing everything was cooldown based...but that I received more skills than I could possibly use in a reasonable amount of time anyway (and that many OP skills were only 1 use per rest anyway), I dumped the stat. What an awful stat. Cooldown reduction that at most is like -30%? It doesn't feel impactful in combat besides all the helpful passive skills it boosts.
1. Encounters are bland: Enemies, Abilities, and Positioning (almost) don't ever matter.
I honestly can't tell you who is more dangerous - archers, mages, or warriors. In Tyranny, they all seem to do the same amount of damage, tank the same amount of damage, and have the same amount of utility. At the end of the first act, I remember getting pummeled by Fifth Eye's melee attack, but besides that, not a SINGLE ENEMY ABILITY stood out to me as being significantly dangerous.
On the hardest difficulty.
I didn't even use consumeable items (besides the obligatory potions). As I didn't even feel the need to make my party Enrage themselves, or cover their weapons in poison. Immunity to Bleed consumeable item? I wouldn't even know when my party members were bleeding anyway, or when an enemy would be preparing to use bleed, or if bleed even did anything significant.
Mind you, I haven't beaten the game yet, still in Act 2.
Also, the cooldown crap on items is stupid. If you want to load up on poisons you have to wait in between uses, even if you're prepping before a fight. I don't have the patience for that, when the fights are so boring and simplistic anyway.
2. The sigil system accomplishes nothing a traditional skill system would not have already accomplished. I'd argue a traditional system would have been more fun, letting the designers create fun spells instead of letting me very slowly acquire a lame amount of boring "slightly modifiable spells".
Like, yes, Lightning Rune + Close Quarters Rune = Close Quarters Lightning Dage Spell. So what? I can "accent" the rune a little to have further reach, but it's not like I actually "designed" the spell's properties.
I would look to other Skill systems of a similar vein and note how they accomplish it better:
In Path of Exile, your equipment has sockets that are 'linked'. You put a skill in a socket. You put supports in linked sockets. The active skill has its propreties changed by the supporting passive property skill effects.
You can have Fire Ball + "Multiple Projectiles" + "Faster Projectiles" + "Reduced Area of Effect But More Area Damage" + "Projectiles Pierce" + "Projectiles Chain" to create a skill which fires many fireballs which have reduced area of effect by pierce and "chain" (like chain lightning) enemies they hit. In Path of Exile, although they're still iterating on this stuff to give you more options, there are at least some support skils you can socket that change how you play your character.
Sure, PoE's system is lacking in some respects, but it could be interated on. In its current state, it vastly outperforms Tyranny's system, which is literally "stack Lore receive skills". The whole cooldown thing certainly doesn't make the system very engaging, either. In PoE, the system allows builds to utilize the same skills in different ways. In Tyranny, whether you accent a skill or not, it essentially does the same thing.
In Path of Exile, you have a limited number of sockets, similar to your lore limit, and how they further restrict creativity is by putting attribute requirements on specific supports. How you then open up the freedom of choice is making more supports readily available - in PoE you rapidly acquire support skills to socket into your active skills. In Tyranny? I was sitting on a couple cores and a couple accents by the end of Act 1 - which are easy to miss too by the way - making the system extremely limiting in terms of creation. I get they wanted to limit OP spell growth, but if the sigils themselves couldn't be used because of an attribute score instead of a lore score, you could allow them to just be purchaseable right after you step off the boat.
3. The skill trees suck.
The review does an adequate job explaining this.
4. This game resembles Dragon Age 2 too much for me:
-Character animations flashy, gameplay not impactful
-Enemies are extremely rinse-and-repeat - melee, archer, mage; enemies don't have impactful skills
-Story is sort of interesting, with you competing between two warring factions (Obviously Tyranny does a much better job, but same concept in essence)
-Talent trees are stupid, linear, limiting, and don't offer all that much diversity or development as you play the game
-No challenge
The most positive roleplaying aspects I've had so far are roleplaying as "Lawful Evil Lawyer/Diplomat". Kind of an interesting take. I wish more games let you play the "dark side of the law" / court politics.
Considering the spires thing, and the same look/feel, I'm really surprised this wasn't just a direct sequel to PoE. Its story could have fit right in, really. Did they really need to distance themselves from it? Did PoE perform that bad?
I'd like to rate it higher than a 6/10, considering there is some genuinely good design mixed in here, but I just am not finding the game very interesting. While there are thankfully not that many combat encounters in Act 1, the main draw of the game is still combat and it's not very engaging.
Oh and one more criticism:
5. Your characters scale by "doing things"
This is literally the dumbest thing ever. This means your main character should have at least subterfuge/athletics(horrible stat name btw)/lore as high as possible on char gen, because your other skills will just auto-scale for you. Furthermore, because of how dumb this system is, the party member that does the most damage, or does the most damage in the most XP effecient way, will get the most levels, which will create a positive feedback loop - causing characters to wildly form XP gaps between each other. This is completely retarded. Everybody with ANY rpg game design sense KNOWS you don't make your XP system based on "using skill raises skill's level" because even if it doesn't get abused by your players (it will be), it makes it nearly impossible to balance advancement. And it just doesn't make any sense anyway, cooking shit more doesn't make you a good cook past a certain minimum level of skill. I will not become a cordon bleu chef just by making toasted cheese every day.
Also, I initially rolled a quickness character. Upon realizing everything was cooldown based...but that I received more skills than I could possibly use in a reasonable amount of time anyway (and that many OP skills were only 1 use per rest anyway), I dumped the stat. What an awful stat. Cooldown reduction that at most is like -30%? It doesn't feel impactful in combat besides all the helpful passive skills it boosts.
