Elden Vins<\/a>. This custom mode is essentially a giant nerf to invulnerability frames, something I actually see positively, in abstract, since it’s a meta-meme of the Souls games, becoming “roll souls”. This “meta” assumed fact that as long you are rolling you become intangible. As if it makes any sense. That’s obviously a design abstraction to make gameplay work, but rather than being a technical compromise to eventually evolve away from, it became a staple of these games (I guess, again, Sekiro was built precisely to address the cementification of this silly gameplay). So, Shura mode, if you can’t roll because you don’t gain invulnerability, then you better defend and deflect. Or dodge in the sense of moving away from the attacks arcs, rather than into them. It’s, once again, a perfectly legitimate and worthwhile option. One I heard players actively wanting to try and install this mod BECAUSE of it. I just don’t know how well it works in practice.<\/p>\nThis whole thing can be criticized not simply because of the choice to axe all these options at once, but for the path that lead to these removals. What is written in the patch notes is this:
\n– Removed the Special Difficulties menu due to it being entirely modes that were all outdated and generally untouched for years.<\/i><\/p>\n
This doesn’t make any sense. All these changes were parametric, like x2 to HPs. Numbers don’t get “outdated”, merely because they are applied contextually. They are all high level adjustments made to the shape of the whole game, not micromanaged stats that are tweaked individually. From people reporting it seems someone complained on Discord that something wasn’t well balanced, a dev answering no one has tested these modes in a long time, another dev stepping in saying removing the whole thing would simplify development. And so it got all axed.<\/p>\n
First, this mod has been in development, relatively playable and balanced, FOR YEARS NOW. It should be kept stable because it can be. You don’t go removing substantial features on a whim. Secondly, lets assume no one wants to address some minor problems as they are reported, that no one wants to maintain these options. DON’T REMOVE THEM. You have other options. Hide them away in a different menu where you WARN players that the modes might not work perfectly well. Hide them in a .ini file with a note on the wiki on how to enable them back. There’s literally no reason to hard remove these important features that still had a role in making the identity of this mod.<\/p>\n
Then there are a couple other minor changes that I spotted myself. If in general whenever I looked ad Reforged gameplay changes I always thought they were brilliant in their design, radically improving the game, these two changes instead got my attention because they looked very incongruous and sloppy, compared with everything else (and again, appearing very late in the development of this mod):
\n– Players now visually deal 20% more damage in order for damage numbers to appear punchier. PvE enemy health and PvP modifiers were adjusted by 20% respectively to make this a visual change.
\n– Decreased the damage of successive light attacks by removing their progressive damage increase within a chain, with the exception of the final strike.<\/i><\/p>\n
The first is objectively bad: bigger numbers are harder to parse. Want to take it seriously? Ok, then the “feel” is of course important. But it’s not 1990, the feel of combat depends on animations, effects, sound. Bigger number = good, is really a stupid point. You aren’t improving the feel, you are merely misdirecting.<\/p>\n
But might it be that it was done differently? This is what someone replied:
\nThe reason for point number one is quite simple: The mod has a lot of small granular ”buffs” that are too small of an increment to be visible. By buffing both HP and general damage the game stay the same, but those small buffs will be more apparent to the player. This is also for that reason that you have a thousand FP\/Stamina: so that the devs may make even SMALLER buffs to give the illusion of depth to the system for buildmaking purpose. Ultimately this design becomes its worst enemy since builds needs to get the same small ”pieces” to be effective and you cant really combine different elements effectively because they are so small individually.<\/i><\/p>\n
I don’t know if this is real or not, but adding granularity is legitimate. But that’s not what’s written in the patch notes. The MOTIVATION of the change is “in order for damage numbers to appear punchier”, whereas “expanding” numbers in order for small buffs becoming mechanically meaningful is a whole different matter.<\/p>\n
What they wrote is that, internally, numbers stay the same BUT APPEAR bigger. Which is idiotic and objectively bad. What the other user said is instead that INTERNAL numbers are different and calculations include those numbers. If you add a 1% to a percent skill, the practical impact won’t be “felt”, but is still REAL.<\/p>\n
Then the discussion might move to what the user added. It’s the good old argument of Diablo VS Path of Exile. On one end the design strategy is to use discrete skills that are impactful and actively change gameplay. Something felt immediately and substantially. On the other end you have the strategy of tiny increments that all together go to form a very specialized “build.” You don’t feel those tiny increments, individually, but you have granular control and can really shape the thing as you want. These are discrete game design choices that are both legitimate, it depends on context (and neither Diablo nor PoE commit to one or the other, internally things get a lot more mixed).<\/p>\n
Reminds me of World of Warcraft beta, when… when was it? Maybe May or June before release. They decided to greatly boost armor values while telling players that mechanically nothing was changing. They needed bigger numbers because armor pieces were constantly dropping with the exact same numbers, all being sidegrades. By increasing the range, instead, it allowed for these pants to have a slightly larger number bonus, and so players feeling like they got upgrades to equip more frequently than before. I remember ranting at the time against this, because it also wasn’t clarified whether it was a COSMETIC change, or those numbers were still considered internally. I think in WoW’s case it was a mix of things. The numbers were internally “real”, but the actual “outputs” of these formulas were compressed. Meaning that numbers coming out would be approximate, and so those differences of +1 +2 in armor values were effectively cut off, and a mere illusion. <\/p>\n
THIS IS BAD. THIS IS UGLY. Game design is an art in the sense that there’s an aesthetic value that you SHOULDN’T break.<\/p>\n
Detail matters if it is modeled, otherwise it’s NOISE. That’s the same reason I ranted against Tarn Adams, Dwarf Fortress, when he added a million of stone types in the game. This good, right? NOPE. It’s fucking not! You add stone types if stone types DO SOMETHING. If stone types are mechanically IDENTICAL, then you added a bunch of meaningless noise to a game that is messy by default. To make things even worse because all these stone types are different colors, and you play in stylized fucking ASCII, where everything is abstracted, where information IS KING. And what you do is transform the MOST IMPACTFUL visual information, COLOR, into pure, distracting noise. This is a CATASTROPHE of game design.<\/p>\n
Want to make a bunch of different stone types? GREAT. Give them different properties. Why “cave ins”, an important mechanic of the game, don’t factor STONE TYPE. Either you are mechanically consistent, or your game turns into an arbitrary mess of caveats. The more complex the game, and Dwarf Fortress is the max, the more consistent it needs to be. It needs to make sense mechanically.<\/p>\n
Then we come to the other change. This one too quite baffling. I’ll repeat most of what I wrote on reddit. Attack chains have the purpose of goading players into being aggressive, because there’s a damage reward to “push” the chain. Otherwise, being combat risky, you’d favor mobility and stay defensive. Hit and run. You stay and hold your ground, to commit and get better damage. This is somewhat preserved by the final attack, with a bigger boost. But if your goal is to boost the impact and reward of completing the chain, then you can still do it by tweaking numbers, rather than REMOVING all bonus damage from the chain itself.<\/p>\n
Both these things have an important FUNCTION. Removing one boosts the other, but it also kills the function itself.<\/p>\n
In practice it makes gameplay worse. If you know the chain attacks do no bonus damage, then you know it’s all wasted effort unless you’re reasonably certain of being able to reach the end of the chain. If before the chain attacks were a variable, adaptable path. Something performative that articulates the gameplay and offers flexibility. With the damage bonus removed the light attacks merely become a “bridge” to get to the final attack. The result is that on one hand you have expressive combat, that depends on player’s choice and skill, on the other you have a hardcoded, binary path where you either hit and run, never committing, while waiting a long enough attack window where you hope having enough time reaching the end of the combo. Everything else becomes a mistake. You’ve sucked out, with a simple change, most of what makes the combat system varied and fun. Adaptable, personal in how aggressive you decide to be within the risk\/reward formula. You transformed a range of possibilities into a binary path. Why.<\/p>\n
(without considering that chain attacks, weapons, have their own animations and arcs, so they might be different in effective use. But removing the damage still blunts this aspect)<\/p>\n
In practice this single change narrows down combat to a single optimized path, always exactly the same. Again, why.<\/p>\n
May there be more to this? I’m doubtful, but maybe. I guess I’ll never know because with discord reputation being extremely hostile to feedback, and me having wasted WAY more effort writing this than it deserved, I’m now done with all this. It’s written, it’s known, it’s done.<\/p>\n
More importantly: listen, talk. Embrace feedback and criticism. ENCOURAGE them. Keep the community open and welcome its diversity of opinion. Focus on motivations, not the person. That’s how you make a better work. Or don’t, who cares.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I do feel like I’m personally attacked when I get dismayed by some game changes of “spaces” that are so niche but close to me. If it’s Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft (or most of everything), I look from afar, I think and judge and never participate. It’s just a silly world. But those niches that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4570"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4578,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4570\/revisions\/4578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cesspit.net\/drupal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}