Read this article about the combat balancing philosophy in Midnight Suns, and it is a design choice I like a lot! Everything is fun but not perfectly balanced. Seems like it might be BG3's philosophy as well!
Here's a bit from the article: "That's why a game like Midnight's Suns - also XCOM - in their current iteration couldn't be like a 'play forever' [game] like Diablo, for example, which is such a finely tuned game," he continues. "All the stats are so finely tuned and they're brilliant at that. Destiny, too - brilliant! But they have less leeway in terms of their design. I don't care if you said somebody could matrix out all the [Midnight Suns] heroes and their DPS and how powerful they are. They could score the heroes, and I guarantee they'd be way all over the place."
For Solomon, he's absolutely certain "there's clearly a best hero, and there's clearly a worst hero" in Midnight Suns, but levelling them out to make them more Diablo or Destiny-like wasn't ever a concern for him. "That's not our focus," he says. "We focused on the moment to moment of every time you get something, you go, 'Yeah, that's awesome.' I don't care how it matches up on a very, very fine level. We view it from more of a holistic level, they all feel generally equal, as opposed to something that's really finely tuned, like League Of Legends design or Diablo design."
It worked, too. In my Midnight Suns review, I wrote that it wasn't just the best Marvel game I've played, but one of the best superhero games full stop, precisely because it does such a fantastic job of selling you on that superhero fantasy. It's not a total pushover, of course - the sheer number of enemies you have to face with each passing turn does a great job of always keeping the pressure level nice and high. But yes, I must admit that I also probably didn't actually care too much if Iron Man ended up wiping the floor with everyone thanks to his brilliant missile strike cards, or if Magic was able to set up delicious, ricocheting portal grabs so I could drop a massive crane on top of my perfectly placed goon pile at the end of it. It just felt good in the moment, which is what Solomon and his team were striving for.
"The meta isn't as important in a single player game," he concludes. "I think that's the thing. We sacrifice the meta sometimes to make sure that the player's first experience of the game really feels awesome."
There are a lot of questionable assumptions in this article. And the leveling system was one of the most pointless and redundant things in Midnight Suns, anyway. It was just a case of numbers that just kept creeping up and up on both the hero and villain team. Pure Skinner's box design for the sake of it. Which is indeed in some way "like Diablo", but personally I'm not really willing to count that as a plus.
Their previous game XCOM 2 (as usual when counting War of the Chosen, too, because it's basically a different game without it) did a far better job with a progression system that felt satisfying without having to rely on a constant-but-pointless increase in numbers over time.
And frankly, while there are parts of MS that I loved and I hope to see recycled in some form in their Firaxis' future output, WoTC was a far better game in general.
Originally Posted by Wormerine
I thought it was generally agreed that social sim part is between poor-meh, and combat is fine, if a bit shallow and lacking in variety.
That's precisely it.
- A milquetoast "abbey exploration" phase that was basically an action adventure with some decent but underused ideas. - A pseudo-Persona-like "social sim" aspect that was incredibly tedious and shallow (then again I'll admit I've never been that much into it in Persona, either). - Some fairly bad writing, that usually ranged between "juvenile" and "insipid" with only the occasional moment of charm (when it nailed the fanservice about a certain character... Which wasn't often). - A solid core tactical combat system, with a lot of fun mechanics interacting with each other, but in the long run harmed to some extent by a general lack in enemies and maps variety. - The aforementioned leveling system feeling fundamentally a pointless layer of numeric bloat to keep the treadmill going under the player's feet, plus some "pseudo-gatcha" mechanics tied to a series of different virtual currencies for "card unlocks" that reeked of "We were SO planning to monetize this more aggressively until the last minute" and left a bad taste in my mouth.
Last edited by Tuco; 08/05/2304:18 AM.
Party control in Baldur's Gate 3 is a complete mess that begs to be addressed. SAY NO TO THE TOILET CHAIN
