Ey, this video is pretty good, and thorough. I'm impressed.
He was indeed treating it like it is a full game, though, completely missing the point of "prototype". A prototype is not a demo, it is a proof of concept. There certainly is lots missing, and there are hella bugs, cuz we made it all from scratch in 3 months! That's why we want to make the whole game. :^) He repeats, a lot, that he expected more from us. I expect more too, and the fact that he missed the entire point is sort of weird to me given that we are currently running a crowdfunding campaign to, y'know, actually make the game.
I'm used to developers who don't listen and don't change much from being conditioned to not expect such things. The thing I was expecting from the crowd funded development was more content, not so much fixed core systems. That and to be fair, I totally weasel-worded a lot of things with "presently" or "as it's currently implemented". I'm glad you're impressed by how thorough it is, even if I ultimately missed information because honestly practically all the interesting decision-making stuff about this game is really damn subtle and easy to miss if you ask me. (and I like to think that I'm fairly good at picking up on subtle things, given how thorough I was, but hey, I could be a fraud)
Juggles do nothing extra, moving enemies does nothing, why bother allowing position to matter for missing with things?
In the prototype, yes, all they do is look cool. In the full game, juggles are planned to give proportionately more meter as they get longer, and OTGs are planned to give a small amount of Action bar.
Cool. Minor worry: people might just end up repeating the same combos they looked up online that are optimal. OTGs regen meter? Just repeat this sequence that triggers OTGs over and over to get the maximum damage combo. The common person doesn't really like practicing fighting game combos, though of course these are a lot more lenient. Desync in characters' charge rates and compelling reasons to attack with less than full ATB would lead to needing to improvise more often though, as well as probably punishing the maximum damage combos in other ways.
As well, allowing enemies to recover from hitstun once you have hit them will cause them to block until your turn finishes, so dropping a combo will negatively affect you.
This is what I like to hear.
You don't fill your entire Action bar before an enemy attacks at the start of battle:
You can if you hit the enemy, because your bars fill faster if you get the initiative. If they hit you they get a speed boost for their first turn, and if you just run into them neither is true. There's no visual effect that indicates this (besides your bars filling faster) because "prototype", but it's a fairly standard RPG feature. In Indivisible, as a bonus, hitting them to start the fight also deals actual damage.
A thing I want to experiment with is having player-advantage battles start as if that was your first attack, with everyone having full Actions so you can go right into a combo from there.
I was marking that down as a positive feature, but knowing that if you hit them outside of battle triggering the battle increases your initiative. That's pretty cool, cooler than what I originally thought even, though also really subtle. It might be important to communicate this in some way, because I didn't pick up on the trend. A lot of the cool things in this game are really subtle. In this case, there's no visual indicator connecting hitting/being hit to ATB advantage in battle.
Can't tell which attacks hit where, single vs multitarget:
Zebei's Down attack is a horizontal spread, so it will hit enemies that are beside each other. His neutral and Up attacks are not horizontal, but they both have a bug where if the target dies from one of the shots, the other arrows will occasionally switch targets in mid-flight. It's a thing I didn't get to fix. Melee attacks and magic are not subject to this. Arrows also physically travel, so if there is an enemy in the way, that enemy will get hit instead. I don't know whether to count that as a feature or a bug yet. :^)
Goddamn that's weird. I think I noticed some collision weirdness with Ajna's up kick in fist mode on my first playthrough which I didn't have footage of for this, or I missed that part when scrubbing for examples.
No incentive not to wait for entirely full Action bars before attacking:
With the HUGE number of people who strongly insist there is NO incentive to wait for more than 1 bar, the fact that he insists the opposite is kinda funny to me. :^P
Reasons to attack earlier include:
- Being an impatient player. (You have no idea!)
- Building just a little bit more meter so you can do a higher-level super earlier, rather than waiting.
- Reducing the cooldown from supers and from multiple normal attacks; try supering from 3 bars vs from 2.95 bars, you wait about half as long before your cooldown ends when supering from 2.95 bars.
There are others, but in general I did intend to waiting better than not, because the vast majority of people do not want to wait.
(There are also incentives not to mash your attacks - frequently in your clip you mash Tungar's U attack and cut it off before the final hits, which do the majority of damage. Hee hee.)
It seemed obvious, you gain more meter from long combos than individual attacks, meter seemed to charge at the same rate regardless (because ), and enemy meter I can't tell how long it takes to charge, I'd guess it charges at the same rate regardless, so you get off the same amount of damage per second both ways, but only waiting will grant more iddhi meter. Unless I'm mistaken in my reasoning because there's some aspect of the system I missed.
Compelling reasons, all of which eluded me. The second reason should have occurred to me within what I knew about the game. The third one, supers have less cooldown at higher levels? Also isn't that kind of an extension of the second reason if I'm reading you correctly? (the language is a bit difficult to parse here, I misinterpreted it at first as overwriting the cooldown delay by doing an attack as soon as you get charge).
Got me on the mashing. Nice touch. And the number popups make this a bit easier to notice than a lot of these other things.
In general the idea is, there's gotta be reasons to choose both, either through the attacks' physical properties, the properties they confer to you after they complete, situational advantages, or other factors.
Can't tell what the downside is to using high damage attacks vs not, can't see any relationship between damage/meter/AoE/cooldown:
Higher damage or large AoE attacks slow down your Action bar until the next level fills, and they stack.
For example, an Up attack with Tungar/Ajna/Razmi fills your next bar at 70% speed. Using 3 Up attacks refills your bar at ~34% speed (.7*.7*.7=.343) until the next level is filled. Perhaps this difference is not enough to be noticeable in the heat of battle, but I felt 3x longer was a lot! Of course, this is a thing that will be tweaked in the full game.
(Ajna's Down attack with bare hands fills your next action at 110% speed, and THAT stacks too. This is intentional because it looks weak so most people don't use it or examine it, hehe.)
That's all really cool, but also really difficult for the player to notice, given that there's no indicator that it's happening. I certainly noticed that sometimes the cooldown was slower, but it's hard to connect that to the attacks that are being performed without some type of indicator reinforcing it. Do you think most players are going to pick up on this without a little prodding? Do you think it'll be easy to determine whether your charge is slowed or not if you use a bunch of random attacks? Most casual players hate memorizing framedata or even doing so much as looking at it, I don't expect people to be able to identify what attacks cause what refill rate reductions just by looking at the meters, I think there probably needs to be a visual indication, like an icon, that helps out here.
Attacks that are multitarget have a downside of either dealing less damage (Razmi U, Ajna hands U or axe N) or building much less meter (Tungar U). Attacks that do more damage have the downside of a much higher fill rate penalty. Like I said, perhaps it's not ENOUGH, but over multiple turns it makes a large difference - using UUU with Tungar or axe will deal much less damage per enemy turn over the course of an entire battle than using axe D/N or Tungar D/N.
Just because you weren't able to figure out which attacks are better or worse immediately does not mean there are not reasons to use different attacks...
I assumed there were reasons to use the different attacks, but it's difficult to pin down why exactly. When I heard there were different refill rates, I honestly skimped on trying to work out the potential consequences of that.
Estimating DPS calculations isn't something that is particularly intuitive for most people, who look up skill rotations for whatever class/build they play in MMOs. If you want people to be more conscious of that,
Though as is, what's the purpose of using high damage moves if lower damage ones get better DPS due to their better fill rates? Seems like they're only good for situations where they'll push an enemy over the edge where a normal attack wouldn't now, which doesn't come up too frequently.
Prototype! :^) Things like this are planned for the full game...but I should point out that most people who ask for perfect block or timing-based benefits DO NOT HAVE GOOD ENOUGH TIMING to actually make use of those benefits if they are kept to fighting-game-sized windows. This is a really common thread I've noticed...people want skill-based stuff without the skill to use it. :^P
Already, though, since characters hold the block pose for a minimum amount of time even if you let go of the button, but Iddhi drain stops the frame they are touched, perfect blocking already gives you the benefit of nearly double the meter gain as opposed to holding down the button for the entire time.
I only noticed that after I finished recording and editing the video (and screw going back to redo lines), so I was only able to include it as an annotation. Yes, you're correct that blocking at the last moment means maximum Iddhi gain with minimum drain. Given that ties back into healing, then it's probably not a real issue.
And hey, I play Melee. Power shielding to reflect a projectile is a 2 frame window, and I land a lot of powershields. :P
Fleeing is not dynamic or beneficial:
Damn right! Fleeing is not something to be encouraged, and I'm curious why he'd think it would be otherwise. It should be a last resort, and dangerous. I'm not averse to items like the Spikefish Flute that make fleeing easier, but all the time? No way. As my first tweak for production I will probably allow individual-character blocking while fleeing, but it'd still drain your Actions.
Also, fleeing was only even included in the prototype because there are buggy situations where your only option is to flee. Otherwise I'd have skipped it entirely at the prototype stage of development. :^P
Totally fair that it's unfinished.
And I watched your Pacifist run live, the whole thing. I'm glad I was able to catch you finally get Rodney down there and use him to get past the boss. It frankly sucked how frequently you would end up with too low health to continue, and have to just kill yourself to get back to retrying, or how you might get caught in combat, and not have enough health to flee successfully.
Didn't notice Razmi's slow did anything, didn't seem to have much of an effect when he found out what it did:
Razmi's slow changes the enemy color and SLOWS DOWN THEIR IDLE ANIMATION TO BELOW 1/4 speed. It ain't my fault you don't notice.
The slow is a 33% speed reduction and stacks to up a 75% reduction, meaning you can delay enemy turns for 4x as long. Ain't my fault you didn't notice this either.
I only noticed the enemy color getting changed in the animation where they're damaged, the tint afterwards was too slight for me to notice, and youtube videos are pointing out there is a slow effect, which they probably only learned by word of mouth too. I didn't notice the idle moving slower, I didn't think to watch for something like that. And it's hard to notice how long enemy turns get delayed for because their ATB isn't visible, and presumably their ATB doesn't charge during your attacks, so keeping an internal clock for their ATB is even harder.
Having them tinted a bit more blue, and maybe having a status symbol above their head, 1 per debuff, or just the debuff symbol with x2 x3 and so on to indicate stacked debuffs would go a long way.
"I never played Valkyrie Profile [but] as far as I know there is no notable iteration on its' formula present in Indivisible":
This is a contradictory statement, either you don't know enough to judge or you do.
VP is a full game, not a prototype. And VP is strictly turn based so there is no ATB, there is no manual blocking, there is no attack choice except what you set up before the fight, there is no balancing meter use at ALL, Indivisible has so much different that you can't even really compare...you know what, screw it.
It was a stretch, and a comment from ignorance, you can feel free to ignore it. I'm sorry for stepping over my bounds there. You're totally right on this one.
"You're not taking damage because you made incorrect decisions generally, you're taking damage because you have no alternative to taking damage."
You can manually block, rather than hoping the computer blocks/dodges for you. That's the largest "correct decision" that it is possible to provide, and way more than most RPGs give you. I am genuinely curious which games he would place on the good side of this statement. If he meant being able to cast Reflect and completely avoid magic damage or things like that, then, again, "prototype".
Okay, this is a bit of a weird statement on my part, and probably indicates a type of extremism from me. I don't like how nearly ALL RPGs are about unavoidable attrition. I like the few games, like the Mario RPGs, or Undertale, where you can negate attrition, which I recognize isn't a matter of decisionmaking in those games (tiny bit in undertale), it's more a matter of mechanical/executional skill. I actually don't like most JRPGs in the first place, except like SMT 3 Nocturne or Digital Devil Saga, or things in the vein of Mario RPGs that have tiny realtime skill components.
If you can totally negate attrition, then the game might be hard, but you can literally overcome anything if you play perfectly. This is what enables comebacks from no health in street fighter, you always have a way to escape attrition, unless you're knocked down and about to get chipped out. Or beating Dark Souls on NG+7 at SL1. Or beating Ninja Gaiden Black, like at all. In most RPGs, you go out from whatever base you have, and essentially spend HP and healing items as a resource to get where you're going, and player skill determines if you spend more or less, but because you need to spend them, you have limitations on how strong monsters you can fight, reinforcing the need to battle repeatedly to level up, or the ability of leveling up to wreck the difficulty curve with the enemies. Here Razmi and the Iddhi meter create a closed loop that allow healing in the combat system rather than reliance on a place of recovery, which is kind of different, and I can't immediately iterate the effect of that.
That and occasionally you get to low life, you see you won't be able to get enough meter to heal before you're attacked again and it's like, "Oh, I guess I'm just screwed." And that's kind of lame.
As for decisionmaking, it doesn't feel like there is any sort of countermeasures you can take versus specific enemy actions. It doesn't feel like the different enemies you encounter in the game are particularly different, except in the damage they output to you, and which party members they do it to. This is the case with a lot of RPGs, which is why type weaknesses are so common. You don't get things like attacks beat throws, beat blocks, or jumping beating fireballs at certain timings, or the dark souls dynamic of blocking/dodging/whiff punishing where doing the wrong one at the wrong time can get you screwed up. SMT3/DDS were cool in that buffs were such a big deal and the press turn system made turns a resource that could be spent or conserved, so you had to manage buffs/health/turns/damage output as these things fluctuated from turn to turn, and type weaknesses being connected to turns as a resource meant that in different battles, different party members would be the turn earners versus some of the enemies. Here, yeah you have a lot of different factors pulling on you, but it feels like they're all strictly about optimizing damage output/iddhi gain, and it's something that can be theoretically optimized, that lends itself to an ideal of optimization, rather than playing based on heuristics for whatever seems like a compelling choice for the current situation.
Though yeah, I screwed up in connecting that aspect to avoiding damage.
The boss's kick is intentionally just 15f, which sounds "kinda slow" in fighting game terms but is basically unreactable in the prototype.
That sounds like how fast overhead attacks typically are in fighting games. Average human reaction time to something they are specifically expecting and have a prepared response to is around 15 frames, according to human benchmark. When the action to be reacted to is unanticipated (like the boss essentially blindsiding you), reaction time goes up. When the correct response isn't known, reaction time goes up. This is why people in traditional fighting games get hit with ridiculously slow 18f or longer overheads.
"Maybe I was expecting the wrong things; maybe there is something important I'm missing about the game that makes it really fun"
I think he is missing the fact that you're judging a prototype as if it's a complete game. That might be a thing that would help.
Also, he didn't find or fight the cat. That might've helped, too. (^.^)
Damn that cat is hidden well (though it's not gonna make me change my mind about the combat system).
Overall, like I said, it was a very well-thought-out and VERY well put together video. It's aggravating that he calls out all these things he thinks are missing as if the game is COMPLETE, though, which ultimately kinda ruins it. :^S In three months, I am happy we made a combat system that he was able to find things to complain about! :^)
I'd be curious to see a similar analysis of the full game, though, because it IS a good analysis.
Thank you. I'm trying to push forward the practice of game analysis in general, and I felt this would be a good opportunity to get SOMETHING out in video format while the indiegogo is still running and the game is still topical, because it was easy to capture footage for and edit for various reasons. (have another video idea on backlog that I need to rerecord lines for and I'll need footage from like a dozen games that I'm not even sure which games to actually pick for all of it and blah)
I'll consider another analysis of Indivisible when and if the full game is released.
