Grim... wrote:
Who doesn't spell damnit with an n?
http://english.stackexchange.com/questi ... -vs-damnitBack on topic now...
This comment makes a lot of good points:
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FTL has several structural flaws that keep it from its full potential:
1 – The end boss severely constricts your choice in strategies. You have to play with it in mind since moment one; most of what works during the actual game doesn’t in the final battle.
2 – The theme and gameplay clash. You’re supposed to be fighting ships manned by intelligent beings, but the gameplay makes no effort whatsoever to convey that. You see ships with nonsensical weapon load-outs (only beams and no means to pierce shields), enemies send ion bombs to empty rooms… The AI can even do something with burst lasers you aren’t even allowed to (because it doesn’t make much tactical sense), have each shot hit a different room. Sometimes the AI doesn’t even play by the same rules as you: its FTL drive only starts charging after it decides to flee (and you get a notification of that); yours charges for as long as you have energy on the engines, the AI has no means to know if you are planning on fleeing or not.
3 – Because ammo and repairs are expensive, and to have a chance against the end-boss you must have made a “nearly optimized” trip throughout, the game isn’t allowed to (and does not) throw too many deadly, interesting encounters on you. The fact that these are the ones that tend to stick out in your memory says something, but in 9 out of 10 battles you’ll barely suffer a scratch; sometimes you won’t even use warheads. When you do truly survive by the skin of your teeth, you might as well just give up, because the resources you lost there make it pretty much impossible to survive the end boss. It would be far more interesting if most battles were life or death affairs, and recovering between them was inexpensive.
4 – Generally, deaths just never feel fair. In something like Spelunky you always tell yourself “Ok, in retrospect that was pretty stupid on my part… I totally see why I lost there.” In FTL they just feel capricious and random.
5 – It’s too scripted and constricted. There’s no room for emergent behavior and phenomena to ever sprout in its environment (remember when after stealing an idol in Spelunky, the boulder trap destroyed a merchant’s store, sending it mad after you? Stuff like that needs complex systems where everything interacts with everything in order to happen, not menu driven events with two or 3 choices).
I’d say this game would have promise if it was still in beta, but as a finished product, it leaves a lot to be desired.
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As much as I love FTL, the final boss can eat a bag of dicks. The rest of the game is a wonderful game that engages you, challenges you, more often than not kills you, but follows the same rules it imposes upon you – even if they are occasionally semi-arbitrary just to spice things up.
Which is why I think it’s criminal that the final boss cheats. It keeps using systems you’ve very firmly twatted, it repairs weapons with no-one maintaining them, and whenever you kill it, it comes back, and it comes back cheating more than it has before. It just spoils the game; it’s like suddenly you’re playing against a five year old who makes rules up on the spot with a determined conviction to win against all odds, even if it means rewriting them.
And I know, this sounds like me whining about getting killed, and it’s not. Every damn game ends in epic tragedy. The difference is that dying because of a spreading fire in the engine room and a crippled oxygen recycler is satisfying, whereas dying because drones keep wiping out your shield with lasers even with a thoroughly crippled controller is just frustrating. Fuck that guy.
This and other things leads me to conclude... they broke things so it could have a story. You have to play the whole game with the intention of configuring your ship for the final boss, and hoping that it rolls the dice to even give you the equipment you'll need.
I can forsee a patch coming that adds an 'infinite' mode. No fleet chasing you, no boss, a LOT more encounters and quests. Encounters that don't require a specific upgrade or crewmember to be winnable. Instead of worrying about preparing for the boss, worrying about making a ship that can cope with the rigors of exploring the galaxy. As a counterpoint, I can understand why they thought the game needed a boss... if you played and survived for long enough you'd end up with a fully upgraded ship with a crew of two star badasses and both you and your enemies would have to hit a ceiling/level cap and then there'd be almost no point continuing.
However, the flipside seems to me that in their solution they've completely got the pacing wrong. The 'run! the fleet is chasing you!' thing is best pushed to the back of your mind, you need to see as much of each sector as you can. They also got the balancing wrong, with that extended exploration combined with the loaded coin flips (I am beginning to think dice rolls is giving too much credit) eating up all your money in fuel and repair costs.
If anything, it's an interesting thing to observe from a game design perspective. The underlying structure of running around your ship and fighting is sound, but how to provide an overall purpose?
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