Hey, folks.
So, as you may have noticed, CoCII's been announced. I figure that this is an excellent opportunity for me to drop in and share a few of my thoughts about gameplay mechanics—mostly combat—and a few of the things i thought worked or didn't work in TiTS and CoC. I expect that most here won't find this subject too interesting, but if someone wants to have a discussion about this sort of thing I'll be happy to oblige. I'll pepper this post with various suggestion about what I think could be improved upon, but ultimately I recognize that a direction has already been chosen regarding where to take the game, and that systems are already implemented for these things. I understand keenly how unfeasible it is to start changing things up at such a stage, so take these ideas with a grain of salt.
Distinctive Characters
My primary grievance with TiTS—that players don't have enough incentive to get out into the world and actually explore—is being addressed for CoCII, so I am pretty happy about that.
However, something else that worries me greatly is the amount of agency the player will have over their character and their interaction with the game's systems. I am a firm believer that these games are at their best when they mix game mechanics with quality writing. Having been around since the early days of CoC—which, in my opinion, did that excellently—I was thoroughly annoyed with the way TiTS did this. Let me explain.
In CoC, the player character was a blank slate which you could do more or less anything with. You could be practically immune to lust damage with the right of perks, or you could be a total nymphomaniac—and best of all, the system gave you multiple ways to go about these things. My favorite character was a level 1 character achieved by a mix of playtime and the character editor, back when that still worked, featuring maxed attributes in everything, a lust resistance deeply in the negative, and a ton of lust-inducing perks and a bunch of stuff that just let her hit harder. The result being a barbarian type character that dealt out a ton of damage after ramping up, but would quickly crumple when hit with lust attacks, with battles quickly and decisively swinging either way in a way that was very much different from other characters. Despite the simple combat system, mechanics and player customization options were in place that allowed us to build characters with some pretty distinctive playstyles, especially if you had a measure of attention to detail. And while we're on the subject; the more fluid stat system and its interaction with victory, losses and exploration and so on was a great way to give feedback to the player—which is something that is massively important in a game that is all about titillating the player. Losses felt like losses, victories felt like victories, and training/exploration stat boosts felt like progression. Sensitivity will forever be the best stat.
This is not the case in TiTS. TiTS gave us level-locked stats and scarcely any player choice in regards to perks. We get to choose whether we want to be good at melee, ranged, or lust combat, and the class we chose just provides some meager measure of utility—and not very interesting utility at that. Worse, certain perks are forced on us as part of each level up, giving us stuff mostly just for the sake of giving us stuff. Some of those class perks are alright, I suppose, but others are either just flat out boring, as they change nothing interesting about the character save by giving some stat boost or another, or even straight up unwanted. I believe one class even gets a perk that buffs Willpower by a measure of a different stat—but what If I happen to like having 0 Willpower? And then there is the deterministic approach of, "would you like melee or ranged perks?", essentially having you make a single choice at the start of the game, and then continuing down that path for most of the rest of your character progression, with only an occasional choice breaking away from the mold. Why would anyone want to mix melee and ranged perks? And if you are doing a lust character, you don't really have to care one way or the other in any event, except for the occasional scenario where you have to use physical attacks because killer robots.
TiTS, essentially, had no real player agency when it came to mechanics. All you could decide on was a stereotype. This is not fun, engaging, or interesting in any way, shape or form.
The stats in TiTS have similar issues of being deterministic and uninteresting, and odds are that you'll just up the ones that feed into your chosen stereotype. Im not sure what the reasoning behind this stats system is, but I disagree with it vehemently. One critique I understand about CoC's way of handling stats is that you could just grind them to max easily. But I say: so what? Losing is as much fun as winning (or not, depending on your preferences—personally, I like a mix), so let players be in charge of their own damn statistics instead of arbitratrily gating them. If that lets player create OP characters... so what? The point of these games is to enjoy ourselves, and the way TiTS handles the stats system is not, in my opinion, conductive towards that. I've used CoC to create overleveled characters with terrible stats and viceversa, as well as characters with massively unbalanced stats—having huge evasion and terrible hit points can be a lot of fun, I'll have you know.
Tangentially related, I'll link you this video about good attribute design, for those who care about the subject enough to watch a lengthy video:
My point is this: weaknesses are more interesting than strengths. This is true in writing, in gameplay, and in real life. Creating interesting game systems requires understanding and leveraging that, and TiTS... doesn't.
So, what I am leading up to is this: I am worried that CoC2 will take more heavily after TiTS than CoC, with what seems to be a rigid level-locked system that, while offering greater customization than TiTS, nevertheless falls short of giving the player agency. Or thats my initial impression, in any case—we're still early in the development process, after all.
Classes and Abilities
So, I like some of what is being done with the classes. I think having classes in the first place is questionable, but being able mix and match what skills you like is a good thing that could lead to some seriously interesting combinations, depending on the merit of the individual skills. Of the ones currently implemented, I am most sceptical about Bolstering Dance and Guarded Stance—being just a simple toggle, they face the problem of either the combat is lengthy enough to waste a turn activating it, or it isn't. In either case, they're not going to be too exciting to use. I understand that enemies will be able to knock you out of these, but that just makes them all the more questionable as abilities. If they had an active component in addition to just activating their passive benefit, they would be a lot more interesting—for instance, Guarded Stance could immediately grant you a whole bunch of aggro, or it could give you even stronger resistances on the turn it is activated. Also, when activated, the ability UI should show that they active, and deactivating them should not cost you your turn. I'd take inspiration from Diablo 3's Monk Mantras when considering these kinds of abilities!
Anyway, about the ability system itself: Again, I like the prospect of being able to swap out abilities from among any class once you've earned that. However, I don't much like that they are locked to the 1 At-Will / 2 Recharge / 1 Encounter / 1 Day formula. Why lock the player's options in this way? If the player wanted to run 5 At-Will or 5 Day abilities... why limit them? Oh, maybe you could do some cheesy stuff with that kind of setup (but is that necessarily such a bad thing?), and sure, you could then do something like taking 5 Recharge abilities, and that would be pretty powerful, especially with how the system is set up now. I'd argue that you'd then be losing out on having power spike abilities in the form of the Encounter and Day abilities, giving you no recourse for when things turn bad. Provided that the Encounter and Day abilities are themselves powerful enough to warrant having access to in the circumstances where you do need them, I think that this would be less of an issue. A measure of limitation is good, but there is merit to having greater freedom. But I digress.
Player Weaknesses and Party
Like I mentioned before, weaknesses are more interesting than strengths. I like making multiple save games and experimenting with different stuff, knowing that one character goes weak in the knees at the smell of minotaur, or that another has an extremely low health pool, or constantly having to deal with mounting lust due to a masochism perk, or whatever the hell I can come up with. This is something that can be made interesting in oh so many ways, and in a game that is focused around a party of characters, is even something that a clever player can be able to play around, given the right set of companions and perhaps a little knowledge of what you're going up against.
Now, while I am not worried about companion AI being dumb like some others may be—after all, the surprise of not knowing whether the enemy will take the one action that you know will finish you off also applies in reverse to your companions—I do have a very different concern. In a game involving more than the traditional two entities, player power is reduced, because the strength of the controllable player character relative to all of the other characters in the combat is reduced. In such a scenario, it is doubly important that the player is able to exercise agency, both in combat and in building their character. Its okay if the player isn't always the one making everything happen, but it is also incredibly important that they don't become just another cog in the machine. In combat, players need to be able to nudge things in a meaningful way, and in building their character, they need to be able to opt into perks that change the way they play, both alone and with the rest of the party. Weaknesses can be paired with strengths to really change things up, or certain strengths can stand alone (such as Twist the Knife. That one is good), or weaknesses can be purely opt-into, such as in the case of Ceraph's fetishes.
Lastly: I understand that CoCII is being developed entirely with the assumption that the player will play in a party of 3 characters. This makes excellent sense in the case of dungeons and storybased content, and I applaud that. However, I humbly request that some measure of thought be put into allowing players to adventure alone or in a party of 2 without being punished too heavily for content where doing so is more feasible, such as when just exploring zones. Doing so should of course still be harder than adventuring in a party of 3—but again, I am a great fan of player freedom, and I think that just disregarding the issue entirely is the wrong move.
I apologize for the overly long post, and thank you for reading. Please pitch in with your thoughts so that we can have a discussion about this!
TL;DR: Combat mechanics and distinctive player perks help give players agency, and getting these mechanics right is extremely important for the longevity of the game
So, as you may have noticed, CoCII's been announced. I figure that this is an excellent opportunity for me to drop in and share a few of my thoughts about gameplay mechanics—mostly combat—and a few of the things i thought worked or didn't work in TiTS and CoC. I expect that most here won't find this subject too interesting, but if someone wants to have a discussion about this sort of thing I'll be happy to oblige. I'll pepper this post with various suggestion about what I think could be improved upon, but ultimately I recognize that a direction has already been chosen regarding where to take the game, and that systems are already implemented for these things. I understand keenly how unfeasible it is to start changing things up at such a stage, so take these ideas with a grain of salt.
Distinctive Characters
My primary grievance with TiTS—that players don't have enough incentive to get out into the world and actually explore—is being addressed for CoCII, so I am pretty happy about that.
However, something else that worries me greatly is the amount of agency the player will have over their character and their interaction with the game's systems. I am a firm believer that these games are at their best when they mix game mechanics with quality writing. Having been around since the early days of CoC—which, in my opinion, did that excellently—I was thoroughly annoyed with the way TiTS did this. Let me explain.
In CoC, the player character was a blank slate which you could do more or less anything with. You could be practically immune to lust damage with the right of perks, or you could be a total nymphomaniac—and best of all, the system gave you multiple ways to go about these things. My favorite character was a level 1 character achieved by a mix of playtime and the character editor, back when that still worked, featuring maxed attributes in everything, a lust resistance deeply in the negative, and a ton of lust-inducing perks and a bunch of stuff that just let her hit harder. The result being a barbarian type character that dealt out a ton of damage after ramping up, but would quickly crumple when hit with lust attacks, with battles quickly and decisively swinging either way in a way that was very much different from other characters. Despite the simple combat system, mechanics and player customization options were in place that allowed us to build characters with some pretty distinctive playstyles, especially if you had a measure of attention to detail. And while we're on the subject; the more fluid stat system and its interaction with victory, losses and exploration and so on was a great way to give feedback to the player—which is something that is massively important in a game that is all about titillating the player. Losses felt like losses, victories felt like victories, and training/exploration stat boosts felt like progression. Sensitivity will forever be the best stat.
This is not the case in TiTS. TiTS gave us level-locked stats and scarcely any player choice in regards to perks. We get to choose whether we want to be good at melee, ranged, or lust combat, and the class we chose just provides some meager measure of utility—and not very interesting utility at that. Worse, certain perks are forced on us as part of each level up, giving us stuff mostly just for the sake of giving us stuff. Some of those class perks are alright, I suppose, but others are either just flat out boring, as they change nothing interesting about the character save by giving some stat boost or another, or even straight up unwanted. I believe one class even gets a perk that buffs Willpower by a measure of a different stat—but what If I happen to like having 0 Willpower? And then there is the deterministic approach of, "would you like melee or ranged perks?", essentially having you make a single choice at the start of the game, and then continuing down that path for most of the rest of your character progression, with only an occasional choice breaking away from the mold. Why would anyone want to mix melee and ranged perks? And if you are doing a lust character, you don't really have to care one way or the other in any event, except for the occasional scenario where you have to use physical attacks because killer robots.
TiTS, essentially, had no real player agency when it came to mechanics. All you could decide on was a stereotype. This is not fun, engaging, or interesting in any way, shape or form.
The stats in TiTS have similar issues of being deterministic and uninteresting, and odds are that you'll just up the ones that feed into your chosen stereotype. Im not sure what the reasoning behind this stats system is, but I disagree with it vehemently. One critique I understand about CoC's way of handling stats is that you could just grind them to max easily. But I say: so what? Losing is as much fun as winning (or not, depending on your preferences—personally, I like a mix), so let players be in charge of their own damn statistics instead of arbitratrily gating them. If that lets player create OP characters... so what? The point of these games is to enjoy ourselves, and the way TiTS handles the stats system is not, in my opinion, conductive towards that. I've used CoC to create overleveled characters with terrible stats and viceversa, as well as characters with massively unbalanced stats—having huge evasion and terrible hit points can be a lot of fun, I'll have you know.
Tangentially related, I'll link you this video about good attribute design, for those who care about the subject enough to watch a lengthy video:
My point is this: weaknesses are more interesting than strengths. This is true in writing, in gameplay, and in real life. Creating interesting game systems requires understanding and leveraging that, and TiTS... doesn't.
So, what I am leading up to is this: I am worried that CoC2 will take more heavily after TiTS than CoC, with what seems to be a rigid level-locked system that, while offering greater customization than TiTS, nevertheless falls short of giving the player agency. Or thats my initial impression, in any case—we're still early in the development process, after all.
Classes and Abilities
So, I like some of what is being done with the classes. I think having classes in the first place is questionable, but being able mix and match what skills you like is a good thing that could lead to some seriously interesting combinations, depending on the merit of the individual skills. Of the ones currently implemented, I am most sceptical about Bolstering Dance and Guarded Stance—being just a simple toggle, they face the problem of either the combat is lengthy enough to waste a turn activating it, or it isn't. In either case, they're not going to be too exciting to use. I understand that enemies will be able to knock you out of these, but that just makes them all the more questionable as abilities. If they had an active component in addition to just activating their passive benefit, they would be a lot more interesting—for instance, Guarded Stance could immediately grant you a whole bunch of aggro, or it could give you even stronger resistances on the turn it is activated. Also, when activated, the ability UI should show that they active, and deactivating them should not cost you your turn. I'd take inspiration from Diablo 3's Monk Mantras when considering these kinds of abilities!
Anyway, about the ability system itself: Again, I like the prospect of being able to swap out abilities from among any class once you've earned that. However, I don't much like that they are locked to the 1 At-Will / 2 Recharge / 1 Encounter / 1 Day formula. Why lock the player's options in this way? If the player wanted to run 5 At-Will or 5 Day abilities... why limit them? Oh, maybe you could do some cheesy stuff with that kind of setup (but is that necessarily such a bad thing?), and sure, you could then do something like taking 5 Recharge abilities, and that would be pretty powerful, especially with how the system is set up now. I'd argue that you'd then be losing out on having power spike abilities in the form of the Encounter and Day abilities, giving you no recourse for when things turn bad. Provided that the Encounter and Day abilities are themselves powerful enough to warrant having access to in the circumstances where you do need them, I think that this would be less of an issue. A measure of limitation is good, but there is merit to having greater freedom. But I digress.
Player Weaknesses and Party
Like I mentioned before, weaknesses are more interesting than strengths. I like making multiple save games and experimenting with different stuff, knowing that one character goes weak in the knees at the smell of minotaur, or that another has an extremely low health pool, or constantly having to deal with mounting lust due to a masochism perk, or whatever the hell I can come up with. This is something that can be made interesting in oh so many ways, and in a game that is focused around a party of characters, is even something that a clever player can be able to play around, given the right set of companions and perhaps a little knowledge of what you're going up against.
Now, while I am not worried about companion AI being dumb like some others may be—after all, the surprise of not knowing whether the enemy will take the one action that you know will finish you off also applies in reverse to your companions—I do have a very different concern. In a game involving more than the traditional two entities, player power is reduced, because the strength of the controllable player character relative to all of the other characters in the combat is reduced. In such a scenario, it is doubly important that the player is able to exercise agency, both in combat and in building their character. Its okay if the player isn't always the one making everything happen, but it is also incredibly important that they don't become just another cog in the machine. In combat, players need to be able to nudge things in a meaningful way, and in building their character, they need to be able to opt into perks that change the way they play, both alone and with the rest of the party. Weaknesses can be paired with strengths to really change things up, or certain strengths can stand alone (such as Twist the Knife. That one is good), or weaknesses can be purely opt-into, such as in the case of Ceraph's fetishes.
Lastly: I understand that CoCII is being developed entirely with the assumption that the player will play in a party of 3 characters. This makes excellent sense in the case of dungeons and storybased content, and I applaud that. However, I humbly request that some measure of thought be put into allowing players to adventure alone or in a party of 2 without being punished too heavily for content where doing so is more feasible, such as when just exploring zones. Doing so should of course still be harder than adventuring in a party of 3—but again, I am a great fan of player freedom, and I think that just disregarding the issue entirely is the wrong move.
I apologize for the overly long post, and thank you for reading. Please pitch in with your thoughts so that we can have a discussion about this!
TL;DR: Combat mechanics and distinctive player perks help give players agency, and getting these mechanics right is extremely important for the longevity of the game
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