I understand your point, but with the current amount of skills, girls and stances, magic, grapple, clothes, accesories it is an *immense* undertaking to flesh them all out. You are one guy doing this, assuming your partner commits full time to the high quality art and animation. And that is just the combat aspect of the game, not counting all the other big plans like story mode, companions, quests, the roguelike mode, etc.It is insane to say that Assault, All Out Blitz, Vault, Berserk, Haymaker are all interchangeable. Berserk locks you into the stance, making defensive skills impossible until you trip/get knocked down/pass out, Vault puts you in the air, forcing you to switch stances immediately, dodging low attacks, and being countered by enemies with the ability to grab you out of the air. Haymaker is defenseless, making it risky to use, and has a tremendous damage bonus, allowing you to damage the enemy through armor, but requires an extra setup turn. Assault ignores blocking - kind of important if your opponent is, y'know, blocking. Just 0/5.
The DPS race is exactly what this update is intended to address, again. That's why there's boosted enemy-unique armor and reductions in knockdown and armor destruction, to slow down the pace of victory - along with the AI changes that will actually allow the enemy to punish you for overly-aggressive play, when they currently will often let you get away with it. These changes haven't happened till now partially for that reason - most of the complaints people have are about the combat being too difficult, so I couldn't very well make it harder. But that's what I'm doing now, closer to the point where I have the levers to smooth out the difficult by having the AI be consistent, and carefully targeting where the AI will go easy on you and how you can manipulate it - things like arousing enemies or getting them drunk so their decision-making is worse or their goals change from beating you down to something else. Like, I cannot stress enough that you yadda yadda'd over the actual changes that are fixing the problems you're currently complaining about based on the erroneous assumption that a ton of effort has mistakenly gone into trying to fix these problems in the past, which is just wrong.
The solutions to the problems you're raising exist without removing a bunch of skills. If the problem is that Tempo Attack is too effective, it can just be made less effective. If you want an answer to "why shouldn't I just spam this one attack or this simple strategy", the answer is "make it so that spamming this one attack or strategy causes you to lose", obviously, and the fact that people miss that is genuinely baffling. And it's not that I can't do that - I've deliberately avoided doing it so people wouldn't complain about things being too hard.
How are you supposed to figure out that hitting the Dullahan's hand will make her drop her head? I'll tell you! First off, you might just try it, thinking it might do that! You might be trying to disarm her whip. You might try to hit her head, only to have it whiff, because obviously her head isn't where it is on a normal fighter, and think to yourself "oh, of course, her head isn't there... but she is holding it." You might read the changelog. You might hear it from somebody else and go try it. If your goal is to actually explore the game's combat and not to find some optimal route to the easiest victory, which... is not a good assumption for how people are playing this game, for a number of reasons, then you might just find it that way, too. Even the people who don't care about the combat as an artifact itself might care about the sex aspects of it, and might be using seduction in combat not to do the most effective possible thing in combat, but for some other reason, like, maybe, because it's hot?
Or, you might just not see it.
Making the Dullahan drop her head because she fell down is not nearly as fun or interesting as making her drop her head because you realize that if you hit her hand, she'll drop her head. Hitting the "Knock Over" button when you want to knock the enemy over, instead of puzzling out how you can knock them over, is not fun. It's a glorified gallery viewer.
As for Scrambled Eggs - all you need to do is have nothing covering your crotch and she'll automatically do it while she's in Haymaker. That's it. Actually, I can see that she does have one other option now, because of the newer AI system, so I can make sure she uses it guaranteed. I absolutely do not care if people miss things that they could have seen. If you're someone who needs to see absolutely everything in a game, you have my sympathy, but not my accommodation. Finding things spontaneously and surprisingly is one of the great joys of playing games. How are you supposed to know there's a hidden wall behind the chest that is already relatively well-hidden in Blighttown that leads to two entire optional areas of the game, one of which has a beautiful, haunting vista that you would otherwise miss? You aren't. And when you stumble on it, it's magical. And then you can tell somebody else about it, and they can go and see what they missed. I love seeing comments from people discovering the Troja easter egg for the first time and being pleasantly surprised by it, or people stumbling upon the debt Bunnies or the Giantess valley or the Mouth Fiend.
There is an enormous amount of content in this game. People finding it for the first time routinely message me and say they can't believe how much there is - before they realize the game has more than one map. "What if a given player doesn't see absolutely everything in the game" is not a problem I care to give much attention to at all. Notably, there is a tracker for how much of the game you've seen, but there's no achievement for 100% (or ANY percent, for that matter), because that tracker is only meant to give you a rough idea of how much more there is, and maybe a hint about things you haven't seen yet.
So the long and short of it is that I'm not designing for those goals. I'm not trying to make a simple, easy to understand combat system that anyone can pick up and immediately fully understand that will show them all the possible interactions without having to experiment or think about anything. I'm not trying to make sure every unique interaction is seen by every player. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is more. Brevity may be the soul of wit*, but it's definitely not the soul of sex.
*this quote is actually meant ironically in context
The dark souls example is actually a great point. Dark souls establishes early that there are many alternative passages and you will be (most of the time) rewarded for exploration, not punished. In addition, you can get clues with the in game messages. It is a fleshed out system that is consistent througout the game, with some small twists.
In ToA, you are punished if you stray from the meta and experiment and with so many skills and stances the unique interactions seem arbitrary and random. The lost HP carries over to the next encounter and most skills are just the clearly best picks. Right now to experience all these scenes, the best way is to quicksave, try out something until you discover a scene, look at it and enjoy it, quickload and cut down the enemy health asap with actually good skills to then actually progress. Is this really the intended way? My example with overrun was an example how you maybe could combine gameplay with unique interactions. Knocking down enemies is a good combat strategy and one can assume that players who want to win may try to use overrun on Dullahan if they see that she is unbalanced. The chance of that happening is pretty high and adds both depth to overrun and the balance system. They would also "naturally" encounter the head drop scene and get to enjoy it. What is the chance a player picks wrist shot and thinks of using it on her?
It think ultimately you run the risk of ending up with tons of unique interactions, but them being spread over many redundant skills and still feeling sparse and arbitrary.
Yep, this.Well, the point stands that the player will not use all those. Those skills have huge downsides, and so nobody would ever suggest to even learn them.
I never knew that Vault is essential to find Ouroboros stances before I was told it is. Because this skill DOES NOTHING FOR ME. I don't know what could do the attacks aimed at hand to Dullahan. Because I WOULD NEVER AIM FOR THE HAND.
Why? Am I lazy? Am I dumb? Probably not. It's just currently, here and now grip on weapon as mechanic bears NO IMPORTANCE. I don't need to hit their hands because I must hit their chest and end the fight faster. And that's the general issue with the approach to mechanics in this game. They exist to be there. They exist, because it's “neat that there are such mechanics”. But the gameplay DISCOURAGES YOU COMPLETELY to use them. And that's not what it should do. It should reward you for going out of your usual way to try shocking spell on Golem. But you actually made elemental spells worse by making some characters immune to them. And they were already bad because you need to: invest soul crystals in them; invest stats in Magic (that is objectively less useful of a stat than any other stat besides Charisma); spend two-three turns to cast it. Why would I even do that to all the opponent to figure out one has a unique reaction? I won't. Because it will ruin my walkthrough. I will have to restart everything when I realize this build sucks and it doesn't let me freely get the scenes I wanted to.
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