Into the Breach is a fantastic strategy game, but, more importantly

General discussion about the game.
troop9
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Joined: Wed Sep 04, 2019 7:03 pm

Into the Breach is a fantastic strategy game, but, more importantly

Postby troop9 » Wed Sep 04, 2019 7:06 pm

One of the key elements of Into the Breach’s design is this idea of perfect information. I’m going to start by looking at some other TBT games, ones with much higher budgets and studios, and then explain what I think ITB does better.

Let’s start by looking at XCOM, one of the biggest (and most fun) contenders when it comes to TBT games. Keep in mind, I’m not saying that ITB is necessarily better than XCOM, though I think its more fun, personally – I’m giving an example of what ITB does different that I think games in the genre can learn from.

Picture a round in XCOM. You’ve used up all your squad to fight off 3 different aliens. They’re dead, so you more one squad member forward, say, 3 spaces to get into cover. This small movement causes a second wave of enemies to spawn, with turn priority – before you even expect it, that single soldier is wiped out, along with another, farther back member of your troop. Obviously, a mistake has been made here on the player’s part – he should have left his squad member where he was, waited until the next turn, and then moved as a single unit forward into the room/ field/ wherever this fight is occurring. It doesn’t make it less infuriating, however – despite being a mistake on the player’s end, it’s hard to not feel like you’ve been screwed over in some fashion.

A better way to explain it is through Slant’s review system – the top listed con by most players is that “Choices that affect the game are not obvious when they are happening and once realized is too late.” Essentially, it’s impossible to know what your choices are going to bring to the table until minutes, or even hours later.

This isn’t a knock against the game inherently – in fact, it’s the way that 95% of strategy games operate. You make choices, and then you see how they pan out.

In ITB, you make choices, see how they pan out, and then execute them. That’s the key difference, and something I think a lot of developers could learn from this game. Literally everything in the game that you need to fight against is laid out beforehand. The entire basis behind the game is that enemy attacks are telegraphed, but it goes far beyond that. There are no “weird” interactions in the game that don’t make logical sense, that you need to play through a situation 10 times before you finally figure out exactly how a mechanic works. If you want to make a move, you pretend to do it, and the game will tell you exactly what will happen each time. If moving an enemy will, for example, cause a train you are supposed to be defending to crash into that enemy, ITB will let you know beforehand, leading to less moments of “oh come on, how the hell did that happen?” and more “well, I guess I have to decide to do this anyway. This even comes down to turn order and enemy order. Enemy turn order follows a logical pattern each time, and highlighting over a small icon next to your bonus objectives will tell you exactly how turn order will play out. Will this fire kill an enemy before he has a chance to get his attack off? No need to guess -just look at the attack order and you’ll know the exact answer before you make the move. This constant stream of perfect information leads the player to spend less time figuring out how the game works, and more time figuring out how to win, which is the big point here. In ITB there is no wrestling with mechanics, because the player knows everything at all times, down to what enemies spawn in which area, what rewards he will get for completing an area, what the enemies are doing, and what every single attack in his arsenal will do.