Subset Games Forum

misterfanwank wrote:But random chance dictating the final outcome more than skill IS bad game design.

You've clearly haven't been spending nearly enough time playing roguelikes . Most of them use it as one of their base mechanics. Look at games like Dwarf Fortress" (not your prototype roguelike, I grant you). If a game uses "Losing is Fun" as slogan, you know you're bound to throw a mouse or two across the room from what the game throws at you. Makes the spoils of victory all the more sweet if you ask me.

misterfanwank wrote:

Warhawx wrote:Bad luck =/= Bad game design

But random chance dictating the final outcome more than skill IS bad game design.

I like the basic mechanics of the game, I like the game's ability to put you into organic "no-win" situations, I like the sense of urgency and survival the game gives.

I do not, however, like how the game often asks me to make decisions with a minimal amount of information. I don't know how this could be fixed, but if a sequel is made I hope this is addressed.

it makes sence that you dont get much info its a risk

Aufklarer wrote:just take pride in actually getting to the mothership

But that's just it - it wasn't my achievement. It was just dumb luck.

Guswut wrote:If EVERY game ended with you getting to the boss and beating it, would you consider that proper game design?

If I'm suitably skilled at the game, then yes.

Take something like Binding of Isaac. If you lose in that game, it's because you screwed up, not because the game screwed you. Sure, it's possible to get lucky and have a really good run, but you can get incredibly far in that game without a single upgrade if you know how to play. To supplement that, the game actually gives you more opportunities to get gear (at a price) if you're sufficiently skilled through increasing the chances of spawning the Devil's barter room after each floor depending on how well you did on the floor.

In contrast, FTL's final boss is literally impossible if you didn't randomly acquire sufficiently powerful gear.

Correlation does not imply causation. FTL has incredible randomness, and I (overall) like FTL. That does not mean that I like FTL because of the randomness; in fact, it is just the opposite. I like FTL despite the randomness. The core game concept is brilliantly simple and thoroughly engaging, so I'm willing to put up with some tedium to get to the bits that I really enjoy. However, I would enjoy the game far more if it wasn't so frustratingly random. That's not to say that all randomness is bad in games like these (some randomness certainly adds to the experience), just that FTL ramps it up to eleven while flaunting trollface.jpg at your smoldering corpse.

Guswut wrote:If EVERY game ended with you getting to the boss and beating it, would you consider that proper game design?

Actually it is possible to win every game on normal with the easy ships like Kestrel and Fed Cruiser. Bad luck and randomness can only screw you over in sector one or maybe two, after that it is possible to plan for every contigency and it becomes impossible to lose to randomness. But still very possible to mess up things and lose because of bad tactics.

Honestly the randomness is a staple of roguelikes Nethack, Dwarf Fortress and really all the rest which is far too many to list all have massive amounts of randomness. Take Nethack for example it's completely possible to end up with nothing you can actually use with tons of strong monsters that can kill you in a second just because, or maybe Dwarf Fortress. You could start and go do the first quest you get and maybe he has somebody with a bow. Whoops you're dead three screens away now due to sheer randomness. FTL is no different you hope you get the correct stuff but if you don't you might die. It feels a lot more interesting. Honestly always getting exactly what you need is a bit stale and fake. Yes it's random but so is everything you'll never have everything you need and just need to work with whatever you have, but that's half the fun.

Timmy wrote:Take a look at conventional RPGs - you have say 1% chance of finding "Item X" after defeating "foe X". But the game allows you to fight hundreds of foes if you deem the item that vital to your strategy.

This seems to imply that you've determined a strategy prior to starting a game. Precommitting to a specific strategy is a rather poor meta-strategy for FTL.

Timmy wrote:Take a look at Minecraft. That is randomly generated too - but you are still guaranteed that the next biome (desert/forest/etc.) won't be thousands of miles away.

Take a look at Dwarf Fortress. That is randomly generated, and you're not guaranteed to find anything particular ore upon embark. Take a look at Pac-Man. That's not randomly generated at all.

Why are we looking at other games to determine how to play this one, again?

Timmy wrote:Now compare this to how FTL works. You have (I'm guessing here) 20% of finding "upgrade X" in a shop and 2 shops in one sector - that means that there's a very realistic ~41% chance of not finding the upgrade during the first 2 sectors. (And that is without considering that sectors often enough have just 1 shop in them). The same applies to the chances of finding "passenger/crewmen X", meeting "foe X"/"condition X" etc.

I'd imagine it's actually even lower than that, for any single arbitrary weapon/drone/system/augmentation/crewmember out of all of them in the game. If your precommitted strategy relies upon "I must get Weapon X to win" then you're gonna have a bad time. And lose. So a better strategy - learn to win with whatever you can find.

Timmy wrote:Thus the game forces you to to pretty much forget everything you learned the last time around, since it will be useless for the current game run.

Maybe this is true of the immediately last time around. Definitely untrue for all of the rounds as a whole - you should be continually learning to determine "oh, this event means X might happen, or Y might happen - if I can't afford Y right now, I should pick X" and "oh look, new weapon/augmentation/etc in a shop - I should try different things with this and figure out how to work this into my growing list of strategies".

Timmy wrote:I understand the necessity for randomness to keep the game exciting. But this isn't the way. I know the dev-team was very small and could not have come up with more foes/scenarios during the game, but this still isn't the right way to stretch out the play-through time. Forcing the player to adopt an entierly new play style every time is anything but exciting - it's tedious. Now combine this with the ability of not being able to save and you pretty much have a recipe for frustration.

Then this likely isn't the game genre for you. Others who enjoy that disagree - I actually would prefer a way to further increase my play-style variety. Playing the same game the same way every time sounds boring and tedious to me. (Thus why I was working with mod-makers to implement some sort of "random ship" starting game event.) Obviously, though, different people enjoy different things.

Timmy wrote:The appeal of a roguelike is to learn how to handle the situations. To know when to fight and when to retreat. To be able to prepare for upcoming fights by improving your stats - to learn how to handle the game. But if you have to deal with altered gameplay mechanics each time (since you can't apply the tactics you learned last time) it feels like a cruel joke.

This is like complaining that your playstyle as a Wizard in Nethack doesn't help you win as a Tourist because you can't apply your same tactics. Obviously, you can. Just not every single one, and not in the exact same way each time.

Nethack has a lot more ways to compensate for a bad streak of luck. Didn't get that item you really need? You can wish for it. Turned into a werewolf by chance you can pray to your god. It also has levels like sokoban where you are will always get 1 of the items you need.

Compensating for random in this game is more hoping what you need spawns and having a diversity of tools to deal with a variety of situations. (always have a teleporter and be able to board if you have to and have a missile weapon and a beam weapon that you can swap between just in case.)

I would liken it to Poker. Your strategy will put the odds in your favour, but nothing can guarantee total success.

If you tend to complete games by finding one thing that works and simply doing that every time, I can understand how FTL might seem frustrating as it doesn't really let you do that. You can't be Captain Dronemeister every game because you might not get a drone controller, or the patterns you need, when you need them. Instead, you have to learn how to adapt your overall strategy to the situations at hand, as Icehawk78 says. But also, you learn to be wary of things that catch you out (in my case, unchecked fires in frickin' nebulae).

Slugs disabling my medical bay and then teleporting on board my ship through my zoltan shield. I should have had some one on board other then zoltans but the only time I had a chance to buy them I was out of cash >.<

Of course I might have been able to salvage this horrible horrible botch but they breached my engine room and took out my life support. This game needs a self destruct button.