I on the other hand don't go for concise posts
The below turned in to a giant ramble, but here's my TLDR.
-Y so many mandatory plots per mission? Half would get the point across I think.
-Choice of plots is cool, but also too broad/not explained well enough.
-No outcomes for most of this stuff makes it hard to judge the impact it has.
Played around with it a little bit more.
5) It does not appear possible to fail a mission step without screwing up ALL sub-aspects. For example there was a hacking segment that had 3 parts. Hacking, Cracking and Data Flow. Failing two out of the three was not sufficient to cause any additional mission parameters to get added and the entire segment was marked as "passed."
This. Which I assume cuts to the heart of the prototype, there's not a lot of outcomes for what you do. I noticed my corp's share increase 20%, and my bankroll increased significantly after completing the mission already in progress.
But I didn't see anything change with the Operatives. I watched a not-hacker repeatedly fail at hacking challenges and their vitals didn't go anywhere. (I assume what's intended to happen is failing those missions makes them take damage, making it harder for them to succeed at later challenges without gear.)
Which leads me to the math of it all. I like it. I didn't make sense at first when I was reading the description on the KS, but now I got it. So everyone rolls their base stat (I assume their current value) against the challenge, and adds in the value they get from skills, trying to beat the challenge rating. If they fall short, they spend gear points to make up the difference. My not-hacker blew through 6 gear in 2 plots (6 challenges). So that's where getting safehouses together to refill would be. You'd send one team on a mission to create a safehouse, and then make a one of the plots in your other mission to be rearming and refueling.
It all makes more sense when you start plotting your own missions. Missions have a set number of plots that need to happen. You choose each plot type, which opens up the actual plots, which are collections of 3 challenges.
Here's where it starts to get a little shaky. While it's fairly obvious what you're doing (you build missions toward your ideal team's strong points), you have the option of running like shootouts and ambushes during your investigation missions.
It's kind of Hollywood meets practical logistics and planning, and that's cool. But in a way some of it feels like overkill. There are 27 individual challenges that need to be passed for a mission in the prototype, that's about 6 challenge per team member. Which isn't bad, but there's a lot of places to fail, and even succeeding it's kind of like....is it done yet? I'm not the kind of person who likes to play games with the ultrafast button pressed, so I'm hoping that's not the default way the game should be played for expediency.
Bearing in mind this is the prototype, I'll speak to what I can see now. I think fewer, harder challenges are more appealing than a ton of easier challenges. While challenges in the full game will include critical moments, that's not necessarily a good thing either. That all builds up until it doesn't scale at all. See Dominions 3 late game for an example of that.
Re: Plot choices. I have two thoughts here. One is that I think there's a disconnect between the highly tactical, information-based mission choices, like "Research Files" or "Investigate the scene", and action-oriented ones like "Alley Chase!" or "Building Chase!" The logic of it sounds funny to me. Like everyone sat around in the briefing room at HQ and said "Alright, so in phase 8 you plan to get chased through a building by security? Sounds like a plan."
That stuff reads more like critical moments, reactions to stuff that happens.
And that's my second thought, is that there's no real feel for consequences right now, probably because most of them aren't in. What does it mean to these series of missions you've strung together, where you failed to hack the 2nd Alarm Bypass? What will it mean? Is that where the heat comes from? Is it just Operatives losing HP, making future challenges in the mission harder? Can a mission fail because one of these critical components was failed, not because you ran out of numbers, but because it's built not to succeed without x things happening at least y times? Will rewards be variable based on the # of successful plots, the specific plots succeeded at or will it just be 5/8 plots passed, here's the reward?
Let me put it this way. If I'm running a mission, and because I fail at bypassing 1 alarm, 1 building chase and 1 hack security test...I either generically do or not complete the mission, that makes it seem like there's no weight or real point to the plots you choose to run. For example. The last plot point in this Investigation mission I'm looking at right now is "Gain Intel (Spy)". Its choices are (ignoring the duplicates) "Investigate the scene" and "Tail Person". If I succeeded at that plot, but not most of the others, would I fail the mission? Either way there's a disconnect and it kind of mucks up the illusion. Elaborate plots can't succeed when either the beginning or ending parts of them fail. You kind of want an explanation of what happened. "He failed to hack the system and get the info." "Oh so they failed then." "No they successfully got the intel." "How?" "Good question." The plots seem to imply they should be weighted, like getting into the area you're running the plot in, or bypassing one alarm, carries less weight than actually acquiring the intel.
Consequences is what will ultimately make all this tick, and right now the prototype doesn't really have a lot of that. But in the final game, I hope there's reasons beyond thematic (I ran an all spy plot and seduce someone, because it's cool) and practical (I have no good hackers and bunch of sneaks, I'll run a stealth plot) for which kind of plot you choose, and how they play out. I'd imagine, once everything is hooked up, that action-based plots would be the most dangerous, because failing those would hurt your body score. But what about the outcomes of failing other plots? What's being reduced to 0 Integrity or Acuity or Agility mean for a character? Because that is ultimately driven by what kind of plot you'd pick. Would some mission choices generate less heat, pass or fail? Result in different kinds of critical events?
Anyways, what I really like is the options and potential to meticulously arrange all this stuff, from hiring the right person to choosing the plots with the best chances of success, to choosing the right member of the team to do it. But I hope all those options are tempered by some common sense, the mission at hand and most of all: consequences for the stuff you're doing. That's what will I think makes the plots feel more than just containers for the skill rolls you'll be making.
Parting thoughts:
-Must...detach..windows...ugnh....I get what the layering system is supposed to be now after fooling with it and stacking some open windows. But part of me wants to be able to go to the Operatives page without having to go through the main menu first. It's not a huge deal, but something to consider for the full game.
-It would be swell if there was a directory we could dump music to so the game would play it along side the game music. Don't know if that's within the scope of your software or what.
-I like how game looks running in a maximized window, it's a cool effect.
-Need to have a readable log of pass/fail rolls, they're lost to the void. Since completed missions seem to be kept in your game log, it shouldn't be hard to preserve the skill rolls made either. (So we can follow the trail of what happened to our operatives back.)
-I will feel the need for a lot of updated numbers and notifications to really be on top of what's happening. If the goal is to run multiple missions with multiple teams simultaneously, that's a lot to keep track of. So I'm thinking stuff like, statistics being colored green for a period of time after they increase or red when they decrease. Screen notifications of when Operatives' vital stats his 0. Notifications of rewards for completing missions, or perhaps large swings in your corp's market share/stock price.
-I didn't not expect to here some jazz in here. It was a nice surprise.
-As I sit back and think about running missions against other corps, I think about all the data I want coming back to me without me having to look for it. Things like, soandso completed some sidework, a mission was run against the corp, operative x left your employ, stuff like that. I almost feel like the player needs a personal news ticker just for their operations, once they're up and running.
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Topic: Net Gain: Corporate Espionage in 2043. Development probably abandoned. (Read 61991 times)