And if that's not overpowered as fuck then I don't know what is.
giant cave spiders, being webbed and put into a stunned state which gives anyone auto-crit on hit.
or letting a dragon breath fire on you, or any of the AOE effects demons have.
Yes, I agree. Those are also broken as fuck.
The way they could be 'balanced' would be making such attacks require 'charge-up' like states (think
archvile from doom (without the prostrats)) that indicate that they are going to fire off such an attack - another great time to make Observer rolls - and consequently giving you time to
get the unhallowed fuck away from there for dear life.
This also makes for the opportunity of painting mental pictures of someone looking at a dragon taking a big breath and doing a sick dive away before it huffs out pure death. Cool.
a necro tower full of zombies can and will still kill you. Zombies are indeed way overpowered.
The problem with zombies is not only that their absurd stats will make them parry everything all the time, but also that their absurd strength means that their muscle tissue is fucking unbreachable at the same time.
And if that's not overpowered as fuck then I don't know what is.
Your complaints are imaginary. Zombies do not exist, so Toady is free to balance them any way he pleases and it will always make sense. It is not and cannot be overpowered or absurd.
Full-body omelette or not, I'm still going to address this shit.
First of all I really dislike the whole "
he has full articstik ctornol!!" argument that quite a lot of people bring up, due to it being completely backwards in regards to my second - main - point;
Dwarf Fortress is a game, that much is undeniable.
It is a fantasy world simulator first, yes, but it is also a game in that allowing you to interact with it is just as - if not more - important than just simulating the world.
This means that for it to be enjoyable, it has to follow the vague concept known as "good game design".
Here's a fun little anecdote from a radically different game;
The algorithms were, of course, very fun to construct and interesting to discuss outside of the game. The players, however, felt left behind -- the computer was having all the fun -- so we cut the feature. Further, games require not just meaningful choices but also meaningful communication to feel right. Giving players decisions that have consequence but which they cannot understand is no fun. Choice is only interesting when it is both impactful and informed.
--Sid Meiers, on Civilization game design
In this case we are talking about a turn-based action game, which has different requirements than "meaningful choices with meaningful communication of their effects" - though those are also important - the most important of which is
the ability to handle a situation or fight.
DF is based in a high fantasy world - a more down-to-earth of the sort, yes, but there's still plenty of bizarrely unreal things such as titans of smoke and shit like that - which does give it an excuse to include gargantuan, terrifying figures that are nigh-unkillable and which can squash just about anyone with little effort. This is already present, as that is what function demons have; they're absolutely massive and crazy dangerous to fight without exploits, a terrifying foe.
Now, as cool as having those "big bad evil" creatures is, they have to be few and far between for them to be truly terrifying - otherwise they're just perfectly ordinary; if every enemy is massive and unbeatable, then there is no real contrast between them, and they don't carry any of the weight they would should they only be extremely scarce.
Besides the fact that having every enemy be unbeatable would make for a very
boring theme:
Violence isn't all that
impactful in a game like
Hatred, since you both have no
choice but to kill people and to execute them in various violent ways; there are no contrasting colors in this gameplay picture, it's all violence and gore, thus violence and gore isn't very impactful, unlike something like
this (watch a couple of minutes).
Thus part of what makes for a good
turn-based action game that
has nigh-unbeatable enemies is to keep those enemies reasonably scarce.
But that is only one tangentially related thing, because I haven't even gotten to the meat of the issue yet.
The issue with the massively overpowered zombies (40.01-42.04, rip in piss) is one of
meaningful choices.
With the "big bad evil", you have the choice of running away or not fighting them at all, like with zombies - but there is also no reason to fight them other than to challenge your luck and the well-being of your character for a blaze of glory.
Zombies, however, protect a certain thing you may want to put your hands on - namely the power of necromancy. An actual gameplay feature locked behind a wall of guards.
Your choices with the overpowered zombies, however, were severely limited; you could either bite the bullet and spend many hours (and probably a couple of powerful adventurers due to them only having to get lucky
once) painstakingly dragging single zombies out of the their huge crowds and 1v1'ing every single one of them - a very boring exercise in patience - or dig around the wall and become a vampire to make the zombies not care about you.
You cannot sneak past them - they smell your life - you cannot kill them with throwing (cross/bows are completely out of the picture) because they are fast, untiring and extremely dodgy - and you absolutely cannot take them on in a brawl because each one takes forever to kill due to the
absurd amount of muscle. Your choices are thus either doing something
extremely boring in comparison to everything else you could be doing in the game, or becoming a vampire and skipping all the 'fun'.
That is not how a good game works, because this is neither a 'the ultimate big bad' kind of encounter or one that is supposed to be absolutely impossible to approach - since it
is a wall to a special aspect of the game (necromancy is quite different from normal companions) - and it's certainly not set up to be anything
particularly special; the demons are
massive monsters, while zombies are literally rotting corpses.
For this to be good fun, you have to actually be able to handle it in some way that does not require exploiting(!) game mechanics for hours on end (not fun!).
Thus the zombies shouldn't be among the absolute strongest opponents in the game. They're nothing special - necromancers aren't
that uncommon - and there's certainly no meaningful reason (the demons come from
the terrifying depths of fantasy hell, zombies are walking corpses) for them to be among the most powerful beings in the world. The fact that they can't be defeated with stealth already dictates that brute force is the only solution, and thus this
must be a viable solution - otherwise there's not really any choice (it's either "go vampire" or "fuck off", gee, fun!). That Toady has decided to make the zombies much weaker and clumsier while charging all the time is actually a good thing, since it means that you really want to break them up unless you wish to risk losing your footing and be stuck among a horde of zombies, which is already a change of pace from normal fights where such things aren't nearly as necessary. The fact that they're clumsy as hell likely means that if you take the lazy path of brawling and get knocked down, you can cut a lot of feet off to stand up soon afterwards, but that will require some actual playtesting to see if that's practical.
Either way, the nerf provides you with some actual
choices on how to approach the fight; you should no longer be forced to spend hours taking down zombie Kenshiro after zombie Kenshiro in single combat exclusively with a fantastically skilled adventurer for a slim chance of success. That is a good change, because they had no place being just as (if not more) unwinnable than fights against the biggest baddest things that even
exist in the world.
Which now solves this design issue I've rambled about for quite a while now that made zombies
not fun, woop-ee.
In short, then no - this is not some imaginary issue. DF is a game, it should try to be a good one.
There are no excuses to intentionally make a shitty game that doesn't try to be a good experience.
Which is
especially important seeing that the whole "fantasy world simulator" thing has a lot of effort put into it.
tl;dr good game design is hard and kenshiro zombies had no god damned place existing let alone being harder fights than fights against motherfucking demons from motherfucking hell, good thing they're gone now
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Topic: Strongest base playable animal character? (Read 31024 times)