This is part of a continuing series of old rants/essays/snark/thoughts/etc/etc/etc from years back that I figured I might as well throw somewhere other than a decrepit and deleted Discord server. This one comes from a “video game book club” that I played with some fellow traveler nerds. This came from fairly early in my playthrough
As Always, Assume Spoilers
So, I’ve played a bunch of Deathloop now for very little progress. But I think I’ve finally got enough of a grip on one of the core mechanics of Deathloop: Julianna. The invasion mechanic is kinda the heart of the games pacing. So let’s look at this from both sides, because while I think this is a really cool experiment, and I love it on paper, I feel like it’s wonky in execution so far. No spoilers will be included.
From the Colt side: Eh . . . It could be better.
I’m pretty sure that I already know 80% of the path to beat the single player mode. Executing on it is hard, though, because I’m getting invaded every single fucking time I do anything. Remember when I said that wasn’t happening? Yeah, that fucking changed. I’m getting fucking destroyed left and right by stronger powers I’m unable to collect due to getting murdered like crazy.
Now, could I just switch to playing offline/friends only? Yes. And I’m glad they included that feature. But it seems to me that the difficulty curve isn’t balanced for pure single player - it’s kinda easy. There’s some moderate challenge without powers, but I can already tell that the powers will really start breaking it to the easy side before you get like half of them. And the AI doesn’t seem that great on the normal enemies, so I doubt that AI Julianna is really good enough.
The “proper” flow of the game seems to be to struggle against more powerful Juliannas early on, scrape out some hard won victories off and on, and slowly get stronger from a roguelike perspective. If at first you don’t succeed, etc, etc. It feels like most of the game is balanced around that and it will feel kinda weak. I don’t know what the AI invasion rhythm is, but I would bet that it’s the expected frequency.
From the Julianna side: Holy fuck, this shit is rough.
First the Good: You as Julianna starts out real weak. This isn’t too bad. You’re still rewarded for just playing, which makes failure feel like it’s not a big deal, and you start getting powerful toys very quickly. The gameplay feels good, and it’s a fun cat-and-mouse concept. I really do like this idea, the core is very sound.
Now the Bad: Matchmaking takes slightly longer than you would think - I tend to get a game, although there is roughly a 50% disconnect rate. But a lot of the powers feel like they’re doing the opposite of forcing a conflict . You can either hunt for Colt or camp the antenna, but neither feels good with the Invisibility or Damage Resist. I definitely have an impatience thing going on, which doesn’t help, but sitting around waiting for Colt to do something is fairly dull. When no one has powers it feels better. Also, getting better powers is kind of a grind.
Now the Ugly: Honestly, this doesn’t seem to work well on a technical level. The lag in every invasion is crazy, clearly from a peer to peer connection. I played a game today that was basically unplayable because the lag just kept rubber-banding me back into the place I started. It took me longer than it should have to even commit suicide. That one was the worst, but I’ve had a lot of similar deals. I’ve seen accusations that the invasions aren’t properly region limited. When I invaded Steve, this lag didn’t happen at all, so I’m inclined to believe that theory.
From a design side:
I’ve described simple problems above that seem very easily fixable. That’s not really true, though. The core of this game is based around the invasion mechanic, and maintaining that is hard. You need roughly equal amounts of Colts and Juliannas (with a slight bias towards Colts) actively playing to keep the system going, which requires a whole set of incentives to keep that running. And I’m not really convinced that the kind of people who generally play Arkane games are particularly interested in the multiplayer side - and cutting that out changes the emotional flow dramatically.
To use another example that does something similar, Dark Souls allows you to be invaded in single player. But in Dark Souls there is an opt-in mechanic - you use an item that boosts your stats and lets you summon helpers, but it also has the downside of opening you up to invasions. You’re given a reason to opt-in. (This is the end of anything nice I can say about DS multiplayer, which is generally garbage). I haven’t finished the game, so I’m not sure there’s really a good reason to opt in to online multiplayer or keep playing as Colt here? It makes your life harder, but does it add anything?
I suspect the online players are massively skewed towards Juliannas who already beat the game as Colt. This asymmetry feels skewed the wrong way. Tie that in with what I suspect is a low player base, and the heart of the game drops out. I don’t really know how to fix that? All that being said, even if this turns out to be lesser Arkane, I respect the large amount of ideas and thought put into this experiment.