Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Hopscotch, The cRPG

"And running is something that we've always done well and mostly I can't even tell what I'm running from"

Amanda Palmer - Runs in the Family




Leap
Burrow
Flight
Shade Shift
Void Glide
Oil Splatter
Leaping Flames
Tactical Retreat
Cloak and Dagger
Phoenix Dive
Nether Swap
- and of course, "Teleport"

... are all teleportation spells in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Not to mention all the abilities which approximate the same effect:
Blitz Attack
Battering Ram
Backlash
etbetera.

I could probably find more but I'm only halfway through the game. I've repeatedly made this point in previous posts. Some superpowers prove so consistently immersion-breaking or game-breaking that they should be allotted much more sparingly than mere laser eyes and lightning bolts: time (or turn) manipulation, telepathy (or mind control) invisibility and, of course, teleportation.

D:OS2 handles three of those four quite well.
Manipulating action points or turn frequency is restricted to a couple of abilities and effects.
Invisibility is easily countered by AoE and doesn't yield the usual griefer-friendly one-hit-kill we've been taught to expect by MMOs.
Mind control is difficult to achieve and readily countered.
Teleports on the other hand were handed out like candy on Halloween.  At least four different skillsets offer them at early levels and every single encounter after newbieland seems to feature teleporting enemies. And enemies which can teleport you. And enemies which can teleport both themselves and you. With little to no cooldown.

All this leapfrogging might be less aggravating if I weren't officially playing in "tactician" mode. You keep using that word... Tactics is out-thinking, prediction, positioning, forming ranks and deciding order of engagement. Some degree of stochasticity is quite welcome, but when your enemy gets to ignore all the ground effects you lay down, when every positional gain gets reversed every single round... usually more than once... you lose the entire point of having front and rear guards, ranged and melee attackers. Overusing teleportation not only shrinks worlds but yields "a toilet-bowl swirl of players getting rewarded for taking the easy way out." It invalidates the main combat dynamic of a team RPG.

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