10 years of FTL: The making of an enduring spaceship simulator
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The best part of the game is the soundtrack. On twitch the FTL soundtrack has to be getting more playtime on broadcasts of other games than on broadcasts of FTL itself. It's great atmospheric space themed music.
Any non boarding strategy seems non tenable right now for me
With them, it becomes managable, even on hard - with luck. If I don't have any luck, I can also die on easy.
but also valuation of spending and damage. Apparently, good players can win about 70% or so of the time on hard, because the game is designed such that the amount of leeway/mistakes you're allowed to make is near zero (but not zero).
Or a moment of not paying attention and then suddenly your shields are all down and destroyed and before you know it that was it. But I haven't played easy in a while ..
Or waiting for the opposing crew to run out of oxygen?
So you could use that to level up your crew to all locations, which was a pretty big gain, especially early on and before / without clone bay (with a clone bay your dupes are expendable and lose skill, so getting them to level 2 is less valuable).
My Shrike minmaxing strategy typically involves o2 depletion to whack enemy ships out and get maximum rewards. But it does frequently require a lot of waiting.
Or burning them out (optional with rock bording party)
Anyways trying to define what qualifies what a "rougelike" is has started countless semantic slapfights (which is why I tried to use the cop-out word rougelite). Please consult a rougelike alignment chart to know where you stand in the great holy war over the definition of the word "rougelike" [1]. Nowadays most gamers think of indie games like dead cells, hades, enter the dungeon, darkest dungeon, crypt of the necrodancer, and ftl when they think "rougelike" and those games are all tagged with "rougelike" on steam and twitch.
Traditional Roguelike for full-on Berlin Interpretation Roguelikes, like Nethack and Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.
Roguelite for Slay the Spire, FTL, and similar. Much easier to say than Roguelikelikes or Games with Roguelike Elements.
And the word Roguelike? The battle was lost a long time ago, and most people will understand it to encompass both categories above. (Even though I personally have a tough time taking it to include the three great games in the mechanics radical column of the chart).
Usually any game that has procedural elements & permadeath now becomes labelled "roguelike" or "roguelite" by the community, depending.
I'm still a snob about it, to me roguelikes are nethack, ADOM, even newer games like Cogmind and Caves of Qud are roguelikes, but to me, FTL is not.
to each their own but like, it's _pretty_ close!
I think Subset Games are true game design greats. Really admire their work.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s_I07Iq_2XM
What was great about it is they fully admit to wanting to give up at one point. They simply couldn’t make the game fun. They stuck with it and eventually made it a great game, but it was persistence that led to success.
Game designers with a lot of success get put on a pedestal and labelled “great”, but they fail as much as anyone, they just push through it. Or they throw their games away, case in point Edward McMillen and Meowgenics.
For some people, the puzzle aspect is where the fun is. For others, it's a recipe for frustration.
But eventually I grew very tired of the mental effort required. After a long day using my brain, doing it for fun was just not doing it for me anymore.
It's hard but not frustrating, varied, and short enough to play while waiting for something :)
Runs fine on Mac too!
In general, I dislike action games, don't want to learn key combos, and like to be able to save my progress.
Yet for all that, Hades is probably (for me) the best game I have ever played.
Action within each room is hectic, but in between (after you clear one and go to the next) there's time to think, power up, adjust your strategy, and then plunge into it again.
The game handles death so well I actually wanted to die many times just so I could go back to the starting point and check new powerups.
It was frustratingly hard (for me, casual gamer that really doesn't play action games) but even on those times I kept pushing because of the story. It's surprisingly good foe a rougelite (and action games in general).
All this is to say, if you haven't played it, give it a try (at least a few runs, and explore the other character). You might be surprised.
That's pretty standard for roguelites, the metaprogression is usually necessary.
I guess FTL is the one one out there, because the metaprogression is only ships being unlocked IIRC.
Though you're completely correct that Hades is on the more ARPG-side of things (very much in-line with previous Supergiant games).
It's not that twitchy compared to an Enter the Gungeon or Binding of Isaac.
But then I haven't played FTL unmodded for a long time...
There was a science fiction story a long time ago, probably from the 70s or 80s that I don't recall well enough to identify, but in the story people were playing a war game where each human player was sort of like a general without direct control over their side's forces. The simulation was extremely detailed and the battles were recreations of historical events, but the gameplay was very high level.
When WarCraft and StarCraft came along, I wasn't that impressed because the skills required seemed so micro-manage-y and unrealistic.
Has anyone ever come up with an AI that lets players be commanders at a very high level? Where things unfold in real time, with elaborate graphics, but without the ability to control each individual unit. Even if it was dumb, it could cause interesting problems with command and control.
There's also something like Gratuitous Space Battles (or worse, Stellaris' combat mechanics) where the player has no combat control at all, but it also doesn't seem quite right.
I fear the formula may simply not be very fun. GSB may push the envelope on how much you can take the player out of the loop without losing the plot, but even there I suspect it borrows quite a lot from strategic games like Stellaris (or any Paradox grand strategy) where the tactical layer exists solely to validate or falsify the players' strategic decisions in a slightly more dynamic way than "bigger number wins".
I wish they open-sourced the game, like VVVVVV was. Oh well, at least Fex-Emu, Box86 & co are progressing well :)
I know this is a very minor late game complaint. The game is tough, and this only effects the very best, but it's something I've thought about many times and I was wondering if anyone else has thought the same?
I think that FTL has largely been abandoned because it has been played out but it did take quite a few years to get there. Designing a game that is consistently hard without just regularly throwing you seeds that are impossible to win is difficult to impossible and at some point I think you need to move onto a new game.
https://www.twitch.tv/dolphinchemist/video/28582788?filter=c...
I look at what "being good" is, and what devs have to do to add a player-demanded "higher difficulty", and what players have to do beat it. What's fascinating is how the experience changes; Sometimes that means "breaking" the game (check-pointing and cheesing), sometimes not.
I've recently discovered this gem of a channel about philosophy and ftl https://youtu.be/L2HpA5u5qKc
Watching right now !
Check out "Star Traders: Frontiers" here: https://www.tresebrothers.com/