Hello and welcome to that most auspicious of occasions, the architect address, welcome, welcome, take a seat. Today we’re here to talk about some of the videos that came out recently, what I think of them and what it was like to make them.
First up, let’s talk about the video I did all about short games, ending and Before Your Eyes. When you’re in my line of work, you end up playing a lot of games, so that means that I rarely get to actually finish them. Seriously, I think about 10% of my steam games I’ve actually finished - and that’s doing some pretty generous rounding up. Basically, because I don’t have the time to invest a bunch of effort into a really really long game every day, I’ve come to really appreciate shorter titles and until before your eyes came along there wasn’t a game that I could really point to as exemplifying the strengths of this sort of design.
Shorter games with better paced endings are kind of illogical on the face of them - you’re paying the same amount of money for less videogame which makes a lot of them quite a hard sell. But what you don’t think about is how having less content can actually be a boon because not only do you actually get to experience more of the game, what’s there is probably better on a minute to minute basis because there’s less padding. But beyond that, there is a deeper call to try and completely complete games that before your eyes directly challenges by not letting you do that, and making a deeper point in the process that wouldn’t hit anywhere near as hard if it never forced you to continue and miss out on stuff.
As far the video, it, uh, didn’t do too well for a variety of reasons, I think not many people are actually interested in pretentious arty games with weird gimmicks like I am, and there’s also the matter of Jacob Geller releasing a basically identical video around the same time which did loads better, that bastard. But I’m pretty happy with how the video did, and it was absolutely great for patreon uptake so hello new people, welcome to the page, thank you for giving me money.
The next video was all about permanence, which is a concept I totally made up so if you’ve got a better suggestion I’ll start using that instead, thanks. Honestly, I love getting really wanky about the mechanics of storytelling and how videogames can do it better, and I’d struggled to find a way to talk about games allowing us to assemble emergent narratives over time, which is weird, because it’s what makes a bunch of awesome games tick.
I had the script mostly planned out but Wildermyth really exemplified the sort of design I was looking to cover and allowed me to leap into this topic full force. Honestly, I have quite a few issues with the game, I think it’s pretty easy when you get right down to it - it needs a few more events to avoid repetition, and there’s a weird problem with how retirement works. Essentially, doing well in a given chapter means you get more years of peace afterwards, which translates into your adventurers retiring sooner, which is bad. I guess you could argue it fits the narrative and helps to stabilize difficulty but it does feel pretty bad to be punished for doing well like that. Not sure how they’d fix it but it’s the one black mark in a game that’s otherwise really good.
Going through some other highly permanent games was a lot of fun too - Death Stranding is ace, playing a bunch of oldschool roguelikes was fun, and even shadow of war had its moments. That last one pisses me off though, because when you get right down to it, both of the shadow of games are deeply, deeply mediocre videogames with boring combat and rubbish writing and a bunch of rubbish open world padding, all held up by the nemesis system, which is really good. So now that the nemesis system has been patented, no-one else is allowed to use it, and it’ll never actually get used in a game that deserves it, which is kind of a shame.
All in all I think with this video I spent a bit too long explaining and elaborating on a fairly intuitive concept so I don’t think it needed to be as long as it was. I really like all of the examples I used and I’d really been looking for an excuse to try out Hunt Showdown but there’s quite a lot of filler at the start and at the end that doesn’t need to be there. I THINK the next few videos are going to be a bit shorter though but I guess time will tell on that one.
With that, I’ll leave things there stay cool, stay safe and play some videogames for me, okay - bye!
Videogames are a storytelling medium, everyone knows that - but unlike their contemporaries, they allow us to write our own stories too - by interacting with the systems and mechanics of games, we can tell gripping stories of survival against the odds, create epic rivalries between us and NPCs, and epic quests starring heroes of our own creation.
So... how can games do this?
Well, one of the best ways is through a particular game design ethos called permanence - where games remember your actions and allow you to build on them, not just over the course of a single level, but an entire playthrough - and there's no better example of it than a little game called Wildermyth. As a result, the Architect has spent the last few weeks making friends with orcs, delving into old addictions and apologizing to dragons for that big misunderstanding, all in an effort to understand how games can create stories not by writing them - but by giving us space to write them ourselves...
Hey, you might've noticed the title for the video changed! I thought it wasn't very clear what the video was about (plus it wasn't doing too well in terms of views!) so I changed it - just a little bit of transparency!
Endings are something that we don't appreciate enough, we spend so much time trying to squeeze every drop of content from games that we often don't get around to finishing them at all - and worse yet, some developers don't even *want* you to finish their games, leading to a malaise that's afflicted videogames for close to a decade.
The solution? We need to embrace the shorter, more imperfect endings that video games have to offer, and after blinking their way through time and across the boundary of mortality, The Architect has some wisdom to share about how some of the best games of the year so far can create satisfying conclusions that mean much more because they aren't complete.
Hello! And welcome to the Architect Address for the month of may 2021. Rather than my usual aimless rambling I do before I talk about the videos I’ve done recently, I thought I’d talk about the after the video segment because I noticed a youtube comment that I’ve since lost asked me why I make a point of shouting out random people who’ve never heard of me in every video, and probably don’t care.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that… deep down I feel sort of incredibly out of place being able to do this for a living. When I look around on youtube and other places on the internet, I see so many people making things that are much funnier or more insightful or from a more interesting perspective than anything I’ve ever done and I can’t help but feel like I got incredibly lucky to be in the position I’m in. Whilst I am of course incredibly grateful for all the support you lot have given me, I personally can’t see any of my videos as anything more than basically pretty rubbish
And yet, all those talented people and interesting projects aren’t as popular as they should be for a variety of reasons, chief among which is bad luck. So I sort of see it as my responsibility to not just promote interesting games that I think offer a new perspective or a new way of doing things, but also to help elevate new voices and interesting ideas in the internet media sphere as well. Basically it’s all the result of crippling impostor syndrome but if marginalized, obscure or just plain underappreciated cool stuff can benefit as a result of my mental illness then I’m going to call that a win.
Anyway, what about those videos, eh? The first one I’d like to talk about is Breaking the trinity: or why do so many games have tanks healers and DPS. This is a subject that I feel like comes up all the time in discussion threads for various games, but people rarely think to widen the lens and analyse this pattern from a broader perspective, which more often than not just leads to petty squabbling that goes nowhere. The holy trinity isn’t bad, per-se, but I think that several companies, in particular those bastards over at blizzard lean on it so hard that the holy trinity style of gameplay ends up swallowing everything else.
One game I didn’t think to mention but got brought up to me is Monster Hunter, which despite having group content and classic big boss encounters, doesn’t really adhere to the trinity at all. I think there are two main reasons for this, and that’s that a) the game doesn’t really have an aggro system, meaning that the controlling power of tanks is severely weakened and b) because everyone has access to a buttload of healing items, dedicated supports aren’t really needed. Even the lance and hunting horn, which are the tankiest and supportiest weapon classes in the game respectively are ultimately just a different flavour of DPS, and I think the selfsufficiency monsterhunter offers helps to really shake up its group play, although that does come at the price of limiting teamwork - you’re all just sort of bashing away at monsters next to eachother rather than actually working as a team a lot of the time. Still, it’s an interesting take.
And yeah, I played a lot of games and saw even more mentioned in the comments that claim to shake the trinity up with summoning classes, or debuff classes or yadda yadda yadda but they’re invariably just an abstracted version of those classic three archetypes. I’d be really interested to see if it’s even possible for a game to have a both a traditional RPG setup that doesn’t slide into either the trinity or everyone being a mostly independent jack of all trades - i’m not entirely sure if it is possible, who knows, it’s an interesting thought experiment for sure!
The other video was the art of tension, and honestly it was one big excuse to gush about resident evil because I love it - and uniquely amongst my videos, that was the topic from the start and I didn’t change my mind and refocus on something else midway through like I usually do. I do think that Resi does have a unique edge over other horror games that have sort of died off or never been as consistently popular because it treats the suspense as much more important than the actual scares. Hell, resi 4, one of the best games in the franchise has maybe one moment which is actually scary, and that’s about it. All the emotional weight comes from the systems and the way they force you to play the game rather than just a monster jumping out and going boo.
I think that, especially when it comes to games that draw a lot from cinematic tradition, particularly horror and linear setpeice action games like uncharted, there’s this tendency to copy the structure and pacing of a two hour movie you enjoy in a single sitting and try and make it fit a twenty hour game you play in multiple sittings, which never quite works. Games need little breaks between rising peaks of tension to give you a place to take a break and stop playing or at least mentally reset yourself before continuing - if games fail to do that then players will just burn out.
In addition, I think there really is something for the power of the unknown in games heightening the experience, in survival games, we’ve been quite justifiably conditioned into scouring the wikipedia of whatever game we’re playing just to understand what we’re supposed to be doing, but a lot of the time that can remove the sense of awe and mystery that makes not just exploration, but also the survival itself so compelling, and that need to be in control can be a very difficult habit to break, even if it ultimately makes the experience worse.
There’s probably space for a whole video on that but I’ve got to be careful to avoid stepping on my own toes and repeating myself too much, so I think I’ll leave that topic for a while and move onto other stuff, what will that be? Who knows!
Alright I think I’ll leave this there - in case you can't tell I’ve been a bit fast and loose with this one I've not really written a script, just some talking points I’m going to have to clean up later. I hope this wasn’t too messy or in the case of that first bit too TMI. I might have to rerecord some stuff - who knows. Anyway, have a fun June I suppose, I’ll have the next video out when it’s done and…. Yeah, have fun in the meantime - bye!
Note: Eagle-Eyed patrons might've spotted a last second name change from "why resident evil doesn't need to be scary" to what you can see above you. This is because the prior name - on top of being so clickbaity that it wasn't actually true - was a bit boring so I swapped it out. Looks like I'll have to forgo all the sweet, sweet engagement I'd get from people correcting me and spoiling everyone about a big scary moment.
Resident Evil is a hell of a game, it's got great world design, terrifying zombies and some... *extensive* characterization - but that's not all. Resident Evil is also the master of tension. Tension is the secret ingredient that turns mere excitement into exhilaration and simple fear into outright horror, but how do the best of the best use this subtle game design element to their advantage?
Whether it's Half Life Alyx's Jeff, Resident Evil's Lady Dimitrescu and Subnautica's Reapers - the greatest moments of videogaming tension rely not on outright scares, but on taking control away from the player - and after a much-needed change of clothes, the Architect is ready to tell you how they do it.
Tanks, Supports and Damage Dealers are a staple of... too many games to count - and no matter where you look this holy trinity seems to be growing more and more popular over time - but why?
A veteran of MMOs, Hero Shooters and all sorts of tactics games, The Architect has squeezed into an ill-fitting helm of domination and waded out onto the battlefield to work out why the holy trinity is so common, and what effect it has on our favorite games.
Hi hello and welcome to yet another Architect Address, how are you doing? Cool. Good to hear.
So, what’s been happening over the past few weeks over here in Architect HQ? Well quite a few things, first and foremost is that I’m ramping up to another big video along the lines of the undertale one and the Near A Tomato one, this time about Disco Elysium - I’m not sure when I’ll fully commit to it or if it’ll ever actually come out but it’s in the planning stages right now - there’ll definitely be at least one or two more videos to go before that though so don’t hold your breath.
Speaking of that, I’m saying it here mostly as a way to get myself to actually do it but I’ve gotta get videos out faster. I’ve been feeling a bit sluggish lately and it’s probably pandemic stress but I’ve got so many ideas I’m leaving on the backburner right now and I want to get them out - so, here’s hoping.
That’s all plans for the future though, what about videos I released recently? Well, the first of those is How to Make a Legendary Swordfighting game which oh boy is a bit of a mouthful. Swordfighting games have always been a passion of mine, I love soulslikes, I love platinum games I love Furi and I’ve made craploads of videos about those individual factors so it’s only right I unified them into a video that’s in many ways kind of a culmination of several of my previous ones and I think it turned out well, even if I did get the predictable nerds in the replies critiquing my history knowledge.
One of my most interesting experiences as part of research for this video was playing Sekiro for the first time and true to FromSoft tradition it’s a… nearly really good game? I dunno this isn’t the place to complain about Sekiro but whilst its big bossfights are absolutely sublime and basically faultless, there’s a lot of weird bullshit in between like the skill trees and prosthetic tools that feed into some fairly fiddly micromanagement and some boring binary weakness play which almost but not quite spoils the fantastic swordplay.
All in all it was a good video and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out! Though I do agree with some of the commenters that I should’ve used a slightly newer game than Bushido Blade - I had to borrow some footage and even then the quality wasn’t great, I dunno - maybe I should into Hellish Quart…
The other video released was: what we can learn from a 2000 year old puzzle which like I say in the video was a bit of a doozy to put together, I was stuck on it for ages and then I finally figured it out and wrote the whole script in a few days, it was bananas. Overall, I think this video is one of my best for a while, it’s a unique take on the “what makes a puzzle game good” idea and the response has been very positive. I also like the whole historical spin I gave it, I like throwing in some subject areas beyond videogames to liven things up and give people a broader education, it’s cool.
My only real gripe besides the view-count which is pitifully low is that I think I got quite negative towards some games in particular. I don’t like taking cheapshots generally and I think me dissing Superliminal and Maquette was justified but… maybe not entirely necessary. I cut out a LOT of complaining because I think that many of games I criticize on the channel are interesting and worth experiencing, even if it's their flaws that make them interesting.
Superliminal is a really interesting example of a game that’s overflowing with cool ideas but doesn’t quite stitch them together in a way that’s satisfying and Maquette is an example of a high budget for art and expensive voice actors actually dragging the rest of the product down. I dunno.
One thing I did want to talk about but didn’t quite get the chance is why the idea of perspective in a literal sense is something puzzles keep coming back to, both in the form of the ostomachion but also in videogames. Manifold Garden is probably the best example of that with its whole gimmick being that it takes place in recursive 4D space and getting your head around that is the main challenge. Maybe I’ll save it for another video, there’s something in the idea of physically impossible spaces that can only be represented virtually but that’s a topic for another time.
As for what’s coming next, I’m either going to do something on rhythm games or more likely, a look a the holy trinity of tank, damage dealer and support and why it seems to be everywhere - but who knows!
Why are puzzles so popular? They're less exciting than action games, less compelling than narrative ones, and less challenging than the peak of strategy games, but in spite of all that - they're enduringly popular. Why?
The Architect has delved into both ancient records and cutting-edge games to try and figure this out, and after some initial confusion, they've happened upon a eureka moment all of their own, holding the secrets not just of puzzle design, but of why we create them in the first place.
Swords have been a mainstay of human culture since before you fleshy sacs of mostly water knew how to write - all across the world, nearly every culture has its version of the sword, and a whole host of stories and heroes to accompany it.
Tales of swordfighting are all about high adventure, epic battles, and legendary duels between masters of the blade - but how can we adapt them to videogame form? Well, The Architect has been training with wise senseis, duking it out with cybernetic goons and facing down mighty warriors for weeks just to be able to answer that question, and the answer may surprise you - a great swordfight isn't about realism, but about creating both a sense of lethality, but also a sense of vulnerability.
The second video was Why Hitman Isn’t a Stealth Game… or was it? Eagle-eyed viewers might’ve noticed that I actually changed the name from “How Hitman Teaches You To Be Creative” which, it’s just a bit boring right? That title could come from anyone but the line about it not being a stealth game is a statement, it challenges your expectations and promises some sort of critical angle which is what I always try and bring in.
Well, it’s been a little while since I’ve done one of these, apologies! Between Christmas and the last two videos being…. Uh… long and time consuming to make, I’ve not had the chance, my bad! Hopefully I’ll be able to get the next ones out a little faster. I think in general we’ve had a pretty slow start to the year and whilst that is mostly the result of me taking a two week break, I’ve also stopped and started on a variety of projects I’ll get around to finishing over the next few months I think!
The first of the videos that have come out recently is all about Immersion, what it means, what it is, and whether we should care about it as much as we do. This is a topic that has run rampant through gaming circles in the last couple of years, in particular surrounding high budget narrative games like cyberpunk, the last of us, bad rats, you know those kinds of games. Ultimately, immersion has been diluted and co-opted so many times that it’s sort of lost all meaning, but there’s utility in distinguishing games that break down the fourth wall as much as they can and create a unique sense of enjoyment through their verisimilitude.
Games like papers please, in other waters and even ones I didn’t mention like death and taxes aren’t traditional entertaining, but the way they put you in the shoes of a particular character and setting should be noteworthy. I guess the thing that bugs me about the way bi companies have stolen the term immersion is that it’s become synonymous with production values, when in reality it’s quite a specific experience that can often be achieved better with minimalist graphics and simplistic gameplay.
All in all, I’m pretty pleased with how this one turned out, even if I was hoping to talk about In Other Waters some more. It’s a really fantastic game but it’s just a bit… unwieldy to talk about - the UI’s lack of readability means that other waters doesn’t translate well to video essay format either, hopefully it was interesting enough to look at that you might want to try it out for yourself, I think it’s a real sleeper hit that people are going to suddenly discover one day. Plus, you know, the extended pun of talking about a lot of watery games whilst on the topic of immersion was too good to pass up.
THe second video was Why Hitman Isn’t a Stealth Game… or was it? Eagle-eyed viewers might’ve noticed that I actually changed the name from “How Hitman Teaches You To Be Creative” which, it’s just a bit boring right? That title could come from anyone but the line about it not being a stealth game is a statement, it challenges your expectations and promises some sort of critical angle which is what I always try and bring in.
THe video itself was an interesting one to research, part of the reason why it took so long was because I originally intended to be a bit of a retrospective on the hitman franchise and for me to go back through all the games to see how the design process had changed. Unfortunately the first few games are… kind of… baaaad? The first hitman in particular is borderline unplayable with these INSANE solutions to levels that are old-school point n click levels of obscure and just awful controls and really horrible communication - they’re bad.
The world of assassination games are, however, awesome, so I decided to focus on them and show what hitman’s really all about the whole time - it’s clear from the way the hitman team essentially retold the blood money story and revisit a lot of the same level themes that this is the game they really wanted to make all along and I think that’s great. I wish I’d talked about blood money a little more because it’s a really interesting middle step of the evolution process but as you can see the video is already really long already. Yikes.
All in all I think the video turned out pretty well… unfortunately that hasn’t translated into views. I’m not sure whether that’s because it just doesn’t interest people or because it took so long and youtube forgot I existed or some other algorithmic weirdness but worrying about that stuff is a recipe for madness so I’m not too bothered.
Right, I’ve got to get to work on the next video which hopefully will be a little less time consuming, which I feel like I say a lot. Anyway, bye!
Hitman is a hell of a franchise. It's been around for just over two decades and it's been rebooted and overhauled more times than anyone can count (3), and over its many iterations, the team behind it have learned some very interesting lessons about how to get people to play a certain way, and about what kind of game they were actually making.
With Hitman 3 marking the end of Agent 47's career for the time being, The Architect - a fellow master of disguise - has taken it upon themselves to look back at Hitman's history and run through how the game earned its by now legendary reputation, as well as how the developers created it.
Sorry for the late upload! Youtube decided my original upload was FORBIDDEN and purged it from the internet for unknown reasons!
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For decades video game discourse has been dominated by a single word, one with no clear meaning but a whole lot of promises to deliver: Immersion. As much as we love to use the word immersion to describe gripping experiences that draw us into fantasy worlds - it's becoming harder and harder to define what, if anything, immersion actually means.
So, what is the deal with immersion? That's something The Architect has been pondering for Eons and it's about time we got some answers. It took diving to the deepest oceans and getting stuck into far-flung worlds, but The Architect has got a few ideas about what immersion actually means to us gamers, and how understanding it can improve the way we talk about our favorite games.
Hi, hello and it’s time for a 2020 wrapup spectacular. I’m technically still taking a bit of a break but whatever - let’s get this thing done shall we. The original plan was to record this and do a full Architect Address but there’s some loud building work going on outside and I’ve delayed this for long enough as it is!
Anyway, let’s get on topic. First of all, welcome to all the new patrons that joined as a result of the end of year video! It’s great to have you around and your support means a lot, particularly in times when money is tight. Stay safe out there, particularly with all the stuff going on in the US right now.
Anyway, the first video I want to talk about is “When Great Games Have Terrible Beginnings”, a video made entirely to justify the fact that I’ve spent upwards of one hundred and fifty hours playing through both of the xenoblade games. This one was… bizarrely popular for what I thought was a pretty niche subject area and, to be honest, an overly long video. The idea of talking about literary topics like how to structure a story via the medium of games is always one of my favourite ways to make a video and I think that this clearly resonated with people.
In many ways this one is a followup to the earlier video about how to modernise and fix RPG combat systems and draws from a lot of the same angst - maybe they could’ve been one single episode but I think intros and combat systems are distinct enough to be worth splitting up. When you play as many games as I do, you realise that a lot of games are so backloaded with microtransaction nonsense and DLC that they forget to actually hook people in and that sucks, hopefully games can remember how to make people enjoy playing without relying on a bunch of cheap sketchy tricks. We’ll see.
Next up is a video that up until the last second I just called The Barrel Video. Probably good I changed it, huh? Anyway, the elephant in the room is that I unintentionally ended up sliding pretty close to the premise of Ahoy’s great video on sort of the same subject, something I wasn’t aware of until it was much too late to change course. WHoops. Luckily, we end up talking about pretty different things, Ahoy’s video is all about the history and cultural context of barrels whereas I use them more as a jumping off point to talk about symbology more broadly.
I think tropes, symbology and their uses in games are some of the most important and least talked about things in game design. Without developing a language of games and moving beyond the absolute bare basic form of media criticism, games are never going to develop the sort of robust critical landscape that other forms of media enjoy. Plus, talking about this stuff and trying to convince people that tropes are in fact not bad and are an integral part of how we view media is a good way to root out some hacky critics which is just gravy.
The third video I need to talk about before I talk about the channel more broadly this year is of course 2020 games you should have played, which has been a rousing success! Honestly I didn’t think I’d be able to get it done as fast as I did but somehow I managed to pull things off. Honestly, the end of year videos are sort of my little treat, I really love putting them together and they’re a great excuse to go back and play a bunch of great games I missed over the year. My preliminary list for 2020 was fifty seven games long and let me tell you there were some heartbreaking decisions to be made as I narrowed it down, 2020 has been full of great games and some really great ones were sadly left out
Luckily, I really like all the games that made it into the final list and it’s great to see that a lot of the games I mentioned were actually not very well known! Terra Nil seems to be the real surprise hit of the bunch along with Crumble and Deep Rock Galactic so I’m really pleased to see those games thriving. I think the biggest “snub” was probably Hades or Ori 2, but both games were too big to qualify for the list so I don’t feel too bad about excluding them.
Speaking of the year as a whole, it’s about time I go over how 2020 was for the channel and I can’t do that without dressing Covid-19. Obviously, a hell of a lot more people than usual have been indoors watching youtube and that’s meant a lot of eyeballs on the channel, it’s been one of my best years so thanks for sticking with me even when things were tough.
Obviously, the pandemic wasn’t all good news and I absolutely think it had a hit on my productivity - I produced fewer videos this year than any other and whilst they were longer and debatably of higher quality, I’ve felt lower energy and I think that’s got a lot to do with being forced to sit inside all day looking at a computer screen as opposed to... willingly doing that. It’s a big difference, honest.
I don’t mind the videos taking longer to come out in theory, god knows I’ve complained about it enough in the past - I just don’t like feeling that I’m being lazy. Being self employed as I am it’s hard to stick to deadlines and I’ve got no idea how to balance work and leisure time even after more than a year doing this professionally, it’s all part of the learning experience I guess and it’s something I’m going to have to work on going forwards.
In terms of individual videos, the “the longing” video was so massive that it pretty much warped everything else around it, so it’s hard to get a solid read on what performed well and what didn’t. What I do know is that broadly speaking the weaker videos were the more… specific ones, with by far the worst performing video being the one on deckbuilders, which is a shame, because I quite like that one. Videos about more general gaming concepts like combat design, intros and time in the abstract fared much better and that’s good because those are the sorts of topics I most enjoy discussing!
I think one of my biggest aims for 2021 is to get more involved in the wider community of youtube video essay people, I’m a very independent person and I never really felt I relied on anyone else's' popularity to get the channel rolling but I do still feel like there’s a lot to be done vis a vis sharing ideas, creating a more unified critical landscape and turning talking about videogames on the internet into less of a cottage industry and more of an actual group of likeminded people. To be honest, I’ve got no idea how to start with that sort of thing but I’ll give it my best shot.
This might be a little short given that it’s an end of year wrapup but I’d like to get back to work as soon as possible - I’ve got a bunch of great ideas already! Hopefully your 2021 is shaping up to be good and if not good then at least interesting, stay safe, have fun, and I’ll see you around. Bye!
2020 has been a hell of a year for a variety of reasons, there's been social movements, disasters, political upheaval... and also some fantastic videogames. However, with all the big-name blockbusters taking up everyone's attention, some smaller games that are just as good haven't gotten the praise they deserve.
It falls, once again, to The Architect, to swim the darkest depths of 2020, fight a variety of weird and wacky monsters and take a train back to give you a haul of great games that you should have played from this year.
Explosive barrels have been a trope for as long as video games have existed, appearing in everything from shooters to strategy games, but why? What possible advantage could there be to all videogames copying eachother?
Well, as it turns out, the reason goes much deeper than just red cylinders filled with explosives. Barrels are a symbol, they communicate hidden details and they're not alone! Games use light, shapes, and even the elements to communicate to us constantly - and once The Architect reconstitutes after that last explosion, they'll tell you how.
"It gets good... Eventually" it's an observation that you've no doubt heard before about the latest TV show, book, game or whatever. By this point, it's all but expected that any game over a particular length won't actually be fun for several play sessions until you've got it all figured out. But does this need to be the case? The Architect doesn't think so.
By re-examining the job of introductions in games, we can fix this problem of boring tutorials AND make them more effective in the long run. How? Well The Architect is on their way back from their third trip to Alrest so just hold on a second, things will get more interesting in a bit....
What’s up? It’s the architect address! I’m here today to chat for a few minutes about the videos that have come out recently and go over what I think of them, how well I think they did and some other details.
Before that though, I want to talk about the release schedule, or lack thereof. RIght now the average time for me to get a video out is around three weeks, which is a little longer than this time last year, I dunno - I’ve received nothing but patience from people on the patreon and I have been making some longer ones recently but it feels like I’ve been making them too slowly. I’ve been going on about this for literally YEARS but I just wish I could write these damn things faster, I’ve got so many ideas I want to get out there but seemingly I just can’t get the videos out fast enough, blehg, whatever, maybe that’s something for a new year’s resolution?
Anyway, let’s talk about the first vid that came out recently and that is What Among Us Has To Do With Soviet Psychology. What a title huh? It’s a bit crazy, but I wanted to it to reflect the kind of crazy origins of hidden role games that I don’t think is popular knowledge at all.
I was absolutely floored when I found out that mafia was the result of some high-profile psych experiment and honestly reading a lot of the writing that dimitry davidoff has produced since I think I was right on the money about hidden role games being, primarily, tests of social dynamics but in a controlled environment - I think that’s why I like them so much, there’s comparatively less to deal with compared to actual, real social interaction. Anyway.
I’ve wanted to do a hidden role game video for YEARS now and I’ve been a big fan of them for ages, and among us provided the perfect opportunity to talk about the genre. For all of its mass appeal and streamerbaity nature I think the game is really cleverly designed. The way it pairs back a lot of the more combat-centric takes on the hidden role formula allows it to really focus on the social element rather than invariably being balanced around who shot first or who knows the roles the best.
The map design is also fantastic, all the little blindspots and walls go a long way towards depriving the crewmates of crucial information, allowing the impostors to get a much needed leg up when it comes to controlling the flow of the game and overall making the whole thing more fun.
I think the game does suffer a little at high levels though, where the simplicity of among us starts to work against it. Top level play is really all about memorising timings and how long it takes to run places or abusing visual tasks and that isn’t much fun at all. THe game is great for causal play though, just don’t play it too much or you’ll ruin it.
As for the political content of the video some people complained about that but I think it’s pretty much impossible to separate the context in which mafia was produced and the social slash political climate that among us became popular in. Maybe I went a little heavy but I don’t want capital G gamers hanging around in my comment sections anyway.
The other video that came out recently was one all about Spelunky 2 and why it’s veryvery hard and why that’s actually a good thing.
I think this video turned out pretty well, even if it was fairly long and I spent most of it talking about one game. Difficulty in games has always been really interesting to me because I seem to fall right in the middle of the hardcore I only play games that hate me camp and the I only like easy story games camp. I really enjoy both!
Whilst spelunky 2 absolutely falls into the former group it does constantly surprise me how forgiving and fun the game is even if you’re absolute crap at it. The day it came out I played the game for… it must’ve been 3 hours straight and I never once reached olmec but I still had an absolute blast figuring out how everything worked and how all the systems fit together. I had to actually play as much of the game as possible before spoiling the hell out of myself for the inevitable video, and it was amazing how much of the game I missed - I thought I was fairly close to seeing everything but no way, there were entire levels I had no idea existed. Spelunky 2 is great.
However, I do think that its lack of any sort of accessibility features does stick out a little bit particularly in the context of all the other games I was discussing. Just being able to slow the game down or hell even have seeded runs unlocked from the start would be great not juust for accessibility but also for testing purposes. I had to farm the game for like an hour to get footage of an eggplant just because I’d not unlocked enough characters which was a bit frustrating.
Accessibility modes are a fairly big deal in games criticism but I’ve always struggled to talk about them in a way that’s interesting. These modes absolutely weren’t the focus here but I think I was able to touch on them and say something more than “they’re a good idea” in the context of them creating different gameplay states and preserving the intended feel of a game but I dunno, it would be impossible to spin a whole video out of the topic because there’s no real questions to answer there? Are accessibility modes good? Err, yeah yeah they are. Honestly a little mark next to someone’s save that says “hey they used the accessability mode” and an upfront warning to only use the mode if you really need it is enough to prevent speedrun cheating or anything whilst also letting everyone play the game as intended.
As for the other games, I could’ve really made Hades the focus of this video but I’d sort of already talked about it in the difficulty loops one so I was wary of repeating myself. It absolutely rules though, I played it a lot through early access and the game sort of felt like it was missing something until the devs sorted out the endgame progression system and the pact of punishment and now the game is great. I highly recommend trying it out. Of course it was also always good to talk about celeste again which is really the gold standard of accessibility stuff, Maddy Thorson and the team really knocked it out of the park there.
Hope that clears up any stray details about the videos released recently, now if you don’t mind I’ve got to psyche myself up into getting to work on the next one so I’ll see you around! Bye!
So it turns out the original upload of this failed overnight and you all could've gotten this half a day earlier! To make up for that I'll release the Architect Address a day earlier than expected, sorry patrons!
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Spelunky 2 is a hell of a game, what else could you expect out of the mastermind that is Derek Yu? It's also really, really hard - to the point that whoever is reading this is probably never going to completely beat the game. Is this a good thing?
Err... Yes.
As weird as it sounds, whilst Spelunky 2 is obscenely hard, it's also got one of the best approaches to difficulty The Architect has ever seen - and it's at the forefront of a bunch of recent games that cater to expert players and newbies using a cool new technique called Granular Difficulty.
You Saw: Spelunky 2 (2020) Spelunky (2008) Hades (2020) Celeste (2018) DOOM (2016) Into The Breach (2018) Dark Souls 2 (2014) Paper Mario And The Thousand Year Door (2002) Shovel Knight (2014) Ori and the Will of the Wisps (2020) Doom Eternal (2020) Bayonetta 2 (2014) Breath of the Wild (2017) Xenoblade 2 (2017) Yooka Laylee and The Impossible Lair (2019) Metal Gear Rising Revengance (2013) Ultimate Chicken Horse (2016) Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (2020) Rayman Legends (2013) Sonic Generations (2011) Mario Odyssey (2017) Super Mario 3D world (2013) Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) Halo Reach (2010) The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess (2007) Mass Effect 3 (2012) Risk of Rain 2 (2020) Dark Souls 3 (2016)
Among Us is the hot new game right now - and who can blame it? It's tense, innovative and from a long tradition of games about lying to your friends, it's great. But what caused Among Us to become popular now? And what does any of that have in common with an old Russian psychology experiment from the 80s?
Fresh from another killing spree, The Architect is determined to find out why, and that's going to mean delving into murder mysteries, our modern-day political landscape, and the truth behind why we enjoy hidden role games to find out the truth behind Among Us' surprising rise to fame.
Hello hello and welcome to the Architect Address - the occasional video I do to explain what the deal is with the channel and the last couple of videos. This monthish I managed to get myself a new computer, and whilst the longing video is mostly to thank for that, you patrons are as well so cheers for that, I can finally run adobe premiere without it chugging constantly. The transfer did result in a bunch of my footage getting corrupted as a crappy hard drive finally gave up the ghost but hopefully the move to a fancy new system will be better in the long run.
So, the first video I want to talk about is Frog Fractions is a game about fractions, something that you ought to know is absolutely not the case. I absolutely love metafiction, I enjoy nothing more than shows that break the fourth wall or play with the expected formats of their genre because it plays into my hyper analytical frame of mind - I love seeing how things work and metafictive works are intrinsically conscious of that fact.
So, it’s no surprise then that making this video was loads of fun, particularly playing through all the frog fractions games. One thing I was going to talk about regarding those games that I could never quite make fit, however, was the fact that metafiction is a constantly evolving thing, and so no frog fractions game - no matter how crazy - will ever have that same punch as the first game. Frog fractions two in particular was a fantastic ARG but the game itself lacks the same spark that made the 1st one work, frog fractions 3 works better as a game but is still missing something - you know you’re playing a frog fractions game so whilst the weirdness is entertaining, you’re always going to be mentally prepared for it.
Most of the games that are going for outright laughs or scares are much more successful, the stanley parable still holds up completely and I absolutely LOVE pony island and everything Dan Mullins makes - if you’ve not seen his upcoming game inscription then please check that out, very excited to get the chance to play it. There’s something about how absolutely ruthless all of Dan Mullin’s games are with their fourth wall breaks that completely throws you off guard, I love how twitch chat pops up in the corner of the screen whenever you win an RPG battle in The Hex and all the fuckery that Pony Island gets up to in order to try and make you fail puzzles. I guess it all ties into one of my big ideas with the channel that games are at their best when they take the form of a conversation between designer and player, and metagames are pretty much the purest form of that.
The other video released recently was all about RPGs, and boy was this a hard one to put together, between the aforementioned footage loss and transitioning over to a new PC I also had to contend with the fact that I just could not find a good angle on what I wanted to talk about. I went in thinking that RPG combat wasn’t fun, after all, it was the main sticking point where I got consistently bored, wasn’t it? However, the more I tried to justify this position, the more I came to realise that it just wasn’t true.
RPGs have this weird reputation, particularly in the west for having boring samey combat, and that really isn’t true, even the games I rag on in the video have interesting things going on and combat that has a lot of interesting design - what the combat of these games don’t have is the longevity required to last for their forty to sixty hour runtimes. Final fantasy is great for like the first few hours but by the time the combat and whatever skill system they’ve got going on has shown all its tricks you’ve still got two thirds of the story left to go.
Honestly, I’m sort of not happy with the way the video turned out, because I feel that the end segment where I discuss actual solutions to these problems is the real meat and I don’t spend nearly enough time on the subject. RPGs have length and a particular kind of combat deeply baked into their design genetics, but that doesn’t mean these things have to be included in every RPG ever, and - to be honest - the term has become so unusably broad over time that I’m not sure trying to stay true to “RPG tradition” is even possible any more. I dunno, I think i’d like to have a look at how long games should be at some point but I’d like to let that topic cool off before I touch it again.
On the plus side, it was really fun going through a bunch of RPGs I’ve either sidelined or never gotten around do, Chrono Trigger is just fantastic, and it amazes me that the damn thing is more than 20 years old, Divinity OS 2 is just great and I actually had a fun time grabbing a little bit of footage from Final Fantasy 15 which is a controversial and transparently unfinished game but damn if I don’t have a bit of a soft spot for it. The thousand year door, surprisingly, didn’t hold up as well for me, there is a LOT of backtracking and fetch questery in that game that really slows everything down, particularly towards the end, and forget about the trouble board sidequests, jesus.
Anyway, I’ll upset certain people if I slander the gamecube any more so I’ll stop things there, thanks for paying attention as per usual and I’ll see you… around at some point for a video about among us! ooooh! yeah, I've been meaning to make a video about traitor games for a while, it should be fun! Anyway see you around, bye!.
Sorry for the wait! Between a short break, numerous technical mishaps and a new computer, this took longer than intended! My apologies!
RPGs are a classic genre - so much so that they've been around since before the dawn of videogames. However, despite their years of evolution and tradition, RPGs have a problem - namely, that no-one can ever finish the damn things, why?
The Architect thinks it's got something to do with how they handle combat - something that's core to the RPG identity, yet is also one of their weakest elements. How can this be? What can be done about it? Watch the video and find out, dummy.
We did it! 250 subscribers! Thank you all so much for your support over the years! As a way of giving back, The Architect has organised for some of your most popular and pressing questions to be answered.
Onwards and upwards to - err - 500 I guess?
I only asked some of the Patron questions so I'll go back and answer the rest right now!
So, I just hit 250 subscribers! - THAT happened much sooner than I expected. Thank you all so much for your support in getting to the big one quarter of the way to 1000 milestone!
In the grand tradition of the previous time I hit a subscriber milestone, I thought it might be fun to celebrate with a special Architect of Games Q&A Extravaganza, where you all ask me questions and I answer the ones I think are the most interesting for you all to see. Why? Mostly because I feel obligated to do some sort of celebratory thing and this is pretty easy, to be honest.
So! If you have a burning question that you'd like me to answer that I haven't already answered and won't implicate me in any unsolved murders, drop it in the comments and I'll see if I like it. You have until the 12th to get those questions in so don't delay!
Half of the questions I choose will come from you lot because you're patrons and are therefore more important than the CHAFF in the youtube comments, so feel free to drop me some questions and I'll be more likely to pick yours as I have a financial incentive to do so.
Hey, a bit of a special director's cut this time around which is why it's going out to everyone!
Back in university, long long ago - I did a dissertation on Metafiction in games which just so happens to be the topic of this video. A lot of the talking points that I would've liked to go over in this video are covered here, albeit in a different style than usual.
It might be a fun read for people so I thought I'd stick it up on the internet - I sure as hell wasn't getting any use out of it. Fair warning, it's very long and if I'm being totally honest not fantastic - even relative to my usual slapdash writing.
Frog Fractions, developed by Twinbeard Studios is the canonical fractions-based video game of all time, the best there is. In this video, The Architect unpacks exactly what makes Frog Fractions the best fraction-sim of all time and how it came to be the father of the fractionlike genre.
Yep. That's it.
You Saw:
Frog Fractions (2012)
Undertale (2015)
There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (2020)
Oneshot (2016)
Deadpool (2013)
Valorant (2020)
What Remains of Edith Finch (2017)
New Super Luigi U (2013)
The Stanley Parable (2011)
Nier Automata (2017)
Blazing Saddles (1974)
Funny Games (1997)
Spaceballs (1987)
The Wonderful 101 Remastered (2020)
Monkey Island 2 Special Edition (2010)
Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door (2004)
Tales From The Borderlands (2014)
Banjo Kazooie (1996)
World Of Warcraft (2004)
Batman Arkham Knight (2015)
Pony Island (2016)
From Dust (2011)
Metal Gear Solid (1998)
Doki Doki Literature Club (2017)
Batman Arkham Asylum (2009)
Super Mario Bros (1985)
Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild (2017)
Call of Duty Blops Cold War (not out yet lol)
Bubsy 3D (1996)
The Princess Bride (1987)
80 Days (2014)
Event 0 (2016)
Metal Gear Rising (2013)
Doom Eternal (2020)
Gris (2018)
Dr Langescov, The Tiger, and the TERRIBLY cursed Emerald i got the name wrong (2015)
Shh! Don't tell anyone! It's a new Architect Address!
Hello and welcome to the architect address, a weirdly named occasional segment that I release to keep people abreast of what’s going on, talk about the videos that have come out and show some gameplay footage I thought you might want to see.
This month-ish has seen two very interesting videos which are both noteworthy for entirely different reasons.
The first one is Is It Possible To Fix Videogame Toxicity? A pretty straightforward, inoffensive concept for a video that… well… had more or less the expected effect. It turns out that gamers tend to respond with insults, rudeness and general vitriol whenever their behaviour is so much as questioned, obstinately because they’re so well behaved. Yeaaah, I knew the video was going to upset some people but in a weird way I’m glad it did because that means it struck an emotional chord. I think a lot of the time gaming toxicity is discussed purely in moralistic terms and not so much from the perspective of systems. I think a large part of determining which games end up full of arseholes comes down to how their communication systems enable that sort of behaviour.
By making being nice easier than being mean, whilst giving players flexible communications systems that allow them to express a variety of ideas, games can create if not nicer spaces, then spaces that are much more comfortable to just exist in. There’s a lot of different ways to do this but ultimately that rule holds true I think, give players the most efficient possible tools to express themselves whilst also staying on topic. Whether that’s apexes pings, journeys little chirps or just some well-executed emotes, it all works so long as players are communicating in the right way.
A lot of people mentioned that I need to play thatcamecompany’s new game sky children of light, apparently it’s got a lot of similarities to journey but is also more of a multiplayer thing? Who knows, seems cool though. Anyway.
The other video released was Why The Longing Takes 9600 hours to play. Hooooooo boooyyy did this one do unexpectedly well! At time of writing it’s sitting on about 400k views which is significantly better than anything released this year. I don’t actually know why that is, the video topic is pretty niche and the game is too, but I guess it’s just a matter of luck at the end of the day, right?
The longing is one of those really interesting games that I love to bits but hesitate to universally recommend. It is… really boring and has a couple of really unfair, punitive mechanics that are just cruel. Anyone who’s gotten a certain ending knows exactly what I’m on about. In spite of that, though, if the game caught your interest or if my rambing bit at the end of the video struck a chord with you I highly recommend at least giving The Longing a look because there is absolutely nothing like it out there and I think it’s an experience well worth having.
In other parts of the video, I mostly talked about the effect of time based mechanics and I think it’s pretty interesting, I particularly liked working out how all these different systems motivate us in different ways.
over the years people have come up with a lot of catchy ways to categorise these kinds of games and they’ve never really worked for me. Mark Brown, for example, came up with the term clockwork games, and that doesn’t sit right with me, clocks are rigid and orderly, and go in one direction, but in so many games with time loopy or time centric gameplay you’re actively altering events or the way chronology works, i dunno - I get the whole clocks equals time thing it’s just not a good comparison.
I also played a fair few idle clickery games for this video and whilst they’re 100% not for me I do think that they tend to get a bad rap. They’re certainly not the deepest or most tactically sophisticated games out there and they use the simplest possible reward mechanisms but so does pretty much every big multiplayer game so whatever, right? Particularly with stuff like universal paperclips, there’s a lot of potential to do interesting narrative work within the idle game context and the simple pleasure of watching things get bigger can be a really nice way to unwind or relax for some people, provided that isn’t leveraged into selling microtrnsactions like fuckin adventure capitalist, took me off guard when I saw that pop up.
Before I go on another tirade about manipulative f2p games I’ve got to get back to disabling all the midroll ads youtube dumped on my videos like the bastards they are, that’s going to be fun. Seeya!
I really wanted to get this one out on time but I'm up at 3AM once more! just as I was about to upload to patreon I realised an entire segment of the video had borked-up audio. Sorry about the delay!
Time's a funny thing, isn't it? We've got so much of it and yet it never feels like enough. So many games are about time, and they've all got different ways of using it to motivate and manipulate players - but what's the underlying truth behind the way video games use time?
To find out, The Architect is going to have to go deep, deep underground to play with a little game called The Longing which, as the name may imply, is very very long indeed.
I sure do love fighting with adobe premiere ahahahahahaahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAenjoy the video!
If you've played any online game ever, chances are you've run into some form of toxicity. From BM, to name calling to the old classic teabagging, meanness and vitriol in games comes in a variety of forms. For years game developers have tried to fix this problem to... mixed results - what gives?
It turns out, video game toxicity is less of a systems problem and more of a communication problem - by removing barriers to effective communication, and rewarding people for not being dicks, we can go some way to fixing this eternal gaming problem.
The Architect is going to need to drop into the outlands, take a stroll around Azeroth and journey to the top of one of gaming's best mountains - all to learn the best ways to be nice... or something.
Okay, Architect Address time, what’s up friends? How have you been doing? Staying safe during the lockdown stuff? Good.
So, what’s been going on with the channel in the last month and a bit, well - we hit 200 subscribers, first and foremost, yay! Seriously it’s a big milestone and I’m incredibly grateful to you all for continuing to support the channel in spite of its objectively terrible quality. As for why I chose not to do any sort of big celebration this time around, it’s a combination of 200 not being a particularly important milestone and the event coinciding with the peak of the George Floyd riots and I’d feel really bad undermining that well-deserved anger with some self-congratulatory nonsense, so I’ve decided to defer to 250 because that just seems to make more sense.
However, I did get to release some videos during that time and the first of which was How Satisfactory Makes Work Fun. I have been waiting to make a video on optimisation games for YEARS and it really wasn’t until satisfactory came out with it’s big liquids update and Factorio announced that it was finally coming out that I finally got off my arse and made the video. These games are fantastic, they use all the super compelling tricks and tactics to make you feel good without the downsides that usually come with sketchy free to play and gamification mechanics.
What really surprises me is just how much playtime you can get out of these games - the save file you saw in the video has had about 40 hours put into it and I think I could comfortably play it for another 20 before I’ve gotten everything done and the devs are planning to add more content to the tech tree later. I think what these games really come down to is that you get exactly as much out of them as you put in, which can’t be said for a lot of other games which either require a lot of investment to be any fun at all, or become less fun the more you get invested in them. Planning out super-intricate factories with perfectly balanced production lines is fun, but so is making weird dumb spaghetti networks like these ones you’ve been seeing right here.
The thing is though, whilst logistics games are great, I’m interested to see where the genre will go from here. Factorio is great and so are citybuilders like Anno but past a certain point you are more or less doing the same thing every time with the same road and conveyor belt mechanics. What i really want to see is a properly high fantasy logistics game where you’re gathering things with weird spells and teleporting them around or transmuting them with weird rituals you've got to automate with magical golems or something… I guess what I want is the thaumcraft minecraft mod which is just fantastic, play that if you haven’t already.
The other video released recently waaaass What Makes a Great Deckbuilder which I’ll be honest is a super boring name but I couldn’t really think of something more interesting, my bad.
Deckbuilders though are really interesting, and even after playing a bunch of them during the production of the video, the first thing I did after uploading the thing was to boot up nowhere prophet and play a game of that before ragequitting because it’s a bit broken, not to spend too much time shittalking a game I barely mentioned but vast swathes of that game are super easy and you can waltz through without breaking a sweat until suddenly you get one bad opening turn and it’s just game over - I like the game, but the combat takes a little bit too much from hearthstone and is just sort of a swingy value war no matter what your strategy is - anyway.
Deckbuilders are a real favourite genre of mine because I love improvisational strategy where you’ve got to think on your feet to find and construct synergies. I was originally going to make the entire video about synergies until I realised it would’ve been a bit too similar to mark’s video on slay the spire and I didn’t want to embarrass him too much, so I broadened the scope.
I ended up playing a crapload of different deckbuilders over the course of my writing/research period including a lot I’d never played before. Ascension is a classic tabletop deckbuilder that has so many cool ideas in it and although I didn’t end up showing much footage of it at all, ratropolis is a game with a lot of potential but I’d hold off until they get the balance sorted out.
The real standout though is monster train which might have overtaken slay the spire for my fave deckbuilder ever, seriously, give it a play and it’s got an almost guaranteed spot in the games of the year list, please give it a play.
Okay I won’t keep you any more, that’s my rambling nonsense done. See ya round! bye!
Hey, hey, hey and come on down to read the latest director’s cut - the special patron thing where I talk about a cut talking point from the latest video. The topic today? Hero Battlers.
For those not in the know, hero battlers are a fairly recent genre that see you going up against usually seven other players to buy heroes from a central market, plonk them down on a board and watch them fight to see who was the luckiest/best. Common features of the genre involve the ability to upgrade heroes by collecting three of them and a cast of characters stolen from mobas like DotA or LoL.
Hero battlers are an interesting example of convergent evolution - they’re often compared to Deckbuilders but actually have a completely different game design lineage. The original hero battler, as many people know is Dota Autochess, a mod for DotA 2. It is responsible for codifying most of the genre’s primary features but although it shares a lot of features with deckbuilding games, it has a completely different origin, namely in Mahjong.
Mahjong, on top of being waaaaay older than the likes of dominion functions in a fundamentally different way, namely in of the fact that it’s more of a handbuilder and the deck is a central one that everyone draws from. Because you can’t control what’s in the deck, nor what you draw from it, the game becomes much more focused on making do with what you do draw and managing the resources used to purchase heroes.
Owing to the sheer randomness of the game, heroes are sorted into tribal types such as Murlocs, Pirates and Demons in Hearthstone or Alchemists, Blademasters or Wardens in Teamfight Tactics - this means that most of the game’s synergies are ultimately hard synergies, and they’re not all that tactical. Most of the game’s skill comes not in creating synergies and figuring out fun ways to abuse particular abilities but just in collecting as many of a particular type of hero as possible - this feels good to do, but isn’t particularly deep or nuanced. Instead, most of the skilltesting comes from how to handle your limited resources used to collect and play heroes.
For example, in hearthstone battlegrounds, the card shop offers a bigger selection of more powerful minions based on its level, but leveling up is very pricey - so you’ll have to choose between sifting through the options to find the cards you need right now, and leveling the tavern up to get more powerful cards later. And in both Dota Underlords and teamfight tactics, you’ve only got a limited amount of space on your bench. When you need to combine three one star heroes to get a two star, and three two star heroes to get a three star you’re really going to need to juggle your space, and make some tough choices about which heroes you want to try and get to 3 stars and which can just stay at two or even one, because if you try and rank up everyone, not only will you run out of cash, but you’ll also run out of space.
Hero Battlers and Deckbuilders share a lot of the same design tips and tricks, but they’re also very different. Instead of focusing on designing interesting cards, players need to be encouraged to think in broader terms about positioning, managing their money and gambling on which kinds of heroes they’re going to go for. Much like mahjong upon which the genre is based, hero battlers are gambling games first and tactical ones second as opposed to deckbuilders which are the inverse.
Hopefully with that explanation you’ll see why talking about Hero battlers in a video about deckbuilders might’ve seemed like a logical move but is actually way more difficult than it would appear!
