Flarst Impressions of Into the Breach: "Too Good To Play" - Commentary And Rants 

Where did he contradict himself

You have the correct mindset for sure. I am almost frustrated at myself for not seeing it this way, which I think I touched on in the video, my 'productivity complex'. I liked the gameplay, but felt let down that I couldn't complete some grand project with it in the game. The concept of just having fun in real life seems to have been lost on me!

I see what you mean, I just call it a time loop because the other timeline no longer exists from your perspective, e.g. there is no meta game. So for the player, no matter how many times you play, the timelines you save got deleted same as the ones you didn't, and only the current one now exists. Yes, quite a lot of work involved in solving infinity timelines of problems, probably that's why only 3 people are willing to even try :D Come to think of it, if they have a time machine, they might as well go back and stop the vek ever becoming a problem in the first place...

@@OffyDGG which would make a fine meta-final mission for your time squad... go back to t0, assault the vek in their home planet, or maybe they were created in a lab by humans, guarded by mechs...that would still hurt replayability though, why would you keep playing after the X campaigns required to unlock the final mission etc. etc.

@@nobubblegums-1899 Well you say it would hurt replayability, but that "why keep playing" thing you mention is how I feel after the first campaign right now. So adding something more would only be an improvement from my perspective. The existing replay value would still be there for those who want it, I think.

I suppose I would just like some kind of in-game reward for doing those challenging feats, so that I feel more motivated to do them. For whatever reason, doing it for my own accomplishment feels uninteresting, as I suppose I ultimately don't care how good I am at the game. I'm all about that illusion of progress!

@@OffyDGG Do you feel the same about PVP games or fighting games? A fighting game has basically the same issue. It gives you a challenge. You beat the challenge or fail. Done. No bonuses. It's funny. I absolutely feel the same way as you do about a lot of games but in others I just accept that they're ... arcade-y? Like, I remember this little web game call Stop the Darkness which was just a little timed puzzle game. You had so many minutes to build one of several ways to win because every few seconds the darkness would eat one of the tiles on the map in a swirling pattern. It was really fun for a bit. I played it until I figured out all the tricks and then I set it down. I played here or there a couple times later when I felt like it. I wonder if ItB's adjacency to roguelikes conjures this false expectation of what the game should be. I also wonder what that adjacency even is? Is it "you do something and then do it again?" I'd say no, because Street Fighter isn't roguelike adjacent. It wouldn't even be "a puzzle game where you do something ... again" because the other I mentioned isn't. I guess it's just "general vibes." This game vibes too much like a roguelike.

Good call, Loop Hero is insanely good!

No haven't played that one, was that the nose themed thing from a few years back? Remembering vaguely hearing about it being good.

@@OffyDGG I assume you meant Norse themed not nose themed lol But yeah it's a trilogy of games mixing narrative choices with tactical turn-based combat. It's like 80% off right now on Steam

Ah yes, probably not nose based, although I suppose that would be more original! Thanks for the tip!

Actually I am one the world's largest FTL-haters, or at least I was back when it came out, so I much prefer this. I remember someone saying 'I play FTL because I want gaming to be miserable', or something, and I sort of agree. I thought it was a stolkholm-syndrome-generator type game where the good is essentially 'absense of bad'. Then again, this was many years ago and I barely remember. I should probably give it a serious try and see if any of these things I'm saying are at all true.

@@OffyDGG I mean, it's a good game for what it wants to be but once you beat it once you'll have the same issues as Into the Bridge. "GG, Victory, now do it again... with this ship, and maybe a higher difficulty". Or may I expect too much from games that I like and want more. I think it's an issue with me that a good game is either too short (before it becomes obviously repetitive) or soo long that I stop playing it before finishing it.

@@Palora01I mean at least it doesn’t pretend to something it’s not. FTL is very much a roguelike. There’s the Multiverse mod which does have an actual end, on top of adding more content

Now that is the perfect excuse - I just have to make my own reason to play it!

@@OffyDGG in case you missed it: you can (eventually) do a custom team with mechs you've unlocked. An excuse to play more to unlock more of them for the perfect narrative team. :D

I do like the idea that you don't 'have' to play since there if nothing in particular that you need to do to progress, it sounds good to me, it is just that in practice I felt that I could be doing something 'better' with my time. By that I just mean an illusion of achievement. I haven't played those games you mentioned, mainly indy games of recent times, and the thing I didn't like was needing to repeat earlier content to see later content. My preference is that once level 1 is done, your progress attempts are only on level 2, but generally level 1 has to be played again to attempt level 2 and that gets boring or unfulfiling to me. I suppose the point is meant to be that the gameplay is so good that you don't care you are repeating the beginning a lot, or perhaps the beginning is no different to the end so it doesn't matter, as in into the breach. For whatever reason, I can't find that satisfying.

@@OffyDGG So, I've been doing a lot of thinking since I made my comment, and then again after reading yours. And I think a lot of it comes down to content and replayability, a discussion that's not exclusive to roguelikes per se. Take your typical 4x game. You can make an argument its a lot like a roguelike in a few ways (i.e. randomized stuff, permadeath, and just generally dealing with the hand you've been given). Generally everything is available to you at the start and there is no meta progression. Your only reason for playing it again would be that you found it fun and now you want to try out a different faction or whatever. In one of my examples, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for instance, has 27 different races, 25 different "classes," and 26 different gods you can worship, each VASTLY varying your playstyle, allowing for untold possible combinations. So let's say you die an early death. Well, you don't necessarily have to grind through the beginning of the game in the same way, you can pick a different race, a different class, a different god to worship and have a totally different experience. I think you might see what I'm getting at here. I remember you mentioning Hades as one of your examples for wishing ITB was more like. Thing is, Hades has a TON of content in general, and also has some of the elements I mentioned above (i.e. you can switch up your weapons and god boons and have a totally different run "feeling"). Perhaps you wish that ITB just had, you know, MORE in general, which I can totally see. I've never played it myself but watching you I can see how you came to that conclusion, but I do love roguelikes as a whole, especially the traditional ones because those have a load of content.

I like your 4x comparison, I think it is pretty much right. The difference is the timescale, in that one campaign will last long enough that it's constitutes a whole game, so to me it feels less like I need to start again afterwards. So you could perhaps imagine a roguelike with a single 10 hour run where its designed such that the player is unlikely to need to restart until the end of the run. Well, for me that isn't really a roguelike anymore! The thing about something like hades is that it is *both* a tactical moment generator and a standard progression experience, and I think the takeaway is that nothing is lost by adding an overall progression system, since the core gameplay is still there either way. It is just that the progression gives that gameplay context and addition goals, or more motivation. So you could call hades a 20 hour story divided into 40 half hour runs, and a 4x game a 20 hour campaign divided into 200 6 minute turns, but you can't call into the breach much more than a 1 hour campaign that you are welcome to repeat. The gameplay is good enough that it doesn't matter too much, but I think there is nothing to lose and all to gain by taking the 'modern' approach of shifting it to be more like 20 campaigns that lead to some 'ending' that gives achievement and closure. I think that's the missing element that makes the good gameplay feel almost wasted, since you see everything the game has to offer so quickly.

That is interesting to hear - I secretly hoped there might be some extremely clever formula that influenced the AI into giving you problems you could solve one way or another. But that is probably too difficult to program to be worthwhile!

It's a step in the right direction for sure, it is only that it wasn't enough for me, for whatever reason. I wanted more to change loop to loop I think, or for there to be more of a purpose to it in a wider narrative. Funnily enough since making this video, I have played loads of 'Halls of Torment' which is is a similar plot-less rogue-like-like experience focused on getting achievements. So in principal I think it's a fun design. Maybe I preferred Halls of Torment because the achievements unlock increases to your power, rather than the more side-gradey unlocks in Into the Breach. I have been thinking of coming back to try it again recently, I wonder if my view will have changed.

One day I'll really cut loose and get so drunk that I can enjoy an entertainment product without wondering what else I could be doing. I am in dire need of revolution, I have nothing to lose but my hatred of roguelike mechanics ⚒️⚒️⚒️

Generally I agree, although with point 3, I think randomness is actually provided through the AI behaviour and spawns. So while the outcomes of your actions are deterministic, what happens each turn is pretty much random, so you are still reacting to unknown scenarios all the time. I think that's a great combination, and works better than say, xcom, which is the other way around. I also didn't like the randomness in FTL since it the luck factor changes the difficulty a fair bit each time around, and I didn't like how much your progression/strength relied on random things happening to you. "One day the RNG gods will suffer defeat, and games will be back in the hands of man!" - me as a discount Final Fantasy villain.

Did I complain? Feels like this video is praising complexity, not complaining that its simple.

I don't think you picked up on what I was getting at here. I'm not criticising the game for being too easy or anything like that. It's the way the meta-game pushes you into keeping the difficulty low / doesn't reward you for increasing it, and it's shooting itself in the foot by being that way. I suspect you agree, since you are trying to argue higher difficulty is more fun, so anything the game does to get people to go to higher difficulty faster would be helpful. In your second point, you are hiding behind a genre definition here and I guess I don't care about that. First if you want be technical ITB *is* a rogueliTe, because it does have meta progression, as I just mentioned. But we could debate the definitions of these terms all day so let's not bother. The most important point to remember is that if ITB had, say, a plot, like Hades, this takes *nothing* away from the roguelike part of the game. Making the jump to roguelite can be a straight-up upgrade with no gameplay elements removed. So I think you are wrong to complain that I said I would prefer this. I want *more* IBT. ITB has made this jump to a minor extent, but in such a way that it not only pushes players to keep the difficulty low, which is a bad move, but kills the potential for the game's mechanics to be used in an *even better* game. It's a missed opportunity. You can say you like it how it is, but remember above all else that a player like you loses *nothing* if more content is added. There is a reason roguelites are vastly more popular than roguelikes. But they are harder to make. Not doing this is absolutely, to use your phrase, 'on the game'. Hades is an ideal example of this, again, with loads of meta progression and loads of 'do this to prove you can' all at the same time.

@OffyDGG fair enuff. --> on the topic of [meta] progression: meaningful [meta] progression can be a treat but at the same time will usually strongly influence the overall difficulty of a game. looking at classic, typical roguelites like TBOI or Hades there's always a clearly definable meta in terms of strong and weak or even hazardous items, passives, you name it. unlocking new content i.e. weapons, passives, you name it in those games usually means getting stronger - which implies you'd have to make the game have a very smooth difficulty curve but be always challenging so that you would need those upgrades in the first place. i dont feel like most roguelites do that well, including very well known and established classics, usually you just jump from either underwhelming or neutral state to a "usually neutral with very large spikes in either direction"-type of gameplay. i like that. i also really like that ITB DOESNT grant you straight up upgrades when e.g. beating a run on a given squad, neither right away nor eventually. it simply unlocks more content in the form of different playable characters. i dont feel like ITB has major spikes in either direction as it is after all mostly a puzzle game. but that consistency to me is a great thing for a puzzle-roguelike. in games like TBOI or Hades, assuming i have played the game before and seen what type of stuff i can unlock, i often feel a craving as in "when will i finally have this cool unlock" or "can i finally have this unlock so i can make progress faster/better". in ITB i just crave getting better, seeing how far i can make myself go and what cool combinations i can personally figure out. i would like more content ofc in the form of different maps, objectives, challenges etc., which is just the result of liking a good game. missed opportunity regarding story elements, additional enemy designs, additional game modes etc. but thats a point you can attribute to most imperfect games since large amounts of content are not generally doable in a reasonable time span :D. in other strategic roguelikes/lites e.g. Slay The Spire, Monster Tain or Gloomhaven, there ARE permanent upgrades to pre-existing abilities which forces a player like me, trying to explore a game in its entirety, to "self-nerf". i dont think roguelites with meaningful upgrades (i.e. unlike ITB where you do unlock new stuff but you dont typically grind for the unlocks) are fundamentally better or more long-term games, it very much depends on the player. if i just wanna jump into a run and have fun, TBOI or Hades to me are definitely not the pick as theres just way too many barriers in the form of unlocks, knowledge issues, skill/usage issues etc. ITB, Luck Be A Landlord, Peglin and similar games on the other hand fill the niche of "[can be made] challenging but is generally very casual friendly". --> regarding ITB specifically: i believe i get where youre coming from. i dont disagree more content is always amazing. i dont personally lack a motivation to play the game, my motivation is learning the ins and outs, playing randomized squad combinations, simply fuelling my brain with dopamine; i play because its simply fun and at some point i know that fun will inevitably vanish, as happens for all games. i personally strongly prefer games, specifically roguelikes/lites where you can (not necessarily must) build different builds and prove your skill on them rather than get overpowered by finding a couple items. ITB could certainly be a lot more intense in terms of spikes of excitement, cool unlocks that make you wanna play different squads and or difficulties, unlocks of alternate challenges and enemy designs etc. but at the end of the day it is just a game like any other: you play for achievements, in this particular case quite literally, you keep playing for a while after as long as the game is fun, and you likely drop it eventually, often after hundreds of hours if you explored a game in its majority / entirety. i dont think theres anything wrong with that type of approach, i.e. just having achievements, not having cool, super interesting new unlocks (beside mechs and difficulty that is). i do feel like regular roguelikes (i.e. definitely not TBOI lol) generally are more of a "play this for a very long time but only in occasional sessions"-genre, therefore they dont really need a reason for a player to come back every day - they simply must be designed in a fun, enticing way for a player to want to experience the game :D. i dont mind the initially proposed low difficulty or the lack of reward between the actual difficulties - i think that should be an essential part to a casual-friendly game.

It sounds like we come at this from different angles. I think I mentioned in the video that I pretty much don't like games where there isn't some in-game reason to do stuff. Or to put it another way, I can't just have fun, lol. This is basically a me-problem, but even then having fun is still more fun in principal if there is also some reason to do it other than enjoyment, I would say. It sounds like you are in the perhaps better position of liking the game for what it actually is! This is probably the right way of thinking about it. I guess all I wanted to say is that while I do think you are right about progression potentially messing with the gameplay or the balancing, I like to think that the core experience is still there. What you call 'self-nerfing' isn't necessarily a bad thing, if you want to be the kind of player that is looking for gameplay challenges. But I think that overall it's better to have that be a choice the player makes, with the option to play with power progression mechanics as well if they like. It feels messy but it also feels like a decent balance of utilising the potential of both approaches. Then again, it's not like there is any shortage of roguelikes and lites, so these games really don't need to explore all their 'potential' or cater to a general audience at all - I am pretty much just trying imagine what you need to change to give something like ITB a more broad appeal, for my own amusement. Probably because I don't have much time so I automatically lean against any games where you repeat content - basically I am the last person rogue-x's should be trying to appeal to! But I still had fun with ITB all the same, which was interesting, probably because of the puzzle aspect. Anyway, thanks for the interesting comment!

First of all, remain calm! What do you mean I talk about the game being boring? This is a video about me liking the game. Not sure what you're getting at. The playing on easy thing is explained in the video. I thought it didn't need to be said, but since it does: when I talk about completion and motivation, I mean IN GAME / IN UNIVERSE and not in real life. That's the root of your apparent meltdown here. I would prefer some kind of progression, ending, or 'final boss' type thing for the overall experience to work towards. Getting a high score, arcade style, isn't that interesting to me in this particular game. I could probably go outside and see how many times I can throw a ball in a air and catch it, but I guess I just don't want to since it doesn't lead anywhere. Do you see what I am getting at? I don't think this is an insane a thing as you seem to believe. As a great man once said: "If you need a game where number goes up go have an opinion about cookie clicker holy crap"