Well, I'm thinking about Ogre Battle before sleeping. What makes it so much better than modern autobattlers?
Let"s talk about it on my tiny phone keyboard.
The first thing is that there's some complexity. There are five slots (most autobattlers have three) and front/rear rows as well as left/right positioning mattering. Modern autobattlers don't do that for one bug reason: gacha.
The driving force of gacha means things need to boil down to raw stats, to drive you towards the five stars and the stat-up purchases.
Having actual strategy involved would reduce the gacha pull!
In addition, Ogre Battle usually involves at least half a dozen autobattle units on the field at once.
They not only have a specific map position, but health only regenerates in town. This creates a flow of units around captured towns.
The relatively simplified Ogre Battle units are used as part of a much larger whole, and that whole is a wartime front with dozens of active units and cities.
Modern autobattlers focus more on one team and a linear string of battles, to allow for zero player involvement.
See, 'autobattler' has come to mean 'a game that plays itself', rather than 'a game where you have to plan ahead'.
That's the heart of the problem, I think.
This isn't to say Ogre Battle was perfect. I can see why its sequel went a different direction.
But I love setting up little 'programs' of units, improving them, exploring the possibility space.
In Final Fantasy Tacticslikes, the battles are dense and strategic.
I enjoy the looser, less locked-down battles of Tactics Ogre. I like planning tidbits and then watching them play out.
Modern autobattlers just don't do it for me, since they are explicitly casual-gacha games.
What a waste.
Ugh, the looser tactics and flow of Ogre Battle, I mean. Tactics Ogre, its sequel, was a Final Fantasy Tacticslike.
Or visa-versa.
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Watching a very long video on Elder Scrolls games and I'm happy to report that I disagree with most of the points he makes!
I actually got to watch a video that makes points! And has reasonable opinions!
Being able to watch a video and go "hmm, good point, but I think-"
is so much nicer than watching a video that grinds down your resistance by spending the first five minutes pretending to be about a stupid joke skit.
Skits are a way to recontextualize the body of your video. They allow you to bypass most of the critical thinking your audience might do because, hey, it's just me, Fartdog. It doesn't matter whether Fartdog is right or wrong, so you might as well not think too hard.
So, let me talk about how "close to the pain" stories are.
I've noticed a rise in the number of video games which are literally about trauma, as in they flat-out say "here's representations of this character's trauma, use cards to beat it up and win!"
These are "close" stories.
However, many video games are about the same kind of journey, but abstracted.
For example, Outer Wilds is not "here's the terror of death, here's some cards to battle death with!"
It's still a game about coping with death.
This is a "distant" story.
There's not necessarily anything wrong with either option, but the medium does matter.
See, if I read a three-page comic about someone personally coping with something, it's one tweet and takes twenty seconds.
But playing a game about it takes hoooours and requires downloads.
Hm. I'm very sleepy, looking for a game I might like. There's a new game out in a genre I sometimes like, but it... looks really terrible.
I mean, the art quality is great, but every screenshot screams "we didn't include any gameplay".
It looks like a phone game. Not in terms of art, but in terms of play.
"Here's two squads of three autobattling", "here's a clickable map", "here's a talent tree", "here's cards"...
They proudly assert it's a mix between Dungeon Defender and Roguelike, which is a bit like proudly asserting your newest dish is a mix of pudding and beefsteak...