Unpopular opinions go here
- Thread starter Whizbang Dustyboots
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Man, I used to dream of getting in on the black market cheese trade. Never dreamed of eating the stuff.
No way you're getting it in the US. It's nearly impossible to get "live" cheese; you're not going to find cheese with live things.
MGibster
Legend
They dancing maggots are hypnotic.
And now you know how a necromancer casts hypnotic pattern....
Here's another one. Durability mechanics are the best, but designers often neglect to do them well.
In fact, I would argue that Tears of the Kingdom almost perfected it, through the idea of fusion.
By making breaking things desirable, because then you can add new and customizable capabilities to your equipment, you turn the Durability loop into something that can be meaningfully engaged with.
I think the only place it went wrong is in the presentation (and in how it works in terms of the UI but thats a separate issue). While the kind of silly, gonzo presentation in TOTK works for that games aesthetic, I think if one is translating the idea into more conventionally styled games, Fusion should be presented as Repairing.
Funnily enough just before I got introduced to these two Zelda games (I hadn't ever actually looked into either one until someone gifted me both a few weeks ago), I had already come to this conclusion on my own games Durability mechanics; I needed a way for the mechanics to be desirable to engage with in addition to being easy to run (which I had already solved).
I got there by just examining what I've already done to do this with other things (I want Food to matter, so I make it as deeply customizable as Weapons), and it became a no-brainer. When you go to repair your stuff, you can add in new materials to confer temporary abilities to your stuff.
For example, Springhorn when used in crafting usually confers a boomerang effect to your weapons. If you repair with some Springhorn Dust, however, you can add a few uses of this capability to any weapon, and if you use it with Armor, you get some natural Reflect Damage against Ranged attacks.
That makes Durability a lot more interesting and opens up a lot of levers for players to tweak.
And funnily enough when I figured this out I kinda felt dumb for not realizing it earlier, as I had already had and applied the idea to the Magic side of things, where Corruption serves as the magical counterpart to Durability, by setting myself up to design each Mage with some means of turning their Corruptions into advantages.
Such as Wizards, who basically contain their Corruptions in runic sigils etched into their bodied, that take the debuffs of a Corruption and make them into buffs instead, that they can then spend to empower their spellcrafting and casting.
However, for the Wizard these also come at an additional cost, as the runes will actually grow more powerful overtime, and as such will do more when expended, but by allowing this, the runes will also eat away at the Wizards body, reducing the ability to regenerate Energies (aside from Mana), and as such making the Wizard quite frail if they don't expend them. It also handily aligns the Wizard with its depiction in other games/stories.
This not only serves as a nice mechanical symmetry with Durability (you can't repair and add stuff if your weapon is still in pristine condition), but also managed to line up pretty perfectly with the core idea of my magic system, in that magic can only fundamentally destroy, and never create.
Other mages will handle Corruptions differently, but in general this the sort of thing to be expected; you get more gameplay out of these systems when they aren't just things the system demands you do for their own sake.
In fact, I would argue that Tears of the Kingdom almost perfected it, through the idea of fusion.
By making breaking things desirable, because then you can add new and customizable capabilities to your equipment, you turn the Durability loop into something that can be meaningfully engaged with.
I think the only place it went wrong is in the presentation (and in how it works in terms of the UI but thats a separate issue). While the kind of silly, gonzo presentation in TOTK works for that games aesthetic, I think if one is translating the idea into more conventionally styled games, Fusion should be presented as Repairing.
Funnily enough just before I got introduced to these two Zelda games (I hadn't ever actually looked into either one until someone gifted me both a few weeks ago), I had already come to this conclusion on my own games Durability mechanics; I needed a way for the mechanics to be desirable to engage with in addition to being easy to run (which I had already solved).
I got there by just examining what I've already done to do this with other things (I want Food to matter, so I make it as deeply customizable as Weapons), and it became a no-brainer. When you go to repair your stuff, you can add in new materials to confer temporary abilities to your stuff.
For example, Springhorn when used in crafting usually confers a boomerang effect to your weapons. If you repair with some Springhorn Dust, however, you can add a few uses of this capability to any weapon, and if you use it with Armor, you get some natural Reflect Damage against Ranged attacks.
That makes Durability a lot more interesting and opens up a lot of levers for players to tweak.
And funnily enough when I figured this out I kinda felt dumb for not realizing it earlier, as I had already had and applied the idea to the Magic side of things, where Corruption serves as the magical counterpart to Durability, by setting myself up to design each Mage with some means of turning their Corruptions into advantages.
Such as Wizards, who basically contain their Corruptions in runic sigils etched into their bodied, that take the debuffs of a Corruption and make them into buffs instead, that they can then spend to empower their spellcrafting and casting.
However, for the Wizard these also come at an additional cost, as the runes will actually grow more powerful overtime, and as such will do more when expended, but by allowing this, the runes will also eat away at the Wizards body, reducing the ability to regenerate Energies (aside from Mana), and as such making the Wizard quite frail if they don't expend them. It also handily aligns the Wizard with its depiction in other games/stories.
This not only serves as a nice mechanical symmetry with Durability (you can't repair and add stuff if your weapon is still in pristine condition), but also managed to line up pretty perfectly with the core idea of my magic system, in that magic can only fundamentally destroy, and never create.
Other mages will handle Corruptions differently, but in general this the sort of thing to be expected; you get more gameplay out of these systems when they aren't just things the system demands you do for their own sake.
The oft-cited 30 million is, if i recall correctly, historical - over all time, 30 million people have played. That doesn't tell you the size of the current market.
I wouldn't blink to find that the current market is in the millions, mind you, but it isn't like 10% of the USA is currently buying PHBs.
YOINK!
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
I mean I'll be 40 next August. I think it's fair to call something that come out when I was a freshmen in high school older.
Last I saw posted here, 50 million was historical and 30 million was a current estimate. Granted, I don't know where that number came from and it sounds way too high to me, but
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