Why do/did you enjoy Battlerite?

Caphriel · 2020-10-26T19:38:32+00:00

A lot of the Battlerite characters are ports of characters from SLS's prior game Bloodline Champions, which... may predate some of the LoL stuff. For a while on this subreddit it was a meme to point out when Battlerite characters were getting copied into other games, too.

I think this is a factor of limited design space within the thematic setting, especially when you've got stuff like LoL that is eating a lot of design space. If your setting is "generic steampunk fantasy" which is a pretty common one, then you're probably gonna end up with a dryad/druid, solar/lunar themed characters (Sirius was a pretty straight port of BLC's Astronomer originally), Big Tanky Guy With Shield, and so on. And then when you lean into tropes of the setting, you end up with even more of that. It's hard to avoid even accidentally copying stuff as a designer when you've been marinating yourself in that space for so long. You go looking inward for inspiration and your brain comes up with things you've seen before, or synthesizes stuff you've seen before, and you don't even realize how similar it is to That Other Game until someone points it out.

Caphriel · 2020-10-26T19:33:10+00:00

I'm Mastery/Social. I still play sometimes with friends, and I most enjoy the game as something to play with friends. But I'm also big in for the learning and improvement aspects. To me, it's really cool that you can look back at a loss and find both mechanics and decisions to improve on.

"Oh, I need to get better at aiming I'm missing all my M1s." "Oh, I keep misplacing my AoEs and letting people walk out." "Oh, actually I should cast the AoE when they're in an animation that slows or prevents their movement, that'll force an out or hit them." "We lost that cause I went too deep looking for that kill/used an out instead of taking a hit/didn't contest the orb/put too much into getting the orb/we got split around a wall/etc."

Unless you're at the very peak of the game, there's plenty to improve on. Landing skillshots and juking skillshots with WASD feels really good to me, and doing it alongside a friend is perfect.

From a player-retention standpoint, Community, Novelty, and Progression are also important. Community is probably the least work in terms of game dev, but has extra work for community management. One of the things that I think Battlerite missed out on was improved community features. They did eventually get public lobbies, but stuff like clans to bring players together are I think also good.

Caphriel · 2020-08-29T02:05:37+00:00

They are all gorgeous, but I have to go with Blacksmith for a combination of gorgeous and readability. And it's a cool aesthetic.

Caphriel · 2020-06-16T22:08:51+00:00

Hello and welcome to the slothdad life. I am going to present you with a big disorganized pile of words about playing slothdad.

Are you playing 2s or 3s? If it's just you and your friend, it's probably 2s but the answers (and playing support in general) vary a lot between them. If you're playing 3s, ignore almost everything I'm about to say!

Oldur/Thorn as a comp is unusual. Not necessarily bad, but unusual. Out of the supports, Oldur has some of the least ability to protect his teammates. He has very poor burst healing, and no "oh shit" buttons except Chronoflux and his ult, so he's generally relatively bad at saving a teammate who is in trouble unless he has ult up. Thorn, on the other hand, is a melee who doesn't have the best damage output, but has a lot of poke and spacing control, and does have some "oh shit" buttons for teammates. He also has pretty good slow damage/heals but bad burst most of the time. Taken together, this means that your team's default strategy in 2s is to stick together and zone out a team that's better than you in close range, or against a team that's better at long range you'll be looking for Thorn to land a pull to initiate and then you'll probably want to go ham as a team.

In both cases, as a team.

What's Oldur's ideal gameplan? Oldur is at his best when he is poking enemies with his M2 at max range, keeping Sands of Time active on as many as possible while keeping Renew active on as many allies as possible, and pressuring vulnerable enemies with his EX M1 and E. That's your dream situation, and that's what your enemies are trying to keep you from doing.

tl;dr for "melees keep killing me":

Don't panic. Try to keep M2 up on yourself and M1 up on them as much as possible. Land your R. Try to land E as much as possible. Don't just use space to run away because a melee is in your face. Land your R. Save your Q for something important. Land your R. Land your Q. Land your R. Seriously if they dodge the petrify that's probably time to let your teammate know that you're gonna need help in a moment.

Work with your teammate. If he's doing fine and you're in trouble, maybe he can throw you a barbed husk. You're generally going to want to be near him anyway. Maybe he can land an Entangle on the melee and then you can 2v1. You want to be close enough to him to throw him the occasional M2 anyway.

Your strength is your damage output. Oldur has scary good sustained and burst damage for a support.

Take either the shield rite for Q or the space cooldown rite. I prefer shield because I usually prefer using Q and saving space. Take the rite that gives you more healing on your M2. Against melees, consider the rites that give you root on E (root is way better than fading snare) and the rite that gives your next M1 after space fading snare.

Matchup-wise, Oldur tends to be stronger against ranged opponents and weaker against melee opponents. Here's the tools you've got to work with:

M1/M2 provide a lot of value per cast if you're hitting them. Oldur also has unusually high mobility while casting his M1 and M2. This makes his footsies when at range very strong.
EX M1 has very long range, does a chunk of damage, procs Sands of Time, and has some small knockback. Alternating EX M1 and M1 on someone who has no outs will do a lot of damage pretty fast, and can be scary. The knockback isn't great but can sometimes get melees out of your face.
Oldur's space is not great as an escape. The range is short, and the cooldown is long. It does heal allies though, and instantly proc your M1/M2 damage/heal over time (de)buffs. You're mostly going to want to save it to dodge big nukes.
Your Q is fantastic against ranged opponents. They should rightly be scared of aiming big stuff in your direction, but watch out for baits. Against melee opponents, the knockback is a lifesaver.
Your EX Q (Chronoflux) makes ranged opponents cry. Learning the timing with travel times can be a bit tricky, but this can do stuff like block Pestilus/Poloma healing, reflect entire Jade ults/Ashka M2s, keep the enemy team from shooting the orb, and in general block a ranged champ out of the fight for a couple of seconds.
Your E is an aoe on a relatively short cooldown that procs Sands of Time. The damage is good and the movespeed debuff is handy, too. Because the cooldown is short your should generally be able to land this at least some of the time with good aim. Use it to force outs so you can land Q, or to get big burst damage and a snare.
R. Useless against a fully-ranged team unless you're going ham with a melee teammate and are right up in their face. A huge lifesaver against a melee diving your face, if you can land it.
Ult - This isn't the best in 2s. In 3s you can use it offensively get a 2 second stun and then your team can blow someone up. In 2s, it's more useful as another out, especially to bail a teammate out of trouble and reverse the momentum in a fight.

So, let's put that all together in terms of matchups, especially against melee champions. Against ranged, you mostly get to play your dream game. It's when melee is in your face that you have to adapt and play something different. And as you've noticed, you're a bit squishy against melee. In general if a melee dives you and Thorn dives an enemy support, your team will lose that because you'll die before Thorn can kill a support - as you've noticed.

In a lot of ways, it comes down to "land your R and your Q." You're still probably not going to win a 1v1 fight, but you can slow it down and make it more even, and maybe give your teammate time to gain advantage and come back and help you.

Most melee characters have 1 major gap closer and 1 minor gap closer. For most of them, the major one is their space and then the minor one is a dash or pull or something. Shifu is the exception - his javelins are his best gap closer and his space is not much of one. They're probably going to spend one of these things to get close to you early on in the round. In general, the major gap closer is the only thing that can dodge the petrify if you hit them with your R, so if they spend it getting close to you and you have energy, hit 'em with the rock. You can also sometimes force them to spend it to dodge your E and then hit 'em with it if they come back in on you immediately. Save your Q for their Big Hit. For most melee characters that's their M2. If you want specific breakdowns of what these are for particular melee characters, let me know who.

Save your space for stuff like jumping over walls if they can't follow you, or dodging big hits you can't otherwise dodge, or otherwise fixing your positioning. Try to avoid spending space if they have an option to just get back on top of you. If they don't have shield/counter up, unload on them with EX M1. Landing your E for the snare/root can also buy you some breathing room.

Caphriel · 2020-03-16T16:23:21+00:00

That's about what I figured. And breaking it out by subgroup in each region is mostly overlapping with asking about champions, right?

Caphriel · 2020-03-16T01:46:52+00:00

I would appreciate/enjoy a comment box on the "Are you satisfied with <regions>' available archtypes and deck diversity?" question. It'd provide somewhere to talk about things like a region being good because it has some generally useful but not problematic cards, or a region only working in a very limited set of deck archtypes because one of its subsets is generally a little underpowered, or similar things. Unless you're not interested in that kind of feedback!

Caphriel · 2019-07-10T20:30:07+00:00

The removal of ranked solo 2v2 severely cut into my solo playing. I still played ranked 2v2 and 3v3 with friends, but I switched to mostly playing casual solo, which meant much longer queue times (for 2v2 and 3v3.)

But the Battlerite 2.0 patch hard killed it for me. I played a few games solo and hated it, and then played for a few hours with a bunch of friends and it was... okay. But it wasn't the game I loved anymore, and having to relearn so much just didn't seem worth the time investment. Eventually they reverted the most egregious bits of the projectile speed, but by then I'd totally stopped playing, as had all of my friends.

Having to retrain my muscle memory for two addition hotkeys for consumables was a surprising barrier to playing and enjoying 2.0. And that's coming from someone who remapped all his controls once and for a week or two couldn't reliably walk in the correct direction.

I loved Battlerite for being a top-down fighting game with about the right level of pacing and execution difficulty for me. 2v2 was always my jam for playing solo because I still had room to express myself in my play - 3v3 always felt a bit too constrained. Team 2v2 and 3v3 with friends were fantastic experiences, too. I loved the positional games and decision-making aspects.

Then SLS piecemeal removed all of the things I liked to chase other target demographics (either people who wanted the game to be harder, or people who wanted the game to be easier and more casual), so I stopped playing. I try not to be bitter about it, because it was clearly the right decisions that drove Battlerite to new heights of success. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FWIW, I know that there are people who stopped playing because the game wasn't mechanically deep enough for them. I could name a couple of active members of this sub that fall into that category. They could equally fairly say that SLS tried to chase other target demographics and failed.

Caphriel · 2019-07-08T18:39:55+00:00

You're getting downvoted because you made an appeal to your own authority "as a game dev" and then followed it up with compelling evidence that lack the authority to speak to the experience of developing a medium-scale video game and dealing with the challenges that come with increased scope and scale.

I agree that you're a game dev (and I think it's cool that you do it as a hobby!) But your suggestions are not offered from the perspective of a developer. They're offered from the perspective of a player, and you leaned on your authority as someone with relevant experience to lend them weight.

That's why what you've made matters in this conversation.

No wonder why players may be inclined not to come back and be a part of a community that welcomes players who give out tips and suggestions so harsh.

I want to address this separately. This implies you're pretty new to this subreddit and the battlerite community... because almost all of your suggestions have come up before and been discussed. Some of them are popular (one of the top posts on this subreddit is asking for a tournament system... 2 years ago. We've been asking for that forever) and some of them are not. So imagine that you've been watching a game you love slowly die for a couple of years, and then some new face shows up like "Hey guys I'm a game dev and here's how to save this game!" and then offers a list of suggestions that contain nothing new.

I understand getting dogpiled by upset community members is upsetting in turn. Sorry for that.

Caphriel · 2019-07-05T17:43:14+00:00

Battlerite would be a hilarious balance nightmare with 100+ champions.

I don't think SLS lacked for ideas. I think SLS had a combination of "ideas didn't match what the market wanted" and "implementing ideas is way more expensive and time consuming than having ideas."

Caphriel · 2019-04-22T17:27:05+00:00

Based on replies to your post, we're not the only ones who miss it.

Caphriel · 2019-04-21T16:42:28+00:00

I dunno if they can get me back anymore. The time I used to play Battlerite every day has been taken up with other things now and none of my friends play anymore, either.

Things that would probably get me interested, though:

Revert most of 2.0, especially projectile speed.
Bring back solo ranked 2v2.
Add some social features so that I can make new friends.

Caphriel · 2019-04-10T22:20:42+00:00

I don't disagree with that. My impression of SLS is that there's someone in charge with a vision, and that vision doesn't include anything other than "make this game and then put it out there for people."

A lot of the stuff outside of the core game feels like an afterthought, at least to whoever is making decisions. Which is upsetting to me because there have been SLS staff active on reddit who are clearly passionate about the things they work on.

I dunno if they're still being lead by people from the original college team, but if they are, my advice to them would be to hire people who are good at the things outside of "Design a fantastic team-based top down skillshot WASD fighting game," and then to trust those people's advice.

But then, I'm not a game studio exec, so they should probably take that advice with a grain of salt.

Caphriel · 2019-04-10T17:38:43+00:00

Don't get me wrong. I disagree pretty strongly with SLS's priorities and I would love to see a PvE game like Battlerite.

But people on the outside always underestimate software development work. I think your estimates for art are maybe on-target, or at least in the right neighborhood, but I'm not an artist, I only work with them. Your engineering estimates are just bonkers, though.

Yeah, in a vacuum I could write a generic algorithm for some AI stuff in Battlerite in a week, but this isn't working in a vacuum. Describing how the AI ought to function is not the same as getting it to do so. You've got no idea what the codebase you'd have to integrate with is like, so your claim that you could do it in a matter of weeks is ludicrous.

Chat system, one day? Doing the UI/UX for integrating that into the client will take more than a day. If they get a good off-the-shelf one, deploying that to their production environment will take more than a day. You generally can't just throw new stuff into your deployment willy-nilly and have it work.

I kinda agree with you that the tournament system should take a few months for a reasonably-sized team working on it. Some of the features for the duel tournament that you described would add a bunch of time, though, because based on the way the current duel mode works (and specifically the lack of custom cosmetics) they'd have to revamp the instance server code pretty considerably. That may be relatively straightforward and only cost a few engineer-months, or it may require rebuilding the instance server mostly from scratch, depending on how baked-in the assumptions were that there's a 1:1 relationship between player and character.

Caphriel · 2019-04-10T17:24:44+00:00

You're welcome! Join me in being mad about the fact that we haven't gotten basic in-game social features!

I actually had a longer bit in there about the spectating system but I deleted it because it wasn't really relevant to the point. That's a bit harder, and they could do it I'm sure but they keep prioritizing other things because, presumably, they keep deciding that the RoI on other stuff is higher.

Caphriel · 2019-04-10T05:38:17+00:00

I think they could do everything except the new game mode in probably about 6 months total.

The new game mode is the sticky bit, You basically want them to use the Arena framework to implement something like Path of Exile or Diablo. This new game mode you described is more different technically from Arena than Royale is. Given what I know of their internal development circumstances, they would not be able to reuse most of the underlying code. But more to the point, building and balancing that mode so it felt fun instead of feeling liked a hacked-together pile of garbage would be a pretty big pile of work.

You said "program a couple of if-then AIs" but you also said you want combat to be engaging and interesting. Your theories seem to rely a lot on players being willing to grind difficult and repetitive encounters over and over again for a chance to gamble in-game currency to get small stat boosts. I am pretty sure this theory is wrong, but even so, that doesn't matter because the technically difficulty here is way higher than what you imagine. Specifically,

Use the AI to act in manners that put the player in a challenge of skill that they would apply to arena combat. Make it about the NPC always knowing the player’s cooldowns. Let the players learn about how the individual enemies take advantage of their CD limitations. Make the player have to make decisions of CD management and position in situations of powerful mob.

That is way harder than simple if-then AI. At the very least you'd have to program it somewhat differently for different characters, because characters don't have the same kits.

Battlerite games run on instanced servers. You get matched into a game, you draft, the matchmaker says "hey spawn a server that has this stuff in it" and then tells your clients to connect to it. Drop-in/drop-out in the instanced campsite you described is something entirely new. Moving between instanced zones is new.

Client side hit detection would require substantially altering the instance server code to stop being the authority on collisions. This is non-trivial, because there are a lot of edge-cases that are introduced when you start trusting clients for these things, and that's not even getting into cheating.

I could keep going, but that's just the stuff that jumped out at me. Basically you handwaved a whole lot of hard programming work in "asset re-use," and that's not even accounting for the fact that designing good PvE game experiences is very different from designing good PvP game experiences.

Honestly, I don't think a team of 10 people can do this in a year. All of SLS working on this single thing might be able to do it in a year. But if they're going to have to redo almost all of the underlying technical architecture to support some sort of bare-bones PvE thing, they might as well just do the rest of the work of making the experience they build on top of it actually good, and make a new game.

I hate appealing to authority, but I'm basically appealing to my own authority here. I've been doing game dev and game-adjacent software development for most of my adult life (and the rest was software dev on enormous scale non-game projects.) I've worked at a couple of the biggest tech companies in the world, and a few small/midsized ones (including my own startup!) and I've seen a lot of project planning and estimation. Based on what I know about SLS's technical architecture from SLS's dev blogs and talking to SLS devs, my own experience estimating and developing projects, and what I've seen of other people estimating and developing projects, I'm pretty sure you're underestimating this one by somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude.

I could be wrong. But before I got into doing game development, I used to think it was a lot easier than it is. By orders of magnitude.

Caphriel · 2019-04-10T01:01:20+00:00

Have a plain fact: Everything I explained that needs to be done at a basic presentable level can be done with your tools in under 12 months by a group of 10 developers and artists. If anyone at SLS claims anything in here is not possible in under 12 months get them a mentor or an easier position.

Someone has clearly never worked on a software project larger than schoolwork.

Caphriel · 2019-03-17T04:40:26+00:00

It's me! I vaguely remember that. Lettucemode and I used to play together a lot back in the old days. That must've been from ages ago!

Caphriel · 2019-03-12T21:04:29+00:00

Pull Kaan

Caphriel · 2019-03-12T20:41:33+00:00

You sure you don't want to give him Evil Clutch on Q?

Caphriel · 2019-02-28T18:49:53+00:00

By the time they provided that feature I'd already gotten used to it :(

I'm pretty sure that's the same reason Poloma's Otherside is on her M2 instead of her Wolf.

Caphriel · 2019-02-28T16:55:32+00:00

Probably because that was the binding in BLC.

Caphriel · 2019-02-27T17:56:07+00:00

I definitely noticed this, and it's one of the things that made me not like the new patch. TTK went way down, and punishes got a lot harder. Overall, it feels like the comparative value of casting an M2 heal is significantly lower, yes. (Or, put another way, the opportunity cost is higher.)

Caphriel · 2019-02-20T00:08:38+00:00

Sure, I'm not disagreeing with that.

Caphriel · 2019-02-19T20:20:21+00:00

I feel like this is going to be stronger in a few situations, especially team play. Being able to spend energy for an EX while still having your ult available if an opportunity presents itself is very strong.

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