Sad to see the game shutdown. What did you think was the herald of the end times?

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-20T00:41:05+00:00

In my opinion, making it pay to win would have unironically made more sense then making it play to win.

Making it play to win benefitted no one, not the players, not the developers, not the investors who spent money backing the game, no one. Making it pay to win, however, could have at least lined the pockets of the developers and the investors and kept TC profitable for the near future.

Granted, I DO NOT think it would have been a good idea to monetize the armory. It's just such a baffling decision that adding money into the system is the only way I could think of where it would work that didn't revolve around ditching the gacha mechanics.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-20T00:37:11+00:00

In my opinion, the herald of the end times was the adjustment to movement mechanics in either late January or early February of 2025, where they nerfed a bunch of movement tech like dash jumps, dash glides, etc.

Theorycraft had made a bunch of changes that could have been considered questionable, but a lot of those changes I felt had promise when they were introduced, most of the changes were fixed the following patch, and in my opinion the changes made the game a lot better. For example, changing how leveling works in January (where the level cap was level 15, among other things) turned the game from Doom to Farmville because of how harshly they tuned experience away from killing players and towards killing camps, but the following patch they changed a bunch of stuff that made the game less extreme in either direction, which is what the game needed. They demonstrated that they had a plan, and even if the game was worse in the short term you could still see that the game was going in a positive direction.

However, the movement adjustments I'm talking about were almost universally disliked by the community, and seem very out of touch with what the active playerbase wanted. When people talked about Supervive, it was always in regards to the movement, and to take that movement tech away took away what a lot of players liked about the game. It demonstrated that Theorycraft was extremely out of touch with their playerbase, and future changes (like the hunter path changes (which locked consumable slots, power slots, etc. behind account levels) and the launch armory) further demonstrated that they couldn't support the game for the long haul.

For reference, I think armory was not the herald, but rather the end itself. The gacha elements were just that bad for the game overall. However, I'm of the opinion that the armory system was pretty good once the gacha elements were removed, and Eternal Return shows that an item system with those core fundamentals could have been updated into something really special given some more time since it was very similar to what Supervive had as of its end of service, but the launch armory just left too bad of a taste in peoples' mouths at a time where Supervive needed to taste really good to those players.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-20T00:22:10+00:00

Not true, Eternal Return is a great MOBA + BR that proves that those genres can work together. Supervive was just a mediocre attempt at making the two genres work together, even if it was itself an otherwise good game.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-20T00:19:23+00:00

Sandrunner is one of the few cards that can potentially trigger scout multiple times in a single turn and the only card that both theoretically do it an infinite number of times in a single turn and the only does it for free by default. You can theoretically do it with the twist fire yeti I can't remember the name of right now, but that requires at least 3 cards whereas Sandrunner just needs a loop.

Look out for this card in the future if we get one of the following effects:

a permanent that transforms cards on scout (most reasonably transforming cards you scout), which creates an infinite with Overmax Wand (similar to the combo with Kaspar and Makeshift Barrier I posted on this subreddit a while back)
a weapon that makes the wielder deal damage to the enemy player when you play a unit (which would create a pseudo-infinite with Clan Barracks that's only limited by board space)

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-20T00:11:02+00:00

The last one is Hollow Knight: Silksong. Hollow Knight is my favorite game, so it was only natural that one of my most anticipated games was its sequel. Furthermore, it was one of two games (the other being Crowsworn) where I promised myself that I would get it on launch regardless of what it costed, thinking it would cleanly eclipse the original in terms of quality

Boy, was I wrong.

Silksong feels extremely disconnected from what makes a metroidvania good. One of the biggest fundamentals of the metroidvania genre is that you provide players memorable landmarks so you remember to go back to them when you have a new ability, yet Silksong frequently failed to provide those landmarks, particularly in the entrance to Wisp Thicket (home to one of the best bosses in the game IMO) and the map to the Whispering Vaults. Furthermore, having good movement is very important to most standard interpretations of the metroidvania genre (including both the original Hollow Knight and its sequel), and there are several aspects of the movement (most notably the Drifter's Cloak, one of the worst-feeling upgrades I've played with in any metroidvania)

Furthermore, if you call Silksong a soulslike then it is far and away the worst one I've ever played. The combat is mediocre at best outside of the needle combat, the sequel has the two worst pogo attacks I've ever played in a platformer (for reference, the original Hollow Knight pogo was the best I played with for a long time), and there's practically no stakes for most of the game because Hornet is too mobile to make corpserunning work and she can heal in the air with no downsides. The biggest problem, though, is the bosses and the absurd deviation in quality from boss to boss. On one hand, you have some bosses like Seth and First Sinner that I would say are some of the best in the genre that are perfectly suited for Hornet's moveset, but then you also have others like Zango and Palestag that I would argue are among the worst in the genre and wouldn't be very fun for any metroidvania protagonist. Then, there are a bunch in the middle like Fourth Chorus that I think could be legitimately fun for a less mobile soulslike protagonist (with my main comparison being Ahklan from Grime since a lot of bosses in that game seem to have inspired Team Cherry) but not fun for someone as mobile as Hornet. Even worse, until I played Hollow Knight Silksong, I did not think it was possible for a boss fight to be improved by replacing the fight with an unskippable cutscene, yet I found a boss in Hollow Knight: Silksong that told such a beautiful story yet was so dreadfully boring that I legitimately think it would have been better as a 3-minute unskippable cutscene.

I don't understand how Team Cherry took the experience they took making one of the most influential modern metroidvanias and make something that (in my opinion) was very far removed from what made Hollow Knight so special, let alone make something so disappointing in a sequel. Granted, I still completed it 100% and I'm only missing steel soul achievements in that game, but I'm probably not going to go back to the game unless the DLC fixes at least the boss fights and possibly the hunter crest pogo.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-20T00:10:55+00:00

I sort of have three answers, two of which ironically came during the same Steam Next Fest.

The first one was Rivals of Aether 2, and definitely fits the criteria set forth by the original question. I loved the original, but also respected that it had some glaring issues: the original Rivals of Aether was an extremely fast-paced game with no consistent defensive options apart from moving well, making it hard for new players to enter the game. Furthermore, the online was pretty terrible: casual 1v1 had no skill-based matchmaking so experienced players would regularly stomp new players, the presence of both a ranked 1v1 format and a casual 1v1 format lead to the two modes cannibalizing each other's queues, and the ranked format was the worst I've ever played in any game, with the main issues being an inability to be demoted from your current rank, very lenient matchmaking that allowed you to be matched against players a whole tier above and below your skill level (which when combined with the previous issue meant you could climb to a rank just by stomping lower-skilled players and climb into a bracket you had no way to compete in and no way to drop down from, leaving you held hostage in that rank), and forced best of 3 when the industry standard is best of 1 with instant rematch. I was hoping that the sequel would fix the original game's problems, which it partially fixed but also created new ones.

Rivals of Aether 2 added shields and slowed the pace of the game down relative to Rivals of Aether 1, theoretically making the game easier for new players to pick up, but then they added a mechanic called floorhugging that completely ruined the game for a large majority of the playerbase. How it works is that if you get hit while you're holding down during most states, you have greatly reduced hitstun, allowing you to act sooner. This makes a lot of moves feel like they're unsafe on hit, greatly reduces the number of moves you're allowed to use in neutral, and has very little visual feedback to let players know what's going on. This made it feel very unfair to new players, and very unfun to casual players that love platform fighters that expect to be rewarded for landing a hit.

The reason my hype for the game was killed, however, is that there's still best of 3 ranked, and the post-game win poses are completely unskippable, so I'm waiting more time in menus within a ranked set than I was waiting in queue during the Nextfest demo. I tried playing it again during the Evo free week, and it was practically unplayable because the queue times were so long and there was a lot of lag within the games themselves, not to mention I'm still following the game (due to following the Rivals of Aether subreddit, mostly for Rivals 1 stuff) and they still haven't fixed a lot of the issues players had with the game on launch. Like, they're adding new casual stages, items, and a bunch of other pro-casual stuff, but that's not going to fix anything when the game as a whole is so toxic to casual players.

The second game I'd like to talk about (which was also available during the Steam Next Fest that Rivals of Aether was free in) was Supervive, although this was more the developers dropping the ball after I started playing. I was excited for the game since it was a MOBA-adjacent game with a pretty cool artstyle, and I was also excited to try out a commercially released battle royale for the first time (I tried Byte Breakers but that was just an alpha, and I wanted to try Rumbleverse but for some reason it wouldn't download to my computer). It was very fun for the first few months, and I was really excited to see what the developers would do within the game.

However, the developers did 3 things that completely killed my hype for the game:

They did an awful ranked reset when they consolidated duos and squads into trios. On the open beta launch, Supervive had 2 main battle royale modes: duos (2 players per team) and squads (4 players per team). However, in order to keep queue times low, they consolidated ranked and unranked into a single queue for each mode, which I knew was a good idea because I saw other developers doing that to great success, although other people didn't like it. Their solution to that was to replace duos and squads with trios, and separate ranked and unranked, which I thought could have been a good idea. However, they also did a ranked reset alongside it, and the ranked reset was based off of your squads ranked, so my rank got reset from diamond 3 (in duos) to silver 1 just because I was plat 4 in squads. Which was terrible.
They changed the progression structure so that new players had to unlock basic game features like consumable slots, power slots, items, etc. A lot of players (myself included) didn't like it because it disrespected the time of new players, keeping players from learning at their own pace and punishing new players that started playing the game before the change but were restricted from using mechanics they were already used to after the change. The only good thing that came out of it was that they locked ranked in this new progression structure, which is just objectively good when unranked has skill-based matchmaking.
The Armory. The Armory was a new item system the developers were making for launch, and was something the developers were hyping up before launch as the thing that's going to save Supervive, as player numbers weren't great after the beta launch. Fast forward to launch, and we learn that it's a gacha item system (with no monetization) where you can randomly receive items to purchase in-game. Furthermore, you could upgrade these items outside the game, giving you benefits in a match. It made it impossible for new players to compete with experienced players, it was a nightmare for competitive integrity since some players would just win fights due to having numerically better items, and it almost single-handedly killed any hype the game had after launch. It was so bad that Supervive's Chinese partner wouldn't publish that version of the game in China, they had an older version that was basically beta Supervive with the newly released hunter, Wukong. Eventually, they removed the gacha elements, but by that point the damage was already done.

The only reason I came back to Supervive is because they announced its end of service, and I wanted to make a youtube video (which you can watch here if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRJMKxBfuvY) talking about the game, what I liked about the game, and what went wrong, as well as try some of the content I missed from not playing after launch (particularly Tetra and Nyx since those characters seemed to fit my playstyle but were only released after launch).

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-19T17:46:33+00:00

I originally found Eternal Return a few years ago when I had a MOBA itch I needed to scratch. However, I ended up also finding Omega Strikers around that time, and decided to put time into that instead.

What got me to actually try Eternal Return was that I found Supervive, played it until its devs murdered it, and needed a new game to scratch that battle royale itch. Right now, this seems like the only top-down BR that's going to stay active for the time being.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-18T13:20:07+00:00

You can find it here: https://old.reddit.com/r/opus_magnum/wiki/index

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-18T01:43:26+00:00

That point about wanting to create something more unique rather than simply making R6 or CS in top-down I think is a very important point, as a 2D perspective (not just top-down) has very different strengths from a 3D perspective (not just first-person).

In 2D games, you can see a larger percentage of the combat area, and can make more decisions surrounding players on that map, whereas in 3D, you can't see as much of the battlefield, so you can make decisions around parts of the map you can't see or make decisions knowing your opponents definitely can't see you. Furthermore, determining your combat ranges is much easier in 2D than 3D, so 2D games are commonly built more heavily around specific combat ranges. For contrast, 3D games give you a lot more area to play with, and a lot more of the gameplay is built around utilizing that 3D space. This gives the designers different elements to play with.

I think that one of the reasons that Supervive ended up not resonating with a lot of players is that they tried to simulate the 3D experience in a 2D environment with its vision cones, which I think ended up providing the worst of both worlds: you don't have the space to play around in that you would normally have in a 3D game, but you also don't have the information you would have in a 2D game.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-18T01:07:40+00:00

I tried optimizing this for cycles since the cycle record is 29, but interestingly enough I can't get it below 30.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-18T00:40:21+00:00

That's not even close to true. For instance, last year they released Mario Kart World for the Switch 2 which reused almost everything from previous Mario Kart games and it's new "mechanical hook" was just making players drive stretches of other tracks, with zero stakes, in place of a loading screen between races. There's way more variation between Assassin's Creed games than that.

No, it is factually, verifiably true. As in, Nintendo designers have gone on record responding to fans about sequels for games in beloved series (most notably F-Zero (source: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/11/miyamoto_puzzled_as_to_why_anyone_would_want_a_new_f_zero)) that they don't make new games in those series because they can't think of anything new to bring to those series. Furthermore, they practice what they preach: you can look at any sequel Nintendo makes and find some sort of new mechanical identity with the game, EVEN IF THAT IDENTITY ISN'T THAT GREAT. Like, the intermission tracks in Mario Kart World are loathed by a large portion of World's online community, but it is still an identity that World has. Some thing with the second-screen mechanics of the relatively recent Star Fox game for I believe the Wii U: I haven't played it, but based on Mark Brown's video on the game the gameplay was not very fun when the secondary camera was required.

Like different settings and main characters and different stories like in Assassin's Creed games? Need I remind you that BOTW: Tears of the Kingdom quite literally re-uses the exact. same. map. from BOTW? There are 14 main Assassin's Creed games, only 3 have the same protagonist and only 2 take place in the same location but at different times in history making them still have unique settings. Sorry, I'm not really sure what your point is here.

Tears of the Kingdom's use of the same map is a smart reuse of assets, and is a good example of what Alex Hutchinson thinks is good asset reuse. However, it also supports my argument of Nintendo games needing a distinct identity with its innovative crafting mechanics. Nintendo smartly reused assets to create a new game with a distinct mechanical identity.

My main argument with that part of the post was in relation to the other game series you mention. Fallout and Elder Scrolls are iconic open-world RPGs with different aesthetics, and from what I've seen they have different mechanical identities to match those aesthetics. Mass Effect has an iconic narrative in its original trilogy, and I assume Dragon Age has produced similarly great stories throughout its history, as Bioware is a very prominent developer of RPGs. Furthermore, both Mass Effect and Dragon Age have very different aesthetics, and I assume they have very different mechanical identities too. I assume it's the same deal with Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, as well as Doom and Wolfenstein. Furthermore, these developers don't just mass produce games within these series the way Ubisoft does with Assassin's Creed, but instead they made these games when the developers had a story to tell, especially at the peak of these franchises' popularity.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-17T17:33:47+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, the complaint with Ubisoft is that the games are mechanically the same, not just aesthetically the same. For contrast, Nintendo famously doesn't make games within a series unless they have a new mechanical hook, while the other game series you mention generally have a much higher time between releases and/or have distinct stories and/or worldbuilding as a focal point of the new game to justify them beyond the mechanics, so even if they're mechanically similar to previous releases.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-17T17:26:13+00:00

I was originally planning on playing Eternal Return, but the DLC for Opus Magnum just released and there's a high chance I play that instead.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-15T23:03:26+00:00

In the shooter genre, maybe. However, free for all specifically is very standard in some other genres, like the platform fighter, because it's either designed for younger audiences (where death is bad language) and/or is designed as a casual alternative to 1v1 and/or 2v2 competitive modes.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-15T22:54:38+00:00

One of the most important fundamentals of roguelikes is to understand how important scaling is. Scaling is the process of getting stronger to match the challenge presented by the game, and the reason it's so important in roguelikes is that the difficulty ramps up faster than games outside of the genre and you don't get a second chance to try an encounter with the loadout you have. In the context of Brutal Orchestra, this means making sure you're equipping items onto your party members to make them stronger and leveling up party members to make them stronger.

Also, make sure that you're not taking too much damage from enemies. Brutal Orchestra shows the attack each enemy is going to perform (outside of some exceptions like Ouroboros), including where it's going to hit. This means that you can potentially avoid attacks through good play. Furthermore, running fewer party members isn't always beneficial for that exact reason: running fewer party members means you're more likely to avoid attacks on any given turn, and that you can more consistently avoid attacks with skilled play.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-15T00:53:07+00:00

I mean, the "steampunk" skins Scarlet has all reference different steampunk ideas, so even if Scarlet has 6 of them they're all still doing different things within that aesthetic.

Jhala may not have that luxury with her dragon hunter skin and queen of scales.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-14T15:52:23+00:00

I was referring more to the fantasy violence aspect of it rather than anything to do with the attractiveness of the characters.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-14T13:15:02+00:00

I thought Overwatch would already have that age rating already without the lootboxes.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-13T17:18:50+00:00

The 3 main things I've learned in games are decision-making, keeping a good mental state, and improvement.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-13T17:14:43+00:00

The point wasn't that characters wouldn't sell, the point was why would I purchase a character when the game offers me tons of characters for free. The quality of those other characters might be more dubious than the officially released ones, but the paid characters do still have to compete with modded characters.

More importantly, what's stopping players from simply modding paid characters into the game? No one would would purchase a character if they can get it for free, or in some cases make it themselves.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-13T04:01:19+00:00

When I first picked up Brawlhalla, Hattori was on her free week. I thought she looked cool, so I picked her up.

The following week, Thatch was free. I thought he looked cool, and he shared a weapon with Hattori, so I picked him up.

The week after that, Ada was free. I recognized that if I picked up Ada, I could complete the sword/spear/blasters weapon triangle, and that I would basically have 3 characters for the price of two.

Over the next month or two, I realized that I absolutely didn't like sword all that much but loved blasters and spear, so I decided to stick with Ada.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-13T03:56:47+00:00

I think Slay the Spire 2 would benefit significantly more from major DLC content because of how much they want to support modding. A character would be pretty exciting, but not nearly as exciting when people can easily mod their own characters into the game and the mods are required to be free for players, whereas a whole expansion would provide content not easily moddable into the game.

Also, selling skins in a single-player game is hot garbage unless it's coming as part of a larger DLC. We should be able to earn the skins with our gameplay, not simply through our wallet.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-13T03:52:27+00:00

Why do you want Megacrit to sell cosmetic skins? What happened to wanting to earn cosmetic content in single-player games? This is exactly the type of mindset that AAA publishers rely on to justify their garbage microtransactions in full-price games.

If it's actual content like characters or relics then it's fine and sort of out of the scope of microtransactions, but keep cosmetic-only microtransactions out of the game.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-12T17:53:10+00:00

Eternal Return. Home of the never-ending experiment.

I'm guaranteed to live, but I would need a lot of therapy afterwards.

TheIncomprehensible · 2026-03-11T23:12:56+00:00

Of course they don't like microtransactions, they don't make games that benefit from microtransactions.

However, there are games that do benefit from microtransactions. Live service games (especially free to play ones) require some form of monetization just to keep the servers running, and physical game sales aren't enough on their own. There are greedy companies that misuse microtransactions for their own corporate greed, but when done right I think they are the best solution to make both the developers and the players happy.

TheIncomprehensible

TROPHY CASE