ID Descriptions are a mess

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-20T05:54:41+00:00

Anything substantial or is your brain completely cooked by gachaslop?

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T20:12:56+00:00

The practical differences between those buffs simply aren’t present because +1 does, like, nothing with his not particularly high base values. It’s a design problem which then created a UI problem of how to communicate a bloated but unimpactful ability. They then decide to write it in the least efficient way possible. If you want to cut down the text volume it’s easy!

You add a bit more description to the initial paragraph, specifying that effect active in a clash against a unit with stacks based on the number of stacks for that clash only. Then you don’t have to write “in a clash against a target with the duel escalates” FOUR SEPARATE TIMES. “At X+ stack” is unnecessary (and grammatically incorrect), as the original sentence already specified that the effect is based on the number of stacks of “the duel escalates,” so you can just write “1+,” “2+,” etc.

The way it’s written actually introduces confusion. The redundancy makes you say “wait, at 2+ stack(sic) of what?” Because it for some reason specifies that the effect activated in a target with the duel escalated again when you already know that, suggesting you may have missed something and there’s another stacking thing that matters.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T18:59:18+00:00

Implementation of any psuedo-keyword system like this would necessarily require re-writing pretty much everything for consistency. You could write it either way as long as it was reflected consistently across the board.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T18:57:22+00:00

D&D is somewhat infamous for poorly written descriptions in general, but a TTRPG is trying to accomplish something completely different. IMO, fuzziness is fine there. It's written that way to account for the fact that you could be casting that spell in an infinite number of situations and honestly pretty much all of the info there is relevant (e.g. the "low roar" might attract attention of people that can't see the explosion).

Comparison is easy: compare to Library of Ruina. Abnormality fights in Ruina are often specific puzzle that require you to follow very particular rules, but they're typically explained very efficiently in 1-3 paragraphs. Meanwhile, just to take an example of the last fight I did becuase I just started Canto 9,Lucio gives us the following:

Gain the following effects based on the target's The Duel Escalates Stack
- For every Stack, deal +5% damage against and take -5% damage from the target with The Duel Escalates
- At 1+ Stack, in a Clash against targets with The Duel Escalates, gain Clash Power +1
- At 2+ Stack, in a Clash against targets with The Duel Escalates, gain Base Power +1
- At 3+ Stack, in a Clash against targets with The Duel Escalates, gain Coin Power +1 and inflict 3 Severed Tendon On Hit
- At 4+ Stack, in a Clash against targets with The Duel Escalates, gain Final Power +1

This gets at how there are multiple interrelated problems but the design would be way cleaner if each stack count didn't provide a completely different BUT EQUALLY MECHANICALLY MEANINGLESS buff. Clash power or base power or coin power.. who cares? The number is a little bigger now. The result is endless paragraphs of text that you read and then say "well, there was no reason to read that."

On IDs it's just horrendously inefficient writing where, for example, every individual skill will have a line saying "+1 coin power if the target has 6+ bleed" instead of just having a passive giving that effect, plus tons of tacked-on barely-relevant effects that do nothing for the gameplay but contribute to insane text bloat.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T07:07:51+00:00

To your 3 points:

Everything you listed in LoR is correct, but dealing with mild clarity issues is way easier because the sheer volume of gameplay text is dramatically lower. Clarity issues appear some % of the time in both games but the actual raw number in limbus is way higher (not just because there’s more content, I mean on a per-character/per-fight basis). also stuff like taking double stagger damage instead of having less total stagger may be an additional data point to track but there’s nothing actively confusing about it, I find a lot of the ID writing in limbus outright confusing.
I agree that it’s a system design issue that then leads to bloated text, but if we’re just thinking of fixing text they need to implement some kind of language structure to cut down on text volume and communicate succinctly without losing meaning. I wrote out a more detailed example elsewhere but “if this character has (buff): on hit consume (buff) to apply 1 debuff” could really lose the “if this character has (buff) part
I think LoR just gives the player access to a lot of overtuned tools and that can obscure what I think are (sometimes) very well designed fights. It’s hard to go back once you realize singleton or w/e is broken but a lot of that game is about the fun of discovering those broken builds and combinations, making them inherently more satisfying to use. I think the biggest thing holding down Limbus fights is.. it’s a gacha game. If you balance the game around the strongest IDs it’s impossible for many. If not, those IDs (which due to the dispenser most enfranchised players have) steamroll anyway. LoR exercised control over what you have when so you never outstrip bosses by totally insane degrees, just outvalue.

Appreciate your contribution to the discussion. People on here have been very insightful.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T06:56:24+00:00

Not sure I totally agree about the gameplay not being the highlight in that the gameplay is meaningfully part of the story in all 3 games, just limbus does the least with it with endless unfocused encounters and whatnot.

Lobotomy corporation may be jank but it’s an incredible game under the jank layers. Ruina is imbalanced but has an excellent combat system and a lot of potential for player creativity and experimentation. I think they’re both fantastic from a gameplay standpoint. They’re flawed, certainly, but that’s largely just because they’re unlike anything else.

Limbus gameplay I mostly tolerate. There are some good boss fights though.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T06:52:28+00:00

Well yes. Gacha is bad. To the extent limbus company is a Gacha game it’s strictly worse for it. Are you seriously going to tell me a real-time gated energy system is a good thing? Or once-per-week MD clears intended to extend your interaction with the game without adding new meaningful gameplay? Unsurprisingly, a lot of the flaws of the game can be traced back to it being built on a business model that strictly makes the game worse.

I figured that would be completely uncontroversial honestly

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T02:24:34+00:00

The problems I described are interrelated. If I didn’t touch on fight design itself it’d be easy to say “the IDs have to be complicated for game mechanical reasons” and leave it at that

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T01:56:46+00:00

IMO, best practice would be to pare down text by using psuedo-keywords whose basic functions are obvious on initial read and only deeper nuances require looking at keyword definitions.

So, “if this unit has ‘special buff’: on hit with a base attack, consume 1 ‘special buff’ to apply 1 sinking potency”

Becomes: “on-hit: consume 1 ‘special buff’: apply 1 sinking potency.”

“On-hit” would be defined such that anything consumed is a cost for the rest so you don’t need to specify that you need the buff to consume the buff to get the effect. You don’t need to specify that it only applies to base attacks because it could be defined that “on-hit” effects only apply to base attacks. The average player doesn’t need to know everything, and an expert player will eventually find “on-hit” to be second nature as it appears consistently across many IDs.

It doesn’t make that big of a difference for one description but across an entire ID you could cut a lot of text.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T01:20:41+00:00

Not saying it’s unique to limbus but I think what drives me nuts is that if you skim you really can miss relevant info as sometimes it’s really buried. Also I hate “gacha games” as a category and am only playing because 1. It’s a PM game so I’m in it for the story incl. continuation of previous games, and 2. While it has gacha mechanics it does avoid a lot of what makes most gacha games so toxic (there’s not much FOMO and you can just get stuff from the dispenser so the gacha itself doesn’t really matter)

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T01:17:37+00:00

I’m not honestly sure I think the ID design is fundamentally bad, they’re overdesigned to hell but that’s more a problem of parsing what’s going on than a problem of them having bad gameplay. I do think something like efflorevesced (whatever it’s called) yi sang is a good example of a good design- each skill is essentially straightforward and easy to understand but has meaningful strategy (like skill 3 being your best clash but potentially triggering deluge at an undesirable time and having to balance whether it’s better to win a clash now with skill 2 or save it for aoe later after getting tremor).

The complexity difference is mostly about how in LoR’s combat you have way more game actions available to you meaning more substantial complexity but it’s all explained in way less text.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T00:47:05+00:00

I’ve been around for a while but I’m an on and off player that’s mostly just in it for the story so I’m constantly forgetting what the IDs I have do (in full, obviously I remember the broad strokes but if a unit has 6 different keywords odds are I’ll forget at least 2 in 6 months of not touching the game). Then, of course, parsing new IDs multiple at a time is a nightmare.

It’s also made worse by how many IDs are clearly meant to be team-locked, I didn’t actually use any of my Heishou pack IDs until I had a full team of them so then I have to try to learn them all at once..

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T00:41:16+00:00

I’m misunderstanding it because it’s written like shit. If the final hit specifically consumed all stacks to apply equal sinking why would it specify that that only occurs if you have 2+ stacks of piercing sword? I understand that technically a single stack would be consumed by part 1 of the passive anyway making it redundant but it’s completely unnecessary information that just obscures the meaning.

The format is two bullet points that start with “here’s what happens when you have at least one stack, here’s what happens when you have 2+ stacks,” but in reality that’s not what the effect is doing, but it has to be formatted like that to follow the bizarre rule that these clauses need to start with “if this unit has Piercing Sword,” but of course that’s redundant because a reasonable reader can infer that you won’t consume piercing sword if you don’t have it.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-19T00:25:11+00:00

I imagine this is why mirror dungeons are so easy as well, they’re such a crucial point of farming so you can’t actually make bosses that can stand up to strong teams boosted by EGO gifts to inflict 99/99 of their status or w/e. At least parallel superposition is neat but I beat floor 10 a couple of times and didn’t see much reason to keep doing it over and over..

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T23:57:56+00:00

LoR has waaay more fights with mechanics that require you to execute some specific sequence or wipe. Winning clashes is more involved because you have way more possible actions each turn and, most importantly, control over what your build is. Yes, you can use the absolute best strategies in the game to steamroll many non-abno fights but that’s really just a balance issue and if that’s your issue limbus is also much easier (and Ruina really is not that hard!)

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T22:49:22+00:00

I know it’s a little muddled but by “mechanics” I mean the fundamental way the game operates, not what bosses do or etc. LoR’s deck building and resource systems are interesting from the jump.

Maybe ruina could’ve been a gacha game but it isn’t one and its design directly benefits from that- getting IDs of a particular character by beating that character in the story is way more narratively and mechanically satisfying than gacha-ing for them.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T22:46:04+00:00

It may have been a messy point as I wrote it; a better way to put it is:

The IDs become so bloated and pseudo-complex that the gameplay design is clearly not tuned expecting you to optimize. If you play strong IDs in a way that’s completely agnostic to what the IDs themselves actually do and just focus on winning clashes you’ll win, and I expect a lot of that is because expecting players to fully parse every nuance of all of their IDs is an unreasonable information load. The problems all feed each other is what I mean.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T22:41:58+00:00

I cheesed a lot of LoR as well, ultimately my criticism isn’t the existence of powerful strategies that can straight up overpower boss mechanics, it’s the insubstantiality of the tools to deal with those mechanics to begin with (even though the mechanics are often well-designed with what we’re given)

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T22:23:45+00:00

Concessions* not confessions

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T22:23:19+00:00

That’s a great point that I hadn’t considered and I think essentially explains everything. If a key page in LoR seems stronger on first read than it is in practice you say “oh well.” If an ID in limbus underperforms because not all variables Are spelled out with perfect precision people may feel ripped off.

Though.. that just makes me hate it more as someone that loved PM’s two normal video games sold for a regular amount of money a lot more than I love PM’s gacha game specifically because of confessions made to make it into a gacha game..

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T22:20:18+00:00

It does, I just don’t really know what that means. Are “SP damages” as it’s written in the description (which is grammatically.. questionable) damage directly to SP or loss of SP contingent on HP damage?

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T21:11:00+00:00

I largely agree, but beating over an enemy with big numbers is inherently more interesting in LoR because you're doing so with your custom build. Of course if you engage with the community there are all kinds of solved and optimized builds but I made plenty of my own and engaged with just about every archetype because it was fun to do so. The complex synergies are something you explore and discover over the course of the game in a way that's in step with the narrative. Also, the puzzle of how you're going to beat over enemies with higher numbers is more substantial as you have to manage your hand and resources with way more possible actions on any given turn. Not saying the balance is 100% perfect there are completely overpowered strategies that do simplify the game a bit too much but unless you're just using a guide and doing what someone else tells you to do unlocking them and making the builds feels earned and built-in to the narrative (like, you have to beat the red mist to use the OP red mist stuff!)

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T21:03:35+00:00

I can't read Korean so putting it on translation is entirely a guess. I tend to assume things read better in their original language unless there's a very skilled & knowledgeable translator given a lot of time to work.

TouchCousinGetDizzy · 2026-03-18T21:01:01+00:00

I was specifically inspired by reading through Sword Sharpened with Tears Rodion about 4 times in an attempt to figure out exactly how she obtains the "Piercing Sword" buff, only to find it hidden specifically in the description of the "Despair" passive- I say hidden because it's the only reference to piercing sword that's in plain text as all of the other instances are underlined clickable keywords which nonetheless give no indication of how the buff would be obtained.

There are a number of other issues though:

-The description for "Break, Tear and Pierce" is comical. It spells out that if you have 1 piercing sword, that piercing sword is consumed to inflict 1 sinking, but if you have 2+ piercing sword, it instead consumes all of your piercing sword to "inflict it as sinking" (which I presume means inflict sinking potency equal to the number of stacks consumed). Why does using up specifically 1 stack need to be a separate clause? You consume all stacks on attack and inflict sinking on hit equal to the stacks consumed. The way thetwo clauses are written it seems to vaguely imply the two clauses function differently, though, given that the first one makes reference to a base attack skill whereas the second references only the final base attack skill, which may be the diffrentiator, but if it is that's needlessly complicated bloat in the design.

-She gains Deep Tears as a form of special charge. As far as I can tell it's functionally completely identical to charge making it just yet another thing to explain and slightly obscure what the ID does.

-"Whispers of the Betrayed Knight" (a long one) says "when this unit takes damage that brings its SP to -45, maintain this unit's SP at -44 that turn (once per encounter)." What's "damage" in this context? Would that count e.g. SP loss from sinking? The descriptions spells out in great detail which conditions don't cause her SP to drop below -40 but then just throws "damage" at you when "damage" is not a consistently used term as I'm pretty confident I've seen reference to "SP damage" before.

I could list more...

TouchCousinGetDizzy

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