I think we’re digging into some really deeper questions here about player motivation and (I have to say) some of the arrogance of modern game design surrounding it. This isn’t to say that gamers can’t be their own worst enemies if they lack the ability to critically evaluate themselves and what they actually find fun, nor that there isn’t a technical cost to be paid for giving them a totally customizable experience here, either. I just find that games have increasingly gone out their way to shackle you into doing things the way a particular designer wants - and I’m not talking about moment-to-moment gameplay decisions here.
In all honestly, I blame achievements (or at least the mentality behind/resulting from them) for this.
All I can say is I’ve found fun in the farthest reaches of both ends of the scale in question here; ultra-challenging-one-false-move-and-you’re-toast stressfests vs cheesy zero-skill-giggling-godmode-killathons. I just wish more games did a better job of catering to both. I’d have no issue with the game gently nudging you that perhaps you should/shouldn’t play it in a certain way - so long as you get the choice.
So, regarding ‘pre-determined diceroll’ mechanic; yeah, I know that it’s still possible to work around these, but I think you’re missing a couple of key factors here by broadening the scope to other games. For example, your range of choices in a single turn here is magnitudes smaller than one in, say, XCOM. I also think the severity of a random roll not doing what you want is also smaller overall - consider that there’s no ‘chance to hit’ going on, though, yes, things may hit the ‘wrong’ target. I also still feel there’s just less randomness here as a general rule overall; in MT once your monsters are down they’re pretty much constants, for example. Plus you can certainly build an effective deck which shuns random effect cards and artifacts entirely.
Ultimately, I just don’t agree that undo turn for this specific case will ever really bear much fruit in any consistent sense that would effectively undermine a player’s enjoyment. Failure here is generally written over a handful of turns rather than a single bad one - with the notable exception of those times I cack-handedly drop my main damage dealer unit into the wrong spot.
Step back far enough and you’ll see that this is just what starting a new run is, effectively.
So to put my cards on the table… :) I’m doodling around with a deckbuilder design where undo is a core feature, inspired by a recent Crate & Crowbar podcast episode where they confidently made the assertion that it would be trivial to retrofit undo to Slay the Spire. Which I think is not the case, even if Tom Francis clearly knows orders of magnitude more about game design than I do. As a consequence, I’ve thought about this subject a bunch both offline, and while playing Monster Train.
Yes, a lack of undo in Monster Train is quite frustrating in at least three cases.
Misclicks, which are particularly common with overcrowded 7 monster rooms.
Easy to miss deterministic enemy effects (e.g. incant for armor, extinguish for damage), Miss one and play a card that predictably has a bad outcome that you now can’t back out of.
The combat preview is a core part of making this game playable, but you can only get a preview using the exact board state now, not a preview of “what happens if I play this card”.
The first two could be solved with a limited undo. E.g. Invisible Inc allowed you to mulligan a turn a certain number of times per mission, depending on the difficulty level. So you could recover from misclicks, you could recover from misunderstanding how the AI would react or what an enemy’s vision cone would be every now and then. But you could not brute-force through a mission. This kind of limited undo would actually fit perfectly into the game. It makes for interesting decisions if you get unlucky (damn, the ice storm did not hit the right unit; is it worth spending my last mulligan on that, or do I need to save it). It would also potentially make for interesting card, covenant and artifact designs specifically around controlling how the undo works.
But it does not solve the third case, and that’s actually the one I feel is the most painful one in Monster Train. To solve that use case, you need generic and unlimited undo, and then you run into all these design problems around allowing players to brute-force the optimal outcome from within any specific undo domain.
MT, like StS, is a game that’s basically designed to be played at beyond one’s skill limit thanks to the ascension system. If you give players the chance of gaining an edge in that kind of environment, of course a lot of them will do it no matter how boring. (There are, after all, streamers whose Slay the Spire streams will sometimes involve bringing up a spreadsheet and theorycrafting something for 15 minutes.)
I don’t think it is, since with starting a new run the odds of ever getting into the same state are infinitesimally small. Partially undoing turns, or even restarting specific missions, will converge you towards victory even with bad play. Restarting entirely won’t.
Just beat covenant 1 with Awoken. The Seraph boss is really tough. I’ve really found only one way to win with Awoken and that’s to build the boss with 100% rejuv/retaliation talent tree and then spam stacks of rejuv so you have a huge stack of it for the final boss fight. If there are other viable ways to win, I’d love to hear about them.
No, it doesn’t. It appears to be pretty rare so I don’t know what conditions trigger it. I haven’t seen it again.
I still think you’re sorta side stepping the core point that the undo mechanic is still present in both games, though it’s non-obvious (and thus, to me, merely a problem with poor UI/UX). I’m pretty sure it’ll have been relatively easy for both games to save the exact state of a round when you leave and resume it when you get back to eliminate this but the fact that they didn’t implies that ‘undo round’ was a feature they sorta wanted but weren’t confident enough to just flag to the player.
Even if it was an accidental oversight, the point is that all of these ‘mandatory ironman’ modes usually just gate people on their technical ability to usurp them, and not one of them stands up to a dedicated effort from a savvy user. Again I just feel it’s somewhat arrogant to say the game must be played in this one way with no do-overs. I already play a game like that all day every day and it fucking sucks, man. :)
I just feel that trying to crack that ‘perfect implementation’ is a fools errand, and that there’s a wisdom in just allowing players to customise their own experiences to their tastes. We can debate to the nth degree the relative merits of unlimited undo vs limited undo vs no undo, but if each maximises the enjoyment for a particular type of player, for the dev cost is it really not worth just putting in as an option up front?
Oh, I totally disagree. The only unwinnable game is the one left unplayed (silence, WOPR!). Consider those ‘gimme’ runs in these games were the perfect combo of cards and relics are thrust into your hands right outta the gate…
I still think you’re sorta side stepping the core point that the undo mechanic is still present in both games, though it’s non-obvious (and thus, to me, merely a problem with poor UI/UX). I’m pretty sure it’ll have been relatively easy for both games to save the exact state of a round when you leave and resume it when you get back to eliminate this but the fact that they didn’t implies that ‘undo round’ was a feature they sorta wanted but weren’t confident enough to just flag to the player.
Where is the undo in Slay the Spire? Asking for a friend…
Now, you didn’t hear this from me, but let’s say you were to exit to the main menu mid-battle and then resume your game…
(I suppose I should’ve made it clear I’m talking about ‘undo battle’ above rather than ‘undo turn’, but ‘undo battle’ is arguably more powerful than ‘undo turn’ even if you do restart with the same deck shuffle and random seed)
So far I’ve just been playing the first 2 factions (yea! I beat covenant 2!), first with the demons as the primary, then the other as the primary. Now I have gold cards. What benefit do they give?
If I start using the other factions, I imagine it will be harder to win at the start since I don’t have any unlocks. I imagine I should start doing that soon while I’m still playing low difficulty (now covenant 3)?
Oh, hehe, that is a bug? I experienced this too I think. When I noticed it I assumed I had mis-clicked when removing cards and removed it myself. Great to know I am not that bad.
They look cool! That is all :-)
This works in Monster Train too. If you exit mid-battle you reset to the beginning of the battle. I used this in Slay the Spire quite liberally. I did not feel at all bad about it given that a run would typically take me close to 2 hours and this let me have a do-over on the one bad combat that ended it.
See, I don’t buy that all :) I just think the didn’t want to implement saving in the middle of combat, which is a lot of work, just to fully close a loophole. The lack of a “restart this battle” UI isn’t an oversight, it’s the best way they have of signaling the design intent.
That’s the core disagreement then, and kind of the point I’ve been trying to make all along. Doing that will not maximize the enjoyment of all players. Oh, everyone would claim that they love the featur at first. But then it would make a lot of players miserable without them understanding quite why.
Everyone understands that save scumming isn’t actually an intentional game mechanic in these games. Nobody will restart the same battle 20 times to find the perfect set of moves that gives them a victory. Maybe they’ll never use it, use it when there was a bug, use it after a misclick, or use it a couple of times during a run after they feel the outcome of a battle was bullshit due to bad luck. And all of those outcomes are basically fine, none of them distort the design all that much.
That is not how a sanctioned undo option would work. To a certain (I’d argue large) segment of players it will immediately become a tool to use to the fullest possible extent when trying to win the game, not just a convenience. The game turns from whatever it’s now into a boring and grindy brute-force tree search. But because that’s the optimal way to play within the rules of the game, this is what those players would do no matter how boring it is.
I’m not saying that you have to keep that particular player segment happy at the expense of others. They’re not intrinsically any more or less deserving of getting the game they want than others. I’m just saying that there is a tradeoff: adding an undo into the framework of these existing games is not a purely positive no brainer feature. For it to be a win/win, it needs to be a part of the design from the start, and understood that it’s not just about UX but about the rules and incentives of the player.
No, the best way of signalling the design intent that you’re permanently locked in to every click you make would be to always save the latest state as and when a click occurs. We can speculate as to why that didn’t happen, of course - lack of time, unwillingness to lock the player into an unfair fail state if a bug occurred, etc. but this decision was still made at some point (and continues to be made).
But no matter how this came about, or why, I just don’t see how the implementation as-is does anything other than to segregate the playerbase into those that know about this ‘feature’ and those who do not.
I think you’re still missing what I’m getting at with making it optional. I mean, in no uncertain terms, that you should ask the player at the start of the campaign: do you want undo turn? If so, how many? Like how XCOM has ironman as an option, or how Invisible Inc. lets you configure pretty much every aspect of it (oh Klei, why can’t they all be as perfect as you?). You can literally even tell people in plain language next to the droppy-down: the design intent is that you get 1 use per battle. Or no uses. Whatever.
Basically; provide a guide to where the fun lies, but don’t dictate it. You don’t know what people have got going on. I can’t imagine how awkward it is for people with certain disabilities to play some of these things without any sorta safety net (my guess is: they don’t).
Your core argument here is everyone will pick the cheesiest option and just abuse the living daylights out of it is fundamentally flawed. If it were true, nobody would ever pick anything other than the easiest difficulty modes in any game as, arguably, hard mode is just sub-optimal play when the goal is to reach the end as quickly and unhindered as possible.
People want a challenge, have a bit more faith in them that they can define that on their own terms. Some are idiots unable to escape the morass of their own laziness, sure, but even they can learn a valuable lesson (eventually) on the dangers of cheese.
No, that’s not my core argument. I also very explicitly was not making claims about what “everybody” would do, and never talked about “options”.
You claimed that there’s no good reason to not support undo. I presented a selection of what I believe are good reasons for why that would not work in the context of this game. You’d need a very different design to make undo workable. You don’t believe that, which is of course fine. And if the above caricature is what you got out of my best attempt at explanation, there’s probably no point in continuing.
It’s a sterile discussion anyway, since neither of us is in a position to change the game :)
Well, yeah. Every discussion on an internet forum is sterile. I thought the golden rule was we don’t acknowledge that fact, lest we catch a glimpse of the abyssal void interminably awaiting us all.
Won on Covenant 2 with the Stygian Guard. I figured out they’re all about the spells so that’s what I emphasized. The holdover spell upgrade seems to be a big part of all my winning strategies so far. I used the Awoken as allies because I needed some tanks. Stygian units are really weak health-wise. So yay, 2 in a row, and now on to Covenant 3 and the Umbra which I just unlocked on that run.
As an aside, I wonder why they didn’t name this “Hell Train” instead of what they named it. Especially since it’s a … hell train. The name actually kind of put me off from paying much attention to the game at first. I’m sure they thought about naming it ‘hell train’ though. Maybe they figured that having ‘hell’ in the title would offend some people (and if so, they would probably be correct).
“Restart battle,” whether that’s accomplished by a button that says “Restart Battle” or by quitting and re-launching, is categorically not Undo.
Of course no game should allow you to Undo an action which lets you keep information that you gained by performing and then Undoing an action, UNLESS that is part of the design, a la Invisible Inc. But it’s not part of Slay the Spire’s design. It’s fine to wish Slay the Spire was a different game. But it’s not a different game. It’s the game it is.
The fact that games might “let you” back up a save file, save-scum, or quit and restart a battle, does not mean that the designers intended that to be part of the gameplay. Nor does the fact that games might “let you” run the same seed on five different computers all next to each other so that you can try different strategies on the first four and then apply the knowledge you gained to the run you have going on the fifth. Stuff you do “outside” the game is, obviously, not part of the game.
This is a minor quibble and I’m still enjoying the game a lot. I don’t like how the score is calculated. In principle I like how you get the bonus for what floor you stop the boss on, but in practice sometimes you don’t have a choice but to play you strong set of monsters on the top floor - like in waiting out rage on enemies to dissipate.
