Best Decisions
Dmitry Kolpakov: I guess the best decision was to spice up the game with some science fiction elements like Panzerkleins (combat exo-skeleton armor), the Thor’s Hammer organization and energy weapons. It’s a bit like an alternative history, and nobody can say with absolute certainty that such ideas were non-existent during WWII. Mysteries and uber-weapons always draw lots of attention. Besides, there are many authentic games about this war, like our own real-time strategy game, Blitzkriegs. Just making a special forces squad sim seemed a bit boring to us. Therefore, we couldn’t resist the urge to carry out some experiments. :)
Dmitry Zakharov: Still further, Panzerkleins and uber-weapons helped invigorate the game. They gave significant firepower and let players enjoy the destructible nature of Silent Storm’s environments to the fullest. Aviation machine guns and automatic cannons were way too heavy for the characters
Ummm…the majority of your fanbase, including a lot of people who thought S2 was otherwise a great game, think that the PKs totally hosed the game.
Goddamn, clue incoming, or what. Or just another developer/designer blinded by their own “cleverness”?
–scharmers
EDIT: Quote shameless ganked from an IGN interview.
Translation: We didn’t have the time to make vehicles work properly, so we had to come up with something that could mount heavy weaponry yet not be too different than a normal soldier.
As someone who is very into tactical games like Silent Storm, but is totally, utterly sick of World War 2, the sci-fi elements seem like a welcome change of pace.
Now, of course, the fact that the PanzerKleins have serious balance issues is another matter entirely. That needs to be dealt with, but I’ve got no issue with the basic idea.
I do constantly find myself on the otherside of the fence on this issue, same thing happened with BF1942, whole masses of people foaming at the mouth about realism problems.
Maybe you are just talking about the game balance problems, but I think it’d be possible to keep the game balanced while pulling in sci-fi elements. They just didn’t do a great job at it.
I’m not adverse to the “unrealistic” Weird War elements … just the fact that the game itself is trashed by this total 180-degree spin on game balance. The game just isn’t FUN anymore with the PKs. It’s entirely possible to introduce Battlesuits into a primarily slug-thrower/HE environment and still make them a combination of asskick and “wait a minute…I ain’t THAT invulnerable”, like Fallout.
In general, I dont like genre mixing. I always hated it when lasers showed up at the end of a MM or Wizardry game.
The PKs in Silent Storm gave me the same feeling, except worse because they are ever more overpowering than the sci-fi tech elements in other games that have done the same thing. Bleah.
I’ve only fooled around with the SS demo, but from what I saw — the overdrawn characters, the comments and wisecracks keyed to game events — the game was closely imitating Jagged Alliance 2 in style as well as form.
From that I extrapolate that the real reason for the sci-fi elements popping up midway through SS is that sci-fi elements pop up midway through JA2. A WWII JA2 could have been very serious, it’s true, but ultimately these guys were offering a 3D JA3, not a 3D Advanced Squad Leader.
Oddball’s Mod v1.2 – removes sci-fi weapons
PK Mod 1.0 – weakens PK armor
Neither of these sounds like it does the job yet, but from the looks of things over at the game forums, I think someone will pull together a more balanced mod sooner or later.
Thanks for the links, malphigian! I’ll be curious to give those a spin. That PK Mod 1.0 seems to have the right idea.
And just to echo a few of you: the PK’s aren’t a problem, in theory. It’s how they’re abruptly folded into the game that’s the problem. X-Com was damn near a work of genius the way it gradually ratcheted up the level of lethality – and even futzed with the paradigm with psionics – without breaking its own balance.
That Nival wasn’t able to do this doesn’t mean they’re ideas are bad. It just shows that they don’t have the appreciation for the finer points of gameplay that the Gollup brothers had.
It’s interesting that when DICE did this sort of thing with their Secret Weapons of WWII expansion for BF1942, they didn’t even bother trying to make the sci-fi-ish stuff live side-by-side with what they’d already balanced. They just built whole new levels.
It irks me that Nival couldn’t be bothered to offer the player the option to play a “realistic” version of the game, a la Jagged Alliance 2 (where you can disable the ridiculous sci-fi aspect).
I bet I wouldn’t have even batted an eye at the PKs had Silent Storm not been billed as a WWII-themed game. I might have been able to swallow a bit of “what-if” content had it been reasonable, but thinking that game players only want high-powered sci-fi weapons is an insult to game players. I mean, why bother with strategy when you can storm around in a mech?
Then again, we are not the gaming mainstream. Maybe adding this stuff really did make the game sell better, but somehow I kind of doubt it.
