Neocore, please stop "steamlining"

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I know it's quite a late comment for a 6 year old game, but bear with me - you'll find it applies today, and always will.

Please Neocore, when surveying feedback and updating your games, make a point of sticking to your guns and avoiding "streamlining" (the word behind the decline of games since circa 2005).

Note that this is not limited to Inquisitor. For example, Legion IX had a colder reception for the perceived streamlined / simplified systems, after the excellent and uncompromising Knight's Tale. Also, note that you company is not an egregious example of the practice - you have consistently delivered complex mechanics, fun concepts and hardcore design with your games.

As regard to Inquisitor Martyr, I feel most of the decisions motivated by a desire to streamline have resulted in adjustments that are either boring, hasty, ill thought out, or even outright broken/buggy. Some examples:

  • Tech Adept "revamp": I was salivating about finding and testing different weapon types with varied enchants for my Tech Adept Constructs, but to address some complaints (and to "simplify itemization", in you words) instead of tweaking what you had, you axed the original, correct system and substituted it with the abismal "Tech Fragment" one. Now Tech Adept is the only class requiring an extreme grind and having completely inflexible progression (once you invest in a weapon type, you are set on a build forever). The fun item hunt built into the class is gone. In one stroke, Tech Adept went from being one of my favorites, to the last class I'd play. See the following Steam post for details: New Tech Fragment system greatly hinders Tech-Adept.
  • Mission tweaks/streamlining: some mission types have received a pass to address some player complaining it was "too slow" or required more than one neuron firing to play. The revamped mission types have become a bit worse than the originals.
    • Datahunt / Secure the Artifact. The original mechanic of holding the terminal was nice and took no time at all, regardless of complaints. If you were confident, you could try to hold the button and try to fight all the waves (a nice incentive to using trap style skills - mines, tarantula turrets, etc.), or be prudent and fight them one by one. Now, to make things faster/simpler (why?), that element is gone, you only get one or two wimpy enemy waves, and the mission voiceovers are bugged - the dialogue prompts from both your character (e.g., "Id rather have my Tech Priest dealing with this") and Metrodora Thelema ("Accessing hostile network...") are cut-up immediately.
    • Sabotage. I loved the fact that you needed to check the shape of the object you wished to destroy; a rare moment where a ARPG required to pay a modicum of attention to the environment. Now you have a quest maker to your goal and it's just yet another Purge mission with different description.
  • Psyker death explosions / other environmental perils. While I get that the original damage was bugged / out of whack, now you've removed them entirely for regular Rogue  Psyker enemies. I miss them, as I found them a nice in-world detail and a good way to encourage the player to pay attention. The same could be said to environmental interactions / traps that were softened or removed entirely (environmental poison, mines, etc.).
  • Priority Assignments. I don't know if this was intentional (i.e., you "gave up" on them) or not, but now they don't work at all.
    • The Debriefing screen when finishing an Assignment is gone. That means that gone are the rewards and the whole point of the CYOA (maximizing Sucess Level while minimizing Collateral Damage). You should simply have updated the rewards to match competing activities (Ordo Missions / Void Crusades), with an emphasis on Glory rewards.
    • They only grant Purge type missions, regardless of conflicting descriptions that point to different mision types (Datahunt, Hunt, etc.), which is beyond boring. I believe the gave you the right mission types before.
  • Combat 2.0. While it was well received by the community, I think the original pre-2.0 concept of the game (a sort of "real-time tactics") was much more interesting, and explains my enduring interest in it. The design favored deliberate tactical action - e.g., cracking the "nut" of an enemy position with an approach appropriate to your character (intelligent target priotizing, use of cover, suppression removal for stuns and debuffs, use of traps, timely use of shielding skills, etc.). Now there's a zillion bullets flying a second and stats, not tactics, reign supreme. Many of the most interesting mechanics became abandoned/underutilized as a result (mainly, suppression/debuff interactions, cover, positioning and recon). That said, enough remains of the complex mechanics and attention to detail that the game has its own flavor. Believe me when I say that its enduring appeal owes much to the original design principles, NOT the more Diablo-like approach. I've elaborated a bit on that on my post: Before 2.0... and beyond (some thoughts on gameplay).

If it was up to me, if "streamlining" was perceived as unavoidable (though it rarely is), I'd always keep the original design as an option, for instance in a "Hardcore" mode. See this concept used to great effect in Kingdom Come Deliverance (playing it on Hardcore is an outstanding experience granting the uncompromising vision of the developer, and contributed much to the positive reception the game got).

My dream would be to have some sort of WH40K Inquisitor Martyr Director's Cut, including an entirely optional "Hardcore Mode" that brought back some of the slower methodical pace and uncompromising gameplay elements (see Tactical Mode on my old thread Suggestions - from small tweaks to large features).

In the unlikely case someone is reading this, maybe I'll make an updated suggestion list for such an edition (e.g., Steam Deck support, GOG release, Buff and Combat State Legend, buff tooltip hover on pause, new enchants and crafting recipes, new Archeotech Shards and Psalm Doctrines, class rebalance, bring Warzone to Lvl 100, activity reward rebalancing among Story Investigations / Priority Assignments / Planetary Influence / Void Crusade / ..., and more).

This post was edited 15 days ago by Chacumbele
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Neocore, please stop "steamlining"
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