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Risk of rain artifacts12/17/2023 Artifacts are ultimately here to change the game in interesting ways. They’re here for you to mess around with hard challenge runs, or testing out strange item builds, or seeing how wildly busted the game becomes with double spawns for fun. These are not here to deepen the game or create more genuinely intended experiences. The intent was ultimately for these artifacts to not be part of the “core” game, but to be something interesting on the side, an element that explicitly creates interesting game states before any other considerations. In their own words: “Consider them almost like secrets or cheat codes: they make the game different. However they break the game, they decided that would be OK. In a short blog post they wrote up, they discussed their philosophy behind the artifact system for this game, which is that ultimately they decided to not balance the artifacts at their core. This is the entire point of the artifact system, really, and if you won’t take it from me, take it from the developers themselves. And if you stack multiple artifacts, well, you’re playing with fire at that point. Well, yeah! This isn’t some gotcha situation where things sound unbalanced but the game finds a way: these artifacts well and truly do have a serious impact on the balance of a run, some of them utterly trivializing the entire difficulty, and some making the game borderline impossible. Don’t these sound a little… unbalanced? Command sounds like it’d easily trivialize the entire point of a roguelike, Honor makes the game sound impossible, Vengeance ramps the difficulty up and gives you not much reward. Even the Artifact of Vengeance, which makes a super powerful clone of your current character invade as a boss on occasion. Or the Artifact of Honor, which makes every single enemy the super powerful elite type. Take the Command artifact, which lets you choose every single item you get from every chest drop. Because these artifacts don’t just change the game like I mentioned, but dramatically shift the balance of it all. So, a good game gets a great update, we’re all happy and continue playing away, but that’s not the end of the story. This stuff is interesting and really adds to how much you can play the game, not just limiting you to one “mode” of play but giving you dramatically more ways to go for a run. The artifact of Sacrifice makes rushing the teleporter almost needed, while the Swarm artifact means you need to shoot for a lot more AOE items over single target items. It’s really an interesting and great way to extend game time and just to play around with the game mechanics. That sort of stuff, the kind of things that make you have to really rethink your gameplan and change how you’re going to play from square one. Stuff like your health being cut by 90% but your attack is buffed dramatically, or chests no longer spawning but enemies dropping items on kill now. You unlock new artifacts that radically change basic mechanics of the game in a lot of ways. If you’re not into Risk of Rain 2, here’s how this new update works. Oh, and they demolish any idea of game balance with reckless abandon, and I absolutely love that. These artifacts are interesting, make you play the game in really new and strange ways. I wouldn’t be typing this out if there wasn’t something new and neat about the game to discuss, and there is indeed, as about a month ago, the new artifacts update released, introducing artifacts that radically change the game’s state. I write a lot about Risk of Rain 2, probably too much, quite frankly! But it just keeps impressing me with admirable game design philosophy and solid, enjoyable updates, to the point where I’d feel bad if I wasn’t singing its praises.
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