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Happy Friday everyone. I always enjoy them as it's an entire day I get to spend making uninterrupted progress on the game. I'm hoping to be able to start showing you some previews of its fruits soon.
Those of you following the F95 thread might have seen that there's been some discussion there over the last day or so about the combat system. For anyone that hasn't, the short version is this: combat is the area of this game I'm least interested in, and it shows. However, with this update containing yet more wrestling, and the third Jess fight also on the horizon, it's something I need to get locked down pretty fast.
The common themes of the discussion so far have been:
- The Poppy and Jess 2 fights are too hard (with also a few complaints about the 3x bad girl fight in Down with the Bad Girls.)
- RNG is too great a factor in combat
- The best tactic is a cheesy grapple/guard-spam with little skill required
- The harder fights create the need to grind for items, which is not something I want players to have to do.
I have tried to lean into some of these shortcomings in the wrestling fights, where the goal is to land a grapple then rip your opponent's clothes, creating a clear two-step process for winning. I personally think it works better, though I've not really heard anyone else's opinion either way.
So, now the question becomes do I change the schoolyard fights to make them more like the wrestling matches, giving Missy the ability to do something special when grappling, or keep some clear water between the two and instead tweak the schoolyard fights to make them less dependent on a random roll?
Perhaps the answer is to make grappling more expensive in terms of TP but near-guaranteed to land, or even to reduce its scope, perhaps taking away some of the poison damage? Maybe some of the other skills just need to be a little stronger to bring them up to its level? Perhaps the solution is something else entirely.
If you have thoughts on this, please do share them with me, here or on Discord, but for now, the first step is gauging your opinion on where we are now. Please vote for as many of the below options as you feel are relevant, and feel free to elaborate on your choices in the comments.
Please note that choosing to make school fights more like wrestling matches will not necessarily result in gaining the ability to rip your opponent's clothes off. I'm not saying never, but that isn't currently the plan. I'm asking if you like the mechanics of the two-step system.
Have a great weekend!
Trinian