Ok, here we go - the systems working against eachother post! This is just from me playing the game and looking at it from my game design experience and study. I'm bound to miss a lot, since this game has SO many weird little problems in it, but I'll try to cover my biggest complaints!
As an ending for this massive post, I want to say that most of what lead up to all of this certainly was not under Monolithsoft's control. As someone who studies game design and worked on a game before, it is very obvious to me that Monolithsoft set out to spend years on a massive sprawling epic masterpiece that would make Xenoblade 1 look tiny by comparison, but then they were pushed to rush out a product as fast as possible to match the Switch's launch year. And I'm not really blaming Nintendo for this either, they REALLY needed the switch to succeed and they needed an awesome RPG for it and knew who to go to, and I'm sure they very very handsomely rewarded Monolithsoft accordingly. But conflicting directions create a conflicted game. I'm already starting to put together the original vision, where the concepts of Colony 6 are spread out into the entire game! Bits and pieces of it are everywhere! It's a shame that that never came to past.
That said... they were rushed, so they focused on the narrative and just dealt with the mechanics as they could then shipped. Honestly, if they had to make something subpar and rushed, that was the right choice. In RPGs players come for narrative, and narrative is the driving force of the genre. If the narrative sucks, to the audience the whole game would be bad, but if some mechanics are bad, to the audience only those specific mechanics are bad. Plus you can't patch the narrative, but you can patch the mechanics to some degree. I really hope there are some patches coming that will smooth some of these issues over (and maybe some performance patches would be nice too!). They can't solve the core conflicts, but, they can ease it a bit, and address some of the smaller issues.
Still, this is the game we have, and while its nice to imagine what could have been, it didn't happen. And my theory could just be totally wrong! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aaaanyway, this has been my probably should have been a blog post thing talking about Xenoblade 2’s mechanical problems. And this will also probably be the last time I rant like this, since I’ve basically said my peace at this point. If you read all of this… Wow you’re amazing!
Xenoblade 2 Systems Analysis (yes, spoilers): (Show Spoiler)
- Blades are people; Combat
Blades are people was a narrative decision.
How can I say this so confidently? Because the game's systems make a lot more sense if they were just magical weapons! Let's examine this.
- First is the Core Crystal Gacha system. The core crystals contain magical weapons that give their users great power, and it is random but based on the person that opened it. So you could have a character who prefers a certain kind of weapon, or a certain element, and randomize other values. This system actually makes a little sense now, and is much more engaging than just buying a weapon in a shop. And this provides a way to customize the character themselves too.
- Environment effects require certain weapons active to use. So, the player is encouraged to build up a collection of varied weapons to use different powers, and swapping them out as needed is pretty simple. Again, this is more engaging than buying an item in a shop, and encourages swapping out weapons a lot and experimenting.
- Swapping weapons in battle makes more sense too. By having multiple magical weapons, you are able to adjust your play style and combat effectiveness based on the weaknesses of enemies. Not to mention setting up combos with the other characters. If you randomly get a really good weapon, but it favors someone else in the party, just give it to them. Simple.
- And if you have a bunch of spare weapons lying around, as you inevitably will from how much the game encourages having a lot through randoms, you can give those weapons to mercenaries who will use them to give you a little free money and experience, putting your RNG bad luck to good use.
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So what is the detriment of having blades be people?
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- Blades are people, and as people, you will have favorites. And not favorites as in "I really like this sword", but "I really like this PERSON". This discourages experimentation and swapping, which the game is built around. For example, I use the blades with personalities, and avoid those that don't as much as I can. I enjoy those characters and want them to be around. This is very human, and a sign of great writing, which xenoblade 2 has! But it is also working against the mechanics the game has already established.
- While the core blades have great personalities, the swapping mechanics demand LOTS of blades, way way way too many than could be written for! For every Vess, who has a wonderful story arc introducing her, you have a hundred mindless drones. And I'm including rare blades in this too, not just the typical common blades. Any blade that doesn't interact with the other characters is not a person, simple as that. There was nothing they could do about this. The game mechanics and the blades as people concept just conflicts here. There is no way for the game to encourage having tons of blades AND every blade have great character.
- Ok, so blades are people, and players are getting attached to specific blades all the time and not swapping as planned. So let's put in a mechanic where a blade and driver need to get to know each other to unlock their full potential. That's... one way to adjust for player behavior. But this further discourages swapping and experimentation, hindering the other systems.
- Also, you can't just have users get better blades and discard old ones over time, they're people and we're attached to them! But just using them alone and upping their stats is making users not touch new blades! They are too weak for the late game and it takes too much time to level them up! So they added a store where you can buy weapons for the blades to enhance their powers. So um, now we have a store to buy weapons for a weapon every time you reach a new area. Hmm. Wasn't the whole concept of the random weapon generation system to make something more engaging than buying weapons in a store every time you reach a new area? Whoops.
- So the game has this gacha system, and involves randomly unlocking. Even though its not monetized, to encourage users to use the system it needs to have some sort of carrot, something to reward players that use it. Naturally, that means rares. You need to have prizes that are infrequent and highly desired. How do you make a rare blade desirable, when you don't have the resources to give them personality? Stats! Except that isn't possible here. Users are getting attached to certain blades and are not swapping out as originally intended, so the game is using a progression system to accomodate sticking to favorites. So um, this is quite a conundrum.
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Apparently, their solution to this problem was boobs. Give rares huge ridiculous boobs, and players will want them! Uuuugggghhh. This is assuming all of your players are male, in a genre that leans female. Dumb. Also, you are literally creating sexualized people with a massive power balance out of their favor. This is not ok! - Blades are bound to drivers. This conflicts with the random gacha system, since if you get a blade that would be useful with another character, you can't move it. So they added the overdrive system as a way to move blades around, but it's super rare so it doesn't quite do what its meant to. Honestly, they should have just made swapping simple. It undercuts the narrative concept a bit, but you can't have a random system and lock it to a single character in the party. That's bad, as the luck is no longer giving players a bonus, but hurting them if everything doesn't line up perfectly.
- Combat chatter was already a little annoying in Xenoblade 1 and X, but it was necessary to leave on to hear cues for player intervention, like when a player needs healing. Adding three more characters who also chatter into the mix just makes this problem EVEN WORSE! It hurts the mood because the awesome battle music is hard to hear, and even hearing the intervention cues is hard! But they have to talk; everyone else is talking in combat, so they should too to remind everyone they are people and have personalities, right?
- Rejected sentient life is a big issue for me with this game. You are literally creating life. The game goes on and on about this this. Blades are PEOPLE, and drivers who treat blades as objects are bad! Except the game requires you to create and ignore life to use its mechanics. Yes, the narrative pushes all of this about blades as people, then the mechanics objectify blades at every turn.
This is a fundamental conflict. There is no way around this. Either blades as people goes, or the mechanics encouraging making lots of blades goes. You cannot just sweep this under the rug and force the player to create then ignore dozens of sentient beings without comment- oh the game literally does exactly that! Well great job game, you are forcing the player to objectify people and then telling them how bad objectifying people is, undermining your narrative AND mechanics. Wonderful.
In the end, this is the fundamental conflict of the game. Honestly, there are no easy answers here. The gameplay needed to be massively overhauled to complement the fantastic narrative they were doing. But they were under great time pressures and just tried to glue everything together as best as they can, and ended up with a royal mess. I would very much have preferred waiting a year or two for a better game, than Monolith being rushed to push a game in the Switch's launch year. But, this is the game we got.
- - Experience, Inns, and Fast Travel
Ok so, the game has a linear story. It wants you to go along with that story, and provides obstacles in a balanced fashion so you accrue enough XP so you never have to leave that linear story arc if you don't want to. This is all normal.
Except most of the XP you accrue isn't given to you on the field. Most of it is in the form of "bonus" XP that you have to go to an inn to spend. Why the fudge does this exist? As a way to force the player away from the main story from time to time? If so, that's TERRIBLE! Having to walk all the way back to an inn and back to get the experience you already earned is a horrible, horrible idea. And apparently someone at Monolithsoft thought the same thing, because no matter what's going on in the story, fast travel is never contained. It doesn't matter if your character is stuck in a battle in the story, and even without that battle are stuck on a specific titan without transport. At any point in the game you can still go literally anywhere you have been before, breaking immersion, but allowing the player to teleport to an inn and get the XP that was withheld from them and zip back to the main story during play.
So, instead of adding the patch of uninhibited fast travel, why not just, give us the XP immediately, and use other means of making players go off the beaten path? Like, you know, fun side quests, which Xenoblade 2 already has in the game (though they don't currently give enough XP given as rewards for completion) and have already used in prior games as a means to break up the linear story progression? Then you can avoid breaking immersion and only allow fast travel to places your party would be able to reach at that point in the game. Of course this would also require setting up how the player can go between titans, but they kind of did that with the guild ships so they could just be more specific in mentioning that, make sure guild ships are at every port, and allow the player to talk to someone outside the guild ship to bring up a travel menu between titans. Done!
- - Elements and Combos; Chains; AI controlled characters
These systems all compete against eachother.
The combat system in Xenoblade 2 is designed around combos and chains. If you just use auto-attacks, you will fail, period. You have to use arts to accrue more damage, and you combo arts to accrue even more damage, and finally you use combos to apply orbs which you can break in a chain attack to elevate this even more to MASSIVE damage in a single turn. But as you go up the chain, it requires more and more and more precision and planning.
A most basic element of this is the type system. Every art has a type, and you need to follow the combo in the top right to execute it based on the types it shows. But if you do the same combo over and over, the game will punish you. It wants you to keep things varied. So to keep it varied, you need lots of type options to play with, which means lots of different blades per driver. Alright.
Timing is an important element of this too. If you time combo attacks too soon, your other party members won't have time to build up energy to execute theirs before the timer runs out.
Everything is fine so far, but there are two curious things in this mix. One, is that you can't swap between blades immediately. There's a cooldown. This magnifies the importance of timing even more. But because of this cooldown, AI players change blades automatically. So you have this huge timing pressure, upon which the entire system relies upon, and a factor out of your control that can ruin it all whenever it wants. Uh oh.
Literally dozens of times now, I'll have planned out a combo, only to have an AI party member swap out their blade at an inopportune time, killing the combo, and delaying the chain attack, and then the enemy goes into rage and knocks out a character and I have to spend affinity to revive them and not only do I not get the chain attack, but now I'm playing catch up and will often die because I've fallen behind. Yes, the combat system is THAT sensitive. Especially since straight up grinding is not beneficial at all in this game, so you cannot just rely on pure level power to steamroll enemies, you have to master and execute these systems well.
The game is building this wonderfully complex system where you orchestrate huge damage by controlling various factors, and even requires you do this on some bosses, and yet lets AI utterly destroy this at any point by changing their blades in a way you cannot control. This is TERRIBLE, game. You cannot create a system this complex and this important to succeeding, and add a random element that can destroy all of your hard work.
How would I do this differently? I'd get rid of the blade switch cooldown, and allow the player to control which blade is used when. So, instead of having the player press ZL to execute a move by the left character, instead you hold ZL and select the blade that will execute it from a menu. That simple change fixes this problem, all on its own!
Another option would be to return the ability to pause and switch characters on the fly, and give players the ability to control EVERYTHING. But I assume that was lost because it became too overwhelming with just how insanely complex this game's combat is, so I wouldn't recommend that!
- - Shackle Driver
This one is pretty simple. This is a game. The designers of the game want you to play the game. Xenoblade 2 gives you this crazy complex combat system to play with and its genuinely a very fun and interesting system when everything works, and it breaks easily. Except, as I get further into the game, there are more and more enemies that can just... make my party unable to do anything for a 5-10 seconds. This throws of all of the timing that is so critical in the game, and can then ruin combos and chains and just mess everything up.
What's the solution to this problem? Do not stop the player from playing your game, stupid!
As is common with terrible mechanics that should not exist in the first place, the game allows you to equip an accessory to prevent it from happening. Though only 90% of the time because they somehow think that mechanic has value and won't accept removing it entirely. Ugh!
- - Too many systems
This is a lot of little things, but the game just has too much to it. Here's a quick list of needless things.
- Purchasing shops
If you shop at a store and buy one of everything, you can buy the shop. What does this do for you? I don't really know! You don't get a return from the shop when you revisit it, I've checked that. Maybe it gives discounts? But then you spent a ton to buy the shop in the first place, so that's pretty pointless. Maybe it increases development of an area? But that's also dumb.In the end, everyone just ignores this system. Have you purchased any shops outside of the one that was involved in a quest? I certainly haven't!
- - Area Development
So apparently they wanted you to be able to inject money into the local economy and make the area better. In theory this sounds nice, except it isn't like Colony 6 in xenoblade, where you turn a flat nothing into a thriving city, which is memorable and wonderful. All this means is... items that the stores should have are locked until you get enough development points. Before you go "that's such a negative spin, really it's just giving you more items in shops as they develop", the game literally explains it to you in this way. It directly tells you that a shop will not have all of its items until you develop the area more! Obviously the way to fix this is... remove the system. I know this is a remnant of something really cool that they were trying to do but, it just doesn't work. :/
- - Too many item types, cooking
Ok, so, it's kind of neat that you buy literally buy groceries and cook them. Except it doesn't have a rewarding crafting system ala Breath of the Wild, the result is just a tiny little passive buff that is meaningless and is designed to be ignorable since surely no one used it in testing, and it just adds yet more pointless crap that the game has to explain and the player has to sort through then ignore. Add in the various trinkets, and stuff, and your area has a dozen stores and only one or two that the player actually visits. And a WAY too much clutter in all of the floating store names that overlap eachother! Again, this just makes things cluttered and is yet more rubbish for the player to sort out before they realize they can ignore it because it's useless.
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In the end, all of this system bloat is time that they spent on things they shouldn't have. That wasted time could have spent on making the game itself better, such as smoothing over the games awful difficulty spikes and/or adding more fun side quests. Not to mention you have to explain all of these things to the player, and the player has to sort them out and learn to pay attention to the important bits through all the clutter. In game design, system creep is an easy thing to fall into, and cutting it is hard. So I'm not saying they are terrible designers or anything. I'm just... sad that it happened here, to such a degree. Especially with how little time this game had to be made.
I'm assuming these systems were devised before they were knew just how little time they'd have to make this, though. - Purchasing shops
As an ending for this massive post, I want to say that most of what lead up to all of this certainly was not under Monolithsoft's control. As someone who studies game design and worked on a game before, it is very obvious to me that Monolithsoft set out to spend years on a massive sprawling epic masterpiece that would make Xenoblade 1 look tiny by comparison, but then they were pushed to rush out a product as fast as possible to match the Switch's launch year. And I'm not really blaming Nintendo for this either, they REALLY needed the switch to succeed and they needed an awesome RPG for it and knew who to go to, and I'm sure they very very handsomely rewarded Monolithsoft accordingly. But conflicting directions create a conflicted game. I'm already starting to put together the original vision, where the concepts of Colony 6 are spread out into the entire game! Bits and pieces of it are everywhere! It's a shame that that never came to past.
That said... they were rushed, so they focused on the narrative and just dealt with the mechanics as they could then shipped. Honestly, if they had to make something subpar and rushed, that was the right choice. In RPGs players come for narrative, and narrative is the driving force of the genre. If the narrative sucks, to the audience the whole game would be bad, but if some mechanics are bad, to the audience only those specific mechanics are bad. Plus you can't patch the narrative, but you can patch the mechanics to some degree. I really hope there are some patches coming that will smooth some of these issues over (and maybe some performance patches would be nice too!). They can't solve the core conflicts, but, they can ease it a bit, and address some of the smaller issues.
Still, this is the game we have, and while its nice to imagine what could have been, it didn't happen. And my theory could just be totally wrong! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aaaanyway, this has been my probably should have been a blog post thing talking about Xenoblade 2’s mechanical problems. And this will also probably be the last time I rant like this, since I’ve basically said my peace at this point. If you read all of this… Wow you’re amazing!
![[Image: RPvlSEt.png]](https://i.imgur.com/RPvlSEt.png)
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