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Metagame: Design Vs. Development: Who's Running the Asylum?

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Old

08/07/2004, 00:09

#1

Kergillian

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Metagame: Design Vs. Development: Who's Running the Asylum?

“You’re food now, shirt!” —Suggested alternate flavor text for Charaxes (who was formerly Killer Moth)

To me, the Arkham Inmates are all about fun. That’s not to say I don’t think they’re a good team for high-end playability, just that when we were making them, we really wanted them to come off as a blast to play. (Unlike the Sentinels—we want playing them to be a chore.*) Don’t get me wrong—I’m only saying we wanted them to be a blast for you to play, not for your opponent to play against. In fact, earlier this week I watched a guy get crushed by an Arkham deck so badly he started weeping tears of blood. (Then again that happens a lot around here. It’s just something that we do.)

Before the DC set came out, there was a lot of chatter on the boards about what the Arkham team was going to be like. (You know, like what their focus was going to be, like how the Fantastic Four are good with equipment, or how the Brotherhood is good at dominating metagames.) One popular theory was that Arkham was specifically not going to have a focus. They were going to be a random collection of crazies with no rhyme or reason tying them to each other. They would be a non-team team (kind of like the opposite of the unaligned guys who, through enablers like Mojo or Deathstroke, can actually function like a real team)._

The funny thing about that theory is that early in preliminary design, we actually considered the very same thing. We tossed around the idea of intentionally forcing a lack of synergy between any of the Arkham characters just to up the chaos factor. In fact, at one point we considered making Arkham the only team whose members couldn’t team attack or reinforce one another. But there was a problem (as there usually are in these kinds of stories—I mean, how interesting is a story that’s like, “Yeah, so we came up with this idea, and it was good, so we tried it, and it worked, and we were done”?).

The problem was that, intentional or not, there will always be synergies or cards that work well together in a large enough collection. What I mean is, sure if you look at two cards in a vacuum, there might not be any synergy directly between them. But if you add in a third card, you have to check all three against each other. As you add more and more cards, natural synergies become impossible to avoid especially if you allow other cards to connect them. For example, there may be no obvious synergy between Storm, Ororo Munroe and A Child Named Valeria, but once you add in cards like Invisible Woman, Sue Storm and a bunch of small, front row FF characters, Storm’s ability to prevent opposing characters from flying over your reinforced, unstunnable little dudes creates a lock on the board.

Read the rest at MetaGame.com

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Old

08/07/2004, 11:25

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AaronTheRed

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Quote

Unlike the Sentinels—we want playing them to be a chore

I KNEW IT!!!

;)

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Old

08/07/2004, 12:14

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ringwraith9

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Ahhh, my crazy brothers

Thanks for the breakdown on design. Tjis is definitely the team I have played with the most since Vs. came out. It was nice to get a look at how the team was made in the first place. Keep em comin!

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08/09/2004, 08:09

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imported_imported_cyke

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man, now i want a sandwhich.

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