![]() In the second expansion, Defiant Honor, they introduced a whole new tier of equipment: "ethereals," color-coded orange, which were above the previously highest tier of equipment, "divines," color-coded green. Team Ninja peaked in its design indecisiveness/schizophrenia between the second and third of three DLC expansions. actually, no, wait, let's change it back! It's like they decided at some point in the game's absurdly long and troubled 13-year development cycle (it began development in 2004 and was released in 2017) that players seemed to like color-coded loot nowadays, and maybe they should include that, but didn't really understand the design principles behind modern loot games and just left things kind of conflicted and half-assed, design-wise. There are plenty of action games (like Ninja Gaiden, for one!) that have a discrete number of new weapons or tools or whatever to unlock, and once you have them, all that's left is to keep re-playing the game as long as it amuses you.īut Nioh's implementation of loot was. Not every game needs to be a loot game with a never-ending chase for a marginally better weapon and a marginally better hat. Now, to be clear, it isn't inherently bad to have a system where you can simply get ideal equipment and stop needing to improve it. Such a system gives you some scope to customize, but keeps you going back to playing the game to get a better item. At that point, Nioh basically ceased to be a loot game at all.Ĭompare this to Diablo 3, which only allows you to re-roll a single property on a piece of equipment, and every time you do it, the cost on the next attempt goes up. Second, it was a relatively quick and simple matter to get absolutely ideal equipment, making subsequent loot drops literally meaningless, because they could never be better than the item you'd spent time crafting. What this meant was, first, that the end-game player taking the path of least resistance to good equipment spent a lot of time initially in the reforging screen re-rolling properties rather than actually playing the game. Coupled with a little save-scumming, it was a fairly simple matter to keep re-rolling one property at a time on a piece of equipment until it was ideal, back up your save, and move on to the next, until you had the ideal piece of equipment. "Reforging" allowed you to re-roll each individual property on any given piece of equipment one by one with no limits and no accelerating cost. Second, each weapon or armor had something like six randomized properties (max) which each had a randomized numerical value, e.g. Reforging in action.įirst, almost every piece of equipment in the game could be "forged" at the blacksmith at the highest rarity tier simply by using some materials gotten by breaking down other items (in some cases you need a "Smithing Text," i.e. Nioh did neither of these things, and the reason was its extremely generous "forging" and "reforging" systems. Second, it shouldn't be too easy to get absolutely optimal gear, otherwise you end the chase/grind prematurely. First, the way to get better gear should always be primarily to engage in the core combat/gameplay. Most loot games share a couple of fundamental design philosophies. For every loot game out there that you can think of, there are guides that instruct you in the quickest methods to get the best gear. ![]() Let's start with this: efficient loot grinding in Nioh. They just couldn't seem to decide whether they wanted Nioh to be a loot game for realsies, or an action game with some loot elements to it. Not only did some of its systems seem to clash internally, but in one case Team Ninja actually tried to fundamentally shift the design with the release of an update/DLC, only to reverse course with a later one. I've already pre-ordered the special edition of Nioh 2 (out on March 13, about a month away as I write this), and I don't often pre-order games anymore.īut I don't think there's any denying that Nioh had some weirdly inconsistent design, especially when it came to loot. It was a unique combination of combat that split the difference between Ninja Gaiden and From Software's Souls titles, plus a Diablo-like color-coded loot system, all of which are things I like. I really liked the first Nioh, so much so that I logged 640 hours and 34 minutes playing it.
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