It’s once again time for a dev diary for Menace. Unfortunately, this is probably the weakest of the lot, since it does not say much new at all. We knew there would be officers with different backgrounds already, and that these agents would lead the squads from a leader position. The characters will be pre-written, as to have a stronger personality writing, and story connection – compared to say anything randomly created. This is all fair and good, but if there aren’t a ton of agents for release, it’s going to be slim pickings when it comes to repeated playthroughs, or missions wipes.
The officers
Many classic games run on the same premise, like Jagged Alliance 2. But that does not reduce the fact that taking casualties (aka, living with your poor tactical decisions) in those games can become a problem fast. In Jagged Alliance 2 for example, even when you have mercenaries left to hire, they can refuse if you already messed up and got some of them killed. It makes sense in the setting, yet, it has always been a pet-peeve of mine. Losing a squad is essentially a game over, while X-com, with endless randomly created characters, allow for total failure missions – more than once. It creates a fun dynamic story, instead of having to reload a save after a mission going south.
From the diary: “Of course, the amount of written characters is limited, so if too many die, that means game over”.
The squad leaders will be the characters you care about, like your legless mercs in Battle Brothers. I also get the impression that your actual squad members will not mean much more than act as a health buffer for your officer. From what I understand, the officer can’t die, and can’t be the first one to eat it. Unless his squad have been wiped out, he will not die, and then he will start to bleed out – for a chance for the other squad leaders to rescue him or her. It’s more abstraction for easy gameplay rules, which is not surprising, as many things already follow that theme.
Other than that, the devs talk about stats and such. I didn’t find it too interesting, since it does not differentiate much from the stats of the squads. I just hope we get plenty of agents, as I would consider anything less than 20 being on the low amount.
Until next time!
/Thomas
Tom's Gaming Vault 