Friday, 20th February 2015, 17:08 by and into
Personally, I think "gimmick" can be used pretty neutrally, though it can carry a negative connotation, whereas "gimmicky" is clearly and nearly universally negative. I would describe, and perhaps have described, what vault wardens do as a "gimmick," but I quite like what they do. (In general; crate pointed out some weird stuff that the "sealing rune" does beyond just make you unable to open doors and use staircases and (I think?) hatches, and those seem like excessive and thus not very good features.)
This is not exhaustive, by any means, but off the top of my head:
Works well, could be used more/earlier:
Sealing
MP drain
Marked status
Recall
Flaying
Good, but possibly overused:
Summoning
Blinking
Torment (in "post"-game)
Problematic:
Banishment — When this happens to the right character, it is very interesting and tense. When it happens to sufficiently strong characters, it only succeeds in attacking the player's patience. This is a perennial concern, and I know the dev team knows about this, but it seems worth mentioning.
Fear/Mesmerize — Mesmerize seems like a very complicated way to punish controlled blinks. Aside from that, if the situation is dangerous, I respond in much the same way as a lot of other situations I cannot move away from (random tele), and if it is not dangerous, I now want to preserve consumables, but I am forced to fight in awkward, uncomfortable ways. When it is dangerous, it is not bad, but it does not particularly stand out. When it is not dangerous it is very, very bad. This is setting aside all the weird interactions and special cases about noises (have those been removed yet?) and whatnot.
Spider Webs — Way overused in spider nest and also from jumping spider. Combat and autoexplore become very choppy; it isn't pleasant. Throwing nets are fine, because realistically there aren't situations where they are spammed at the player. Limiting webs to, say, Arachne and a somewhat beefy, semi-rare spider that likes to chuck throwing nets (flavored as "webs") at you would be sufficient to introduce this kind of threat, without having it be grating.
Enemies casting/using digging — I find this visually disorienting to a degree that is not compensated for by the tactical situations it can introduces. It also causes problems with certain vaults, and (somewhat related) at least potentially can make you want to kite an enemy back to a wall you need gone. "Burrowing," by contrast, does not bother me as an idea, except for the fact that boring beetles are... not particularly exciting. (No I'm not going for the easy joke.) (Also ok I guess burrowing does have the same kiting/vault breaking problem, but the "visual disorientation" issue is not there.)
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