My Thoughts On The Current State Of Witchit

Hello.

This post presents my opinion on the current state of witchit, mainly relating to gameplay/progression system/rewards and their relations.

I have been playing Witchit on and off for a few months now, i knew about the game awhile before that and had been curious to try it. I have played similliar modes in Source games, SC2 and maybe others, it's a common type of mod, and i was curious to see what a full fleshed game could do with the idea.

As a rule of thumb i don't indulge in early access games, but the Daedalic humble bundle came out, so i decided to buy it primarily for Witchit.

Once i started playing the main thing that captivated me was the art style, i am a sucker for visuals so it didn't take me much to get into the game. I had not seen gameplay nor paid much attention to screenshots before playing so i was surprised by how much i ended up liking it. Gameplay wise it was enjoyable, i was new so i just played however i felt, experimenting with the skills i got, I didn't put much thought into items yet, so my experience with the game was mostly pure fun. It was basically what you would expect from a game of this sort, but with fun visual design, some interesting skills to create gameplay variety, funny sounds, and enjoyable music when present (however the lack of it in some maps, was undoubtly an unpleasant contrast).

I am now lvl 51, and i do not feel as positive about the game as i did during those first few hours. I do not offer the viewpoint of either a veteran nor a newbie. And i cannot claim to represent anyones opinions other than my own.

I should start by describing what I consider to be a successful enjoyable game. To me, for a game to be good, it has to offer an enjoyable experience in which a player can look back at the time spent with said game, and feel like enough value was drawn from the game to warrant that investment. The game should respect the player and his time, and strive to offer the tools/challenges/narrative necessary to allow for true engangement.

Now for the gameplay.

(nitpicking) When you start a match, you wait several seconds for people to connect to the server and pick their skills. Then the match starts, hunters wait, witches hide. The only thing i'd like here, is more ways to fool around with other hunters and I feel like the time limit should be slightly raised, because some objects are so clumsy i occasionaly get caught still positioning myself properly and often catch people doing the same, but i would only change it by 2-5 seconds. (end of nitpicking)

On to the core.

As a witch you have mainly 3 options in terms of base playstyle.
You can hide in a place of low visibility and hope noone knows your spot.
You can hide in a place of good visibility but are usually more obvious and more prone to getting randomly checked.
You can be aggressive and constantly move around the map maybe shrooming and trolling Hunters.

These are obviously generalizations that make the game seem over simplistic and you can activelly change playstyle, but i do find them the core of basic thought when playing.

Here is where things go bad. Ideally, every single playstyle should be viable, games are about having fun, in this game the only ones truly working as a team are the hunters, and only somewhat. The witches can be as selfish as they want. So if a witch wants to play aggressive and ends up getting killed early on, the game should punish them for it, if a witch wants to hide all game, that witch should not be punished for it, but they are.

Because where this game goes wrong at, is Dust pickups. This feature was probably added to incentivise witches to get themselves in unfavorable positions, giving themselves away instead of hiding all game. But this destroys proper game design.

Now, there is a very strong meta game if you care about cosmetics. If you want to fill that cauldron you want to catch as much dust as possible, but you don't want to lose the match either.

So what do you do? Aggressive play means you can end up dying early on with little to no dust collected. That is a bare 60 dust.

Hiding all game in a low visibility spot? That is 60+ 30 if you win, dust is hard to collect when you are hiding in some gap on the wall.

Hiding in a good visibility spot with decoy equiped? Boom, you have a winning formula. Pick a spot with good map visibility, but not so obvious that a chicken will be thrown on top of you and there you go, start hitting that Q. Suddently you can get 5+ dust pickups a match. On good matches you get a win and up to 9, all without moving. That is 60 base + 30 win + up to 70s of dust. That can go over 160. As opposed to 60-95.

Suddently dust pickups decentivise you from playing any other way. This is pretty much the only way i play now. As a non-veteran player i own a limited ammount of cosmetics, and as i have said, i truly enjoy this games visual design so i can't resist. It's the same reason people grind boring dailies, weeklies and limited event items in other games. Its the reason people are willing to spend hours of their life on boring challenges they hate just so they can get that one skin that they want(before they go after another).
It turns games into the most unpleasant of chores. Take out the trash, pick up cat poop from the litter box, scrub the floor.
Do it enough times and you get a pair of hot pants.

Its infuriatingly addictive, and it is manipulative and gross. I do not believe the designers for this game intended it as such, but it is. Before i realised i could just grind dust with decoys i just played however i wanted, i threw rabbits, i looked for new creative spots, didnt care if i died doing so. It was fun. Now i know some spots that tend to work in each map for grinding, so that is what i do and if i don't i feel that I am playing unoptimally.

Tired of this kind of design. That tries to control peoples playstyle with shoehorned incentives as opposed to good core design that allows for creative player expression.

Hunters are the same thing. The goal as an hunter is to kill witches and yet I have to constantly stop to get that dust that just dropped from a teammates kill if i want to end the match with a decent ammount of pickups. Why.

Now that i have spoken of the relation of gameplay and incentives, let me speak of drops and crafting.
They suck.
This game has so much freaking RNG, my mind is blown in four pieces.

Want loot? RNG, from 2 nails to a pink.
Want to craft? RNG + duplicates.
Want to salvage? RNG.
Want a recipe to skip RNG? RNG.

Why.

Listen to this tale.

You wake up. You live in a coastal city. It is summer and you have no work or school. It is a warm day and you could go to the beach but it's really hot outside and you are feeling lazy. You decide you want to stay indoors in the shade and play some videogames. You are feeling good, you decide to boot up Witchit. You notice you have 2 mandrakes, You have 4/20+ Hunter blues and have been trying to get the summer hunter blue set. You make your goal to get 2 more mandrakes today so you can craft a blue. You spend hours relentlessly grinding with the most efficient playstyle possible, it's an unfun waste of time, but you can't resist that random blue.
It is now evening, the day is gone. Your drops weren't amazing, but you did manage to get the 2 mandrakes you wanted. You can now craft a blue, your work is about to pay off. You are incredibly excited. You craft it. It is the same blue you got last time. You are in complete disbelief. You think to yourself, maybe i will get all of my mandrakes back when i salvage it. You salvage it. You get 2 mandrakes.

It is a new day. You wake up. You live in a coastal city. It is summer and you have no work or school. It is a warm day and you could go to the beach but it's really hot outside and you are feeling lazy. You decide you want to stay indoors in the shade and play some videogames. You are feeling good, you decide to boot up Witchit. You have 2 mandrakes. You close Witchit.

This isn't an hypothesis, this was me.

If you don't want to get rid of repeats, atleast make all salvaging a strict 3 materials. Just like recipes are 1.

Honestly, i had more to say about the game, but i feel burned out right now, so i might revisit and edit this post later.

Thanks for reading.

Submitted August 05, 2018 at 06:40PM by Pinkangaroo https://ift.tt/2LSG579