Played this through Game Pass only to find out it's gotten a lot of attention in the last couple days! I've played enough to be satisfied with it and wanted to give my thoughts on the game as well as my perspective on the discourse.
Vampire Survivors is fun, but it's nearly immediately clear how little depth there is to it. One of the appeals of any roguelite is how it handles its items - how are they found, how do you upgrade them, how do they interact with each other - and VS really disappointed me in this regard. Once you have an understanding of each weapon and its evolution item, it feels pretty hard to make a build that doesn't work, lending a real feeling of samey-ness to every run. This might have been mitigated a bit during the early access period as I believe the weapon evolutions were not listed in-game prior to 1.0, but I'm not sure. Furthermore, the permanent upgrade tree is absurdly generous, giving you extremely powerful upgrades like extra damage, damage reduction, duplication, and even a revive for not very much currency. I haven't tried the curse upgrade yet (think Hades' difficulty modifiers) so this might help a little in that department but hard to say how much of a difference it could make. Few of the unlockable characters really feel necessary to use IMO thanks to a good portion of their individual attributes not leaving a large impact on the run. The more unique ones are fun but still ultimately lack much in the way of truly making the game feel different. TBOI Repentance's Tainted characters these are not. The presentation is obviously minimal, with the light flair of the funny names and bios for items and characters being the only standout bits. I had a good time mowing down hordes of silly monsters with my ridiculous screen-shaking birds and Bibles but there's not enough here to really keep me coming back in a way that something like TBOI or Hades might.
As to the discourse itself, there's been a lot of talk in recent days of VS being predatory with regard to how it's built from a design perspective as well as to how shallow the gameplay is, making it something of a "time waster". I strongly disagree with both of these claims. The dev has gone on record talking about how the game is designed like a slot machine (and he evidently has ties to gambling program devs?), rewarding players with big flashy stuff for little player input. Even in spite of his interview, I still don't think it makes a lick of difference. VS lacks literally any way of getting your money beyond the initial (extremely cheap!) purchase. The idea of it robbing you of your time as opposed to money is maybe worth thinking about in a "Huh, interesting…" sort of way, but there's really no tangible way to back it up. The conversation has been had before, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but this claim should really be leveled at something like League of Legends or FIFA, games that do genuinely want to rob you of your money openly - that's where the real criticism should be focused, not miscast at VS.
The whole notion of it "wasting your time" is silly when you consider that A) all games waste your time and B) people will already happily sink 4000+ hours into DotA or CS:GO, so it's hardly something unique to VS.
There's nuance as to what degree every game is wasting your time I suppose, with the more blatant being ever so slightly harder to defend, but once you get into the minutiae of that reasoning it feels like a very slippery slope to viewing every single piece of media with this lens. Not only is it needlessly pedantic, it also seems like a really bleak way to view the things you like. Like at what point do we just start crafting a Rotten Tomatoes + HowLongTo Beat Reddit karma average quotient to determine whether or not a game "will be worth the time"? To put it simply, if we're going to condemn one game for this, we might as well condemn every game for this.
Vampire Survivors is fun, but it's nearly immediately clear how little depth there is to it. One of the appeals of any roguelite is how it handles its items - how are they found, how do you upgrade them, how do they interact with each other - and VS really disappointed me in this regard. Once you have an understanding of each weapon and its evolution item, it feels pretty hard to make a build that doesn't work, lending a real feeling of samey-ness to every run. This might have been mitigated a bit during the early access period as I believe the weapon evolutions were not listed in-game prior to 1.0, but I'm not sure. Furthermore, the permanent upgrade tree is absurdly generous, giving you extremely powerful upgrades like extra damage, damage reduction, duplication, and even a revive for not very much currency. I haven't tried the curse upgrade yet (think Hades' difficulty modifiers) so this might help a little in that department but hard to say how much of a difference it could make. Few of the unlockable characters really feel necessary to use IMO thanks to a good portion of their individual attributes not leaving a large impact on the run. The more unique ones are fun but still ultimately lack much in the way of truly making the game feel different. TBOI Repentance's Tainted characters these are not. The presentation is obviously minimal, with the light flair of the funny names and bios for items and characters being the only standout bits. I had a good time mowing down hordes of silly monsters with my ridiculous screen-shaking birds and Bibles but there's not enough here to really keep me coming back in a way that something like TBOI or Hades might.
As to the discourse itself, there's been a lot of talk in recent days of VS being predatory with regard to how it's built from a design perspective as well as to how shallow the gameplay is, making it something of a "time waster". I strongly disagree with both of these claims. The dev has gone on record talking about how the game is designed like a slot machine (and he evidently has ties to gambling program devs?), rewarding players with big flashy stuff for little player input. Even in spite of his interview, I still don't think it makes a lick of difference. VS lacks literally any way of getting your money beyond the initial (extremely cheap!) purchase. The idea of it robbing you of your time as opposed to money is maybe worth thinking about in a "Huh, interesting…" sort of way, but there's really no tangible way to back it up. The conversation has been had before, so I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but this claim should really be leveled at something like League of Legends or FIFA, games that do genuinely want to rob you of your money openly - that's where the real criticism should be focused, not miscast at VS.
The whole notion of it "wasting your time" is silly when you consider that A) all games waste your time and B) people will already happily sink 4000+ hours into DotA or CS:GO, so it's hardly something unique to VS.
There's nuance as to what degree every game is wasting your time I suppose, with the more blatant being ever so slightly harder to defend, but once you get into the minutiae of that reasoning it feels like a very slippery slope to viewing every single piece of media with this lens. Not only is it needlessly pedantic, it also seems like a really bleak way to view the things you like. Like at what point do we just start crafting a Rotten Tomatoes + HowLongTo Beat Reddit karma average quotient to determine whether or not a game "will be worth the time"? To put it simply, if we're going to condemn one game for this, we might as well condemn every game for this.
35 Comments
This is a wonderful exchange on the merits of the game and really got me to reconsider the initial fire an brimstone position I had on it, thanks everyone (including the original poster) for the thoughtful words.
@Woodaba no worries, I'm moving on to my other tasks for the evening as well so thanks for hashing this out with me. I think your characterization of my perspective is accurate, and fair point on the rational actors part, that's a pretty dangerous logical road for me to go down. it occurred to me with your mention of podcasts that summarize the book that I actually have listened to an episode of one of these; if anyone is interested, it was a trueanon episode from march that examines the trend in regards to mobile gambling and the rise of american sports betting (an apt time to check out the episode given the recent cali referendum on this) and discusses the book in the second half of the episode. I don't think the majority of this site's active userbase is very into this style of podcast lol but if you are or are indifferent it's definitely worth checking out, really fascinating episode.
@woodaba Admittedly, like pangburn, I completely overlooked the idea of kids playing this and it's a very fair argument to make. I would argue that something like those AI-made ELSA SPIDERMAN HULK DOCTOR VISIT videos on YouTube and kid iPad cases are probably ultimately doing more damage to kids' brains than this would, but it's a very real concern. Like Pangburn, this feels like the sort of thing the ESRB or online stores should have some sway over so as to mitigate the problem and leave us "young adults" to destroy our brains at our own freedom, but I highly doubt it.
@erato_heti your initial review is actually one that led me to work on this one, so thanks for the kind words and for leaving your thoughts as well. I think even if we disagreed in some respects it definitely sparked interesting conversation in a way that the actual gameplay itself could not do because there's really not much to talk about beyond its design.
@erato_heti your initial review is actually one that led me to work on this one, so thanks for the kind words and for leaving your thoughts as well. I think even if we disagreed in some respects it definitely sparked interesting conversation in a way that the actual gameplay itself could not do because there's really not much to talk about beyond its design.
Thank you for having read it and having such a thoughtful response criticism on the game. My own review got taken down by the moderation team for being off topic. So I plan to expand on both the concerns with the design and do a soft reply to the argument laid down here and throughout the comment chain as I actually think it's a very fair one and genuinely quite hard to look past. Pangburn is right here the these larger cultural geists: Videogame violence, online game censorship in china, etc. complicate any true moral bite to the argument and registers them wimpy. It's also true that almost every game on the planet is a 'waste of time'. I'd love to curtail you with my initial impressions and arguments, as Woodaba and many others did here, but for one I assume the conversation is fairly exhausting, and that I've come right on the end of it. And beyond that even if I were able to construct a perfect counterargument and 'convince you' it would be after a 30 comment deep exchange and threaten to tear down the initial argument with an addendum anyway. This is usually assumed as the endgoal, to clear up some deep misunderstanding through socratic method, but to be frank I feel like maybe my perspective on time waste even applies to situations of extended online debating as well. I guess you could say that viewpoint on mitigating time wasted is a virtue I try to hold as many places as possible.
Still I hope to have a more involved recourse that responds to some of the arguments laid out here. I agree that the initial arguments people who condemn the game are far from comprehensive but it's still nice to speak to people in good faith about it.
You take care as well now.
Still I hope to have a more involved recourse that responds to some of the arguments laid out here. I agree that the initial arguments people who condemn the game are far from comprehensive but it's still nice to speak to people in good faith about it.
You take care as well now.
Woodaba
1 year ago