New Blog: What makes Chasm tick?

S0kun
S0kun ADMINISTRATORS Posts: 672 Critical Contributor
edited October 2022 in MPQ General Discussion

Hi everyone! For our latest developer deep dive blogs, we go even deeper into what makes our characters. Particularly, we've seen some ask about how Chasm was designed so sit back and relax as we do a little computational acrobatics in our latest blog:

https://505games.link/mpqc2

If you like what you see, please let us know what other topics you might be interested in seeing and we'll try to do some brainstorming to see what we can dig up.

Cheers!

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Comments

  • justsing
    justsing Posts: 510 Critical Contributor
    This was such a fun read! Would love to see more like this one where devs dive into design and game mechanics.
  • SourCream
    SourCream Posts: 104 Tile Toppler

    :D Immortal Hulk ?

  • atomzed
    atomzed Posts: 1,753 Chairperson of the Boards

    I like this read a lot! ESP with the description of how Chasm breaks MPQ. Please keep this up more!

  • Bad
    Bad Posts: 3,146 Chairperson of the Boards

    I think I learned the same as before reading this but I appreciate this info.
    And many maths students now would understand how chasm works.

  • Bowgentle
    Bowgentle Posts: 7,926 Chairperson of the Boards

    Thank you for that in-depth explanation about how all those characters got broken, that was... a fascinating read.

  • Gymp28
    Gymp28 Posts: 126 Tile Toppler

    Thanks for fulfilling your promise of a technical Chasm blog from my Q&A question a while back!
    It was indeed interesting to have confirmation of what I’d concluded during my testing.
    I suppose the UI difficulty of creating such complex powers is that it’s hard to succinctly convey their effect in the power description.
    Much appreciated. Thanks again :)

  • Sekilicious
    Sekilicious Posts: 1,766 Chairperson of the Boards

    Very fascinating indeed. Chasm, Kitty, and Grocket make Mindless Ones very easy to deal with. For that I am grateful. He is a welcome addition to the roster, even moreso when it becomes easier to counter him and iHulk in Pick 2 scenarios.

  • Weirdnerd2009
    Weirdnerd2009 Posts: 24 Just Dropped In

    It's interesting to learn about what makes certain characters tick, especially the ones that got broken by Chasm. I hope for more blog posts like this one

  • Godzillafan67
    Godzillafan67 Posts: 596 Critical Contributor

    This was such an insightful article. Thanks, and I look forward to similar articles for other characters that have a lot going on under the hood.

  • allen_koholic
    allen_koholic Posts: 103 Tile Toppler

    This is a nice little read and all, but I'd be much more interested in knowing how the power set is developed, not how the plumbing in the background works. Like, when you guys sat down and developed Chasm, why was an abysmally overtuned AP drain passive considered a good idea to tack onto an immortal/reviver. The last time there was a character with a passive AP drain, he got nerfed into the bronze age.

    Basically, what's the thought process that goes into designing the powers (although how making them work with the existing code base is also insightful).

  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards

    They wrote a blog a few months ago and you probably missed it:

    https://d3go.com/marvel-puzzle-quest-new-character-blog-chasm-ben-reilly/

    This is the answer you are probably looking for:

    Trevor Tomey (Design Director): One of our character goals is to tell their story through their art and their abilities, and Ben Reilly’s recent Beyond arc has so much to tell! We wanted to reflect the mental anguish that drives Ben’s journey to becoming Chasm, and the visceral imagery used to represent it in the comic with the Abyss tile and his AP control. But ransacked memories or not, he’s still a Spider-Man – so we made sure to give him his Web tiles and some healing on match to reflect whatever’s left of the good in his identity. Finally, Ben’s uncomfortable familiarity with coming back from the dead and Chasm’s spooky new costume were too good not to work into his design :).

  • danielrandkai
    danielrandkai Posts: 90 Match Maker

    Excellent info thank! Please nerf Chasm. Incredibly unfun to play against and, as others have noted, breaks other characters.

  • Sekilicious
    Sekilicious Posts: 1,766 Chairperson of the Boards

    So I remember Okoye/iHulk getting this much hate, but don’t remember it being Wanda/Colossus. Oh wait, there were 20 page long threads dedicated to nerfing Okoye and Polaris every time they were boosted. I suppose it will the same here. Chasm/iHulk will probably get as many counters as Polaris has.

  • KGB
    KGB Posts: 3,233 Chairperson of the Boards

    We really need a 5* character with a passive that does X damage (increases per cover) per AP stolen/destroyed. So many characters like Chasm destroy or steal your AP so this character would be useful against more than just Chasm.

    KGB

  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards

    And there are players who want Gambit to be unnerfed. This guy also destroys aps passively. And he gains aps passively every turn. I think players need to learn how to counterplay instead of asking for nerfs.

  • GrimSkald
    GrimSkald Posts: 2,636 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited November 2022

    @HoundofShadow said:
    And there are players who want Gambit to be unnerfed. This guy also destroys aps passively. And he gains aps passively every turn. I think players need to learn how to counterplay instead of asking for nerfs.

    Gambit does need a boost, to be honest - the fact that his powers exclude others of the same colors make him all-but-unplayable in almost all circumstances. His unstoppable AP Gain/destruction, though, was a poor mechanic and should not be re-instituted. He was broken from the start and nearly everyone said so. If he was never nerfed he'd still be a huge part of the game. He needed that nerf.

    Chasm's basic mechanics are fine, IMHO. If he needs a nerf (and I'm not convinced he does,) its because he has a lot of hit points for someone who can revive, and he often revives with a lot of hit points to boot. Unless they don't have a lot of other things going for them (i.e. She-Hulk, unfortunately,) characters who can revive should have noticeably less hit points than others of equivalent power, and should revive with substantially less than maximum hit points. But that's just my opinion.

  • Bergen
    Bergen Posts: 27 Just Dropped In
    edited November 2022

    i think char with max hp drain are really good counter to healing-reviwing chars. all we need would be a fast version of knull. also ap drain damage seem a good idea. I like the game gets some dev love

    But changing too much at a time is not a good thing in this kind of game, you would argue new chars are fair game but getting and older 4 star,5 star to max level needs at least 1-2 years; a lot of time, it is not something you can recover in few weeks or even months like in mmos, if you make some char useless, or some old char meta all of a sudden; and you dont let people redistribute all those covers. Rebalance good, but doing it in a pace the game resource collection mechanics doesnt support is not.

  • allen_koholic
    allen_koholic Posts: 103 Tile Toppler
    edited November 2022

    @HoundofShadow said:

    This is the answer you are probably looking for:

    We wanted to reflect the mental anguish that drives Ben’s journey to becoming Chasm, and the visceral imagery used to represent it in the comic with the Abyss tile and his AP control.

    >

    I mean, I guess the anguish and frustration I feel when I see Chasm on either team causes me mental anguish too. So in that sense, I can see it...

    What I mean is, I wanted was some insight into A) how the powers are developed and relate to the character. I don't really consider "he's a spiderman so here's some webtiles that do a thing" to be a good explanation. And B) How much play testing and tuning goes into character design, specifically this character. Why stop at 3 AP drain max? Why not keep going up to five? Why put AP drain on a character that can endlessly revive at all? Why nerf the max revives that iSheHulk gets when her powers are arguably the least good of the revivers, instead of Chasm?

  • HoundofShadow
    HoundofShadow Posts: 8,004 Chairperson of the Boards

    I know you hate this character, so whatever answers you get will still make you unhappy. Ultimately, You want him nerfed.

  • allen_koholic
    allen_koholic Posts: 103 Tile Toppler

    @HoundofShadow said:
    I know you hate this character, so whatever answers you get will still make you unhappy. Ultimately, You want him nerfed.

    I don't hate the character, I hate his AP drain because it's a repressive game mechanic no matter which side he's on. He's aggressively unfun to use or face.

    But asking for the devs to explain how powers were developed and how they were play tested is a valid, no matter which character it is. I'd love to know how they come upon power sets, and how they determine costs and dmg amounts. Between design, announcement and release, how many iterations and tweaks happen? Is the intent to make a fun character or is it to shake up the meta or is to provide a new support or beat stick?

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