Why do people love Vanquish so much? (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Saturday, May 27, 2017, 04:19 (2738 days ago) @ Cody Miller

As always, just my own personal take here, but here goes.

Everything that vanquish does has been done better in other games. Even so, if vanquish assembled all its various elements in a way that was somehow beneficial to the total experience, that would be cool. But IMO, it doesn't do that. The mobility aspect of the game HURTS its functionality as a fun, challenging shooter.

I'll expand on that:

To me, good game design involves allowing the player to master skills in such a way that makes them more effective at conquering the challenges in front of them... AND, in a great game, those "skills" are also inherently fun or satisfying.

When people talk about the "fun" in vanquish, they talk about sprinting and vaulting and sliding around. But you can only really play the game that way on the easy or normal difficulty levels. And at those levels, I personally found little challenge to the game. The enemies weren't tough to fight, the encounters offered little challenge. But bumping the difficulty up higher does not encourage further mastery of those "fun" abilities. Instead, it forces the player to slow down, stop running and sliding as often, and play the game more like a typical 3rd person cover-based shooter. And as a 3rd person cover/-based shooter, Vanquish fucking sucks. It is dull as hell compared to games like Gears of War, which are designed from the ground up to support the more strategic and tactical sides of that style of gameplay.

Titanfall is probably the LAST game that any Vanquish defender should make comparisons to, because Titanfall nails the very element that Vanquish so utterly fails. In Titanfall, the "fun" part of combat (the mobility, wall running, sliding, etc) becomes increasingly important as you face more demanding challenges. You don't get better at Titanfall by slowing down and playing it more like every other shooter, you get better by truly mastering the insanely intricate movement mechanics so that you can continue to be faster and harder to hit than your opponent.

Titanfall shows you a basic set of mechanics, then rewards players who want more of a challenge by providing ways to take those mechanics further and further and further.

Vanquish presents fun, but shallow mechanics. Then punishes players who want a challenge until they stop engaging with those mechanics almost entirely.