Maran wrote:
- - Both work around the idea that you are a powerful being that destroys stuff in cool ways.
- Both work with the idea that you can become more powerful during play.
- Especially on higher difficulties it's about carefully moving to ensure survival.
The first and third are common to many, many games beyond and aren't indicative of the compatibility of the two genres of gameplay (you could argue that even Tetris focuses on moving things carefully to destroy stuff in cool ways). The second isn't necessarily true (plenty of shmups feature no powerups, especially very early shmups and some bullet hells such as SDOJ and CC:WI), and even when it is I don't think they work towards the same gameplay purpose.
Shmup traditionalists tend to emphasize improving the player's skills through practice rather than the stats or abilities of the player character. They also tend to prefer lean, finely-tuned experiences over a greater amount of less balanced and coherent content. To them, the RPG aspects and randomly-generated loot grind of Diablo and similar games would just muddy what could be a focused action experience, and they would rather focus on improving their ability to use what they have rather than grinding for upgrades to pass a "gear check." They don't
want scores to be determined by whoever happens to grind the longest; player performance should be independent of the specific game installation or prior game sessions. Some games such as
Brilliant Pagoda or Haze Castle have tried experience/shop upgrade systems, resulting in complaints such as:
The game is a pain to play without upgrades and trivial with upgrades.
Which basically devolves the game into a euroshmup where you just grind upgrades in order to beat the harder modes.
...
For the record, I'm fine with there being a mode with upgrades so long as there is also a proper arcade mode that is properly balanced, like how Stella Vanity does it. Right now level0000 is too underpowered, upgrades are too overpowered, and deciding which upgrades are fine and which are not is too arbitrary.
(quoted from Jaimers' video description in the video I linked)
Some games such as Fantasy Zone and GR3 have shop systems but those are different in that their effects are all localized to one session and don't carry over between plays, which makes them basically a more customizable version of a traditional shmup powerup scheme.
That said, I don't think it's impossible to fuse shmups and loot-grind into something coherent. You can't satisfy every fan of both genres (hell, you can't even satisfy every fan of
one genre), but there may be some area where the goals of the genres are orthogonal to each other rather than opposed. To some degree the actual combat of Diablo-likes has little bearing on what makes a game "Diablo-like," whether they're point-and-click action RPGs like Diablo or Path of Exile, third-person shooters such as Warframe, first-person shooters such as Borderlands, or something else entirely. You may be able to fit shmup mechanics somewhere in there, but be warned that you walk a fine line between taking the best of both genres and taking the worst.
Maran wrote:Thanks for your thoughts, I am afraid you are right. The more I read and play the more I realise that I probably should start a bit less ambitious and just get the fundamentals down first and try to iterate on that.
That's a good thought. If you can't get the core shmup gameplay just right with a minimal set of hand-crafted content fine-tuned for an optimal experience, throwing in more content such as a loot grind is only going to sweep the problems under a rug. If the game turns out to be fun anyway then the "shmup" part of it isn't actually doing anything meaningful for the game and it could be anything else for all it matters.
