Quote:
Originally Posted by George Nishimura
But the depth of gameplay was quite shallow. The rules reduced 90% of robots to play one strategy: cycle + 10pt hang.
Aerial Assist is a lot braver. It wants to be dynamic and versatile. It wants more teams to think, talk and coordinate before and during a match (at least more than picking which feeder station to use). It wants to be more like a real team sport. Most teams sports have only one game-piece in play at a time as they cater for both defense and offense. That's what I believe Aerial Assist is trying to do.
There are two veins of criticism: criticism of the intent and criticism of the execution. Ultimate Ascent was executed very well, partially because the intent was simpler to execute. But as a fan of team sports, I personally welcome the direction the GDC are trying to take.
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But what Ultimate Ascent did well, that I don't believe Aerial Assist is doing well, is incentivize teams for creative engineering.
In UA, teams who built a floor pickup machine or a climber were rewarded with different ways to play teleop, and more auto/climb points. These were difficult tasks to accomplish. Teams were rewarded for figuring out how to full-court shoot, and that it was even a valid strategy!
Aerial assist tries to reward strategy and different robot designs, except it fails. It wants robots to be specialized in catching, trussing, and high goal shooting, but since all three tasks can be performed by one robot, it fails to do so.
Additionally, in Ultimate Ascent, all three teams could try to score simultaneously, which decreased the effectiveness of defense and the prevalence of defense greatly (except on full-court shooters). Ultimate Ascent also had passing between robots, where full-court shooters would pass to floor-pickup machines, but it wasn't forced by game design that those frisbees were worth more points- it just happened organically.
And so in some ways, in terms of general game design, I love this game, in other ways I'm quite disappointed.
Aerial Assist is like eating salad after your ice cream. The Ultimate Ascent flavored ice cream was delicious, what's next? A salad?!?! Awwww...
(salads are good but not in comparison to ice cream. Duh
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