1. Sui Generis is not a Hack&Slash. Quoting the developers:
2. Sui Generis is not about grinding. Quoting the developers:
Not being diablo does not necessarily renders my arguments invalid. Please let me explain to you:
There is one thing I found that is not very believable about SG; it is the incentive to keep players playing. People play games for numerous reasons.
Someone like myself would just blow through the game ASAP and starts NG+ with every advantage I can get. I want to play the game with every cards in my hands.
Others are fans of theory crafting would like to try out new builds and may be starting some competitions.
There are people who love to role play and will take the game very slowly one piece at a time.
Then there are mindless grinders who love to watch numbers growing.
Also, casual gamers do play games with their friends and such.
SG's dynamic world event generator is cool, but the events will be told to the player via quests. I don't think computers are able to generate coherent stories. Most modern rpgs' are backed by an entire army of professional writers (or just monkeys that can write), so that they can have hundreds of thousands pieces of dialog, item descriptions and surrounding lores. BM only has a few dudes, even Mr. M himself take up the pen, there still won't be enough text to last me a few weekends. So, the dynamic world event generator will likely be telling most of the story via generated quests.
Quests will be mainly about killing and looting, so player will inevitably spend most of their active playing time fighting monsters. (may be there will be more variants but combat is the main element here, or maybe BM can make running around fun).
Thus, a good combat system is vital for SG's role-playing experience.
By having something that can put itself over the top and blow people's mind can really help the game to achieve its place in gaming. What i'm saying is that even though all AAA games are stupidly packing more and more useless stuffs in their games, SG can do a much better job by having a tight focus.
No need to add in token food, water, disease, climate system. No need to add in love interest sub-plot and cliches borrowed from every fantasy movie ever made. All SG needs is a super tight and glorious combat system that looks awesome and plays like hot knife through a bit of butter.
It may take some resources, but it will pay off in the long run.
Of cause it can be argued that SG is likely to stand heads and shoulders above most modern games easily. It's certainly possible. However, BM don't have any way to advertise itself. If BM want to make more games of their liking, instead of going bankruptcy after a while or starting to make quick cash by taking orders from other bigger companies, it needs to have things that make it stands out. SG's story will not be great, lets be honest. No matter how dynamically generated the story is, it will not best professional writers that have undergone years of training. There is no way to make stories that actually get to the player without human's intelligence.
SG's strong point is its combat. It's combat is organic and lasting, but it needs more refinement. It needs to introduce new things and mechanics to players non-stop. (an good example would be x-com, enemy unknown, best turn based strategy game ever, in my book). It needs to give players a visceral feel of stimulation either visually or via surprises.
If it would take too much resources, BM can at least lay down the fundamentals, so that talented modders can implement new features into the game at a later date.
