okay
Let's start with the overall Combat, because it's a good example of how development on the game went.
I joined in 2013 just after the KS to work on combat and core engine stuff. The game was effectively divided into two parts, Quest and Combat. There was rarely more than one person working actively on combat. Praise to my lucky stars that I was not involved in the quest side of the game, looking in from the outside it looked like a loving nightmare - near the end of 2017 the massive first area with interconnecting, multiple-path, time-based quests had been reworked from the ground up at least once and, if I recall correctly, it was still not done. To be honest though, the first area seemed to be very good, and when it was demoed at conventions it was well received. So overall B2 had a high quality for the pieces that did finally click into the puzzle.
The pitch for combat was: Hardcore RPG with guns. Basically Nuclear Throne with some heavy RPG elements and gun fusion. There was ideas for enemies hiding behind cover, flanking, being vulnerable from behind. There was already a bare-bones prototype there when I joined. My first step was to make combat feel more 'solid', with better movement, collisions, AI, and just overall a better feel. In hindsight this was a big mistake and it was my mistake completely, we should have just ran with bare bones combat and got combat done. If I had taken that path, combat would today have been simpler, closer to completion, and perhaps even more fun.
Far down the line we wanted to create a mountain area. To deal with height differences as you scale the cold, windswept mountain sides of Necron 7, I added a map height system so tile maps and characters had different elevation. Then because we later worked more on the starting area which was the Sewers, we started implementing the height maps in... the... Sewers... first. It took a huge amount of time and didn't really add anything to the game. So that was a big waste of time on my end and was just yet another thing that slowed everyone down.
Everyone had different ideas of what combat should be. There was a healthy struggle between making it more fast-paced and action-oriented versus slower and focusing on the RPG bits. However there was a worrying trend starting where we looked less at what the game was actually playing like and more at what was written down in design docs or what the initial ideas from project start was. After two years, combat was still not fun but the push was towards implementing the original designs. The belief was that when everything was implemented according to design it would all come together. Another more direct way to put it is that feedback on design issues and legit serious problems was usually ignored. Eventually after a long time this started to loosen up a bit, but too little too late. Which brings us to the two main points of why combat was boring garbage.
One. Design wise, everything was always massively complicated. Suggesting we keep things simple was ignored, because No that's not the game we want to make. It was sometimes impossible to discuss effort vs value. That's a big part of why gun's fusion took years to get done and working right. That's why the game had at one point eight damage types and a complex elemental resistance system that never really worked well in practice meaning mostly you just considered normal damage and ignored the rest, or at least I found myself doing that when playtesting. Some systems were made way too complicated for any player to ever understand because That's The Joke. Pushing to make the game simpler was really hard, but sometimes the penny dropped, and luckily we avoided some excessive poo poo.
For example, one legit funny joke was your Party. You only ever played as Hoopz, but on your equipment menu there were four party members. You could always see them in your menu but never in game. As I recall it, at the literal final second of the game the other 3 party members would appear out of Hoopz like in a Final Fantasy game and say "Wow, we did it!" "Hell yeah!". Kind of funny actually, but, it's just one small joke. It would make sense, then, from a return on investment standpoint, to not actually implement your party as characters with actual stats and equipment that actually level up alongside you, available with actual status menus. But B2 ideas sometimes made very little sense. There was a serious idea that these characters should do all that so you could see them progressing as if they were with you. Explaining the effort needed to make this particular dream come true was met with That's The Joke. Thankfully this feature was cut before any serious time was spent on it. Not all similar features were cut.
But, in my humble opinion, and everything from here on is completely my personal opinion only, but which Laz also mentioned, there was a much more serious issue with gameplay.
Two. Let's compare DOOM and Dark Souls. Doom is a fast paced game with guns. You are fast, and have long range guns. Therefore enemies are also fast, some have rapid long range attacks, and they come in huge numbers. Altogether you get a fast run-n-gun FPS. In Dark Souls, you are slow and have basically only melee attacks, and can't move while attacking. Therefore, enemies are slow, telegraph their attacks, have mostly melee attacks, and come in very few numbers at a time. Altogether you get a slow, methodical action RPG. Both these games are awesome because everything fits together.
Now as a thought experiment, what if you put the player Character from DOOM, in Dark Souls? Well, you would have Barkley 2. Because the combat pitch for Barkley 2 is a Hardcore RPG with guns, the very fixed idea was that enemies should be slow and tactical. At the same time it's a run-n-gun action game. So, Diablo with guns. In theory, this is actually a very cool idea! But in practice, you're five times faster than enemies, deal a poo poo ton of damage, and combat is just a joke unless you intentionally let enemies gang up on you. There is no reason to bother learning about the hardcore RPG side of things if the only difference is does slow-rear end mole get whacked in 3 or 5 bullets. Every tool in your toolbox that could make encounter interesting, like locked doors to create arenas, or just spawning in enemies to surround you, were a no-go because that's classic game cliches that we don't want to do. Okay. I pitched for and tried out faster enemies, but they were not liked, and also the game was unbalanced and buggy because it's never really been properly played. The response was to again make all enemies slower across the board. No amount of bringing up how this is not actually fun to play could change management's direction on combat or even have an open honest discussion about it.
Many did all they could to spice it up. Different people gave different takes on enemies. Frankie did a huge heroic effort to make guns unique and interesting. But in the end you can't fix whats broken by piling more garbage on top.
In an attempt to make the game challenging, then, you have limited bullets and when I left in 2017 there was still no way to refill bullets without returning to the save point. So the challenge was resource management. Since there was no way we could ever add weak melee attacks you could use if you run out of bullets because This Is A Game About Guns, meaning if you run out you're actually out of ways to attacks, it made balancing the game really, really awkward. Loads and loads of time was spent on gun's balancing to make this work. I don't know how it turned out because of the above issue with not being able to actually play the game for real. Zaubers (magic) would help with this issue, but those are another story and are actually what I was working on and halfway through when I left.
All in all combat was, like many things in B2, wild grand ideas that were very hit and miss in practice.
