Yahtzee's Melee Combat Highway Code | Semi-Ramblomatic

I'm very guilty of minimap watching... I'm playing Outbound at the moment, and the survival/crafting mechanics of the gameplay loop have forced me to keep an eye on the terrain for components, but that's just par for that genre course. Some games with less of a HUD, like SoT for instance, force the player to go to the map table below decks to check up on the whereabouts of the ship, retaining immersion. I feel like Yahtz could do a whole Semi-Ramb on the topic targetting how different genres handle maps/traveling. If there is one already in the SW or 'the other place' archive do let me know!

I hadn't even noticed how often I'm glued to the minimap. Maybe I need a full screen transparent minimap for RedDead .x.

I spent most of The Witcher 3 looking at the mini-map and thought something similar: I could've walked past a parade and not known it.

I've seen as many Semi-Ramblomatic episodes as there were, also the intro designs/branding video - and only today have I noticed the gears in the shadows of the background when Yahtzee's dog comes in and turns the sign on. Ha...

This reminds me of Homeworld. Yeah, way back when and not at all melee (well, not melee except for the OP salvage corvettes, I guess). It had a "tactical overlay" you could toggle that put geometric icons over all the units. Fighters were triangles, corvettes were squares, frigates were rectangles, destroyers were parallelograms, and so on; friendlies were green, enemies red. For the time, the game was extremely pretty to watch without the overlay. But it was also basically unplayable, especially once you'd captured a bunch of enemy ships (your salvage crews couldn't be arsed to repaint them) and things got complicated. So it had all these beautiful graphics but what I actually played was a bunch of triangles and other shapes like it was a decade or more earlier. I think the original problem (NOW the problem is momentum, "everyone else is doing it!") is simply that they didn't think it entirely through up front. Once the game is basically done and THEN you realize play-testers can't tell wtf is going on, there's little choice but to add non-diegetic color-coded geometrics. Redoing the graphics and animation isn't in the budget. If they'd prioritized clearly readable graphics from the get-go, well, you'd still have play-testers not getting it and helpful icons being necessary, but advanced players would be able to turn that off without issue. Maybe even make the icons part of an easy mode.

At first, I misunderstood what you meant by traffic code and assumed you were talking about traffic lights, but didn't mention the green light. If there was a "green light" parallel for this I think it would be when an enemy has there stance broken or their endurance drain to the point to where you get a big hit off like in Elden Ring and God of War 4. On the note about not using icons, I think it should be bladed weapons that can be parried and hafted weapons (axes, hammers, or maces) can't be parried. I remember a game making this distinction, but not which game it was.

What if there was, say, a red-haired party member yelling "Parry it!"?

What with the Problems that Gothic Remake has, which are from the time it was first designed, at least I know exactly what the world looks like very well. Can't be that hard to make a game like this nowadays, but maybe give the ability to teleport a chapter earlier.