Enormity preview play and impressions

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Campaign page - www.kickstarter.com/projects/kingdomsforlorn/enormity - - - - - - Patreon - www.patreon.com/onestop Podcast - soundcloud.com/onestopcoopshop Discord - discord.gg/p4jX8AF - - - - - - 0:00 - Introduction and set-up 9:49 - Round 1 31:19 - Round 2 39:10 - Round 3 45:05 - Rounds 4-5 53:28 - Impressions

[@xtopherrothgery4905]

Thanks for posting this. We've been eagerly awaiting any example of gameplay.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Bairnt from Meet Me at the Table should have a video coming soon as well, and I think he's going to show the more scripted tutorial that I skipped

[@xtopherrothgery4905]

@@OneStopCoopShop Excellent!

[@intotheunknownstudio9176]

Hey Mike! ITU Studio here. Thank you for the video! We hate to do this, but we have to point out that you've made the game much easier on yourself here ;) Starting from the fact that you did not spawn the powerful Automa Unique Specimen at the start of the run, just a few spaces to the right of your party, meaning you are actually entering combat from round one.Though the difficulty of the game is being tweaked all the time - this is a prototype after all - the number of starting Blips and Intruders is crucial to its balance, so not placing some lowers the overall difficulty for the run.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Yeah, I saw it mentioned in the rulebook, but since you didn’t explain where it should be spawned or include other core details (at least in the draft scenario book you printed for the prototype), I didn’t include it. I fail to see how one fairly easy to dispatch unit starting on the board would have changed the playthrough in any case! But glad to hear you are still working on balancing the difficulty. I think that’s all any of us want, and I have a lot of faith in your team to make it awesome!

[@Biodelic]

@@OneStopCoopShop Base on my ITU experience, when they call it a "powerful" Unique Specimen, you probably gonna get served a Russell Peters. "Somebody is gonna get a hurt real bad!" Maybe you could post a picture of that enemy's cards / entry as a community post, so we can get an idea ourselves? Please?

[@intotheunknownstudio9176]

@OneStopCoopShop The Unique Specimen is marked on the setup diagram :) Most Automa Unique Specimen have more than one wound, so not as easily dispatched, especially with a higher Automa AT, they're more like minibosses - and each shot makes quite a lot of Noise with those powerful guns, which trigger additional Blip moves, which trigger additional spawns and so on. It's a domino effect which you didn't start. And us working on the balance is right there on the first page of the Rulebook :D And thank you for the vote of confidence!

[@OneStopCoopShop]

@intotheunknownstudio9176 but I think most viewers agree with me that the blip mechanics are underwhelming at the moment in any case. Even in the initial scenario that I didn’t film blips never got close to my characters until we were close to the end of the mission. It was a lot of turns of move and reduce stress, rinse and repeat.

[@Biodelic]

@@intotheunknownstudio9176 Ladies and gentlemen, we found the hurt. 😳🤣

[@christian_daigle]

Thanks Mike for this playthrough and your impressions!

[@Biodelic]

I just gonna throw my wallet, my mortgage and the organs of my loved ones at this campaign.

[@tmcd5049]

I haven't checked the T&Cs, but your wallet should suffice.

[@normstewart546]

Thanks for your frank assessment/observations - much more valuable than the usual applause.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

I do have quite a bit of applause for what I played of a boss battle, but I don't think anyone is surprised by that after the huge success of Aeon Trespass Odyssey :)

[@BoardGamesUnLocked]

Your review at the end was exactly what I was gonna comment on because it was my main concern as well. I have the utmost faith in Into the Unknown because of ATO and it seems that this demo was meant to be curated to possibly show what the game can mainly be. However, an idea I had was to change the colors of rounds so that you have maybe 2 white rounds, 4 red and 4 black? So, that way the blips are more aggressive as the game goes on. (That is even if they keep the blip system) Right now, the blips seem more fiddly and kind of stupid because if you’re messing around where you aren’t supposed to and the AI is just fumbling on the other side, it doesn’t make sense. However, I do think it’s unique and I want it to be different otherwise I can just play Massive Darkness or Nemesis if I want swarms. Into the Unknown has an interesting conundrum to work on because it’s supposed to be a dungeon crawl with insane replayability but they have to make that replayability intriguing every time otherwise it’s just a grind and they’re competing against some very solid dungeon crawls already on the market. Either way, I’m all in like I am with ATO and Kingdoms Forlorn. XD

[@zakoglesby]

Pretty hyped for this game! ATO is one of my favorite games of all time. Definitely see your concerns, I'm hopeful they're things that will get cleaned up during further development and play testing.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

I have a lot of confidence in this team so I bet things will only get better

[@joachim4889]

Well I'm not sure if I want to invest in another itu property, but they have shown in the past that they will fine-tune the experience a lot during the upcoming design phase. Just take a look at the kingdom forlorn updates. So I am pretty confident that they will solve those concerns . But I'm also sure that this game will be again at least one Year late 😢😅

[@OneStopCoopShop]

@@joachim4889 they are still finishing up Heracles (I think) AND Kingdom Forlorn, so yeah I expect this will take a while.

[@zakoglesby]

Honestly I'm fine with the wait so long as they keep communicating with us. Yeah it sucks that things take a while, but their products so far have been good enough I don't mind the delay too much. Now if they had worse communication (like some companies) I would be a lot less forgiving.

[@joachim4889]

Yeah, i'm also fine with waiting, at least to a certain degree. I have some campaigns were the delay reached comical degrees, but since they are still communicating and you see progress it is acceptable.

[@teifan6674]

Thank you for this demo play! I can't wait to see you play more of this demo. This game feels like it was made specifically to suit my taste, haha! The way the stealth works and the problem you described kinda reminds me of a videogame called Aliens: dark descent (great game btw) in that it has precipitating failures as a main game mechanic: sure, most of the time you are doing fine, but then you make one wrong turn and an alien spawns, you shoot it, which attracts other aliens, which then you have to shoot, which make more noise, and your ammo runs out, and one of your guys starts hearing voices and shooting at the voices - which I imagine is something very hard to balance.

[@coffeespoonman7931]

If I have faith in any designer, it's Marcin. I'm sure they'll continue to work on it and tweak things so that turns are more exciting. This is a definite gameplay all-in for me, as is everything ITU does. Aeon Trespass is the pinnacle of board gaming adventure, and I can't wait to see what ITU can do with a Metroidvania in space!

[@winghong3]

Great demonstration. Likewise, I think nearly 90% of the current problems could be solved if they could just ramp up the tension right out of the gate. I honestly don't think the "light source" and "scouting" mechanic is necessary. Take away all the overhead admin of managing blips that are "out of bounds" and just spawn blips at specific chokepoints in the corridors or rooms (have them come directly out of windows/vents/holes etc.). Follow the Space Hulk's rule of revealing the blip enemy as soon as they enter a character's field of vision. Use blips to hide enemy numbers and threat level, but revealing them faster would actually make the game more fun. Because when people look at the cover of this game, they probably are expecting intense firefights of gunning down aliens through tight corridors, and not a 30 minute session of slow-burn of console-operating office work. I think this game will have good combat, it just needs to happen sooner.

[@intotheunknownstudio9176]

Combat should have happened on round one, see our general post ;)

[@OneStopCoopShop]

And like I said to your general post, that would not fix the core problems in this play. I just want to make sure you all realize that so you don’t think having an enemy at the start would suddenly make this scenario tense and exciting!

[@intotheunknownstudio9176]

@@OneStopCoopShop Due to how the Noise mechanic and Blip movement works, it would though :D It's basically like not escalating a Primordial in ATO - if the self-feeding mechanics are not engaged, one side may quickly gain a rolling advantage.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

I disagree, based on my plays of the intro scenario too, but we don’t have to argue on KZbin. Feel free to email me

[@intotheunknownstudio9176]

@@OneStopCoopShop Absolutely!

[@denisloebner4882]

schau ich mir auch mal mit einem kritischen auge an. mike ist ja an sich schon immer sehr wohlwollend und genügsam; wenn der jetzt schon deutliche mängel ausmacht sind das eigentlich klare alarmglocken.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Well, this is a bit of an odd video since I specifically filmed the part I expected to be the weakest aspect of the game (at this point). If I had just filmed the tutorial boss battle, for example, I would have been almost exclusively positive. But this game is supposed to be somewhat light on boss battlers, so I thought a video like this would be more valuable :)

[@denisloebner4882]

@@OneStopCoopShop thanks for the honest and in depth showing. looking forward to the bossbattle too then 🙂

[@thak777]

I love your honesty. This is always the first channel I check when a new game is announced. Keep it up!

[@robotradar]

Juggling more than 2 characters for solo is so bothersome. Hope they will take the route of simplified characters like the squires in Kingdoms Forlorn or in Oathsworn.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

That would be nice!

[@paweskierczynski2085]

Did you like Aeon Trespass Odyssey? How do they compare?

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Yeah. ATO is in many ways a masterpiece I’d say. I mentioned some comparisons in the video, but the boss fights here use a lot of the ATO mechanics, and the random encounter tables are kind of like the random stories in ATO.

[@nte2336]

The hype train is real

[@BoardGamePhysicist]

Is playing with 4 characters too much to deal with for solo players?

[@OneStopCoopShop]

I thought it was fine, at least at this early stage of the campaign. When you have more items and more abilities it might be more of a challenge.

[@BoardGamePhysicist]

@OneStopCoopShop thanks! Looking forward for it to come. And thank you as always for your contents!

[@batmansmk]

Mike, I have a question about how you review those monster KS games. As you don’t have 300h ahead of you to review AOT or Enormity ahead of your Five in Five, how do you evaluate that the content stays engaging, playtested and balanced past the few first acts? Do you flip through the book and check specific things?

[@OneStopCoopShop]

It's a great question! First of all I try to make it clear how far I got in the game, so people can have that context. And my reviews tend to focus on the pure mechanics of games, so often even if I haven't played a full campaign I can still talk with some authority about that. And yes, I'll often skim through things to see how the story turns out (if I am commenting on narrative), and that kind of thing. It's also a pertinent question because an early copy of Arydia is coming tomorrow, and I'll have to balance my limited play time with a desire to dig as deeply into the game as I can before I review it.

[@batmansmk]

@ thanks, great point! When you see the numbers of play a LCG like Arkham require on one scenario to work, I’m always a bit doubtful of games promising 100s of scenarios across a campaign to actually be of the same level of polish and balance. I guess this one is different according to their kickstarter page as everything can be standalone

[@noid3571]

Is this 1 character per player or is it always 4 characters? Maybe this is obvious since they did take a lot from trespass but I am not familiar with their previous games

[@OneStopCoopShop]

You always have 4 characters, divided among the players

[@joachim4889]

Aeon trespass Odyssey is also always 4 characters, regardless of player count. Kingdom forlorn is similar, but you can replace some of the player characters ( called knights) with a simplified version.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

@@joachim4889 and it would be awesome if they add a way to "simplify" some characters here as well, if such a thing is feasible

[@joachim4889]

@@OneStopCoopShop yeah. A lot of people don't enjoy playing multiple characters. Personally I always play multi handed, but running only two full characters would be my preferred way as well. But iirc the scribe system ( the simplified characters) for kf was added later during the campaign, so it might be the case that itu has something planned again.

[@michaeledmonds4849]

Was it supposed to be "Pretend you rolled a 1 and add +1 for each COLOR token already drawn", instead of "add +1 for each token drawn (regardless of color)" for the discovery tokens?

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Rules said regardless of color, but who knows, it’s just a temporary mechanic while they write the rest of the discoveries to fill an actual 20 option matrix 😅

[@michaeledmonds4849]

@@OneStopCoopShop It just seemed like you rolled through all of them quite fast with no chance for completing a chain, but I guess that is because beta/prototype. Thanks for the video.

[@anthonyuccello1458]

Since AOT seems to be the GOAT, let me ask this: would you rather have this or Kingdoms of Forlorn?

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Based on just playing the early prototypes of each, I'd personally prefer Kingdoms Forlorn. But it's hard to say because clearly they are developing and changing both games a lot before release.

[@Deltium5683]

Kingdoms of Forlorn definitely looks better to me.

[@madmax13]

Great play and thanks for the playthrough. For me this aspect of the game (unscripted extraction) has the least interest. If the campaign (3 acts) has 100 hours of game , I dont know who would care to play a random extraction.I definitely aggree with you that there should be thematic action cards for each character .

[@adamwencel5818]

I think you would be forced to play those to gather materials for crafting to be able to progress the story. Just playing the campaign you would probably become underpowered at some point and could not progress. It is supposed to be open world like game, not on Rails and those kind of games tend to make you do some non story related runs / battles.

[@cheekymonkat]

Great play through as always. Wow, my enthusiasm for this game has just crashed and burned… not sure I want to spend an entire session worrying about a pile of little red tokens chasing me down… I have aliens another glorious day in the corps for that and it does a better job.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

I'd give them a chance to respond to the feedback and maybe finetune the balance, but yes Glorous Day in the Corps is awesome regardless :)

[@giannisc.5254]

In general, I probably agree with you based solely on what I see here, especially that the art on the dice is bad and they need to rethink the symbols on them. I really like the design on the character boards and the cards though ! Now, if I may, I wanna stress a point that you yourself brought up in regards to the difficulty and that is that it seemed easier because you avoided a few pickups. I fully understand that risking combat for something that might give you things like exp. which you have no use for since this isn't the full game isn't worth it, but in the full game you bet I am gunning it for those pick ups, I ain't leaving stuff unless I am losing ! XD Lastly, I am conflicted on the whole random story bits so you can play one-offs etc. vs a proper narrative. On one hand when you have proper narrative that means a campaign, which is pretty difficult to start and finish in a timely fashion. On the other, the random mini story bits feel disjointed as you said. Anyway, can't wait for the campaign, thank you for the video !

[@OneStopCoopShop]

You are 100% percent right. If I had tried to get everything, like the stuff in the northeast room and the southeast corridor, they would have been swarming me for sure. Which brings up a separate question... what is the time pressure and session pressure going to be in the game? If I can just return to this same room several times and get stuff again, then there's little reason for me to go into every nook and cranny to get each pickup. But if there is pressure and I am limited in the number of delves I can do, that will help raise the tension for sure. Though in any case I would still want there to be SOME enemies spawning earlier.

[@giannisc.5254]

@OneStopCoopShop Ah yes, I see what you mean. Isn't endlessly spawning enemies swarming you a kind of pressure though ? A kind of faux-count down since you (I presume) cannot take them all on and survive ? Having said that, the game is still actively being worked on (as you mentioned in the video) so I join you in hope that they address these small concerns. I believe in ItU, they have proven they are good at what they do !

[@joncarr5545]

@@OneStopCoopShop They said the campaigns are timed at least....like 15 delves or whatever before it ends and such. I believe that is adjustable via difficulty.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

@joncarr5545 that would definitely help

[@sithgecko]

This game could be great and I love the theme and some of the gameplay but it looks really fiddly when it doesn't have to be. Also, those dice are horrible, I hope they change those and streamline the gameplay. Thank you so much for the preview, you did a great job.

[@cheesedanishable]

Yeah I don't know about this one. I agree with the criticisms, something feels a little off about the game's flow. Like it's trying to take parts of other games but the sum is worse than the parts and the ideas aren't coming together. It's not selling me when I have so many games in the genre already.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

I hope they can find a way to fine tune the exploration gameplay to make it great, because once you get into combat it's a lot of fun

[@AlessandroCorrai]

This is exactly what I felt when looking at the play through. I got bored pretty quickly, it's a "mess/mesh" or everything and nothing put it together to look cool! And this seems to reflect on the rules of the game and the flow. I know I am on the harsh side (this is simply my personal opinion) but this is a prototype... anything can change (I hope so). This is a pass for me. For now😅

[@PACEUK22]

Blackstone fortress looks significantly more fun than this. Shame it’s out of print for those that don’t have it. I worry that ITU are simply taking successful board games (like nemesis and kingdom death monster) and basically trying to imitate them with a few new mechanisms that may or may not actually end up detracting from the overall experience

[@ortizlzitro]

This video made me realize just how "no" this game is for me.

[@zimbo5521]

Miniatures are way too small. Not an impressive look at all. They should make the maps bigger if they need to in order to fit bigger miniatures.

[@OneStopCoopShop]

Bigger spaces means bigger booklets, which will make the box that has to fit those books bigger too, and will also make it tough to fit the game on an average gaming table. So (at least for my tastes) I don't agree with you 😅

[@zimbo5521]

@OneStopCoopShop Evershade character miniatures are nearly 50mm to the top of the head. Zombicide Invader character miniatures are around 36mm to the top of the head. Enormity character miniatures look to be around 30mm to the top of the head. IMO, the miniatures are too small. There’s no legitimate excuse for it. If other fantasy games and dungeon crawlers can have reasonable size miniatures, then so can Enormity. This seems like a cost cutting strategy to me while sacrificing table presence. The character miniatures don’t look much bigger than the dice.

[@DrAhzek]

@@zimbo5521 And you want to hear the biggest complain most people have with miniatures for all these games you've mentioned? That miniatures are fine but didn't have to be so big since it is just a needless bloat for a board game. Don't forget, these are boardgames, not Warhammer. Most players don't look at these minis as anything more than a fun gimmick. Table presence is built through other means as well. Awaken Realms minis are especially often listed as an example of "bigger than they need to be". Nemesis (my personal favourite bg) is probably the most infamous with aliens being just out of scale. It adds literally nothing to the gameplay or thematic experience - it is just an another strain on space. So, your "no legitimate excuse" sounds like a forced argument for the sake of it.

[@zimbo5521]

@@DrAhzek All types of tabletop gamers (board games, war games, RPGs) want great table presence and nice things. That’s why board games with really great miniatures, especially if they are substantial size, tend to fund incredibly well on crowdfunding. Table presence matters.

[@DrAhzek]

@ You missed the point. I didn’t even say they don’t want great table presence. What I said - „most minis are too big for what they bring to the table presence”. I’ve seen a lot of reviews from big and small channels on various games, read a lot of comments on bgg, forums and gamefound. I’ve played quite a few mini-heavy games with others. Guess what? If a topic of size ever comes up it is always about minis being too big, making board harder to operate or trying to overtake the game, as if they were there to hide the bad mechanics. That’s why a lot of people are even against minis altogether, considering them a vanity item that could be replaced with meeples or standees (to a degree it is a valid point). I personally don’t see a single bad thing about minis in Enormity’s prototype. They provide just enough visual help and are not yet another vanity crap. They are still interesting to look at as well.