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What’s better: enemies stopping respawning after you kill them loads, or removing a card from your deck?Vote now as we continue deciding the single best thing in games
Vote now as we continue deciding the single best thing in games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Playstack
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Playstack
Enemies stopping respawning after you kill them loads
In most games with respawning enemies, they keep on coming back. Either they’re back on a timer or they’re back when you die. Either way, there they are, all over again. Unless… most enemies inDark Souls 2will stop respawning after you’ve killed them 12 times. Which most likely means that they stop respawning after you’ve killed them then died, 12 times over.
Some believe it’s to stop you from farming enemies over and over for loot and levels. Others believe it’s the game trying to add another element of progression persisting beyond your deaths. While we can only speculate about the reasons, because FromSoftware haven’t talked about it as far as I know, we can certainly look at the effects.
Removing a card from your deck
In deck-building games, the most consistently powerful change you can make is unbuilding your deck. Adding one great card could be huge if you draw it, but removing your worst cards will improve your consistency and statistically make every hand more likely to be good. God, I adore removing cards.
The rules of many competitive physical deck-building card games enforce a minimum deck size because it’s simply too powerful to have your best cards readily available. What misery for your opponent if you can consistently draw the complicated mechanism to win in one turn! But in singleplayer digital card games, hell yeah, give mea two-card Slay The Spire deck winning with a turn-one infinite combo. And god, yes, you know I’ve been going wild with removal inBalatro, where you (usually) start with a whopping 52 cards and will want to add more. I’ve been delighted with combos that let me absolutely strip my deck.
Or, here’s an argument to perhaps sway the inevitable couple of people every week who complain that they have no interest in either option: if you hate card games, isn’t removing a card a way of destroying something you dislike? Card removal is the fractional death of something you want to kill. You simply want to remove all the good cards too, you fussy little hater you.
But which is better?
I wish every game let me remove stuff I didn’t want. All of them. Every genre. I’ll kill letters in Wordle, I’ll remove SMG spawns and ammo drops from shooters, I’ll delete tiles from Civilization maps. I’ll kill you all. But what do you think, reader dear?
