Hey Bombogachi,

Here is the latest Deep Look! Deep Looks are largely gameplay and commentary like a Giantbomb quicklook; however, I try to cover games that have been out for a while and I intend to use the videos to highlight moments and mechanics that I found interesting. Also I aim to keep the videos under 20 minutes.

This Deep Look is a bit of a companion piece to my blog on Randomness in Roguelikes from last week, so check it out if you want more info! In this Deep Look I show how FTL's randomness represents a new kind of realism in games. I experience the highs and the lows of the game's random encounters and events. I show how the game's randomness can lead to wild difficulty spikes and dips. I even unlock an achievement!

I looks like I might have a partner for the next few Deep Looks! Hopefully that will help the overall quality of the videos and add some new dynamics. Again, any and all feedback is welcome.

Well content/presentation wise you're fine. (except that CoD dig, a bit hokey)

Gameplay wise, there were indeed thing you could have done better even in that first fight. As you've already said you picked the one ship most susceptible to randomness at the start in the whole game, and got a really bad initial start. This would have not been even an issue with most other ships. Being that you have no shields dodge is your only defense at the start besides cloak. So moving a guy from the pilot system was a mistake as was moving the guy from engines. Keep the pilot in his place and the engine room guy (at least for the laser dodge chance if not the beam). Weapon speed boost is insignificant early on with untrained crew member, so move him to the door system, this would reinforce your doors, allowing you to vent the rooms with the mantis more effectively. You would have kept your dodge, and prevented major boarding damage. Then cloaking, it should not be done right at the start but right as the enemy shots, wasting their charge time on misses plus giving you more from the cloak. Loosing a crew member to the mantis was again all on you, unless you are doing a no pause run on purpose this should never ever happen. Trying to put out 3 fires in a 2x2 room and basic doors, instead of venting it, another big mistake. Finally when trying to get away, one dude should have gone to the engines.

Survival was not 100% but it was possible. Yes randomness hurts, but in what you showed here, you dug your own grave too.

:(

The madman encounter is not worth the risk unless you are swimming in resources/upgrades etc or have a way to grantee success with a blue option.

Not exploring sectors as much as possible before jumping: BIG NO-NO.!!

This video felt obvious to me. I felt like not much was said in the beginning of the video and the relations of the random runs to realism felt kind of shallow to me as well. The comment about how the randomness lets small developers add lots of content and replayability was something I had not really thought of before, maybe that explains the resurgence of rogue-likes in the past couple of years.

I really like rogue-likes and it usually is because they are easy to see yourself getting deeper and deeper each run. My problem with FTL is that it feels like the cap on your own skill contributing to success is just too low. In games like Binding of Isaac or Abyss Odyssey, you could win any run despite the randomness. I'm all for learning from failure but without the chance of success is there really anything to learn from your failures? (i'm looking you at you, final boss)

Keep on going with the videos. Even if I disagree sometimes, I still enjoy watching them. I think my problem with this was that I don't like FTL that much, but also that the deep look wasn't about some small part of the game that had interesting depth that would be easy to skim over.

@descends: Sorry this felt shallow. I thought the realism argument was a relatively new one, but I'm sorry if I did not do a better job of selling it. FTL definitely has a huge skill element, but that skill is often shown in memorizing all of the encounter types and situations and knowing what will happen with every choice. A skilled player will avoid all of the potentially devastating random events and only participate in the useful ones. Skilled players will often shoot themselves in the foot less, just like how skilled players in the Binding of Isaac won't use certain terrible items.

@tennmuerti: Yeah I certainly did not play the first encounter to the best of my ability. I had a small case of the Brads. It turns out talking intelligently and playing at the same time is quite a bit harder than I expected at first, and that is exacerbated when playing a game like FTL that requires a lot of thought. I was also trying to balance pausing for tactics and just letting things play out in real time to keep things entertaining. I wasn't aiming to have as strong an FTL run as possible, I was trying to show the many ways randomness impacts the game. High level play of FTL requires mitigating randomness by obtaining from situations that are beyond your control, but that does not make for the best video about the types of randomness that you can face in the game. Thanks for the tips though! I'll put them to use on future runs.