Formidable fantasy soulslike Mortal Shell 2 has been getting it in the shins from certain players over the decision to 'lock them out' of Steam achievements, when they equip the notorious Slayer Seal.
Trailers have characterised the Slayer Seal as an in-game 'easy mode' – as Jeremy summarises in our own Mortal Shell 2 review, it gives "you a pulverising punch and your ranged weapons the ability to deal Break damage", which goes a fair way in an action-RPG this vicious. Not being able to earn achievements with the Seal equipped (or even after you unequip it) has attracted a few Reddit threads protesting that people are being punished for declining to punish themselves… while other people (hello!) wonder why anybody cares this much about Steam achievements at all.
Developers Cold Symmetry have now addressed these fulminations in a video interview, explaining that the disabling of achievements for Slayer Seal users is actually a mistake. The devs had intended to offer different achievements for Slayer Seal users, encouraging people to play through twice over and get to grips with an alternative playstyle. However, they decided to do this only after the game's content had been set in stone, in order to sell it on discs at launch.
"What we wanted to do is have a separate set of achievements for the Slayer Seal than the normal playthrough, and they would be sort of mutually exclusive," studio co-founder Andrew McLennan-Murray explains in a chat with the Between Levels Podcast. "And our original vision for Slayer Seal wasn't just an easy mode, but also like, an alternate game mode, [to] experience the game in a whole different way. And so even if you're a hardcore player, to go back and play again with the Slayer Seal, earn those additional achievements."
Unfortunately, McLennan-Murray added, "we didn't know that since we have a disc version of the game that was simultaneously shipping with the [digital] version, all those achievements were defined like months, months and months ago. And we came to find out that, oh you can't change these anymore. They're like, locked in on the consoles.
"And we were like, there isn't any for the Slayer Seal, and that was supposed to be the whole thing," he went on. "So we ended up kind of cornered there, where we had to lock all the achievements at some point. And in the open beta the language around it was a little different, because we still thought we could do this 'duelling achievements' kind of thing. And then when we realised we couldn't, we were like, well what can we do now?"
Pressed by a podcast host about whether Cold Symmetry might yet introduce another set of achievements, specifically for disabled players who might need Slayer Seal to get through the game, McLennan-Murray agreed that this might form part of some free DLC. "It wasn't that we had planned to lock everybody out," he reiterated. "So you know, maybe there will be some other tools that we introduce in the future, that will make the game more accessible." (Methods for updating games with new achievements vary between platforms.)
As I delicately hinted above, I don't give a tinker's cuss about achievements, myself, but I do like the idea of using them to motivate different ways of playing. It's also intriguing to read that the Slayer Seal wasn't intended simply as a diegetic difficulty setting, despite marketing to that effect.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/we-ended-up-kind-of-cornered-there-mortal-shell-2-devs-say-they-didnt-intend-to-lock-everybody-out-by-disabling-achievements-for-slayer-seal-easy-mode-users
