Yeah, the passive aggressive hyping of 4e was offensive. I don't know who decided that the way to get people to jump on the 4e band wagon was to attack 3e players, but everyone who talked about their work on 4e (including the shills who claimed to be playtesters but who were actually contributors - that was even more fucked up) basically stayed on message. And that message was insulting and fucked up. I have no idea who to blame for it. Might not even be a designer, but some set of talking points handed down from above.ScottS wrote:Obviously he had an interest in hyping the product, but my main beefs with the guy are a) he shilled 4e in exactly the same passive-aggressive way as the rest of the team (e.g. counting arrows in your quiver is "tedious", but having every action in the game be based on exception-based status-effect-and-bonus-humping spellcasting is somehow liberating...), and b) he claimed that 4e was going to cure even more cancer by smuggling in some unspecified "indie-style" game mechanics (which I guess was supposed to mean the skill system, because leaving game functions poorly-defined so that players can word-associate off of the skill names and thereby BS using their cheesed-out skills as much as possible, is friggin' awesome state-of-the-art RPG gameplay...)
Heinsoo is almost certainly responsible for the catastrophail that was the Minion rules. Because he did something almost exactly the same for Feng Shui, where it is a really cool and functional mechanic. But that is because Feng Shui basically has two levels of character in a standard fight: named characters and mooks. You aren't expected to really "level up" in that game, so there's never the cognitive dissonance of a monster being powerful or minionish from the perspective of different characters in supposedly the same world. So the fact that mooks always go down in one hit isn't a problem, because their power relative to the characters doesn't really change. With D&D's level system, and 4th edition's emphasis on DOT accounting, Minions going down in one hit was fucking stupid. But we can probably blame Heinsoo for the idea. And it was probably the big indie game idea he brought to the table (considering that he had already made it for an actual indie game).
The thing I think is really interesting about that particular interview is how much of the 4e methodology he wasn't signing up for in it. Slavicsek was going off about his inspiration that monsters didn't even fucking exist except during a couple of rounds of combat and didn't need to integrate with the world or have any story abilities. Mike Mearls was flipping around about how player characters didn't need to function like things in the world because they were special snowflakes. And Rob Heinsoo was saying:
Considering that and how the other designers complained that Rob Heinsoo was scaling damage up too much (the compromise release had damage scale too slowly), I actually would be interested in what 4e would have been like if Rob Heinsoo hadn't had to work with Andy Collins, Mike Mearls, Bill Slavicsek, and James Wyatt. It almost certainly would have been a better game.Rob Heinsoo wrote:World of Warcraft doesn’t let you change the world you’re interacting with, nor does it let your DM craft their own game world and set stories in motion. D&D characters always seem much more like real people than WoW characters, and you’re likely to remember them as such.
-Username17