Vampire Survivors' Banish Mechanic
Why would I want this dumb thing anyway?
Vampire Survivors is my current frontrunner for Game of the Year 2022 and this entire opening paragraph links to it. It’s £3.99 and you should probably just go play it now.
In brief, the game is “reverse bullet hell” where the objective is to survive 30 minutes of incoming monster waves by spamming ungodly amounts of projectiles at them. See this in action here.
Rather than aiming and firing all of your varying types of bullets, the game does this all for you automatically. Weapons never fail to fire, all of them are always firing at once, and have varying ways in which they fire. Spread patterns, damage outputs, and targeting behaviours. And they’re all upgradeable. See this chart.
You can have (usually) up to six distinct weapon types firing at once but your chosen character starts with exactly one weapon equipped and they have to kill enemies to gain levels in order to have the chance to buy new weapons or upgrade existing ones.
The issue is that each level you gain only affords you one chance to buy or upgrade something from a random selection of three (sometimes four) items. You may have an opportunity to upgrade a weapon. Do you take the upgrade? Or do you take the opportunity to buy into a new weapon type to diversify your bullet portfolio?
Either way, there’s no telling whether you’ll see either of these choices at the next upgrade point. The sequence of choices in Vampire Survivors is at the heart of what makes it engaging and seeing in real-time how your choices pan out facing down hundreds of blood-soaked skeletons is what makes it fun.
That is of course until you start unlocking new weapons. With an expanded pool of weapons, Vampire Survivors ran the risk of making its core strategic mechanic, sequential choices from random menus, incredibly noisy and arbitrary.
This is where Banish comes in!
Banish allows the player to, instead of choosing one of the options available, remove one of the options from the pool entirely for the remainder of the run. It means that the player has to forgo making an upgrade until the next level, but it does make future choices more focused on what the player wants. It also gives the player a chance to avoid being forced into filling one of their finite weapon slots with a suboptimal weapon choice.
What makes Banish work is that you can only use it a finite number of times. At maximum rank, you can only use it ten times (For context, you make 100+ level-up choices per game by the time you’ve done this.) You still must engage with some level of randomness in the choices. Besides, crafting the perfect weapon pool takes too much time. The hordes in this game wait for no one.
The Banish power-up and its upgrades can only be unlocked by unlocking a certain number of other power-ups and weapons into the main pool. The player’s ability to make use of Banish only scales with the potential need to use it.
The self-scaling nature of Banish solves a game design problem by turning it into a player-facing game mechanic. Neat!
Luca Galante, the game’s creator, explains their reasoning behind Banish (and a host of the other mechanics) in this great talk.
Tune in next time for either:
Another Marvel Snap post
Something else!
Until then, happy Banishing!